XVIII. THE PEARLS ARE FOUND

Sewell had received a message when he was halfway to Devizes, putting his interview off for two days. Whereupon he instantly tried unsuccessfully to get Pointer on the phone. Failing him, he phoned to Arthur Walsh, and arranged to dine with him.

Sewell and he had enjoyed what on the whole was a fairly cheerful dinner, all things considered. Arthur talked gratefully about the sympathetic way in which Ann Lovelace was helping him and his father by her tact and kindness, notwithstanding her natural horror at Violet’s appalling treachery.

Sewell agreed with him as to the shock that learning of such deliberate and even criminal duplicity must have been to a nature like that of Miss Lovelace.

“I feel as though I had been under an evil spell,” Arthur said soberly, “to be so blinded. Not to see...” he checked himself. And the two men then discussed the case itself with quite a fair amount of objectivity; Arthur posting Sewell about the bungalow at Shorncliffe Road, Folkestone.

“If the chief inspector fails to find the pearls cached in that bungalow, or its grounds, if it’s got any,” Arthur said thoughtfully, “I don’t see his next step.” Nor did Sewell. But he felt quite sure that Pointer did, and was absorbed in silent speculations as to possible alternatives, with scant attention to the other’s wandering talk.

And when he had left Walsh he got out his roadster and motored down to Folkestone. He himself was now out of the case; free from all its obligations. Nor was it Scotland Yard’s ground. It belonged to the Folkestone police. Sewell knew that part of the country very well. His first O.T.C. camp had been close to Shorncliffe, and he easily found Seaview among a group of other bungalows.

It was about half-past twelve and a beautiful, clear night. He hid his car and walked round the little house in its sandy garden. A willful impulse was rising in him, as he made his prowling observations. He had a knife...that back window catch looked absolutely rotten...It had neither bars nor shutters...Any one could push back the catch and get in...he might have the immense luck to find those pearls that Pointer was after...

Sewell took a half-turn away from that most enticing temptation. Followed irresistibly, however, by a whole-turn back to that window. Next, found the thing accomplished and himself noiselessly inside. He left the window as he had found it, and switched on his torch. He was in the dining-room evidently. It looked the sort of place that he would expect Mr. Gray to have. “Cheap and nasty,” Sewell said, wrinkling up his nose at the thickly loaded varnish glittering on tables and sideboard.

There was a drawing-room opening out of this dining-room, with its own gimcrack chairs and sofa, and a smoking-room on the other side of the hall. A nice room this last. Gray had kept it simple. The drugget was plain; so were the furnishings, even to a big velvet pouffe by the curb. It had a big tallboy with all its drawers locked, he found on trying them, facing the fireplace. There were built-in cupboards, too. Suddenly a click caught his ear. On the instant he stood rigid, his own torch out. Another faint dick. He had heard that same sound only a few minutes ago, made by himself....Someone was evidently at work on the hasp of the kitchen window. Who? Was Mills at liberty? Was it the police? Or a house-breaker? But he mustn’t wait to know which. He softly opened one of the cupboards and to his delight found it empty, with its one shelf some six feet up from the floor, and quietly slipped into it. If it was only some chance thief he might not stop to search unpromising-looking, because keyless, cupboards. “Kismet!”

Unfortunately the door, which he had softly drawn to after him, shut off all view of the room and he dared not leave it ajar. His luminous watch dial told him that it was now close on one o’clock. He heard movements from the man or woman—but the mode of entry seemed to negative the latter—now only too close to himself. He heard quick steps come into the room and after a second the switching on of the electric light. And a moment later the door of the cupboard next to him was opened. He knew now that it could only be a matter of seconds before he was discovered with consequences abjectly humiliating at the best, and perhaps something much deadlier at the worst. His tense apprehension grew so unbearable as almost to make him plunge out to meet whatever might be the consequence. But just as the cupboard door beside him was firmly closed, a creak came clearly from the kitchen. The second corner heard it too, for after one second’s utter stillness, Sewell heard him tiptoeing back across the room, the light was noiselessly switched off, and then came the sound of the door being opened with the utmost caution. He ventured to open his cupboard door very gingerly. He was just in time to see the room door being closed very quietly behind whoever it was that had been in the room with him.

