SIX

Meanwhile a hitch had occurred. The doctor to whom Haliburton had telephoned was just getting into his car, when an urgent summons reached him from a patient who was hovering between life and death. He dashed off to her bedside, and left his secretary to suggest over the ‘phone to Haliburton that, since death had already occurred, and from an accident, Haliburton had perhaps better send for the police. This would have been suggested in the first place, had it not been that important young man himself who had spoken over the wire.

Haliburton jerked his lower lip sideways and set his teeth together as he did when anything happened which he greatly disliked. He glanced at Moy and repeated what had just been said.

“Of course!” Moy said impatiently, “obviously we need the police, and at once. It’s like a ship with plague on board. You must get the officials in before the passengers can get off. We’re in quarantine until the regulations are complied with.”

“The police...” Haliburton hesitated. “It’s most unpleasant for—the women. There’s no mystery here.”

“No, but there’s been a death by misadventure. Of course we must have the police.”

Haliburton looked up the name of the nearest police station. Moy went out into the corridor. He felt as though unless he moved so as to keep pace with his surging thoughts, they would leave him behind—an idiot—and rush on whirling and spinning of their own volition. As a matter of fact, he was not thinking at all. He was feeling, and feeling to the exclusion of everything else. Horror. Regret for Ingram, that fine mathematician and charming personality; sympathy with Gilmour; amazement at Alfreda Longstaff...There she was, by the way, scanning the carpet as though intent on mending it...He caught up with her.

“I wonder if you realize,” he began, “how greatly your breaking off of your engagement will bias the police against Gilmour.” He spoke temperately, but he felt warm. She looked at him with a smile that increased his dislike of the girl. Oh, she was deep...unfathomable. Quite unlike lovely warm-hearted Winnie Pratt.

“I wonder,” she murmured, and stood a moment quite still with downcast lids.

“Perhaps I’ve been too hasty,” she said now with a singularly unconvincing accent of regret. “I really know nothing of what’s happened, except what Mr. Gilmour has said, and, of course, he is so upset. Did he really fire at Mr. Ingram?” she asked in a tone of intense interest which he found hard to answer civilly. “As you heard. He did. With a cartridge which he thought was blank and which by some horrible mistake was loaded. And which killed Ingram.”

Again she looked him straight in the face with that unreadable stare of hers.

“What a good shot he must be!” was her quite unexpected comment.

Moy almost jumped. “Look here, if you say a thing like that, you render yourself open to a libel action.” He spoke severely.

“But why? If he thought he was firing blank?” She met his scrutiny with bland nonchalance. “I think he and Mr. Ingram practiced revolver shooting a good deal,” she went on.

“I don’t know,” he muttered.

“The first time I met Mr. Gilmour he said something about it.” She was standing in the window now playing with the tassel of the curtain.

“Where did you first meet him?” he asked and, on that, he had the satisfaction of seeing a look cross her face that said quite plainly that she wished the words unsaid. Then her gaze returned to the street. She saw a small man walking briskly along the opposite pavement. In his coat was an enormous yellow buttonhole.

“Oh, down in the country,” she replied, as she began to walk towards the stairs and descend them with an air of doing so almost mechanically. The front door was out of sight of where Moy was standing. With cautious care she opened the door. It was not bolted, she saw. Instantly the man with the yellow buttonhole came in. He dropped the decoration into his pocket as he did so.

“Thank heaven it was early. The only yellow flowers I could find were some paper daffodils from my diggings and two men already have asked me if I was doing it for a bet. Now, Miss Longstaff, will you give me your news, please. My name is Courtfield. Here’s my card.”

He was studying her as he spoke with a pair of eyes that took her in from head to heel. Everything for his paper would depend on this young woman’s trustworthiness. Could she be relied on? That was the paramount question. But behind it was another that interested the crime expert almost as much. Why had she volunteered to give the information in the first place? Was it vengeance for the dead, or against the living? He had met Ingram, and he had met Gilmour. He knew of the friendship between the two men. Why did this girl believe, or pretend to believe, that the latter had killed the other? Civil Servants are not, as a rule, a bloodthirsty lot. Gilmour had seemed quite the average pleasant-tempered chap one meets at every turn. Ingram had not shown any irritating peculiarities...then why had this young woman ‘phoned as she had done? Meeting that stare of her black eyes he felt a personality here, a will of steel...Was it merely because of the offer of a permanent post on the paper that she had come forward or was there some other sharper spur? The presence in the house of the lovely Miss Pratt, did that stand for anything?

But Miss Longstaff was now speaking to him. She led him into a small room rarely used by any of the present household. It was chiefly given over to some defunct owner’s butterfly collection, and there she said a few swift sentences to which Courtfield listened as though they were directions concerning the finding of hidden treasure. Then he slipped out again. He did not want to meet the police. No paper would care deliberately to flout them, and he would be at once asked how he got into the house, and what he intended to print. His name, for once, would not appear below his article. It was to be strictly anonymous and to remain so.

