Pointer phoned to Mrs. Finch, explaining that he had news about the pearls which she ought to be told immediately. As he hoped, he was asked to come at once to Ennismore Gardens.
She was sitting before a writing-table littered with papers. She looked a very cool, level-headed business woman, not at all a bereaved mother.
Seating himself beside her, Pointer told her about the real pearls being, at present, untraceable; about the imitations substituted in their stead; about the report of the jeweler from whom they had been purchased; about the advertisement that had been cut from the Daily Wire; about the fingerprints of Mills on Violet Walsh’s bedroom drawer, and also on the shredded-up scraps of paper found at her feet. “Torn up and strewn there after she was murdered,” he said frankly. “Some of them are lying on spots of blood, yet none have bloodstains on them.”
His aim was to move forward at least one step, by clearing away the alibi for Mills. An alibi which he showed Mrs. Finch was quite impossible. But she needed no showing. Her face changed as she heard about the pearls being missing, about the will being torn up. But when he came to the account of Mills’s fingerprints it turned into the really dreadful face that Mrs. Finch could show when infuriated. And for a while she sat grasping the writing-table and swearing under her breath. Then she looked up at him with flint-like eyes.
“So that was his game, was it! And he’s got the pearls?”
The formal warning, quite familiar to Mrs. Finch, as to the penalty of an evidential accessory, even if only after the act, could not stem the spate of her mingled cupidity, jealousy and desperate disappointment.
But she took a deep breath, and a deep drink of whisky-and-soda from a side table, before demanding point-blank:
“Just what do all these discoveries amount to in Scotland Yard terms, inspector?” To say chief inspector was beyond her impolite desire to strike.
“So far, seeing only a fraction of the whole as yet,” Pointer began tentatively, with undisturbed official sang-froid, “it looks though Mr. Mills might have inserted that advertisement as——”
“Wait a moment!” she interrupted, rapidly turning over some of her papers. “That jeweler said that the imitations were made in Paris; and two days after Arthur bought the two necklaces as his advance wedding present to Violet, Mills went to Paris on business, to realize on some gold shares both for himself and for me. I’m being quite frank with you, you see.”
What Pointer saw was a woman who did not know the meaning of the word, but he made no audible comment and she hurried on vindictively:
“Of course it was Mills who inserted those advertisements! Don’t you see that?”
“As I said,” Pointer replied,” it looks at present as though he might have done so, unless he can show an impeccable alibi covering the time when this Mr. Elwes Morris was at the Cumberland.” Mrs. Finch’s eyes narrowed. “Not likely! And I wouldn’t say there was no jealousy at the bottom of it, either,” she muttered hoarsely, as though to herself. “He used at one time to have a decided weakness for my daughter. But when, about a year ago”—she rubbed an inky finger on her blotting-pad with an air of dark absorption—“ I found them secretly confabbing together and taxed them with love-making”—her eyes, as she flashed a glance up at the silently attentive chief inspector, were virtually “spitting fire” as is said of an angry malevolent cat—“they both swore to me that nothing could be farther from either of them. And as it was just about that time that Arthur Walsh and Violet fell passionately in love with each other, why that was that!” Mrs. Finch said with a sweeping gesture and an enigmatic smile.
“But last evening Mills contrived to meet me on my way to town, and almost sobbed—I was too dazed by the news to do so, even if I were of the cry-baby sort!—as he blurted out, without the least consideration for my feelings, as her mother, that Violet had been found by someone in his flat at the Mews, murdered! He said that she must have taken my key and let herself in, or have been let in by some one she had arranged to meet there. And because I thought the dreadful affair awfully hard luck on Mills, as tenant of the flat, while he declared the whole thing—why she had gone there and whom she had met there and why she was murdered—a nightmare mystery to him, as it was to me—and because, too, I own that I didn’t want my business partner to get into any such trouble innocently (as I believed, fool and dupe that I was!) just at this juncture in our commercial affairs, I confess that I promised to secure him from it by giving him a sound alibi.”
