TEN

Frederick Ingram touched Moy on the arm.

“Look here, that was just Miss Longstaff’s idea—that towel excuse—the fact is, I think as my brother’s representative, he was your client, that you oughtn’t to take sides with Gilmour, as you do.”

“Take sides?” Moy repeated, ruffled. “I don’t understand. What do you mean? I’m in the house when a terrible accident happens; I see it happen—practically. Naturally, I form my own conclusions. Who’s more able to than the man on the spot? I do believe Gilmour’s story. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because Charles was your client,” Fred said slowly and weightily. “Gilmour shot to kill, Moy. You should consider that view of my brother’s death and see if it leads you to—Gilmour’s side.”

“It’s just as well there are no witnesses,” Moy said to that. “You must have some reason for your words.”

“Oh, it’s so obvious,” Fred Ingram said loftily, “so obvious that you’re all overlooking it. Of course my sister, Mrs. Appleton, swears that it’s an accident, but then”—a very nasty sneer crossed his face—“what’s easier? Shoot a man openly, and then claim you thought you were shooting blanks...Perfectly safe to get away with that.”

“And the motive?”

Frederick hunched his shoulders. “Some private feud, of course. They shared a flat together. A dozen motives may have arisen of which no outsider would know anything.”

“The chief inspector is coming over at once,” Moy said after a moment’s thought. “Why don’t you speak to him of your suspicions?”

“I’m going to,” was the reply, and Fred swung on down the passage.

Pointer was on his way to The Tall House when the message from his man was received for him at the Yard. He heard the news with his usual impassive gravity. Then he went up and inspected the place where the second sheet had been found. The detective who had taken charge of it had already made his inquiries. The room was naturally never locked, the sheets had all been changed yesterday morning in readiness for the laundry which would call for them some time during the afternoon.

“We looked them all over, sir,” Bosanquet murmured. “Wasn’t here then. But unfortunately all the sheets in the house are exactly alike, except those used by the servants.”

“So we shan’t know off whose bed it came,” Pointer finished.

Up till now it had not been possible to examine any bedrooms, let alone beds, except those of the dead man and of Gilmour. Pointer went there now. The sheet was still missing from Ingram’s bed. It was quite impossible to say which of the two claimants to be the original top one was genuine. Even the housekeeper could not tell any of the linen apart.

“Quite useless trying to find out,” Pointer said to his man. “Evidently it was in, or on, a bed when we first came early this morning.” He examined the hole. If not caused by such a shot as would come from Gilmour’s little automatic, then it had been burned with the pointed end of something of a size so exactly right, that whoever did it must have known exactly what size was wanted, even though the other sheet had been taken away by Pointer.

A tap came on the door. Fred Ingram would like to speak to the chief inspector when he should be at liberty, said one of the plain-clothes men.

Pointer had finished here. He took the second sheet and laid it away in the despatch case which always accompanied him while an inquiry was on. Pointer saw Frederick in one of the downstairs rooms. Frederick informed him that he felt sure that Gilmour had intended to kill Ingram. That all this “stuff” about thinking it was loaded with blanks was “tosh.” Of course the cartridges now in it are, but the first one was a genuine affair, and known to be by Gilmour.

“And what did your half-brother own, Mr. Ingram, that would make Mr. Gilmour—or anyone else for that matter—want to murder him?” was the query, and the gray eyes just swept the other’s by no means ingenuous face.

Frederick clenched his teeth together until his cheek muscles bunched. “That’s a very police way of looking at things,” he sneered. “His purse or a five pound note, you mean? I don’t know what the motive is, but I can guess.” He shot his rather underhung jaw forward. “When there’s a lovely girl staying in the house with two men keen on marrying her, it wouldn’t be difficult to add a third.”

“But Mr. Gilmour claims to care for another lady.”

“Oh, that! Have you seen them both?” Frederick demanded rudely. “Well, where are your eyes, chief inspector? They’ll tell you how much truth there could be in that tale. But whether she was the reason or not, the fact is all that matters here. And the fact is that Gilmour has very simply, but quite successfully, drawn the wool over all your eyes. All except Miss Longstaff’s. Look here, if Gilmour were innocent wouldn’t she be the first to feel it? She doesn’t. She’s so sure he’s guilty that she’s having nothing more to do with him.”

“Well,” Pointer said with carefully obvious patience, “as I understand it, Mr. Ingram, you have only suspicions, nothing definite, to go on? No past quarrels, for instance, overheard by you?”

“Nothing but my common sense,” Fred said shortly. “And what about your own little disagreement with Gilmour?” Pointer asked pleasantly. His shot at a venture went home. Fred’s face flushed.