Upstairs Moy paced the corridor back and forth, that strange look on Alfreda’s mobile face haunted him. And the look that she had fastened on Gilmour’s bowed head as she came into the room where Haliburton stood telephoning. A suggestion of a future triumph, of a “you wait!” vindictiveness about it...What was she going to do? For Moy felt sure that she meant to take some active hand in matters...or could it be that she had already taken it, and was now waiting for the harvest to appear? He believed that she was glad of the awful position in which Gilmour stood...But surely no one could even pretend that this was anything but a genuine accident? Or a terrible blunder. Though Gilmour was an unusually careful and neat-fingered young man. Was it possible that this was a crime on Gilmour’s part? But Moy, putting aside all preconceived idea as to Gilmour’s character, could not see the likelihood of that. The two lived together. If Gilmour, for some as yet absolutely hidden reason, wished to murder Ingram, he could have done so in a dozen better ways without ruining his own life. For no matter how sympathetic the jury or the coroner might be—supposing him, or them, to be in a kindly mood—the fact remained that Gilmour’s whole life was ruined. He could never forget, and the world would never forget, that he had killed Ingram. There was only one chance for Gilmour that Moy could see, and that was that, supposing a crime to be here and not an accident, Gilmour could discover its author. But even if he succeeded in doing this, or even if the police succeeded, could it be proved? Say that someone who hated Gilmour, had secretly substituted a loaded cartridge for the first blank one, the deed was done. Could the past give up its secrets in anything so difficult to prove, so swiftly accomplished? Moy did not see how Gilmour could ever be set free from suspicion, or rather from the pillory of being a marked man all his life unless the crime could be brought home to the real criminal—if a crime, and a criminal, existed behind this death of Ingram. Assuming it not to be due to accident, the murderer, Moy reasoned, must be someone with a motive for killing Ingram, and also someone who knew where the revolver and the cartridges of Gilmour were kept. Suddenly his face blanched a little. He saw that he must go further—much—than this, and he realized that if a crime lay here, then the criminal must have overheard or been told of, that talk only this evening in the lounge, when Gilmour had warned the company that if anyone tried to frighten him by playing a ghost he would fire at it. A sound came from behind him. It was the butler, looking quite gay in pajamas of rainbow hue and a green dressing-gown.

“Is anything wrong, sir?” he asked, looking about him and quickly taking in all that there was to be seen. Hobbs had served in the War and his gaze dwelt on the white mound farther down the passage.

“It’s Mr. Ingram,” Moy said. “I rang for you for nearly five minutes on end.”

“We sleep on the top floor now, sir, and the bells don’t reach us. But I heard doors closing, and came along to reconnoiter, and nearly ran into Mr. Tark who was coming to wake us up...He told me what had happened. I’ve told the housekeeper to let the others know. Have the police been notified, sir?”

As he asked the question, came the sound of a car drawing up with a swish, and a quiet press of the electric bell. Quiet and yet insistent.

Hobbs ran down, and Moy bent over the landing balustrade. He did not intend to leave the corridor to itself again. Through the big front door slipped a short, stout man, a doctor, Moy rightly guessed. Then came a figure that filled it well. Chief Inspector Pointer was a tall, soldierly-looking man with a tanned, pleasant face and a pair of very steady, tranquil, dark gray eyes, the gray of the thinker, without any blue in them. He was followed in his turn by three other men.

“It’s Mr. Moy, sir,” the butler said as he looked up at the young solicitor.

Moy thought that such an introduction was open to misconstruction seeing what had just happened, but he only leaned over and asked if they would all come up to him as he did not want to leave the corridor.

“The body is here,” he added.

The chief inspector said a word to the butler, who remained behind with one of his men, then he took the stairs three at a time, noiselessly as a cat.

Moy introduced himself. “I represent the dead man, Mr. Ingram’s relatives, as well as the owner of the house. Both are—were, in the case of Ingram—clients of mine.” He stared hard at the young man facing him. Much would depend on the officer in charge of this case.

From Gilmour’s point of view one could almost say that everything would depend on the inquiry being conducted with absolute open-mindedness and fairness. Let him fall into the hands of a stupid man and he might find himself in a position which Moy did not care to contemplate. The longer Moy looked into the face of the chief inspector, the more reassured he grew. Here, he felt, were better brains than his own, brains of no common order, and there was, besides, that indefinable something that makes a man stand out above his fellows as a leader, as an organizer.

Chief Inspector Pointer, too, was giving the young man in front of him a far more searching scrutiny than his apparently casual glance would have suggested. He, too, liked what he saw. Moy was tremendously upset, and not at his best, but the shrewd observer facing him knew that he was not trying to be at his best. Here was a young man frankly rattled, not in the least endeavoring to pull himself together, not seeking to make any definite, arranged impression. Also Moy’s face was his fortune all his life long, little though he guessed it. For something warm, and impulsive, and unselfish, looked out of his ugly features and spoke in his voice.

“Just what has happened?” Pointer asked, as Moy led him and the doctor to the white heap at the farther end.

Moy explained very briefly what he himself had seen and heard, and what he had been told by Gilmour.