She was obliged to pause for breath after rattling all this off at a rate that would have prevented any word of intervention from the chief inspector, had he been disposed to say any, as he was not. But the pause was so far from being for self-control that she screamed:
“And he was there all the time! Gone to meet her there! Played the part of the rajah’s confidential secretary, probably. Violet always was a mug! And of course she had the pearls for him with her I And because she saw through his disguise, though he is a very clever actor, and recognized Mills himself, he killed her. And he’s got both those strings of splendid pearls that belong to me now!”
In the silence that momentarily followed, Pointer’s first reflection was that Mrs. Finch at any rate made no doubt but that her daughter had raised a loan on the imitation string knowing it to be false, since she had taken the real ones to sell to the advertised purchaser. But he had his own reasons for breaking the silence by saying that “Mr. Walsh believes and Miss Lovelace says she now agrees with him that Miss Finch never suspected that the string she pledged was an imitation one. Mr. Walsh is confident that his wife must have gone to the Mews because she was on the track of the missing string.”
“And the newspaper cutting in her bag?” asked Mrs. Finch with recovered coolness, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke indifferently in the chief inspector’s face.
“Put there by someone else—after she was killed.”
Mrs. Finch seemed to consider this possibility. Then she shook her mop of coarse, gray-streaked hair. “Can’t see it,” she said briefly. “No. Violet and Mills were in the sale of the pearls together. I’ll tell you how the thing was worked.” She pushed her papers away and cocked one thin knee over the other. “Violet wanted money. She jumped at the chance of selling the pearls and chancing Arthur’s not noticing the difference. So she sets Mills to get those perfect imitations made in Paris, while on his business there for me. She tells him to keep his eyes open for anyone who would be likely to buy the real ones from her for cash, and take them out of England. A foreigner would be best, she says. Mills thinks it over and sees how he can clear the board for himself. I don’t suppose he meant murder, beforehand. Though, as I said, he may have had something like it in for Violet when she fell in love with Arthur Walsh and engaged herself to him. For Mills is a vindictive devil, and as cunning as an old fox.
“Violet herself fixes the meeting with ‘the rajah’s secretary’ at Mill’s flat to keep it safe from me as well as Arthur. And I noticed that Mills was not at all keen on coming down with me. Didn’t I tell you that he really left me just a little after three o’clock? He tears back, changes in his car, goes to his flat to meet Vi as the rajah’s man, and gets both strings of pearls. For I shouldn’t wonder if he’d already bought the smaller one outright.
“But he wouldn’t want to lose that money!” Mrs. Finch’s greedy eyes were aflame as she cried. “I see what happened about that! He guessed that she had put it in that old cabin trunk where she always kept her private papers and special things, even after she was married. Of course her keys were on her! Catch Violet stirring a step without them!” Something in the tone told of black anger. “That’s why he came back after he’d killed her; came here, quietly stepped back after he was shown out, and got that money too!”
Mrs. Finch was not smoking now. Her hand was shaking. She was in a white-hot rage of frustrated, insensate passion. Greed chiefly but not entirely, Pointer thought.
Her words about having “taxed” her daughter and Mills with being in love with each other, meant that she would have opposed it. And something in the eye and tone spoke of jealousy. Real and unalloyed. She was old enough to be Mills’s mother, and Pointer fancied that Mrs. Finch was only too well aware of that fact. None the less, he believed her to have been jealous of Mills’s affections going elsewhere.
But of one thing he was sure; she was convinced of Mills’s guilt. She was not merely pretending to a belief in it. And her story, though frenzied at times, was likely enough, but for the time factor. It was impossible for Mills to have got into Mrs. Walsh’s bedroom with the keys taken from her handbag after her death, unlocked the cabin trunk under the bed (however desperately rapid his work) and turned up at Walsh’s house at the hour given, if both the times that he specified were correctly stated. About the latter one Pointer thought that there was no doubt. The servant who had let Mills in, and Walsh himself, were independently in perfect agreement as to the hour in question. Incidentally, too, when they traced that telephone call it would be decisive. Yet the maid had been absolutely certain that she had heard Mrs. Walsh move and speak, in her own bedroom, at five o’clock!
Pointer put his doubt to Mrs. Finch. She instantly asked him to touch the bell twice; on which her parlormaid appeared.