Sewell on the instant was out of his cupboard and into the one that had already been thoroughly searched. He had barely drawn its door close again, when once more the room door opened, this time with confidence, once more the light was switched on, once more the steps came towards the two cupboards. The same steps. Sewell hoped that whoever it was it was not one of those absent-minded people who forget what they did last. He did not want him to search the first cupboard again. He need not have worried. In another second the second cupboard had been opened, looked into, closed, and then the steps went to the middle of the room.-After some minutes there followed sounds which had no meaning whatever to Sewell’s quick ears. In vain he tried to guess their significance. He grew desperate. At all or any costs to himself he must see what or who was making those queer sounds of ripping, followed by soft thuds! Getting his penknife out of his pocket with the utmost care to make no slightest sound, he softly pried the tightly shut door sufficiently open by what he hoped was an imperceptible space. But in the next instant it was flung open and a revolver was thrust within an inch of his face. It was death. And Sewell knew it. He was not afraid. There is no fear at the very end of all. Fear falls by the way. A whimsical notion struck him that he had come here to learn the truth, and that in another minute he would know the whole truth.

Then everything happened all at once. Or seemed to. A clear voice shouted warningly: “We are the police!” even as his ears seemed to split with the sound of a shot. A flame scorched his forehead. The room was full of figures fighting, swirling round and round. There was another report and then the figures fell apart, revolved themselves into one on the carpet and three others bending over him, while two others stood by the door. And a voice said gravely: “Arthur Walsh! I arrest you for the murder of Violet Finch. And I warn you——”

The warning followed. Sewell was beside Pointer now, though he never knew how he got there. Walsh lay very still on the floor, his head in a widening pool of blood. “I’m done for,” his voice came feebly, “you turned my wrist too far, chief inspector. I’m—going—fast.” His eyes fell on Sewell’s horrified ones. They lingered there.” Quick! Hurry!” came in a throaty croak, “think of your own last hour, and get the bishop of Lower Mesopotamia here. He’s—at—the Franciscans here—with Ambrose. It must be a bishop—I want absolution!” And by these words Sewell knew that the chief inspector had made no mistake. Incredible though the arrest would otherwise have been to him. Arthur Walsh!...Why, Arthur had adored Violet surely! He had no need whatever of money. He could well afford the loss of the pearls. Yet he had asked for a bishop!...and only a bishop can absolve a murder!

“The Church of St. Francis...quite close!...Priests’ house next to it!—Get him for me, Sewell, at once! I can’t last for—”

Sewell rushed out into the night. Chief Inspector Pointer bent over Arthur Walsh. A shot had grazed his head, causing a sense of great shock, but the merest of scalp wounds. Pointer examined him quickly but carefully; as far as he could see, the man was uninjured in any vital or even serious sense. He was almost tempted to let him think himself dying, but he resisted it. It might possibly have been debatable had the Yard needed a confession, but the case against the man who had deliberately planned and brutally carried out the murder of Violet Mills, as she secretly was, needed no confession for its absolute completion.

“You’re not seriously wounded at all, Mr. Walsh,” the chief inspector said clearly to him, “Did you understand my warning about ‘evidence,’ just now?”

“I’m dying!” came weakly from Arthur, who had never in his life borne pain with any pluck. “Listen! I can’t last till the bishop gets here, for I’m going fast. I killed Violet. She deserved it! I didn’t know then that she was already married. I thought I should go mad when you found that out. Mad...I’m half mad...I needn’t have done it! I needn’t have got to this—dying here like a dog!”

“I assure you again, Mr. Walsh, that you’re not dying nor anywhere near it—at present,” Pointer said with stern significance. For not here and now was Arthur Walsh to pass from this life. Pointer’s whole soul revolted at the thought of that butchered girl. Tricked, lured to her death by this callously sordid travesty of manhood. Violet Mills had not been by any means all that she should have been, but she was a saint compared to this cunning tiger who had killed her for his own ends.

“I know better, chief inspector,” Arthur replied. “My legs are already cold.”

They were; since a shot-wound in that particular part of the head always produces that effect.

“And the cold is creeping up to my heart. It was the fault of her mother,” he panted on. “That Finch woman, and her damned Clubs! She’ll never tell you; Mills may; but he’s afraid of her. I want it put on record. I want it broadcast. Take this down quickly I instantly!” His nerve was so shattered that Arthur Walsh really looked now like a dying man.

“She blackmailed me, like lots of other victims, as soon as she cleverly found out that I had given my word of honor to my father that I had no other debts than those he had already settled. He is insane about gamesters who play for stakes they can’t settle. Give me some brandy! I’m going! I shan’t live to tell you the whole story after all!” Panic-stricken with his own certainty, Arthur tremblingly swallowed the water one of the men held to his lips.