“Who drew the sheet out from under the body?” Pointer asked as, after giving it a look, he lifted it off and began to fold it up. So his one glance had told him that the sheet’s position had been altered. Moy, on that instant, realized a little of the quick perceptions behind the chief inspector’s quiet, steady, gaze.

“One of the ladies. She thought his face should be covered,” he said slowly. Time enough to name Miss Longstaff later on.

Pointer and the doctor now bent over the stiff form.

“Bullet still inside the head,” the doctor said. “Well, there’s nothing further for me to do here.” He had an urgent call to an ambulance case. In a few words he and Pointer arranged for the fetching of the body and for the post-mortem. The doctor hurried off. Pointer turned to Moy again.

“How do you know this is the same sheet as the one which you saw draped about him. Were you here when it was drawn out from underneath?”

Moy had not been, but he identified it by the bullet hole close to the hem. Pointer asked him to initial in pencil one of the corners and then locked it away in his case. He had Moy show him where he was standing when he first caught sight of Ingram and Gilmour. Where Gilmour’s room was, where Ingram’s.

Then Pointer went over the floor of the passage inch by inch. He picked up from a cream-colored flower in the carpet a piece of what looked to Moy like a torn scrap of cream wrapping paper roughly the size of his hand, and near it a spent cartridge case. He sniffed at the latter. When he had made quite sure that there was nothing else to be found on the ground, he examined the walls and the few articles of furniture standing against them. Last of all, he stopped for a moment at one blind, whose cord was tied into a sort of bunched knot.

“I saw that done,” Moy explained, “one of the girls staying in the house did it absentmindedly, while talking to me only a few minutes ago.”

“Then the blind was up?”

Moy, for a second, did not see how this simple fact was so patent. Then he nodded. “Yes, she pulled it up while talking.”

“And pulled it down again?” Pointer asked.

Moy nodded.

“Did she open the window?”

“Yes, it was for that reason that she had drawn up the blind,” Moy said. “Then after a moment’s gulp of fresh air, she closed it, drew down the blind, and went off.”

Pointer looked out of each of the others in turn and saw that this window was the only one in the corridor that showed the opposite pavement. The view from the other windows was blocked by a ledge above the first floor.

“Was it the same young lady who drew the sheet out from under the body?” he asked when leaving the window as he found it.

Moy assented, saying that he supposed the signs of hauling on the sheet had made the chief inspector guess what had been done.

This time it was Pointer who nodded and then asked if the position of the body had been much altered. Moy said that as far as one could judge by looking at it, the body lay exactly where it had been before and in the same attitude.

Pointer next asked where Gilmour was, as he would now like to hear his account of what had happened.

“I suppose he still has the weapon with which he claims that he fired the shot?”

Moy said no, that he himself now had it, and could vouch for its being the identical weapon. He handed it over. Pointer looked at the little nickel-plated thing, examined it carefully, smelled it, broke it open and counted the cartridges still in it—all of which were blank—and put it, too, away in his attaché case after requesting Moy to make quite sure that he could identify it again in court.

“Now who exactly are the people in the house?” was the next question. “And where is the host or hostess?”

Moy explained briefly, but sufficiently, what the position was. Then Pointer, leaving one of his men to watch the body unostentatiously, followed Moy to Gilmour’s room at the end of the corridor where Winnie Pratt hurried up to him. She had been lurking on the landing above, apparently.

“You’re the police, aren’t you? Or from Scotland Yard?”

Moy introduced the chief inspector.

“Oh, please don’t arrest him! Please don’t believe it was anything but a dreadful accident!” she begged in tragic accents. “Why, Mr. Ingram was his great friend! Besides—Mr. Gilmour’s engaged to someone else.”

Pointer said nothing. She was very cryptic. Was this really just a silly girl defending a man in peril? There is no more charming sight if sincere than that reversal of the usual roles between the sexes, but it must be sincere.

He asked her why she thought that he would look on the death as anything else but an accident.

She wrung her exquisitely kept hands with their tangerine-enameled nails.

“Because the police always do doubt things. And suspect people! But in this case that’s absurd. It’s not in Mr. Gilmour’s nature to do such a dreadful thing!”

Pointer asked her a few questions about herself, about Gilmour, about Ingram. But she would hardly give an answer to any set question.

“Mr. Ingram wanted to marry me, you’ll hear all about that side of the story, and I—I—well, I wasn’t sure...and I liked Mr. Gilmour—just as a friend. And I showed that I did. And...well...some people will say, so my mother says, that it was all my fault. That I oughtn’t to’ve talked so much with Mr. Gilmour...but that’s such nonsense. He’s in love with Alfreda Longstaff. And besides, it was only friendship—ever. And besides, even if it hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have shot Mr. Ingram. It’s a ridiculous and horrible idea.”

Again Mrs. Pratt appeared looking for Winnie. Moy did not wonder. Really, what the girl needed this morning was an attendant from a Home for the Feeble-minded, he thought savagely. Of course it was all Mrs. Pratt’s fault, trying to make Winnie see the error of her past ways and overdoing it. But what a perfect simpleton the girl was...though a dream of loveliness....

Pointer looked after the dream with a thoughtful frown.