ELEVEN

Pointer turned over very carefully the new idea as to why Ingram might have been murdered, as he drove back to The Tall House.

It was rather suggestive, the notion of a man escaping from a balked robbery, running slap into someone whom he knew, fobbing him off for the moment with some sketchy excuse, and having to kill him before the papers should give the details, unless he was prepared for arrest and penal servitude. Someone who knew The Tall House, who had heard or had been told of this talk about ghosts...seeing the lateness of the hour the probabilities were strongly in favor of it being someone who had himself heard that threat of Gilmour’s. In fact, the only certainty that Pointer had, so far, was that the murderer knew of that talk.

He let himself quietly into the big house with its raking sky line of five floors and a battlemented coping. The room next to the library was locked. Why, no one seemed to know. Inside it sat a plain clothes man watching the unlocked library. The man had a careful list of all who had gone into the room, and through the keyhole, by means of a tiny ended periscope, had been able to watch what each person did. Pointer had “salted” the library a little while ago with papers tucked in books or odd corners. Some of the papers were quite blank, some of them were written on in what looked like Ingram’s peculiar, and, therefore, easily copied, writing in what purported to be either mathematical formulas or ciphers. Green of the Yard could dash off a forgery in a couple of seconds which would defy any but his own eyes to detect. His formulas and his ciphers were the merest conglomeration of figures or letters, but they looked quite impressive. Tark had been in that room for nearly ten minutes no#.

“Mrs. Pratt has been in twice just to have a look-see,” the man finished. “She’s as good a watcher as one of us. Hangs round one of the rooms opposite, seems to give everybody three minutes, and then slips in and is quite surprised to find anyone there, offers to help and is politely thanked, and then whoever it is goes off and, after a second, she looks about her and goes off too.”

Pointer was now watching Tark pounce on a slip of paper, studying it with the look of a ravenous animal on his usually impassive face. Then he stood a moment the picture of indecision. As the door opened he tossed the paper behind the couch.

It was Mrs. Pratt in a smart black and white frock which only made her look gray and lined.

“Back again?” she murmured with a faint contemptuous smile. “Perhaps I can save you trouble, Mr. Tark,” she said with that sparkle in her eye that Pointer generally found meant hasty impulse in man or woman. “The letter isn’t here. It was burned.”

“I don’t understand you,” Tark said stolidly.

“Oh, I think you do,” she replied, still with heightened color. “I saw you looking up at us when I handed it to Mr. Ingram. Well, it’s burned and you won’t be able to use it—as you would like!”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Tark repeated. “I saw you hand a paper to Ingram, yes, but papers you hand your friends don’t interest me, Mrs. Pratt.” His cold eyes flickered contemptuously over her.

Mrs. Pratt only gave the equivalent of a toss of her head. “As though I don’t know how much you would like to find it—and use it!” and with that she was gone again.

Tark stood looking after her, and seemed to think that this was no time to continue his hunt, for he too went on out, leaving the door ostentatiously wide open. After a second Mrs. Pratt came back, closed the door, stood a second listening, and then scrambled at full length under the sofa for whatever it was that Tark had tossed there on her entry.

Pointer decided on a few words. He stepped in so swiftly and so noiselessly that until he shut the door she had no idea anyone had entered. Then she tried to wriggle back from her undignified position and Pointer gravely assisted her, moving the sofa to let her get up. She looked anything but grateful to him as she did so.

“Look here, Mrs. Pratt,” he said on that, “I have an idea you want something back that you lent Mr. Ingram. Something besides that poem you asked him to burn. Now we’ve taken quite a lot of papers away with us. Unless it concerns the murder we don’t want to keep any of them. Yours may be among those that we have. Suppose you tell me what is in it.”

She stared hard at him, pursed her lips and straightened her dress, flicking the dust off it here and there. “Mr. Ingram burned those silly verses, as I just told Mr. Tark, who would like to get hold of them and tease me about them.”

“A playful nature, evidently,” Pointer murmured.