“That has nothing whatever to do with my certainty that the man’s lying, and is gulling you all.” And with that he left the room rather hurriedly.

Pointer was entering a note or two when Moy came in search of him.

“Has Frederick Ingram spoken to you yet?” he asked.

“On several occasions,” was the reply, with a twinkle.

“About Gilmour, I mean. Just now?”

Pointer said that he had.

“Then please listen to Haliburton, too. Here, Haliburton, you promised to be kind enough to tell the chief inspector the tale of the foxes that weren’t clever enough to fool Gilmour. I must be off to the office.”

Haliburton, in his slow, pleasant way, rather jibbed a bit at first, but finally told Pointer all about that old affair. He added that Fred claimed to have been as much taken in as was his half-brother, and Ingram apparently believed him, since it was after it that he offered him the post of his reader, but Fred had never let an opportunity pass, since then, of jumping on Gilmour behind his back. Before his brother he was forced to show a certain neutrality for fear of arousing even Ingram’s unsuspicious mind to make a few connections.

“You’re confident that Mr. Frederick Ingram knew the real state of things?” Pointer asked.

“I don’t see how he could help it. And any other business man would tell you the same. Charles Ingram wasn’t a business man. And one didn’t like to call his half-brother a swindler, so one had to let it pass. As, thanks to Gilmour, he hadn’t lost anything, one could let the matter rest and hope that Fred Ingram would be more cautious in future.”

“Did Mr. Gilmour show any especial skill in detecting the—weakness—of the proposal?” Pointer asked. He wanted to know if the dislike of Fred for Gilmour was reciprocated.

“None. Just used his brains, read what was written between the lines as well as what was in them. Ingram was the sort of fine chap who never would dream that anything could exist between lines.”

“Yet I thought he was rather an authority on ciphers,” Pointer said.

Haliburton said that he too had heard as much, but he seemed to feel no interest in that subject and referred back to the silver fox farm without telling anything fresh.

“Did Mr. Frederick Ingram ever threaten to make it unpleasant for Gilmour?” Pointer asked.

Haliburton drew in his rather long upper lip. He shot the detective officer a speculative look.

“He did. Told him he’d teach him to mind his own business. But I don’t think Fred Ingram the sort of chap who would keep his word—even to himself—if it were at all troublesome.”

“What terms were he and his brother on?”

“Excellent. As far as anyone could judge Charles and Frederick were united by a really strong family tie.”

Pointer drove on to the Yard turning Frederick Ingram over in his mind. Where lay the key to the motive for this murder—if it had been one?

He informed the assistant commissioner of the discovery of a sheet, whose hole would fit Gilmour’s statement, tucked away where it would have been sent to the wash with the other sheets and where the hole, even if noticed, would have been taken for a burn from a cigarette end.

“And it may be just that—or something hot—which did it,” he wound up. “Mr. Gilmour even might have recollected its position before the paper came out, and tried to put a blunder on his part right before it should be too late. He could have done that, of course, and just I waited for someone to make the discovery.”

“Yes, like his story, it’s inconclusive,” Pelham agreed. “Can’t you clinch the matter by the sheets themselves? Or do they all match each other?”

He was told that they did.

“And again it was Miss Longstaff who is connected with this sheet as with the other. Amusing notion of the cat’s bell. And you say Fred Ingram was with her? Odd...”

Pointer went on to speak of the fox farming idea and Gilmour’s part in preventing Ingram dropping quite a nice little sum over it.

“Aha!” Pelham cocked an ear like a hunter who hears a crackling out in the bushes. “So Frederick Ingram told you he suspected Gilmour of murder, did he?” The assistant commissioner passed a paper over to Pointer. “Here are the brief outlines of Fred Ingram’s career, as far as we know them,” he said. “Not at all the sort of saint who wouldn’t try to do his half-brother out of a few shekels. Trouble with him seems to be that he once made a really good win at Cannes, baccarat it was, that most fascinating of naughty little games, and since then he flutters around any casino candle like the proverbial moth, and to very similar effect. However, this last couple of years, as Haliburton says, he seems to be a reformed character. Though he still knows some shady people...I wonder if it was he who sold the story of the sheet to the paper, and not Miss Longstaff...somehow she really seems so incomprehensible...if she did it, I mean. Gilmour apparently so in love with her while she sells him to the press...”

“Yet it is Miss Pratt, sir, who by her words throws the greatest suspicion on Gilmour, the suspicion of a possible motive. As far as I can learn there is no foundation whatever for her idea that Gilmour cares for her. But she seems to think he does. Must.”

