Sewell’s professional interests were at issue as well as his disinterested concern for his friend. The latter maintained that the cutting only proved what he had claimed from the first: that his wife had come on something which had linked the fraudulent necklace directly with Mills’s flat, if not with Mills himself. But Sewell now had disturbing doubts, which must be settled, pro or con, so that, while he half-wished that he had not accepted the commission, the other half of his mentality knew that he did not want to relinquish the intriguing problem unsolved.
If the living Violet had been what her adoring husband thought her, what she had as convincingly appeared to be, at that luncheon, then that cutting should help him to establish it. It might, he thought, lead either to Mills or to some one connected with her mother’s circle. For it had been while Violet was again living under her mother’s roof that she had gone on some suspicion to the Mews, and been murdered in consequence.
Significant, too, was the fact that she had chosen a day for her visit to the flat when she would have every reason to think that neither her mother nor Mills would be in it. Mrs. Finch’s theory that her daughter had gone to meet someone else there had been put forward very quickly. Was it her honest belief? These were questions that Sewell wanted more light on. And it teased him, as well as humiliated his professional pride, to think that what was all fog to him might be fairly clear to the chief inspector; and that not so much from superior training as from keener deductive insight.
“Where do you suggest that one should seek for clues, if not actual evidence, in this case?” he asked him. He did not look for direct assistance, but it would be well to learn along what avenues Pointer’s intentions were moving.
“I think the two families concerned should be closely studied as important factors,” Pointer answered. But Sewell could not quite get at the kernel in this nut. He was too tired to crack it at this late hour, and with a murmured “Goodnight” the two separated.
Next morning Sewell was at breakfast when Pointer rang him up to say: “I’ve some news that will interest you. Walsh is still asleep, his man says, but if you care to come round——”
Sending instantly for his car, in a very short time Sewell was seated at Pointer’s breakfast-table, where he completed the meal abandoned at his own place. That speedily done, the chief inspector handed him a note that he had received a few minutes earlier. It was from the fingerprint department at Hendon.
“You remember those bits of torn-up paper that were found around the murdered Mrs. Walsh’s feet?” Pointer said.
“Yes. Quite blank, I understood. Weren’t they?” Sewell asked eagerly.
“Well, I had them tested for fingerprints,” Pointer said. “You can’t tear paper up easily with gloves on. And our powder showed some marks on those.”
“Fingerprints! Whose?” exclaimed his listener.
“Four clear fingerprints were found on them and traced to one of the men working in the garage. But all the others are those of Mr. Mills,” Pointer answered.
“They were bound to be!” interjected Sewell. His flat; his prints! But what about the garage man? Was there an accomplice in the murder?”
“Not necessarily. I have already had a few words with the mechanic in question, before I met you on the front doorstep here. I asked him whether any parcels had recently come for Mr. Mills, and if so, who had taken them in. That torn blank paper was wrapping-paper. He explained that the three gentlemen living in the house usually answered their own door-bells. But if they were out, and parcels or registered letters came, they were left at the garage with whoever was in charge there at the moment. And yesterday, he told me, a little package had come for Mr. Mills from his laundry, about three in the afternoon. The man who brought it said it was a handkerchief that had been left out of Mr. Mills’s things sent home at the end of last week.”
“Around three.” Sewell was pale with excitement. “If that’s so...Then how did the paper—you think it was that wrapping-paper, of course—but how did it come to have Mills’s fingerprints on it? He says he didn’t go over to his flat at all yesterday until he went there with Miss Kitty and Arthur Walsh at half-past five.”
“Exactly!” Pointer replied. “That’s the question, and an important one. Inspector Watts has one of the pieces of paper with him—to match it at the laundry, if possible. I rang them up on the telephone this morning and asked particulars of the handkerchief sent.”
Sewell did not quite see why; but he said nothing.
“The manageress told me that it was of bright blue silk, with large white spots on it.”
“Mills did have one of that description thrust up his cuff yesterday, when we saw him at his flat!” Sewell threw out his hand with quite a dramatic gesture. “But that would mean?”—his face was all puckers. “How could you prove it was the same handkerchief?”
