Arthur J. Rees

“ If Wendover told us the truth, Nepcote has not been to him with the necklace. Then what did it matter to Nepcote whether you came here or not?"
"Nepcote may have been the man who offered the diamond to Wendover."
"That is impossible. Wendover says that man called some days before the murder."
"Still, it may have been Nepcote."
"That goes beyond me," said Caldew, with a puzzled look. "What are you implying?"
"Nothing at present. Every step in this case convinces me that we are faced with a very deep mystery. It isn't worth while to hazard a guess, because guessing is always unsatisfactory." ”

“ He rarely acted on impulse. His habitual distrust of humanity was deep, and to it was wedded a wariness which was the heritage of long experience. But his obstinate conviction of Hazel Rath's guilt led him to make a false move in his effort to square the loss of the necklace with the evidence against the girl. His own poor opinion of human nature hindered him from seeing, as Colwyn had seen, any inconsequence between such widely different motives as maddened love and theft; that was one of those subtle differentiations of human psychology in which his coarse-grained temperament was at fault. ”

“ His own inference about the crime, swiftly and boldly reached shortly before he arrested her, was that the girl was in love with Phil Heredith, and had murdered his young wife through jealousy. Hazel's silence in the face of accusation supported that theory, in his opinion. She was ashamed to confess, not the crime, but the hopeless love which had inspired it. Women were like that, Merrington reflected. A woman who dared to commit murder would blush to admit, even to herself, that she had given her love to a man who was out of her reach. ”

“ Quick, what am I to say to her?"
"I cannot tell you," responded Colwyn, with another glance at the still form. "It was he who called me in to solve this mystery, and I have done what he asked. I will leave you to tell her what you will, but I cannot keep silence afterwards where the liberty of innocent people is involved. Justice is as impersonal as Truth herself."
"Vincent!" This time the voice sounded just outside the door.
"I must stop her—she must not come in here," said Musard, starting up.
But he was too late. The door opened, and Miss Heredith stood in the doorway. ”

“ Colwyn nodded without speaking. Strange adventures had come to him at stranger hours. He showed the way to the lift, switched off the electric light he had turned on in the passage, and ascended with his visitor to his rooms. There his companion, with an impulsiveness which contrasted with the detective's quiet composure, again spoke:
"I want your assistance, Mr. Colwyn."
"Will you not be seated?" said the detective, as with a swift glance he took in the external attributes of his young and well-dressed visitor. ”

“ There are some discoveries which spring into the mind with shattering swiftness. This was one of them. A revelation seemed to come to Colwyn as light from the sky at midnight, which, lays everything bare in one frightful flash.
"Is it possible?"
He felt as though these words rushed from him like a thunder-roll reverberating through the empty space around him. But his set lips had not uttered a single sound. With tingling nerves he proceeded to carry out an experiment. He first laid the wick of the tinder-lighter along the stock of the pistol, just behind the hammer. ”

“ The abstract ideal of human justice is supposed to be based on the threefold aims of punishment, prevention, and reformation, but the heart of the average man, when confronted by grevious wrong, is swayed by no higher impulse than immediate retribution on the wrongdoer. Captain Stanhill was an average man, and his feelings, harrowed by the spectacle of the bleeding corpse of the young wife, and the pitiful condition to which her murder had reduced her young husband, clamoured for retribution, swift, complete, and implacable, on the being who had committed this horrible crime. ”

“ Sherryman Street was full of gaunt, narrow houses, with prim fronts and narrow railed windows, let in segments, flats, and bachelor apartments. Number 10 was as like its fellows as one drab soul resembles another. Superintendent Merrington's ring at the doorbell brought forth an elderly woman with an expressionless face surmounted by a frilled white cap. She informed them in an expressionless voice that Captain Nepcote's apartments were on the second floor. Having said this much, she disappeared into a small lobby room off the entrance hall, leaving them free to enter. ”

“ He that holds his own counsel gives away nothing—except that he holds his counsel. Ye might do worse than lay that to your heart, Mr. Colwyn, in your walk through life. There's fifty years' experience behind it. Good-bye to ye, Mr. Colwyn, and ye, young man. I wish ye both luck in your search, but my advice is, try the pawn-shops." At the pressure of his thumb on the table the young Jew appeared from the next room, as if summoned by a magic wand, to let the visitors out.
"That's a queer old bird," said Caldew, as they walked away. "Do you think he has told us the truth?" ”

“ Seen in the sad glamour of an English twilight, the old moat-house, emerging from the thin mists which veiled the green flats in which it stood, conveyed the impression of a habitation falling into senility, tired with centuries of existence. Houses grow old like the race of men; the process is not less inevitable, though slower; in both, decay is hastened by events as well as by the passage of Time. ”

“ Then, perhaps, they had been unable to escape from the cave, and had died together of thirst and hunger. But what is the use of speculating? The secret must ever remain hidden in the cave where the skeletons still lie."
Musard stopped abruptly, and sat staring straight in front of him. His strange eyes had a fixed look, as if gazing into the distance. His brown hand rested lightly on the white tablecloth, and the great ruby on his little finger gleamed fitfully in the light.
"You haven't told us all the story yet," said Phil Heredith quietly. ”

“ There was, of course, the possibility that Miss Heredith, grown imperious with her long unquestioned sway at the moat-house, had quarrelled with the young wife, and committed the murder in a sudden gust of passion. The most unlikely murders had been committed under the sway of impulse. Caldew recalled that Miss Heredith had been the last person to see the murdered woman alive, and nobody except herself knew what had occurred at that interview. ”

