Pointer picked up his hat and, after a word with the sergeant whom he left in charge, made a move towards his own car.
“Where to?” Sewell asked. “I’m Mary’s little lamb, you know.”
“I must try for the whereabouts of the necklace. Did you notice the absence from the murdered woman’s handbag of an item that one would have quite expected to find in it?”
Sewell shook his head. “No, I missed nothing—and so evidently I missed something important. What was it?”
“Her keys,” Pointer replied. “Yet the very valuable larger pearl necklace isn’t on her, nor with her. The keys may have been taken out when her handbag was forced down out of sight and almost out of touch in that chair.”
“I don’t see why you’re so sure “that she herself didn’t thrust it there,” Sewell said. At least some half-dozen good reasons why Mrs. Walsh might well have done so were in his own mind.
“There are a few small drops of dried blood on one side of the bag,” Pointer said,” as though it had been lying not far from her when she was struck down. The drops had dried where they lighted, which suggests that either the murderer overlooked their evidence or trusted that it would not be discovered, or hoped to regain the bag when he could safely destroy it.”
Sewell drew a long breath. He had never worked on a capital charge before. In a sense he was not doing so here. For his sole province was the clearing of Violet Walsh’s reputation from the charge of her having criminally raised money on a necklace which she knew to be fraudulent.
“You know,” Sewell said as he lighted a fresh cigarette, “going by faces, I should expect young Mrs. Walsh to have always locked her jewels up with extreme care.”
Pointer cocked an inquiring eye at him as he, too, lit up.
“I lunched with her—them—you know. And—well, I should expect her to look sharply after her possessions. It was indicated in her face. Her mouth, for instance——”
“Looked locked-up, too?” Pointer suggested with a twinkle.
Sewell nodded. “It did! ‘Secretive,’ I tabulated her. But with such high spirits and ‘go’ that I could quite see how a rather cold fish like Walsh would be seized by the—the——“ He groped for the right word to exactly express his meaning.
“Gulf Stream?” Pointer tentatively supplied. And Sewell nodded his thanks for its fitness.
“——Of her temperament,” he went on. “The zest of her honeymoon was vivid in Walsh’s gay young bride, then. And now she’s dust and ashes; or will be in a short time!” Sewell was evidently deeply moved by the sudden tragedy into which he had been personally drawn.
“Was that her usual manner, I wonder?” Pointer queried aloud. Or was she keyed up about something...expecting something—good or ill?”
“I’m handicapped by never having met her before. But if she was just as usual, she was certainly dashed amusing company,” Sewell said. “Not witty, let alone brilliant. Nothing of that mentality. Just chock full of high spirits. She laughed contagiously at the smallest jest.”
A constable came up to Pointer as the two were getting into the Yard car. “There’s a gentleman here, sir, name of Walsh, too, just stepped into the garage. Wears a clergyman’s collar and asks for a word with yourself.”
Pointer went round to the garage door at once. Ambrose Walsh—Father Walsh—was there. Pointer, who had not before met him, was struck by the intense pallor of his face and his air of aloofness.
“I happened to be in one of the houses opposite,” began Ambrose in his charming voice, “teaching a little blind boy his religious lessons.” He handed his card to Pointer.” And when I came out just now and asked the reason for the crowd over here I was variously informed that there had been ‘a death,’ ‘a murder,’ ‘a suicide...’ The name attached to each of these versions was ‘Mrs. Walsh.’
Now, there is a Mrs. Walsh who is a connection of mine by marriage...” He looked inquiringly at Pointer.
“Mrs. Arthur Walsh is the lady’s name, sir,” Pointer said. And Father Ambrose was tensely silent for a full minute before he said quietly, “That is the name of my family connection. Is her husband here by any chance?”
Pointer explained a little, a very restricted little, of the tragedy. Ambrose listened with the close attention to be expected, while his pallor grew still more noticeable.
“Did you know the murdered lady well—may I ask, sir?” Pointer asked.
“I met her once. Before her marriage,” was the reply. “Have you any theory, chief inspector, as to the motive for the crime? Or is it out of order to ask that question yet, if at all?”
Pointer looked at the speaker attentively. He appreciated the force of the personality confronting him. But besides that—as he looked into the dark resolute eyes on a level with his own, and he himself was well over six feet—he was conscious of a curious sensation as though a thick wall of ice or crystal were between himself and the priest. Something that neither he nor any man could pass through, except by the will of the other.
“May I ask exactly where you were visiting, sir, when you saw the crowd?” he asked instead of replying.