“Quite possibly he won’t be carrying it today,” Pointer said. “At least one would expect him to use only subdued colors just now. And if it can be got hold of, among his things, and the laundry can recognize it positively as the one they sent home to him yesterday in the early afternoon by special delivery, Mr. Mills would need to exercise all his ingenuity to explain it away.”
“If it can be got hold of! But how can it be done?” Sewell persisted.
“Say a man, claiming to be from the laundry, calls and asks one of the maids in Ennismore Gardens not to get him into trouble, but to let him have it back, for it wasn’t Mr. Mills’s, but belonged to another customer. He adds that he’s bringing back the right blue and white one instead. Say the maid, touched by his good looks and his pleading, gives him back from Mr. Mills’s room the one sent to Mr. Mills’s flat yesterday. Say the laundry identify it?...”
“If the laundry identify that handkerchief—as they will—you’ll have him!” Sewell exclaimed. “But his alibi? It was confirmed by the mother of the murdered woman! Are you going to question her about that, Chief Inspector?”
“Mrs. Finch is too ill to see any one this morning,” Pointer replied with a very unsympathetic look at his companion. “It happens to fit in well with some of her commercial difficulties—not to be able to reply to questions for some days—so I don’t think she’ll recover in a hurry.”
“But surely, to catch her daughter’s murderer!” the other expostulated. “Are you going to arrest Mills, or question him first?” he asked.
“Question him, assuredly. But at this juncture—only about his fingerprints in her room,” was the firm reply. Which evoked from Sewell almost a groan.
“Then where, my dear chief inspector, does my commission come in? That scrap of paper we found, or rather those two scraps, seemed the first practical suggestion of where to hunt for the pearls that I’ve come across yet! And what, may I ask, do you make of Miss Lovelace’s possession of its duplicate?”
“Just what you yourself make of it, I fancy,” was the smiling reply. “For obviously, if Miss Lovelace hadn’t found that cutting in Mrs. Walsh’s bag on some previous opportunity, her whole bearing showed that she knew of its existence; even if she had not determined that one of the two cuttings should be found there when we were searching for ‘evidence’ of any sort whatsoever.”
“Yes; I begin to think Miss Kitty Walsh was right: that Miss Lovelace isn’t the simple transparently kind creature I took her to be.” Sewell’s gloom brightened a little as he added the indulgent rider: “Of course, just now, she’s trying to get Walsh on the rebound from his grief over his wife’s awful death. And she may I He’s tremendously touched, I know, by her remorseful way of sympathizing in his determination to hound down her murderer.”
Pointer was now wanted on the telephone. The torn-up paper had been identified as the same that had been used to deliver the handkerchief to Mills from his laundry yesterday.
“And the handkerchief will prove that it was in the flat early yesterday afternoon,” Sewell said. “I wonder though...Mrs. Walsh was here at five. Could she have torn that paper into bits? Did it also serve to wrap up the pearls? Frankly, Pointer, I’m at sea! Absolutely at sea!”
Pointer made no comment.
“The date when that advertisement was inserted,” Sewell continued after another gloomy interval, “may get us one step forward.”
“A big one at that,” Pointer agreed, “though not necessarily in the direction you desire, my dear fellow,” was his unspoken reflection before Sewell resumed:
“And what about Mills’s gloves?”
“Mr. Mills’s outfit in that respect would seem to have consisted of two pairs only. Both pairs quite uninteresting,” said the chief inspector.
“But did one glove look crumpled? As though it had been forced into an inner waistcoat pocket?” Sewell asked with intense interest.
“You expect too much. The fault of youth!” was the smiling response. “Both pairs looked smooth, and very little used.”
“Humph!” was Sewell’s discontented ejaculation. “But, by the way, where was Colonel Walsh yesterday afternoon?”
“I dropped in late last night at Friars Halt, as I happened to be in the neighborhood.” Pointer threw in this last explanatory clause quite casually. It was, however, received with a derisive grin.
“He spent yesterday afternoon, he says, looking through a very well-known bulb importer’s stock. From hall-past three to well past five.”
“Anyway, I don’t see Colonel Walsh battering-in the head of even an unwelcome daughter-in-law,” Sewell called over his shoulder as he hurried off.