She shot him a cold and haughty glance, but he did not seem to see it as she made for the door. He held it open without another word. Mrs. Pratt was not going to talk. She did not return to the opposite room but went on up the stairs too. Pointer had his man join him in the little room which he used as a sort of temporary police station. There he looked through the man’s list of names and times spent in hunting in the library. First had come Miss Longstaff; she had spent a quarter of an hour when Mrs. Pratt had dropped in. The detective thought that Mrs. Pratt was distinctly suspicious of the younger woman’s motives for being there at all. Miss Longstaff had said that she had mislaid a return ticket and a letter from her mother while in there earlier in the day, and “must have them back.” Mrs. Pratt, as had been said, showed a certain skepticism of this reason.

“Your letter in here? How very odd! Did you bring it down here, or do you think one of the maids carried it downstairs from your bedroom?” she had asked sweetly.

Miss Longstaff said she had no thoughts on the matter but that she had been reading it when the dreadful shock of this morning had made her come running down with it, and possibly the ticket too, in her hand. Since then both had disappeared. Like everyone else (here the detective said she had given Mrs. Pratt a certain lingering look) she had wanted to see the room where Mr. Ingram had worked...she might have dropped it then...but did Mrs. Pratt want anything in particular?

Mrs. Pratt said that she had handed Mr. Ingram a very silly set of verses about angles and angels, and so on, and only hoped it had not fallen into the hands of the police; she would feel so very silly if any eye but her own and Ingram’s ever saw the lines. And then it had been Miss Longstaff’s turn to be surprised. “You wrote poetry on Mr. Ingram? Now do you know that is the last thing I should connect with you, Mrs. Pratt,” and so it had gone on for a few more sentences. Then Mrs. Pratt had sat down and said she wanted to write a letter, would Miss Longstaff mind letting her have the room to herself for a few minutes? She had always found that she could write best in the library. “Poetry?” Miss Longstaff had asked with one of her stares but she had left the other woman alone. After a minute or two Mrs. Pratt had gone out. Her aim had evidently been to see the girl off the premises. Then had come Frederick Ingram. He had gone over every scrap of paper, and the description of his face while doing so tallied remarkably with the look on Tark’s face, with the effect of half-savage desire, half-indecision which the chief inspector had watched on the man to whom Mrs. Pratt had spoken her odd words. Then again Mrs. Pratt had drifted in, and again had asked the seeker what he was looking for. Frederick said that he had left some very valuable notes here, which Ingram particularly wanted him to rush through for his next book. That he had laid them down while talking with Ingram and did not remember where...Mrs. Pratt seemed to have two strokes to most people’s one, and she saw Frederick Ingram safely out of the room, having another look when he had gone. What was the woman after? Pointer could only guess that she was not so satisfied as she seemed that Ingram really had burned whatever she had handed him. What could that be? The field was too wide and rested too entirely on speculation for the chief inspector to waste any time over it. Certainly the two men examined any scrap of paper no matter how tiny, whereas Mrs. Pratt only looked at sheets of note-paper that resembled that stocked in the writing-tables of the house, and used by Ingram himself in the library, a gray paper with black heading. That much bore out her statement about the silly rhyme, but only that much. At all events, she and the two men did not seem to be in each other’s confidence. As for Tark and Frederick Ingram, they seemed to be strangers to each other, at any rate neither had been seen talking to the other at The Tall House since Ingram’s death.

The inquest was fixed for the afternoon. For a while the coroner seemed inclined to dally with the idea of the unbolted front door, but as a coroner’s court has only to decide the cause of death, and in this case it was most clearly and undisputably death from a bullet, he could not waste much time on that.

Frederick Ingram ventilated his doubts of Gilmour’s story as to a blunder having been made. But all the other witnesses who knew the two men, including his sister, spoke so warmly of the years of uninterrupted friendliness between them that he did not make the impression which he obviously hoped to do.

And, very fortunately for Gilmour, a very eminent Cambridge don, a friend of the dead man’s, told of an incident which had happened only this last Easter on Scawfell. Ingram and Gilmour had tried a rather hazardous cross cut, Ingram had slipped to a narrow ledge and lay unconscious. Gilmour had reached him with some difficulty, and sat between him and the precipice, signaling and calling for help. The Cambridge master had been out, too, with some friends, and had heard the cries.