“Around the corner here is another garage, on the opposite side of the street. Over it are some tenements. I was in a room of which the window looks into a courtyard. So that I had no idea of this crowd—until I found it blocking my path.”
“You know Mr. Sewell perhaps, sir?” Pointer turned towards his companion as he asked.
The priest’s eyes seemed to grow hooded as he slowly said that he did, apologizing formally for not having previously noticed Sewell, with whom he shook hands.
“Do you also know about the matter that Walsh has asked me to clear up?” Sewell asked.
“Yes,” Ambrose said rather curtly. “Arthur told me that he was getting you to help him solve a mystery. Which would now appear to be entangled in a darker mystery,” he murmured in a voice that suggested that his thoughts were elsewhere. “Strange...!”
“What is?” Sewell prodded.
“Strange that I should happen to be just across the road.”
It is said that love cannot be hidden. And Pointer would have supplemented that axiom by another certitude, namely, that knowledge is equally bound to betray itself. And that the priest had some private knowledge pertinent to the murder of Violet Walsh, he felt certain. Of the extent or importance of that very deliberately unavowed knowledge, Pointer could as yet form no opinion. But he felt convinced that to Father Walsh himself it bulked weightily. Which made Pointer force the issue by asking with stern gravity: “Do you know anything, sir, bearing at all on the facts of the crime or charges now under police investigation?”
The priest’s eyes met his as if all .the blinds were down in a house, as he said concisely: “No.” Upon which monosyllabic negative, Ambrose Walsh walked unhindered away, after a stiff farewell nod to the two men. Unhindered, because Pointer considered the whereabouts of the larger pearl necklace more important than endeavoring to get through or over the barrier with which the priestly mind was hedged around at present.
As Sewell and he got into Pointer’s car and left the spot the latter looked questioningly at his companion.
“You want me, I see, to pay for my official keep,” laughed Sewell. “About Father Walsh, for instance. Well, I really know little of any consequence about him. He’s distinctly out of my usual line of business. He’s considered, I hear, to be marked for something high in the priesthood. But I’m inclined to think a mischievous agent here, he’s so bigoted. I have a friend, the doctor for a couple of Convents, and, like myself, a Catholic, from whom I gather that Father Walsh practically forbids them taking in any Protestant children. They are jolly expensive convents, so it isn’t any case of cruel discrimination. But it’s Father Walsh’s idée fixe that the true believer and the false believer, or heretic, should be kept apart, for fear of the rot spreading. I noticed, and so of course you had, chief inspector”—Sewell gave Pointer a friendly smile—“that he didn’t refer to the murder as a ‘terrible’ or even a ‘tragic’ affair. And I can only wonder if he sees in it something grotesquely like ‘divine providence.’ He fairly raved against the marriage, Arthur Walsh told me, when going into the pearl mystery with me.”
“How did he learn of the trouble about the pearls?” Pointer asked.
“Oh, the Walshes are good Catholics. So, too, is Ann Lovelace. Probably they all go to him to confession, when he’s available.”
“Could he tell us about knowing of it, if he had learned of it only in that way?” Pointer asked, though he knew the answer.
“No, evidently Miss Lovelace or Arthur Walsh went to him about it as to a friend. Anyway, Arthur Walsh told me that his cousin, Father Ambrose Walsh, knew and was fanatically against the marriage. The Walshes are rather big fish with us. Their money, and the fact that they were pre-reformation Catholics...A totally different set, socially, from that of Violet Finch.”
“Her father was a barrister, though, wasn’t he?” Pointer asked. He knew all about the Finches from the Yard’s information; but he might get some fresh news from Sewell’s angle.
“Yes. Dublin. Mrs. Finch is a doctor’s daughter. They were bitterly poor, she says, when her first husband died, leaving her with about seven hundred pounds in all and a baby girl, Violet Finch, to provide for. Mrs. Finch put most of the money into the management of a Social Club, to which she went herself. According to her—and I fancy her boasting is founded on fact—she doubled its membership in a month and trebled it in a quarter. She then sold her share for twice what she had put in, and started a nightclub herself in a London cellar. It became the first of her gold mines, those Little Owls——”
“About which the Yard had daily complaints,” Pointer interrupted with a grim smile. “But we know of no reason why they have quite faded out of late.”
“Just fashion!” Sewell said sagely.” Got too popular to be popular any longer. Her prices, too, were fantastic. It was only while it was ‘the thing’ to be seen there that she could get them. Yet once she put them down, the end was in sight. Personally, I’m glad of it. If half the things I’ve heard about her and her clubs are true, they’ve ruined many a young fool between them. The gambling that went on there was incredible.”