“Look here, Gwendolyn,” her mistress said, “I want to get something quite clear about which this officer and I don’t agree. He says that Mrs. Walsh didn’t leave here yesterday afternoon until after five o’clock. Now isn’t that impossible?”
“No, madam, she didn’t leave before that,” the maid said earnestly. “Five struck just as I heard Mrs. Walsh in her room. I was coming down then for my own tea, from my room. And I tapped on her door to ask if she would like tea. Mrs. Walsh called through the door, ‘No, thanks,’ and turned on the water, like Miss Vi always used to do when she didn’t want to be disturbed, you know, madam.”
“Yes, I remember,” Mrs. Finch said, frowning thoughtfully. “Well then, Gwendolyn, we’ll let that pass. But it was quite half-past five before Mr. Mills turned up, and asked for Mrs. Walsh. That was so, wasn’t it?”
“No, madam, it wasn’t!” Gwendolyn answered firmly. “It was just quarter-past the hour. We were waiting in the servants’ hall for the news from North Ireland. Cook always insists on that. Every day we have to tune-in for North Ireland or there’s trouble. Sickening! Mabel and I wanted the B.B.C. Dance Orchestra, which is something like! And just as cook says ‘There! That’s it!’ meaning what she wanted, of course, the front-door bell rang, and it was Mr. Mills, who explained that he’d forgotten his key and wanted to know if Mrs. Walsh was in. Seemed certain she was.”
“And you left him waiting in the drawing-room while you inquired,” finished her mistress, lighting another cigarette.
“Oh, no, madam! I had no call to. Mr. Mills went away at once,” Gwendolyn replied. “He just said ‘I can catch her at the Grosvenor Square house,’ and ran down the steps again and jumped into his car. I was back in the kitchen the next minute to hear cook still listening to the news from ‘the auld counthry,’ as she calls it.”
“Look here, Gwen,” said Mrs. Finch authoritatively, “you’ve got things mixed. Now don’t start to answer back before I’m done! I say you have. Like you did last week when you vowed you hadn’t so much as seen the new napkins and then found them in the linen-cupboard. And lots of other times, too. I know you mean to tell the truth, but you’re apt to go off half-cocked. Again and again you declare that the gong has gone for dinner before it’s been touched.”
The maid, who had opened her mouth for a swift retort, shut it with a sheepish grin, contenting herself with an exculpatory: “And half the time it has gone off, madam. As for those serviettes——”
“Now look here,” Mrs. Finch cut her short: “It wasn’t five yesterday when you spoke through her door to Mrs. Walsh about her tea. It must have been earlier.”
But Gwendolyn was not to be shaken on that point. She stuck both obstinately and consistently to her positive statement; and on her own showing it would have been at the time she said, when she was passing down by the bedroom door of the Walshs. And the housemaid was summoned and bore this out again, as she had before.
On which Pointer took her in hand:
“It’s a question of exact times; and it’s a very important point,” he said in his pleasant quiet way. “I’m sure, Mrs. Finch, that Gwendolyn wants to help us, but I’m wondering if she might not have fancied she heard Mrs. Walsh speaking; if she might not have heard just that reply so often before, called through the door, that yesterday Gwendolyn perhaps took it for granted that she heard them again.”
Mrs. Finch took out her cigarette and looked at him.
“Well, sir,” the housemaid interpolated, with an apologetic smile for it,” that’s possible, Gwennie often does think she’s been called, when she hasn’t been, I mean, if it’s about the time for it. She’s always saying the postman’s knocked (that elderly postman who comes of an evening always knocks”)—this last in an aside to Mrs. Finch, who paid no attention to it—“when she’s waiting for a letter. And I know she’s said before now that she heard you come in, madam, and then we’ve heard you come in later on. Gwennie certainly does think she hears what it’s about time for her to hear. I mean——”
She hesitated lamely, and Pointer turned to Gwendolyn herself. He suggested that the voice she had heard speaking through the door was some one imitating Mrs. Walsh’s voice. Didn’t it sound muffled?—the two words rather blurred? In answer, and looking very excited, Gwendolyn exclaimed:
“Oh, yes, sir; it was like that!” The voice she had heard had had just Miss Violet’s—Mrs. Walsh’s—way of saying things through the door, “over her shoulder-like, without stopping what she was doing.” But Gwendolyn admitted that the words she had heard had sounded indistinctly. And, sifter a few further attempts to explain more clearly what she had already made quite clear, the girl was dismissed.
