TWELVE

About an hour after the inquest, Moy got a message that Mrs. Appleton would like to speak to him on the telephone.

“Do come round to see me as soon as you can,” she begged. “I’m thinking about Mr. Gilmour. It’s a dreadful position for him. I’m staying at my brother’s flat at Harrow for the present, as you know, but I shall be at Markham Square all the afternoon.”

When Moy went round, as he did at once, he found to his surprise that Tark was in the little drawing-room talking to a rather distrait-looking hostess. As Moy was shown in, Tark said that he would wait until Moy had finished, and go back with him, if he might, as there was something that he wanted to talk to the solicitor about.

Mrs. Appleton gave a nod that suggested inattention more than agreement, and Tark stepped out into the little passage, and Moy heard him opening and then closing a door farther down on the same side. The door of Appleton’s den. So he could find his way about the house...Moy had thought that he did not know Ingram’s sister or brother-in-law...but Moy dropped Tark, and what he might have to say to him, and devoted himself to Mrs. Appleton.

She had been deeply moved, she said, by the look of suffering in Gilmour’s face and she had just heard that Miss Longstaff had broken with him.

“I don’t know that there’s anything one can do, Mrs. Appleton,” Moy said rather hopelessly. “I quite agree with you, it’s awful for him, but how to help him is another matter.”

“I can’t bear the situation!” she said suddenly to that. “It’s an intolerable one for me, Charles’s sister!”

So it was not for Gilmour that she wanted to see him after all, Moy thought.

“You know, I’ve been wondering whether someone couldn’t have shot Charles over Lawrence Gilmour’s shoulder, just as he fired the blank cartridge...She looked very white and very tense as she said this. “I mean, Mr. Gilmour may be right in thinking he fired a blank shot, and yet Charles may have been shot dead—but by someone else.”

“I’ve thought of the same possibility myself,” Moy said, “but it seems so far-fetched. Besides, it would mean that someone was in Gilmour’s room, unknown to him, who fired through the open door at the exact second that Gilmour did.”

“Well? He would lift his arm to fire. There would be plenty of time to know when he was going to pull the trigger.” Her voice sounded harsh, as though her throat were dry. “Mind you,” she went on hastily, “I wouldn’t say this to the police for worlds. Nor have them know I ever thought it.” Her vehemence told Moy that her nerves must be frightfully on edge. “But as you’re our friend—friend to all three of us, Charles, Edward, Gilmour and to me—I know I can talk things over with you without fear of consequences.”

Moy assured her that she could. But he looked at her a trifle oddly.

“As Gilmour thinks that he was alone,” he went on, “your idea would mean that someone hid in his room and stepped out just as he himself stood in the doorway with the door open, and while your brother was walking away down the passage.”

“Well,” she said, “there is a built-in cupboard just by the fireplace exactly opposite to the door. It’s not used. The room is carpeted from wall to wall.”

“True,” Moy said slowly, “he wouldn’t have had even to step out, just swing the cupboard door wide open...counting on the fact that when Charles fell Gilmour would rush forward and leave the bedroom door open...but I think I should have seen him...”

“You too rushed to Charles’s side. And were trying to find a switch that would work,” she said under her breath, her eyes wide and dark.

It was true. He had paid no attention to the rest of the passage except to the white mound on the floor outside Ingram’s room half-way down.

“That would mean that your supposed murderer was a good deal taller than Gilmour—which might easily be, for he’s short—or have stood on a hassock.”

“There is a hassock in that room, a huge leather one.” She twisted her fingers tightly together on her knee.

“He’d have to be a crack shot, as well as a particularly callous brute,” Moy finished hotly. Mrs. Appleton kept her eyes fastened on her tightly clenched hands. “Yes,” she said so low that he barely caught it. “Or have been mad.”

“Mad! No madness in such a plan!” he retorted almost reprovingly.

“But madness is wanting a fortune at any cost—at any price!” she finished still under her breath.

“But how would Ingram’s death have given——”

Moy stopped, and suddenly he saw what all this meant. The woman’s white face, the horror in her dilated eyes...So Appleton had not been at home last night. The alibi that she had given was false. She suspected her husband of having murdered her brother...a horrible position. But she had nothing to go on, surely...Of course Appleton was a splendid shot. He got many an invitation on that account in the autumn, and he was just the right height to have fired over Gilmour’s shoulder, or even over his head, at Ingram...But he wouldn’t know about that cupboard. Appleton had never been upstairs in The Tall House. Besides, he couldn’t be sure that his wife would still inherit under her brother’s will, though it wouldn’t be like Ingram to change his will without letting Mrs. Appleton know...Where was Appleton, by the way? He had not seen him except for a few minutes at the inquest. Moy remembered now that he had come in after his wife and sat down some distance away. Near the door.