Ingram had been rescued, and after a day in bed was none the worse for an adventure which, but for Gilmour, might have turned into a tragedy. This piece of evidence flattened out any effect made by Frederick.

As for Winnie Pratt, she gave Gilmour an impassioned testimonial which secretly roused him to feelings little short of homicidal, and even Moy bit his lips nervously. But Winnie was only questioned for a moment, she could give no evidence of any fresh kind. Miss Longstaff was not called.

The weapon was produced, the man who sold the blank cartridges showed how next to impossible it would have been for the suppliers to have made a mistake in a box labeled “Blank Cartridges.” The police put in the two sheets each with a hole in it, one near the hem, one a good fifteen inches from the edge. Gilmour gave his version of what had happened and explained the substitution of a faked sheet for the real one as an idea of some member of the house party fond of a dramatic incident, who wanted to see how the police would come at the truth. Here his glance fell on Winnie Pratt, who smiled gently and encouragingly back at him.

The police themselves offered no objection to this theory. The coroner summed up in a way certainly not hostile to Gilmour, the jury went further, and brought in a verdict of death by misadventure, expressing their sympathy with the sister of the dead man, and with his friend, the unfortunate firer of the fatal shot. They put in a rider as to the danger of practical jokes, and the likelihood of them having unforeseen consequences.

“I congratulate you,” Moy said warmly to Gilmour as they left the coroner’s court together. Gilmour looked at him.

“Would you like to have to sit down under a verdict of Not Proven?” he asked quietly. “Would you let the woman you love think you a murderer?”

“How can she think it! What motive——“ Moy said again, almost impatiently.

“Miss Pratt has represented me as being secretly devoted to her own fair self, and only faithful to Alfreda because I thought I owed it to her.” Gilmour spoke bitterly. “I knew something had poisoned her mind when she came up to town—it’s all that wretched girl’s doing. Alfreda loved me sincerely, down at Bispham. I gave her, as well as myself, time to be sure of our feelings and went down there and got her to come and stay with us. I noticed a slight change then...a coldness, a sort of indifference...I thought she was vexed that I had gone away, but I think now that she had heard something about the beautiful Winnie being here. At any rate, the girl who turned up next day for lunch was no more my bright, amusing Alfreda, best of companions, cheeriest of comrades, than it was a Dutchman. She had been ‘got at.’ In other words, she thinks she has reason to be jealous, and a jealous girl is never at her best.” Gilmour finished with a sigh. “She’ll come round of course,” he added, “but when—how——“ and he fell silent. Moy said nothing. He had told the police, but not Gilmour, of the meeting in the linen room this morning. What was Frederick Ingram doing in there with Alfreda Longstaff?

The assistant commissioner had been present too—unofficially—at the inquest. He was discussing it with Pointer as they drove away.

“I rather hoped to find out who was Gilmour’s and Ingram’s enemy,” Pelham said, lighting up, “for if the man’s telling the truth, and he made a truthful impression, he has an enemy and a bitter one! Personally, apart from the impression made on me, his absence of any sort of a good yarn to account for that first sheet sounds like an honest man. You’ve been delving deep into Ingram’s past. Have you found out any peculiarities? Moy speaks as though it were the plain and level high road.”

“There’s one odd thing,” Pointer said. “Moy doesn’t seem to know about it. How did Ingram manage to change the eight thousand odd his father left him, after death duties were paid, into thirty thousand odd? For that’s the sum he has left behind him. Allowing for the rise in the securities his father left him, and the ones he himself has put his money into—and he seems to have chosen well—that still leaves the fact of eight thousand pounds turned into thirty.”

“Fact? Call it a miracle these days,” Pelham said wistfully.

“He went in chiefly for gold shares,” Pointer said.

“Well, that does explain the miracle a little. Still, even so, I wish I had taken him as my financial adviser!” Pelham spoke enviously now. “Or is this where the counterfeit half-crowns come in? Blackwell will be still more on his toes when he hears this. He’s still hoping to be able to find in Ingram the devilish schemer, the secret head of all coiners who, according to him, really exists somewhere in Europe or America.” Pointer was silent for a moment, then he said, half to himself:

“Faces mislead, of course, as I’m the first to acknowledge, but generally because they’re only looked at as features, as it were, two-dimensionally—breadth and height—but depth is in Ingram’s face too. If ever a dead face looked like that of an upright, honorable man it is the face of the ‘ghost’ at The Tall House. Fastidiously honorable, I should say, unbendably upright.”