“Perhaps more may come out at the inquest. What’s your position going to be at it?”

“Knowing nothing, suspecting nothing, and believing everything,” Pointer assured his chief, and the other let him go with a smile.

Back in his own room, Pointer looked through the Yard’s news-sheet of crimes that had happened last night. It was part of every officer’s routine. There was one item on it at which he stopped, an attempted robbery of a small post office off Leicester Square. That office had happened to have rather a large sum of money in its safe last night, a fact that seemed to have leaked out; but not so the other fact that the authorities had taken precautions accordingly.

A masked man had entered the office only to find himself confronted by a group of resolute postal officials—all armed. He had decamped on the spot. He had rushed down a side street, and it was this fact that interested the chief inspector. For, supposing Ingram to have posted a letter late last night, then he would have done so from either the Leicester Square or the Fleet Street post office, as being the two nearest to him which were open all night. And coming from Chelsea, there was a short cut from Piccadilly Circus by way of Lisle Street which was the identical street used by the masked man in running away. Lisle Street had just been freshly laid down, and on a pair of shoes, neatly placed under the foot of Ingram’s bed, were the marks of having recently been walked over some newly tarred road surface. Pointer already had sent a man to that office asking whether Ingram—to be identified by his portrait in the paper which had printed the diagram of the sheet with the hole in the wrong place—had registered a letter or parcel there last night. A message on the ‘phone while he was still studying the map, told him that a clerk on late duty had recognized Mr. Ingram as the sender of a late fee letter or package by letter post, some time shortly after one o’clock last night. There had been some question of making exact change and Ingram had offered a half-crown which was bad. He had handed in another, and had stood chatting about his first piece and how to identify such a one in future. Unfortunately the clerk could not remember the name to which he had posted the package or letter, and knew that by no effort could he do so, but he was certain of Ingram’s identity, and his description of the rather hesitant, pleasant voice tallied exactly with the dead man’s, who, the post office clerk said, had been alone. He had glanced at the clock at the same moment that Ingram had pulled out his watch and compared the two, and he was willing to swear that the hour was shortly after midnight. Five or six minutes past twelve.

Now that was just a little before the time that the masked man would be running down Lisle Street, which would probably be otherwise quite deserted at that hour.

Pointer was making a note about the bad half-crown when Chief Inspector Franklin came in. He was looking for a ledger on Pointer’s shelves. Franklin was an older man than the other, a cheery soul, with a liking for a joke which found little scope in his profession. He was in charge of this attempted robbery. Pointer looked up quickly.

“I was just wanting a word with you about this post office robbery of yours,” he began. To judge by their talk, all the men at the Yard might have been criminals, there were such constant references to ‘this forgery of yours,’ ‘this attempted larceny of yours,’ ‘this blackmail of yours that didn’t come off.’...Pointer explained to Franklin now how Ingram might well have met the running man.

“Of course the man would have had his mask off...Ingram may have recognized him...had no idea what he was hurrying away from...the man would see to it that he slowed down to a quick walk...if he knew Ingram, he would have snatched at the chance of walking on with him, supposing Ingram to have been hurrying home, which would give the man an excuse for running—he could claim to be running after Ingram...”

“And what about bad half-crowns?” Pointer went on.

“Ah!” Franklin nodded again with a grin this time. “I told Blackwell that we hadn’t heard the last of that coining den of his, but he would have it that it was all cleaned up. You never clean up forgers or coiners.”

“I wonder if that bad coin had anything to do with Ingram’s death,” Pointer mused. “...or did he meet this running man of yours and recognize him?...I’ve been rather inclined to the idea that he had some important document, cipher or cipher-reading, which was wanted by the murderer. But a false half-crown...and a man desperately trying to escape detection ..Pointer’s voice died away into thought.

Franklin was greatly interested. “Of course, supposing my man was known to Ingram, he might have told him some cock and bull story about always running at night in full evening rig so as to slim, but he would know that when Ingram got the morning papers with their account of the attempted robbery in them, his tale would be torn. I think you’ve struck a good line there, Pointer.”

Pointer did .not look delighted. “It’s a pleasant mixture,” he said. “As a rule, in a shooting case, if a man wasn’t on the scene of the crime, then he’s presumably innocent. But here, the members of the house party who were out of the house last night will be the most suspected, and heaven only knows where anybody was. I’ve only their word for it...No way of checking it “

“Well, if your murder is the result of my raid,” Franklin said, quite unconscious of anything humorous in the phrasing of his sentence, “then it looks to me as though a bigger and better raid was being planned. You think he was someone staying in the house?”