Pointer held up a hand. “Mrs. Finch gave you back your I.O.U.’s on your wedding day, in that so-called packet of sandwiches, didn’t she, Mr. Walsh? I thought so,” he said, as Arthur’s head made a sign of assent. “You had beforehand determined to get rid of her daughter as soon after the wedding as possible? You bought your supposed wife those valuable pearls as a wedding present, and then inserted the advertisement about them, ostensibly from a rajah’s secretary. It was you who, as Mr. Elwes Morris, did actually buy the smaller string before the wedding, and after it, as Mr. Elwes Morris, you arranged to buy the larger string from her in Mr. Mills’s flat. Instead of which you murdered her with the steel ornament standing on the mantelshelf, and coolly strewed torn-up scraps of Mr. Mills’s writing to suggest him as the murderer.”

“And that devil took them away and put blank scraps in their place!” Arthur chokingly ejaculated. “He took me to those gambling dens of his and Mrs. Finch’s in the first place. He led me on—and let me down...He got me into that damned harpy’s clutches and he ought to hang! He ought ——”

“Sign, please,” Pointer said coldly as he put the requested deposition before the babbling man. Arthur scribbled his signature eagerly. The numbness was passing off, and his head was giving him more agonizing pain that he could endure without low moans. That it would presently pass, and leave him very much his usual physical self, he was much too hysterical to realize, let alone believe, as he persisted: “Ambrose knew. That’s why I went to confession to him, to stop his mouth ——”

At this moment Sewell came back, bringing Ambrose Walsh with him.

Sewell gave a cry as he caught sight of the face on the floor, for Arthur’s eyes were closed. “I couldn’t get the bishop,” he said chokingly to Pointer, who for once had no clue to his evident distress. “He left this afternoon. But ——”

“He said that you knew all, before he went to confession to you, sir,” Pointer said to the priest on that.

A bitter look just flitted across the tight lips of Father Walsh. He was clearly quite aware of the reason why his cousin had chosen him, though Arthur had pretended to Sewell that he had been too late for a word with Ambrose before the latter had withdrawn into a Retreat. But as he knelt beside the seemingly moribund Arthur, he made a sharp ejaculation; for Ambrose Walsh was also a very good doctor and his hands had passed with swift investigation over the head and torso before him. A fresh moan now came from Arthur: “I’ve confessed, Ambrose; oh! give me what you can! I’ve confessed.”

The priest rose to his feet on this. His eyes were blazing as he faced the chief inspector. “Have you juggled him into thinking himself a dying man?” he demanded sternly. “Have you tricked him by using the most sacred need of the human soul?”

“Not a bit, sir,” Pointer said authoritatively on his side also. “I have vainly assured Mr. Walsh that he has got only a scalp wound. But he persists in believing that he is dying.”

“I’m dying, Ambrose,” his cousin pertinently groaned, reiterating: “Give me what absolution you can!”

For reply Father Walsh gave Arthur a most unpriestly tug, lifting him on to a chair. Then a look of infinite pity swept over the harsh features of Ambrose Walsh, as he said to his cousin:

“Listen to me, Arthur! You’re very slightly wounded; a mere scalp wound. Pull yourself together, and play the man for once! I shall leave you for the moment, to get the best legal help for you that can be procured. That done, if I’m permitted to. I’ll see you as often as you ask for me.”

But Father Walsh only saw Arthur once again. For his cousin steadily refused to see him until the end, when he asked for him. And it was Ambrose who accompanied him prayerfully on Arthur Walsh’s last earthly walk.

 

“Father Walsh knew?” Sewell questioned with incredulity even stronger than his amazement, as Arthur was driven off between two of Pointer’s men. Sewell longed to divert his own mind from the shock of Arthur’s arrest. “And just now, when you saved me from following Violet, where were you? Have you got the fabled cloak of invisibility, by any chance, chief inspector? I heard the door locked by the man in the room whose revolver he shoved into my face. I can swear that you didn’t share my cupboard. Where the devil, then, were you, to play the Yard’s deus ex machina so decisively for me as well as for Walsh?”