“That’s his reputation,” Pelham said. “Everyone seems to agree on that. But how he turned that eight into thirty...” Pelham lost himself in financial speculation.

“He regularly, every quarter, these last five years has had his stockbrokers send in to his bank securities to the total of roughly a thousand pounds. He has spent for some six years exactly four hundred a year on himself—one hundred every quarter. His scholastic books seem to’ve brought him that and a bit more. His father’s capital constantly turned over very much to its increase, and this strange thousand pounds every quarter of the last five years, also well invested and frequently changed, makes up the rest.”

“What do his stockbrokers say? Who are they?”

“Cash and Weirdale.”

“I know them. Good but old-fashioned. Nothing dubious would pass them, I think. What do they say about the thousand pounds a quarter? Was it sent them by check in the usual way on Settling Day—or paid in by half-crowns?” Pelham finished with a smile.

“Neither, sir. Mr. Ingram would personally drop in every quarter day, quite irrespective of whether it was End Account or Buying for New Time, and hand over personally ten packets of one-hundred pound notes.”

“‘Forgeries?’ asks Chief Inspector Blackwell at that point in the story,” Pelham said with interest.

“No, sir. Not as far as we know. The firm had had dealings with Mr. Ingram for years or they would have refused such a way of dealing, but in his case, of course, they accepted it as a quaint bit of oddity.”

“Very quaint, and most uncommonly odd!” agreed Pelham. “A thousand pounds every quarter day...is it possible we have here that never-yet-seen-in-the-flesh character, the gambler with a certain System which consistently wins?”

“I thought of that, sir,” Pointer said.

“You would!” Pelham spoke in a resigned tone. “Well?”

Pointer laughed. “Well, sir, we sent his picture to all the big gambling resorts and he’s definitely not known there. Nor has he ever been away for long from his flat or house. But there is a roulette table, old and dusty, in his rooms in a cupboard, snowed under, and not been used for at least a year. But there it is. For what it’s worth.”

“Do you think it’s worth anything?” Pelham asked, cocking an eye at him.

“It may be some legacy of Fred Ingram’s, sir. But I confess it’s odd....Yet against the gambling idea, apart from no hint of it ever having been whispered about him, as far as we know, is the fact that he only paid in, never out from, his account any largish sums.”

“Looks like the half-crowns,” Pelham murmured in jest.

“It’s a case with many possibilities,” Pointer agreed. “That possible encounter with the masked man after the post-office robbery——”

“Mrs. Appleton looks twenty years older,” Pelham said suddenly, “yet she and her brother didn’t see much of each other these latter years, and if Gilmour’s story is true, she would consider that he died as the result of a sheer accident. You said she looked vastly relieved when Gilmour told her exactly what happened.”

“She did. But as you say, sir, she didn’t look relieved today at the inquest.”

“Has she been searching the library too?”

“Not since her one search. But I told her that we wondered whether any visitor had been in Mr. Ingram’s bedroom last night, and she promptly made an excuse and slipped in there—unobserved, as she fancied. Again she emptied all the cigarette ash out of the window.”

“Was there any? I thought Ingram didn’t smoke cigarettes.”

“There was some left in a couple of ash trays,” Pointer said with a faint smile, “just to test Mrs. Appleton.”

“You think she’s afraid someone was there last night? Appleton or Fred Ingram?”

“Her relations with her half-brother seem very cool, sir. Nor can I think she would have looked so immensely relieved if he had been in her mind—I mean when she first heard of how her brother was actually killed. It looked to me, and still does, as though she feared that someone very near to her had had a hand in that killing.”

“Which means her husband?” Pelham asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you think she thought he might have left something compromising, identifying, behind him?”

“I think so, sir. But the curious thing is she didn’t know what to look for, nor where. Odd, if her husband really had spent the night at Markham Square as she says. Anyway, it looks as though she knew of the existence of a motive...and knows that her husband was not where she says he was, at home and in bed at one o’clock last night.”