“You didn’t see anything that bears out my fantastic idea?” she said, looking at him with tragic eyes. “I mean, now, thinking back?”

He assured her that as he had just said, he thought the idea not easily credible, but was not prepared to say it was quite impossible.

“Then—then”—he saw her pass her tongue across her lips—“if not impossible, it must be looked into. I mean it’s our duty to do so. For Charles’s sake, and above all for Lawrence Gilmour’s sake! I can’t imagine anything more horrible to Charles than to have his friend suffer for something that he never did.”

“One has to think these things over very carefully, Mrs. Appleton,” Moy began. She flashed him an almost scathing look.

“Do you suppose I’ve thought of much else since—it first occurred to me as a possibility,” she said. “I hoped, I thought that Mr. Gilmour might quite clear himself—I mean...” She stopped and then went on with another sentence. “Friends talking on the way home showed me that because of that article about the sheet with the hole in the wrong place he’s by no means cleared. Who could have written it? It seems so motiveless. Just to throw a wicked suspicion on him and not to carry it any further. It couldn’t be just a newspaper idea, could it? To help their sales?”

Now Moy himself was rather thinking along those lines. Had he known of any person belonging to that particular paper being at The Tall House he would have thought of it much sooner. But this smaller mystery sank into insignificance besides the one concerning her husband...He must ask after him in common decency...He rose and murmured something about her having given him a great deal to think over, and the necessity of great care in such matters. He supposed Appleton was out? And hoped she, the children were well. Moy ran it all together in a sort of vague mist of good hopes. She did not reply to his words.

“I’m going away for a long voyage with the children.” She seemed to be already far away. “That’s why I had this talk with you. You will know just what to do about everything.”

Moy did not in the least share her confidence in his universal knowledge. He could imagine few more perplexing positions. Any careless move on his part, one incautious word, and the two Appleton children would or might, be in the position of the children of a suspected murderer. How could he help Gilmour without harming them—Ingram’s little nephews? He left the house feeling as though a weight too heavy for him had been suddenly thrust on him. He had completely forgotten Tark and any talk with him. But that gentleman did not seem to mind being forgotten. He had drawn up an easy chair to the window and sat looking through the lace curtains, smoking a cigar, and now and then entering figures in his notebook as Moy had so often seen him doing. He put it in his pocket as Appleton passed the window. A minute later the master of the house came in. Tark waited until he had closed the door of the little room, before he rose from his deep easy-chair. Appleton swung round with an exclamation as he saw his guest.

“How did you get in? I had no idea——”

“You have been out each time that I asked for you before. Now then, Appleton, what’s your best offer?”

The two faced each other in silence. A long silence. Appleton’s forehead and lips began to twitch.

“I don’t understand you,” he said at length.

“I think you do. Which is why you’ve refused to be in whenever I’ve ‘phoned. Now then, what’s your best offer?”

“I don’t understand you,” Appleton repeated. He tried to speak defiantly, but his voice suggested a bleat.

“Try a little harder,” suggested Tark with a sardonic smile, “for I don’t want to go into details. I don’t want to know them. I’m quite willing that you should enjoy what you’ve run such risks to get.”

“I haven’t run any risks. I haven’t got hold of anything!” came from Appleton fiercely. Tark waved him away with his hand as though he were a smoke ring.

“I’m quite willing, as I say, not to start any unpleasant inquiries, provided you give me a written understanding that we go shares in your—we’ll call it ‘purchase.’ Fifty-fifty, Appleton. Come now!”

“You’re mad!” came angrily from Appleton, whose eyebrows were going up and down like some sign in a window. “Mad! Fifty-fifty? For what?”

Tark came quite close. “For your neck, Appleton. Fifty per cent is none too high for that, and I mean to have that promise. Or hand you over to the police. I know you’ve got the—information—I want. And I know how you got it. And if the police knew the first fact, they too would know the second. At present, they’re hunting for a motive. One word from me, Appleton, one word as to what I expected them to find among Ingram’s papers, and what becomes of you? You with your double motive, that paper, and Ingram’s will?”

“You’re all wrong! All wrong!” Appleton said hotly. “He gave me the paper. Handed it to me as a free gift.”

Tark’s short, low, sneering laugh was his answer to that last assertion.

“Your wife feels as sure of that as I do,” he said.

“It’s true!” flamed out Appleton suddenly. “Damn you, it’s true! She’s been talking to you, has she!”

Tark eyed him with the intent, unmoved, watching gaze of a man accustomed to use his fellow-men, to make the most of any opportunity that came his way.