“Sharp of you, chief inspector (but you look as sharp as they make ‘em”) Mrs. Finch said when the maids had closed the door, “to spot the probability that it wasn’t Violet at all in her bedroom when Gwen thought she heard her. Not Violet, but Mills, eh?” Mrs. Finch said coolly. And Pointer’s repulsion was deepened by her unfeeling way of discussing the investigations into the murder of her own daughter. Whatever Violet Finch had been or done...could not be wondered at in a child shaped and trained by such a mother.
But having learned what he needed to know, Pointer left the house in his car, picking up Sewell, as arranged, to tell him the facts.
“Then Mrs. Walsh wasn’t alive at five o’clock!” Sewell exclaimed after hearing them.
“It’s rather that we don’t know that she was alive then, than that we have any proof that she was then alive,” Pointer said, “though the doctor is inclined to fix the hour when she was killed as about four o’clock.”
“And so Mills, after all, has no alibi at all for yesterday afternoon, from three o’clock on! From where he left Mrs. Finch it would take him only an easy three-quarters of an hour’s driving to reach the Mews. That would give him ample time to change somewhere on the way into ‘Mr. Morris.’ He could then be at his flat in that character by four o’clock; let Mrs. Walsh in or be let in by her according to their arrangement; murder her, after getting from her the larger string of pearls; go back to her bedroom for the money he had already paid her for the smaller string, if he had done so; or to get that string also if still in her trunk! But that theory leaves the mysterious telephone call to Walsh unexplained. That extraordinary telephone call quite beats me!” Sewell was all agog.
“Of course I’m professionally out of the case, I’m afraid; since my commission was to clear Mrs. Walsh from any suspicion of having known that those pearls she pledged were imitations. Well! All this hardly points in that direction, does it?”
“It certainly doesn’t look, so far, likely that Mrs. Walsh, or Miss Finch as she was then, wasn’t up to the neck in the pearls fraud,” Pointer said slowly. “But then, it wasn’t likely from the first, according to Miss Lovelace’s story, as Miss Finch herself endorsed it in writing. And nothing’s yet decisively certain, or proved beyond question. I’m now going to see Mr. Walsh. One of us two—you, for choice—had better tell him what we’ve learned. And, by the way, how did you get on with the bank manager? Was he as helpful as you hoped?”
“He was. What he told me fits in with what you, I fancy, think (and incidentally, what Mrs. Finch thinks, she says) about Mills’s purchase outright of the smaller string of pearls.” It appeared, Sewell continued, that Mills’s bank manager, who had been glad when he closed his account, had said that Mills had had about three thousand pounds in his current account; and had drawn it all out on the day before the Receiving Order against Mrs. Finch was issued, taking it in hundred-pound notes.
“Which he probably changed at various money-changers within the hour, and then changed back again. It would be worth the loss since it would obliterate the trail,” Pointer said. “We shall try to trace the notes, of course, but it won’t be possible beyond the first change, I fear.”
“And now he’s probably got in hand pearls valued around three thousand pounds as well,” Sewell said musingly. “Just double what he took out of the bank. Well, well! I’m sorry for Arthur Walsh when he learns what we have got to tell him. Though I shall underline the possibility of there eventuating the beatification of his wife when all the facts are discovered and used for her. In common honesty, however, I must hint that there’s some doubt of that. But, in common humanity, too, I’ll mention it as possible.
“Add Kitty won’t like the news, either. She’s been a staunch supporter of Mrs. Walsh’s innocence from the first, you know. And there is this on her side”—Sewell paused to eye Pointer with his face screwed up tightly—“we both feel sure Miss Lovelace knew all about that cutting before we had a cleverly arranged opportunity to find it. I’ll eat my hat if that’s not the truth!”