“You know the tallboy whose drawers you hurriedly tried to open?” Pointer answered gravely as well as succinctly, for the preceding scene and forced departure of Arthur for the gallows, unless some miracle of special pleading could intervene to cheat justice, was as tragically before his mind as overshadowing Sewell’s, who now turned sharply to examine the piece of furniture in question on Pointer’s significant answer. He exclaimed with fresh incredulity, however, as he saw, from the tallboy’s moved-out profile, that it was a complete sham. It had no drawers. It had no back, but had been held firmly to the wall by two air cups. Its hollow interior provided for the perfect concealment of the expectant chief inspector and two of his men, for which purpose it had been expertly prepared at the Yard. Pointer first assuring himself both of the intense activities of the others at a distance and of the fact that Arthur was paying his first visit to the bungalow and had no acquaintance with its furniture, therefore.

As he was due at the Yard, he had the place locked and guarded, and—arranging to meet Sewell later—drove there speedily. The A.C. sent for him almost immediately. Pointer had already handed in his report, setting Mills instantly at liberty. He was told only that facts had come to light which proved his entire innocence of the criminal charges in the case. Arthur’s defense exerted itself subsequently to implicate Mills with Mrs. Finch’s blackmail, and with the murder of Violet. But the finding of jury and judge quashed the attempt.

On Pointer’s entry now, the assistant commissioner laid a slip of paper before him. There had been an accident in Park Lane. An elderly gentleman hurrying forward had been run down by a car and killed outright. From the letters in his pocket the man had been identified as Colonel Walsh.

“I had just spoken to him over the phone,” Major Pelham went on, “and asked him to come here to see me as soon as possible. He believed that we had now completed our case against Mills, and I am afraid that he was so engrossed with that idea that he forgot to keep a careful enough look-out when hurrying here.”

“What a blessing—for him,” Pointer said fervently. Pity for the father’s terrible ordeal had weighed on the chief inspector all morning, and Major Pelham fully sympathized with his relief.

Over lunch—to which the A.C. and the chief inspector had been invited by Sewell, his rooms securing privacy and confidential talk without fear of the ubiquitous press broadcasting it prematurely—Sewell metaphorically cornered his revered exemplar in the difficult art of detection, with the query: “Chief inspector, did you suspect Walsh from the first?”

“Practically, yes,” was the reply. “Because, on weighing up the probabilities in the case of each more or less suspect individual involved by the circumstances of the fraudulent pearls and the murder of the owner of the originals, Mr. Walsh afforded, to my mind, the most likely criminal.”

“But! He seemed to crave to lavish everything on Violet Finch, as we all supposed her, because he adored her with all his heart. How could you tell that all that was an amazing piece of acting? How could you see any motive for it?”

“I did neither, as anything like a conviction, though. All that I did know positively,” Pointer protested with his characteristic refusal to play the occult or clairvoyant prodigy, “was that we had a group of associates any one of whom might, so far as opportunity was concerned, have been the murderer if not the thief.

“Just so! Hell? Taking them separately, a priest is rarely if ever a criminal. Apart from religious principle, he is by training if not by nature much too intelligent. Also, the Reverend Mr. Walsh had a good alibi from the garage through which he had to pass to get out of the house in which he was. Next, Colonel Walsh bears the highest character. I had met him and was convinced of its truth. So, although he had no alibi, I put him and his nephew, ‘Father Walsh,’ at the bottom of the possible suspects.”

“That left Gray, Mills and Arthur Walsh,” Pelham interrupted, holding up three fingers. “Why not Gray or Mills?”

“Because, sir, I could see no reason why either of them should stage the murder in a flat which one owned and the other lived in. As for Mr. Gray, one would expect a garage proprietor to have selected a bloodless murder, and to have taken the corpse to some place that had no sort of connection with himself in one of his cars.”

“Um-hum,” agreed Pelham. “There was no attempt at that, certainly.”

“Passion might have struck, with sudden brutality,” Pointer continued. “But Mills seemed to me, and Gray seemed to Inspector Watts, who interviewed him in Manchester, to be essentially the coldly calculating business-first-last-and-all-the-time emotionally passionless type, rather than one liable to either panic or frenzy.”

“And Walsh?” Sewell drew a deep breath. He had been all out in his estimate of Arthur Walsh.

“At any rate she hadn’t been killed on his premises, was my first thought. Then there was the knowledge of Mrs. Finch and the tales about her victims, to suggest what the whole investigation steadily strengthened; namely, blackmail. While the underlying motive to get free from a wife he hated, a marriage into which he had been blackmailed, leaped to the mind’s eye, as a possibility, from the first sight, especially when I learned about his disinherited brother Gerald...and Colonel Walsh’s abhorrence of a lie. And all his income seemed to come from the allowance his father made him, and the salary paid him in his father’s office. Let him fall out with his father, and he would be a very poor man. I learned, though later, that when he had sent in his papers and gone into business—his father’s business—he had given the latter his word of honor not to gamble any more.”