“No matter how I learned about it,” he said briefly, “I do know, that’s enough. Now then, what about the offer in writing for which I’m here, to be left behind when we set off for foreign parts? Just in case history should repeat itself, eh? Just you and me on a trip together—Fred Ingram is still hunting.”

 

Chief Inspector Pointer had taken the bus ticket to the head office. There they told him that it had been punched late on the evening on which Ingram had been shot, and was for the distance from before Markham Square to a little beyond the street in which was The Tall House. He was now for the first time able to see the ticket collector who had been on duty at the time. Pointer reminded him that it was the night of the heat wave, one of the hottest nights in England for the last fifty years. The man remembered it perfectly. He had only had one passenger inside. A tall chap with a twitchy face. He remembered him, because he had jumped off the bus so hastily on catching sight of a friend on the pavement that he had all but fallen headlong in the road. The conductor had steadied him.

“Did you see his friend? The man on the pavement?”

“He was just turning a corner. Couldn’t catch sight of his face.”

So that Appleton, for the description fitted him, must have known the man quite well to have recognized him from that glimpse.

“Was your fare any of these?” Pointer laid some photographs before the man.

“That’s him!” The collector touched Appleton’s picture. “He’s often up and down our way. Lives along there.”

He had not seen him in company with any of the other faces shown him. Did he see the actual meeting between the passenger and the man on the pavement? “A bit of it.” His fare had hurried after the other man, overtaken him, and caught hold of his elbow. They seemed quite friendly. At least the other had not snatched his arm away. Pointer further learned that the pedestrian might well have been Ingram, though this was purely negative, inasmuch as the man had not been old, nor big, nor fat...

Pointer next went on to see Appleton, and that was how he came to send in his name just as Tark was putting a folded paper away in his letter-case while Appleton stood watching him with a face of fury. Tark shot a swift glance around as the maid entered with “a gentleman to see you, sir,” and held out Pointer’s card.

“I’ll go out that way,” Tark breathed in the other’s ear, and made for the double door leading into some other room. Appleton detained the maid.

“When you’ve shown, the gentleman in, show this other out. Be sure he goes at once.”

Pointer looked very grave and very stiff.

“Mr. Appleton, why have you not told us that you walked back to The Tall House with Mr. Ingram the night on which he was shot? That you had a talk with him in the library there.” This was guess work, due to the ticket, and Mrs. Appleton’s interest in cigarette ash. Appleton was smoking a very peculiar Greek brand of cigarette.

“For the very good reason that I did none of these things,” Appleton said sharply. His twitchy face was absolutely still as he turned it to the other. Pointer felt as though it were held so rigid that a finger pressed against the cheek would not even make a dent.

“You were recognized,” he said warningly.

“I couldn’t have been, since I wasn’t there,” Appleton tossed back in as firm a voice. “What you mean, chief inspector, is that someone thought he recognized me. He made a mistake. I often did drop in for a chat with my brother-in-law, but not as it happens on that evening.” He drummed on the table. His fidgets began to come back, now that the strain for which he had pulled himself together had gone, or lessened.

“Pity,” Pointer said thoughtfully. “You might have been able to help us. Supposing Mr. Ingram’s death was not accident, can’t you suggest anything, Mr. Appleton, which might have been a motive for his murder?”

Again the face stiffened, grew still and set.

“His work, for instance,” Pointer went on, not apparently glancing at the other man, “or something connected with his writing.”

Appleton was quite pale, but he shook his head. He sat down in a chair so hastily that it looked as though he fell into it.

“The inquest has just decided that it was death by misadventure,” he said in a curiously halting voice. “I don’t pretend, chief inspector, that I think things don’t look odd...anyone could have tampered with that revolver, as I’ve said from the beginning.” He shot an odd, sly look at the chief inspector, sly and yet determined. “I don’t pretend to agree with the finding of the inquest,” he said again. “I’m glad you’re looking into the matter.” He did not look glad, but he did look oddly persistent and haunted.

“Yes, I have a horrid sort of fear that perhaps it wasn’t an accident,” he went on. “I had intended to say nothing about such a possibility, but—well—somehow I feel it would be letting Ingram down. I have an idea he had some cipher or other of great potential value, and that he was murdered for that...” Appleton threw out his chest and pulled himself in until he looked like a majestic pouter pigeon. His dark, large, flat eyes fastened themselves on the chief inspector’s face. “Don’t you think yourself, chief inspector, that there’s something odd about the affair?” he asked.

“It’s quite an idea,” Pointer replied evasively, and as though much struck by its novelty. “But can’t you suggest what sort of a cipher...where we ought to look for the criminal if there is one?”