“How was it, may I ask, that you never happened to meet her daughter, Mrs. Walsh, until at today’s lunch?”
“Her mother, it seems, wouldn’t allow Miss Violet Finch to go to the Clubs. At least not until the fateful night when she and Walsh met. He told me that it was a case of love at first sight. And real love, too, it must have been, or he wouldn’t have married into that lot. Though I have an idea that he didn’t learn just who she was until they were mutually infatuated. I suppose she took after her father. Miss Kitty Walsh, I know, liked her. And that’s a very good recommendation indeed to my thinking.”
“Did Mrs. Walsh strike you as straightforward?” Pointer asked next.
“Rather! No finesse, and not much tact, probably. But I should think she’d be outspoken to a fault. ‘Steel-true, blade straight. The great artificer Made my mate’—that sort. Poor Walsh! I wonder what the enigma of those changed pearls will prove to be. You know, chief inspector—Walsh’s idea that his wife was hot on the right track strikes me as quite possible. She was distinctly the kind that—if she had come on something or thought of something vital—would have gone straight to have it out, face to face!”
There was a pause. Sewell’s monkey brow worked furiously. “I suppose you know all about that chap Mills?” he burst out finally.
“No,” Pointer replied promptly. “Not necessarily ‘all,’ but a good deal. He’s not yet been found doing anything——”
“——Apprehensible,” finished Sewell with a grin.
“Precisely,” Pointer agreed. “You always did get the right word, I remember.”
“And you the right man! I’m jolly glad of a chance to work with you. I may have my own theories as we go along, but I won’t expound them until the end of this case. Then I’ll own up handsomely. And it isn’t as if you needed any help from me. Nor, for that matter, do you ever parade what you’re after till you’ve pretty well got your hand on it—my dear Pointer. But—to return to our mutton—Mills is a Cambridge man, with some quite decent family connections—for whatever these details may seem worth, though I expect they’re all already in your bag.”
Nothing more was said at the moment until Sewell, as usual, said it by asking: “What do you think oddest in what we’ve been told, so far, in this most extraordinary case, chief inspector?”
“That telephone message to the husband,” Pointer unhesitatingly answered. And Sewell nodded his complete agreement before—as usual—expanding the problem with perhaps its most salient mystery:” What could have been its motive? Personally, I can’t account for it by any conceivable reason for it.”
“It’s just possible that it was from someone who wanted to make quite sure that Mr. Walsh would not be in his mother-in-law’s house at a given hour,” Pointer said. “There are many other possibilities, of course, but that suggests itself as the simplest explanation. Which was why I looked for her keys at once.”
“And they’re missing!” Sewell’s forehead began to corrugate portentously. And when Pointer added, “Yes, it’s possible that the murderer then hurried after the much-more-valuable string of pearls, if he found to his disappointment that his victim did not have it on,” Sewell said with emphasis, “Five thousand pounds, at least, in question! And Walsh was told, when he bought the two, that this string alone might easily fetch another thousand.”
“Then why didn’t the vendor wait for such an occasion? Who sold them? Do you know?” Pointer asked.
“The two necklaces belonged to old Lady Loud-water. Oddly enough I chanced to hear, some months ago, that she wanted to realize on them. They once belonged to Queen Charlotte of Mexico and Lady Loudwater believed they brought their owner bad luck. She rather suspected that that was why they had been sold to her originally. If so, they have assuredly lived up to their reputation!”
There followed another ruminating silence before Pointer asked:
“Do you know Miss Lovelace?”
Sewell had often met her. “It was thought at one time that she was going to marry Lord Wilverstone—or, rather, that he would break off his engagement to another girl and marry Ann Lovelace. But he married t’other girl after all; so probably there was nothing in the chatter. At that time Walsh, I know, was completely bowled over by her. But she never even spared him an encouraging glance. So that, too, evidently, melted away. Certainly he was head over ears in love with his wife, as I can testify, both from what he said to me when asking me to clear up the mystery of the false pearls and from my own observations at lunch today.”
“Did she seem to you equally in love with him?” Pointer asked.
“Equally? No!” Sewell replied. “His evident adoration would have been hard to equal. But in love all the same. I mean that I think she was much more of the femme maîtresse than he was of the homme maître. Dear me!” he grinned, “I’m not as a rule addicted to French chestnuts; but one must borrow such phrases, at times, to get one’s exact meaning defined without too much verbiage.”