“Now how did you learn that?” Sewell wanted to know.

“His late colonel let it drop, when I managed to meet him and, apparently casually, have a word about Arthur Walsh. It was at the end of a great many other words about quite another case. But to go back; all the preliminary information fitted the idea of the murderer being Walsh himself.”

“You know, Pointer,” Major Pelham said with a faint smile, “I rather wondered why you seemed to give so little time to making sure whether it was the young woman herself who was heard at five o’clock. It didn’t really matter, did it?”

“Not fundamentally, sir. It only concerned Mr. Mills’s alibi, but I had to give a lot of time to him, for fear of rousing Walsh’s suspicions. Walsh himself, of course, had no alibi whatever from three o’clock on.”

“Ah, his devotion to the young wife whom he had married in spite of all his family could say, made any idea of an alibi in his case ridiculous,” scoffed Pelham.

“His apparent devotion to his wife!” Sewell murmured in horror.

“Ah, that meant nothing one way or the other! What people say means nothing! But if he was being blackmailed into the marriage, could I find out when any I.O.U.’s could have been returned to him? It would be after the wedding, and they seemed to have left practically at once for the air liner. Then I learned of the wedding present of Mrs. Finch’s. An ideal way of returning letters, or I.O.U.’s. He had left the basket behind, I found out, but had taken the packet of so-called sandwiches on with him.”

“Yes, but the pearls!” said Sewell. “The pearls which he himself had bought!”

“And which, if he himself had got hold of them, were still in his possession,” Pointer countered.

“But taking the pearls by themselves, they fitted the idea that Walsh, forced into a marriage by Mrs. Finch, had intended from the first to be free himself as soon as possible. He would have to make sure of a good, ostensible motive beforehand.”

“A sort of moral alibi,” agreed the assistant commissioner.

“The pearls would make a splendid one,” Pointer continued, “they were bought well before the marriage. Violet was to be given them outright on her marriage so that she could leave them to Mrs. Finch. Walsh would know quite well that the elder woman, whom he hated, would never get them from her. Also, he engaged you, Sewell, an amateur who was known to take only defensive cases; never prosecutions. And yet, by calling you in, he drew attention to the pearls.”

“He did keep them well to the fore throughout,” Sewell at last lighted a cigarette.

“They belonged there. They were in the very heart of the plan. They were frankly my one hope of catching him,” Pointer drew out his pipe at a nod from his chief. “The pearls were not insured,” Pointer went on, “though he told the Colonel they were, which meant that no inquiries from the company need be feared. The pearls suggested a well-laid plot, especially the advertisement, and the rajah’s secretary disguise. The dates fitted. The secretary engaged a room in the first hotel and paid for it for a week just after Walsh had gone to see the pearls. Also, by being the secretary, Walsh lost nothing. Except—possibly—the money he paid for the smaller string.

“Then, too, the hotels at which the pseudo secretary stayed were where Mills and Gray were both known, but where Walsh had never been, a trifling point, but substantiating my idea.

There was a short silence.

“Did he arrange...” Sewell checked himself.” He had nothing to do with the imitations, surely?”

“Oh, no, that was an unexpected windfall for him, though I feel quite certain that he knew there would be something of that sort tried on. Oh, yes, he thought over her character closely,” Pointer granted, “and that of Mills too. Given their natures, he reasoned correctly that they would be up to something. What, he neither knew nor cared. He had his own major plot all cut and dried. The more complications there were thrown in the better, Walsh would think. What did rattle him was that inexplicable telephone call. He didn’t want to be the one to find the body. Few murderers do. He had expected that that honor would fall to Mills.”

“And Miss Walsh thought Ann Lovelace was in the whole affair!” Sewell liked to bracket Kitty with himself.

“She was!” Pointer said unexpectedly. “In the very heart of the crime! But not in the way Walsh thought. As great as his determination not to be disinherited was Arthur Walsh’s desire to marry Miss Lovelace. I’ll stake all my future pay on that. He was madly in love with her.”

“He had been once,” Sewell was impressed by the insight of the tall man now smoking a pipe beside him. “But she tried for higher game, especially as in those days there was Gerald, his elder brother and his father’s favorite. So all Walsh’s fury with her when she came to him about the imitation pearls, and her loan on them, was acting!”