“Whoever murdered Ingram was either stopping at The Tall House, or knew the house well.” Pointer explained about the sheet and the blank cartridge and Franklin agreed that that seemed certain. Pointer ran over the people in the house to him, describing them.

Franklin was not interested in Haliburton or in Gilmour, one wealthy, the other with a good pay and a good pension. Both men he did not consider as probable post office robbers, but Tark seemed another matter. He, too, however, seemed to have means of his own, apart from his profession of a mining engineer.

“He’s the one we know least about,” Pointer finished. “But so far what he says should be easily verified. Born at Beausoleil, studied at Bologna, studied mathematics...got his doctorate there in Letters...claims to have a moderate but sufficient income from his father who was an English biologist worker for the Duke of Monaco on some of his deep-sea expeditions. Hence the house in Beausoleil which the father bought.”

“Beausoleil, not Monaco, I notice,” Franklin said meaningly.

Pointer had noticed that too. It might mean little. But anyone living in Beausoleil can spend as much time as he wishes at the Monte Carlo Casino, which is not the case should he live within the walls of the little principality itself. On the other hand, Beausoleil has its admirers, quite apart from any question of gaming, and it was understandable that a man working for the Duke when not required to be in residence might prefer to be outside his jurisdiction, and yet almost as near as though living in Monaco itself.

“I suppose it’s out of the question for Ingram himself to have had a hand in anything shady,” mused Franklin; “been the directing spirit, say? Come out to watch how his little plans were getting along? That bad half-crown was very casually ‘planted.’...”

Pointer could only say that few things were impossible, which was what made life, and especially the life of a detective, interesting, but that it seemed a strange idea. Not borne out by anything yet found.

“It’s much more in Fred Ingram’s line, one would say, but even with him——“ he proceeded to pass on his information about the younger Ingram.

“Do you want this robbery of yours mentioned at the inquest?” Pointer asked. He was folding up the Yard News.

Franklin emphatically did not. And said so. He watched the other mark some papers and tie them together.

“What do you call this case—The Tall House puzzle?” he asked.

“Personally I think of it as the ‘Either-Or’ case,” Pointer replied.

“Either Gilmour is telling the truth, and is innocent, or he’s lying and is the murderer.” Franklin laughed a little. “Nothing peculiar about that I should say. This suggestion as to a possible motive in my robbery for Ingram’s death seems rather to suggest that he’s telling the truth.”

Pointer nodded in his turn. “But here again, taking Ingram’s death as a murder, either the motive was to escape detection when Ingram read the morning papers or it is something quite different. And I don’t see what part the posting of the package or letter would play in the plot if Ingram was merely killed to avoid recognition, or to prevent his handing over someone to the police next morning.”

“And why should the posting of the letter play any part in the crime?” Franklin paused in the act of lighting a cigar to ask.

“Well, the murderer knew about the ghost talk, and the threat of Gilmour’s to shoot at sight, he would certainly know about Ingram’s going out to post or register a letter. The odd thing is that he was allowed to send that package...and that no attempt was made on his life beforehand...”

“Well?” Franklin was forgetting to light up.

“Yet one would think that the murderer must have foreseen its posting. He was so well up in all the other details of life at The Tall House. Ingram was working hard at something all afternoon, and more or less all evening...the murderer must have been expecting that it would be sent off. It looks, so far, as though he wanted it posted.”

“Waited for it, you think?”

Pointer said that it looked like it so far. “If so, it cuts the ground out from under my idea of Ingram’s chance encounter with the man who took part in your robbery.”

“Unless,” Franklin’s blue eyes darkened, “that package contained something to do with counterfeit coining? Say Ingram was suspicious...had got on the track of some coiners, tested a piece of silver and found it bad, and...but he had posted the package first.”

They discussed the further possibilities for a brief moment. Then Pointer was ready to go.

“I always think of you as soaring far above facts in your deduction flights.” Franklin chaffed him.

“When I’m in a fog, my dear chap, facts are like palings to which I cling, groping for a fresh one before I let go of the last. You’ve laid my hand on some fine fat fellows with this robbery of yours, and I’m much obliged, though a bit lost yet as to where they’re going to lead me.”

Franklin burst into one of his big laughs. “Are you in a fog here?”

“Either—or,” was Pointer’s only reply.

“I don’t envy you this murder of yours,” Franklin said as they parted. “Which of the people up at The Tall House strikes the oddest note? Fred Ingram or this Tark?”

“Neither. Miss Longstaff,” Pointer said promptly, and was gone.