At the Yard Pointer was informed that Mr. Mills was back and quite at his service if the chief inspector would like a talk with him. Upon which Pointer phoned asking Mills to make the immediate interview in his official room. And when his visitor was shown in it was with a very haggard countenance that he seated himself.
Pointer wasted no time in skirmishing. He asked him point-blank how he accounted for the fact that his fingerprints were found on a drawer of Mrs. Walsh’s dressing-table.
Mills stared, and said he couldn’t explain it at all, except that on the day before her return he had noticed that one of the drawers stuck out, and had thrust it home when Mrs. Finch showed him the room ready for the young couple. Obviously, he said, Violet had used the knob when opening and shutting it. As for the french-polishing—well, evidently the polisher had scamped his work. It was a possible explanation and it was made with apparent carelessness. Yet it might be the last talk the chief inspector could have with him without having to preface it by the warning which sounds so simple, and which means so much,—the warning which a police officer is bound to give if he thinks the answers to his questions may mean an immediate arrest, that anything the questioned man or woman says will be taken down, and may be used in evidence.
Half an hour later Pointer learned that the handkerchief had been definitely identified by Mills’s laundry as the one sent by hand yesterday afternoon. The vanman had left it on his way to his own home, about half-past three; for he had driven away from the laundry at three and got home at four. And the Mews was almost exactly half-way by road between the two places.
So now there was definite evidence that Mills had been in his flat before four o’clock yesterday afternoon; and Mrs. Finch must be aware that she was giving him a false alibi unless her partner had misled her in some clever way. Pointer’s mind, however, set that question aside for the moment to concentrate on other details of Mills’s dossier.
Sewell meanwhile had contrived an interview with Miss Kitty Walsh, in which he told her of Miss Lovelace’s change of heart towards Mrs. Walsh’s implication in the false string of pearls.
“Change of heart!” Kitty shook her head like a mettlesome little filly. “Change of plan, more like, since she discovered that Arthur won’t tolerate the least aspersion on Violet’s good faith. I think Ann hopes to take her place as his consoling wife yet.” Kitty spoke with careful lightness. “But she hates Violet, if possible more poisonously than ever. Don’t make any mistake about that I For if you keep that fact before you, and read everything she says or does by its illumination, you may read Ann Lovelace correctly. Otherwise you, too, will be her dupe.”
“You’re a pretty good hater yourself, Miss Walsh,” Sewell said with a grin. “That means a forthright nature.”
“It means that I can’t stand scheming. I’m a Walsh, too, remember!”
“Umph! I wish I could be as confident as to my own professional course towards my client,” he said gravely. “I wish I felt sure that Walsh’s fiancée and bride was all that he——“ Sewell checked himself; his monkey’s brow knotting itself up over conflicting responsibilities.
“I believe you’re yourself falling into Ann Lovelace’s net!” Kitty expostulated. “Oh, don’t let her twist you round her finger, as she does Arthur, with her sham remorse and devotion to Violet’s good name; her pretended belief, now, that Violet was honest in pledging those pearls. Which simply means that she feels she can afford to talk generously because she has all the strings in her hand, to pull them the way she is after.”
“You don’t do my supposed intelligence justice,” Sewell said smilingly. “We found something this morning (I don’t feel at liberty to speak out about it), and I myself have a strong suspicion that Miss Lovelace may have somehow arranged for us to find it.”
“Something that would tell against Violet?” Kitty asked.
“That’s still uncertain,” he admitted. “But it may! Damnably. Decisively, as far as I am concerned in the case.”
Sewell was late for lunch with the chief inspector. But what he then heard was so enthralling to him that it actually put even Miss Kitty Walsh out of his thoughts for the time being, as he exclaimed:
“So it is all up with Mills!”
“I don’t go as far as that,” Pointer replied. “But we know, now, that he was in his flat before Mr. Walsh found his wife dead, murdered, there. We know that it was Mills’s fingers that tore into shreds the bits of paper that we found at her feet; and that the handkerchief we saw in his pocket did not reach his rooms till half-past three.”