“All four women then stand for larger or smaller mysteries in this case. The two elder women as well as the two girls.”

“Mrs. Appleton seemed oddly disturbed when Moy told her just now—I was present—of the amount of her brother’s fortune. I couldn’t say it was alarm, but it certainly was not pleasure, when she heard the unexpectedly large sum he has left behind him.” Pointer was looking at his shoe-tips, deep in thought.

“Well, that is odd!” Pelham said frankly.

“Moy has told me something that rather alters things,” Pointer went on. “By their marriage settlements she and Appleton agreed to go halves in any legacy left them. There was a wealthy great uncle of both who was expected to leave one or other his money. He did, to Appleton, who quietly wriggled out of paying over the half to his wife until he had spent it all. But the settlement wasn’t changed. So Appleton is really a co-heir with his wife, though it’s only a question of the interest on the money, which goes intact to the children.”

Pelham smoked thoughtfully without making any comment. They were back at the Yard by this time, in the assistant commissioner’s room. He reached for a book behind him and opened it at a page which he had marked with a slip.

“I bought this at an auction last week. It’s an old work on crime by Luigi Pinna, translated by some contemporary. There’s a delightful passage which puts the case beautifully, and in words of one syllable. Listen: ‘In numerous cases the sole difference between success and failure in the detection of crime is a sort of osmotic mental reluctance to seep through the cilia of what seems to be and reach the vital stream of what actually is.’ How do you propose to seep through the cilia, Pointer?”

“Well, sir, it sounds rather odd. But I want to have all disappearances during the last three months to six months in, or near, London looked up. I’m only interested in solitary people—men or women—preferably odd looking. No dwarfs wanted, nor giants, nor very thin people...”

“What in the name of Minerva are you up to?” the A. C. asked. “Disappearances and Ingram’s death? How are they linked?”

“I hope you won’t press that question, sir. I would be very grateful if I needn’t answer it at this stage. I may be quite wrong. It’s just a possibility...”

“The classic answer of the gifted sleuth,” Pelham murmured good-humoredly. “The dark curtains being drawn before they part with a bang and the lights go up, while the audience cheers, eh?”

“I wish I could feel certain of that last part, sir. What if the lights refuse to go up, and the audience laughs instead? But seriously, there is just a possibility which has been in my mind from the beginning...if I can find what I’m feeling for, it would lead straight to the solution of the puzzle.”

“And to the motive at the same time?” Pelham asked.

Pointer shook his head.

“Not necessarily, sir, but it would lead to the criminal—if it leads anywhere.”

“Humph...well, I’ll let you answer my questions at your own convenience then. But as to motive...no ideas at all?”

“I can’t think of anything that will fit the case, sir. And I assure you, it’s not due to osmotic mental reluctance.”

Pointer laughed. “I’ve been trying to find out if Mr. Ingram went in for crossword competitions. It would be odd to win so regularly, but he has brains that would lend themselves to that sort of thing, one would think.

It seems, however, that he particularly disliked them. Mrs. Appleton told me that if the children started asking ‘what word of four letters means feeble,’ or ‘one of seven means dashed hopes,’ and so on...he would fly, and everyone else tells me the same thing.”

“Looks like ciphers,” Pelham said, serious again. “Big business firms will pay anything you like for unreadable ciphers, or for help in solving those stolen or intercepted from rival firms. And of course there still remains government ciphers...and Mrs. Pratt’s one-time maid, you know...”

“And her husband who fell overboard...” Pointer finished. “I’ve looked up the record of that. Apparently Mr. Pratt was really out on deck by himself when he fell over.”

“It’s a subtle crime,” Pelham said after a moment’s silence. “This of Ingram’s death. And clever. To get another man to do your shooting for you is really good. The curious thing was that change in the sheets...”

“Very,” Pointer agreed. “It paid us such a compliment. Most of the people one meets seem to think a detective can’t see things unless he stumbles over them.”

“I never heard anyone who ever met you, let alone saw you at work, speak of that as one of your failings,” Pelham murmured.

“Still, sir, it was a compliment to us to feel so sure that we would notice the wrong placing of that hole, if done purposely. .