“Quite the contrary! No man sweats over a very dangerous plot, a life and death plot, and likes to see it blown sky-high. Arthur Walsh’s shield was to be his devotion to his young wife. He had to marry her to get back the I.O.U.’s of his from Mrs. Finch, and be free—to get rid of Violet, and try again for Miss Lovelace. Yet here was Miss Lovelace telling him something which threatened to make that marriage quite impossible. Walsh met it in the only possible way. Refusing to listen. Refusing to reason.”

“He’s a clever hound,” Pelham pronounced.

“He is,” Pointer agreed, “and in nothing so much so as in not trying to throw any doubt on its having been Violet whom the maid heard in Ennismore Gardens at five o’clock. Yet he made one very bad slip. He spoke of his wife having stumbled on some one when she went to the flat at four, and having been at once killed.”

“Well? Only a trifling slip, I should call it,” Pelham thought.

“I should have suspected him from that alone, sir,” Pointer said truthfully. “No husband, new to the facts, would have forgotten the hour when his wife was last heard. But a man who knew that the murder took place at four, who had reckoned over and over with that hour in his mind—he would forget!”

“He passed on at once to some other point when I recalled it to him,” Sewell had a very good memory. “He was planting the pearls in that velvet pouffe, wasn’t he, when he nearly got me?”

“Yes.” Pointer had his pipe well going. “I noticed a book down at Friars Halt, spoke of it, in which there’s an account of stolen jewels which were hidden in just that place. I hoped he would take the hint. He did. Or tried to. I don’t mind telling you, Sewell, that I could have sworn when you slipped into that room! I purposely hadn’t said anything about the bungalow to you.”

“Does it belong to Gray?” Sewell asked.

Pointer grinned. “I told you that the Folkestone police are rather by way of being pals of mine just now,” was the only answer to that. “I knew that Walsh was feeling like a hen who wants to lay. He had the pearls all ready to dump in the most dangerous place for Mills, and only needed a word from us as to what new place we were going to search. He was far too clever to put them among Mills’s effects. That might, or rather would, have looked ‘planted.’”

Sewell sat thinking. “You told me almost at once that the two families were all-important in the case,” he mused aloud.

“Just so. A father who had disinherited one son, his favorite, because he had lied to him, and a woman who ran night-clubs which were known to be hot-beds of blackmail, a marriage against all reason to that woman’s daughter, and the murder of the bride very shortly afterwards.”

“And all that love and devotion was only a smoke-screen. I wonder what his real thoughts were, when he went off the deep end, on hearing about her previous marriage?” Sewell was too interested to keep his cigarette alight.

“He wasn’t acting then,” Pointer said soberly. “First came blind rage. No man likes to think that he need not have murdered. That all the terrible deed, all the awful preparation of mind and affairs beforehand was quite unnecessary, that if he had found out about her marriage to Mills after Mrs. Finch had handed him back his I.O.U.’s, he would have been free and not a murderer!”

“But he laughed! His father spoke to me of yells of sheer hysteria.”

“When he thought of Mrs. Finch!” Pointer, too, gave a laugh, though but a short one. “He knew how she would feel. She had given back his I.O.U.’s for nothing. I told you she struck me as feeling sold when she heard of the real marriage.”

“Her daughter not married to the wealthy Arthur after all!” continued Sewell with gusto. “A son-in-law whom, of course, she intended to milk whenever necessary. A son-in-law who was as good as an overdraft at her bank from the first.”

“Miss Lovelace was notified by Watts that she would have to give evidence about the pearls. I thought it as well to let her know at once that she mustn’t slip out of the country.” Pointer saw his chief glance at the clock.

“The duchess will get her away,” Pelham said at once. “She’ll have the whole Home Office turned inside out if need be. You won’t have the pleasure of seeing that young lady in the witness-box in this case, Pointer.”

Both Pointer and Sewell were sorry to hear it.

“However, it’ll all come out,” the A.C. consoled them, “and she’ll wish that she had never heard the name of Walsh before the end.”

She did most heartily.

As for Kitty, she still thinks that had Ann been put in the witness-box, instead of being sent “on doctor’s orders” to South Africa for a year’s stay—and had she been cross-examined—she would have been proved to be at the bottom of the puzzle of the pearl necklaces.

It is one of the few points on which she will always differ from her husband—for she is now Mrs. Sewell.

THE END