Sewell looked at him with a furrowed brow. “But why should he put those scraps there? Why? They were all blank!”
Pointer did not reply. The question was rhetorical.
“And the marks on the drawer in her room?”
Pointer looked at his shoes. “They are suggestive, aren’t they,” he said. “But his explanation is—”
He gave it, and Sewell passed a tired hand over his perplexed expression.
There was a ring on the telephone. Pointer was some time at it, apparently giving and receiving measurements concerning a carpet, while Sewell bobbed up and down on his chair like a cork dancing on waves.
“It’s about the newspaper cutting,” Pointer was beginning, when he was again interrupted by a telephone calling for the chief inspector.
“The cutting in Mrs. Walsh’s handbag is to the fore,” he said. “The first message to me, just now, was phoned from the Yard. The second was from Mr. Walsh and Miss Lovelace. Both bring the same authentic information; and I fear you will not be pleased by it.
“We learn that the advertisement was originally posted to not only the Daily Wire, from which the cutting was taken, as you know, but to all the other big London dailies severally; in each case with a prepayment enclosed for its insertion daily for a week, and giving a box number for replies to it.”
“And the date when it was posted?” Sewell asked feverishly.
“Nearly a week before Miss Finch, as she was then, got Miss Lovelace to advance the money for her gambling debt, giving her alleged pearls as security for the loan,” Pointer said gravely.
“So my murdered client could well have seen it!” Sewell said with a face no less significantly grave than was the chief inspector’s.
“Mr. Walsh’s message was more than a trifle incoherent,” Pointer continued. “He says he realizes what the facts must suggest; but begs ‘earnestly’ to ‘suspend judgment for later data.’”
“Who sent it and paid for the advertisement?” Sewell asked.
“The sender gave his name as ‘Mr. Elwes Morris,’ and the ‘Cumberland Hotel’ as the address from which he wrote. Each daily which had inserted it received quite a number of replies. Some are still being received; although Mr. Morris sent instructions to each paper to forward nothing more ‘as he was leaving.’ And he did leave at the end of his week. Seemed quite the usual hotel guest, the manager of the Cumberland says. Had no servant with him, very little luggage, and occupied one of their smaller and less expensive rooms.
“Shall we go on there.?” Pointer asked. They had not finished lunch, but neither man stayed for that, as they reached for their hats and gloves. Each wanted to be away before the husband could catch them up. The husband with his belief in his dead wife about to receive a final blow.
At the end of a couple of hours’ inquiries they were aware that Mr. Elwes Morris, on leaving the Cumberland, had gone for a couple of days to the Regent Palace Hotel. He had had many telephone calls and many visitors at both hotels. He had used taxis exclusively. Had never dined in either hotel, and never used the public rooms. He suffered from a bad cold while at both places and always wore a muffler when passing to and fro.
“Disguised,” Sewell said.
The chief inspector nodded vaguely.
“Surely—don’t you think?” Sewell persisted.
“Oh, yes.” But Pointer added nothing to the monosyllable. They then discussed the plans for the afternoon. Pointer wanted to go carefully over the events of yesterday with Kitty Walsh, in case she had noticed anything more than she had mentioned, and arranged with her to see her down at Friars Halt later in the afternoon. Meanwhile he intended to break the news to Mrs. Finch that the pearls on which she was counting were all imitation, and that the real ones were missing.
Sewell said that he knew the manager of the bank which Mills used, and he would try to see if he could glean from him a few friendly (as distinct from official) facts about the latter.
“And what about Colonel Walsh’s alibi?” he asked as he was rising. “You know he made a selection of some of the newer daffodils, and then asked to be left alone in the shed where the commoner sorts of lily bulbs are kept.”
“He often does that, it seems,” responded Pointer. “Lets himself out by one of the doors used by the staff, and sends in his order when he has had time to think it over well and take counsel with his head gardener. That happened yesterday, it appears. He was alone from about four o’clock on. No one knows when he left. He himself says ‘close on five’; and that he sat a while in the park afterwards.’”
“No alibi at all then,” summed up Sewell. “It’s lucky for him that the Colonel is really beyond suspicion;” With which presumptive certificate Sewell sprinted for his car.