No. Appleton assured him that he had only a vague uneasiness that things were not right, but that he had no idea as to who could possibly want to murder his brother-in-law.

“Of course if it was a cipher,” Pointer murmured, as though confiding in his cigarette—one of Ingram’s—“one wonders whether his proof-reader wouldn’t know something about it...”

Appleton drew in a quick breath, his eyes bulged for a moment but he said nothing, only tapped the knuckle of his first finger reflectively against his teeth, which gave him an odd appearance of uneasiness.

“Possible,” he muttered. “That’s really what I wondered. Whether...it’s a ghastly idea, suspecting this person and that, but if it was anything to do with his papers, why of course Frederick Ingram would be by way of knowing about it. .

Appleton leaned forward, one hand on the table, a white, well-kept hand but thin and hollow-sinewed; the hand of a man who was really very ill.

“It’s ghastly for everyone,” he went on in a tired voice, “I mean anyone who also feels uneasy, not to know who did it. But in confidence, chief inspector, I think you ought to keep an eye on him—and on Tark,” he added vindictively and suddenly.

“I thought you were doing that,” Pointer said innocently.

Appleton turned very gray. “Tark? I, or no, he...I...no, I hardly know him,” he murmured.

“Yet you correspond...” Pointer seemed puzzled. “I may as well tell you that I saw a letter from you to him——“ So Pointer had, but in Tark’s letter-case.

Appleton had a very odd writing, rather beflourished and with exaggerated capitals.

“Oh, merely a reply to a question that came up once at The Tall House,” Appleton said swiftly. “We were discussing some question of engine power of the new little B.S.A. cars, you know the ones with the fluid Daimler drive, and I stated definitely some figure which surprised Tark. When I got home I found that I had misread a statement of the B.S.A. Co. chairman’s, and wrote putting right my mistake.” His flat eyes flitted nervously across the other’s impassive face. Pointer could not tell him he was a liar. It was a possible explanation but Tark hardly looked the kind of man to carry such a letter around with him. And the envelope that Pointer had seen in his case was quite well worn.

When Pointer left, together with Appleton’s cigarette, he knew that Appleton had been to The Tall House for some reason—after some object—that he could not, or would not, avow. That search of Mrs. Appleton’s for some paper or papers...it looked to Pointer as though her husband had got it, or them, since he himself made no effort to rummage among Ingram’s belongings. But Tark had done so, and Tark had been followed to this house, and had been heard several times asking for Appleton over the ‘phone. He knew that he was in the house when he himself had arrived. Pointer’s watcher had told the chief inspector that Tark had come quite openly. Was that because he had to? Because Appleton would not meet him outside? Pointer would learn with interest whether Tark now discontinued his search or not. From the look of purple fury on Appleton’s face, he, Pointer, would not be surprised if Tark had got the better of the other in some battle of wits or wills or threats. The question was—even supposing that Appleton had got some document for which the other, and possibly his wife too, had been looking—did it stand for anything in Ingram’s death? Mrs. Appleton had shown plainly enough, Pointer thought, that she suspected something of the kind. She had left Markham Square at once after the tragedy and gone, with her two little boys, to her dead brother’s flat at Harrow, merely notifying Gilmour of the fact after she had installed herself, saying that the children needed fresher air than they were having in Chelsea and that she would see to it that they did not overflow into his rooms. Gilmour had assured her that the entire flat was at her disposal for as long as she would like to stay there.

Mrs. Appleton’s face and manner quite negatived—to Pointer—the idea that she had come on some clue pointing to her husband which she had suppressed, and that her husband felt himself safe for that reason. Appleton did not look as though he felt himself safe. Quite the contrary. Appleton looked a man living in the shadow of some fear, but Pointer thought that the fear was a definite, not a vague one. There were parts of his path in which he felt himself quite safe, and parts where he inwardly trembled, so the chief inspector, an unusually astute and penetrating observer, read the man. Tark disclaimed all knowledge of Appleton, as Appleton did of him. Appleton had traveled a good deal...gambled a good deal...Tark lived near Monte Carlo...Mrs. Pratt came from Geneva...von of de which the expert still claimed was part of a cipher...Mrs. Pratt had once had a maid who was an international spy...HELL LIGHT CLAIRE...The tobacco shreds under the pillow, and yet Ingram’s waistcoat, empty of everything that could interest anyone, lying on his chair. The inner secret pocket with its fastening...Did they all belong together, or were they but shattered bits of many circles? He was thinking them over as he left Appleton, left without any inquiry as to Tark. Let Appleton think himself unobserved, his next step in that case might be a helpful one as to settling his own status in the death of his brother-in-law.