“ Suspicion was in the last degree unlikely in any case, but Hazel Rath's entry and loud scream, just before the moment fixed for the explosion, ensured complete success by adding a natural verisimilitude which might have deceived the very Spirit of Truth. Colwyn esteemed himself fortunate indeed in lighting on what he believed to be the facts. Who could have imagined a situation in which whimsical Destiny had ironically stooped down from her high place to dabble ignobly in a murderer's ghastly plot? ”

“ Colwyn kept his car in a garage off the Bridge Street archway. Thither they proceeded, and waited while the car was got ready for the roads by a shock-headed man who broke the stillness of the night with prodigious yawns, and then stood blinking like an owl as he leaned against the yard gates watching the detective backing the car down the declivity of the passage into Bridge Street. ”

“ The hidden motive of the crime, as innocently laid bare by his sister, was strong, but was it strong enough to impel a woman like Miss Heredith, with the rigid principles of her birth, breeding, and caste, and a woman, moreover, who had spent her life in good works, to commit such an atrocious murder? Caldew considered this point long and thoughtfully. With his keener imagination he differed from Merrington by relying to some extent on external impressions, and he could not shake off his first impression of Miss Heredith as a woman of exceptionally good type. ”

“ Gradually he mended and increased in bodily strength until he was able to sit up, and smoke an occasional cigarette. Sometimes he talked a little with his aunt, but always on indifferent subjects. He never asked about his wife, or spoke of the murder, as he had done in his delirium. It was apparent to those about him that his recollection of the events which had brought about his illness had not yet returned. Nature had, for the time being, soothed his stricken brain with temporary oblivion.
Then one day the change that Miss Heredith anticipated and feared came on him as swiftly as a dream. ”

“ It was easy to imagine such light-hearted beauties visiting again the old garden to revive dead memories of love and laughter: shadowy forms stealing forth to assignations on the blanched, dew-laden lawn, their roguish faces and bright eyes—if ghosts have eyes—peeping out of ghostly hoods at gay ghostly cavaliers; coquetting and languishing behind ghostly fans; perhaps even feeding, with ghostly little hands, the peacocks which still kept the terrace walk above the moat. ”

“ It was a wonderful old place and a delight to the eye, this mediæval moat-house of mellow brick, stone facings, high-pitched roof, with terraced gardens and encircling moat. It had defied Time better than its builder, albeit a little shakily, with signs of decrepitude here and there apparent in the crow's-feet cracks of the brickwork, and decay only too plainly visible in the crazy angles of the tiled roof. ”

“ The crime which had struck down one human being in the dawn of youth and beauty, turned another into a murderer, and plunged an old English family into horror and misery, afforded Detective Caldew's optimistic temperament such extreme gratification that he could scarcely forbear from whistling aloud. But that is human nature. ”

“ Do you think you know anything about London? Believe me, you don't until you have been cast adrift in it with empty pockets. It's a city of vampires and stony hearts, a seething inhuman hell where you can wander till you drop and die without anyone giving a pitying glance—much less a helping hand. Even a man's guardian angel deserts him. It doesn't take a man very long to get to the gutter, to fall lower and lower until there's nothing but the Thames Embankment or the mortuary in front of him. ”

“ If a sweet and gentle girl like Hazel Rath, who had been brought up under her own eye to walk uprightly, could be swept away in the surge of tempestuous passion to commit murder, where did Faith and Religion stand?
Almost as much as the effect of the murder did she fear the result of this second revelation on her nephew. The knowledge that the person accused of killing his wife was a girl who had lived in his own home for years was bound to have an additionally injurious effect on his strange and sensitive temperament. Nobody knew that temperament better than Miss Heredith. ”

“ Colwyn returned to the Angel to look for a taxi-cab. The fog was lifting, and crowds were emerging from the cinemas and a music-hall with the fatigued look of people who have paid in vain to be entertained. Outside the music-hall some taxi-cabs were waiting for the more opulent patrons of refined vaudeville who had been drawn within by the rare promise of an intellectual baboon, reputed to have the brains of a statesman, which shared the honours of "the top of the bill" with two charming sisters from a West End show. ”

“ Those events, as he described them, took on a new complexion to his listener, suggesting a deeper and more complex mystery than the newspaper accounts of the crime.
From the first the moat-house murder had appealed to Colwyn's imagination and stimulated his intellectual curiosity. There was the pathos of the youth and sex of the victim, murdered in a peaceful country home. The terrible primality of murder accords more easily with the elemental gregariousness of slum existence; its horror is accentuated, by force of contrast, in the tender simplicity of an English sylvan setting. ”

“ I've been down to the gutter myself the last few days, falling each day to lower depths, tramping hungry and footsore in the midst of herds of respectable human brutes, slinking away from the eye of every policeman, pawning clothes for the price of a verminous bed, to lie awake all night knowing that I would be murdered by the vulture-faced degenerates sleeping in the same hovel, if they had caught a glimpse of the necklace. ”

“ Colwyn?" said Miss Heredith with a wistful smile.
"I have no doubt of it," said Colwyn with an answering smile. "A meeting with an old friend is always a good thing. Are you going with Sir Philip?"
"Oh, yes. I wouldn't go without her," said the baronet, with the helpless look of senility. "You're going, aren't you, Alethea?"
"Of course, Philip," was the gentle response.
This conversation, slight and desultory as it was, gave sufficient indication to the detective of the heavy burden Miss Heredith was bearing. ”

“ The great lady of the moat-house was a firm believer in the axiom that a woman should be mistress in her own household, and she saw no reason why her guests should not adopt her way of life while under her roof. She was a country woman born and bred, believing in the virtues of an early bed and early rising, and she was not to be put out of her decorous regular way of living by Londoners who turned night into day with theatres, late suppers, night clubs, and other pernicious forms of amusement which Miss Heredith had read about in the London papers. ”

“ There was nothing in common except mutual esteem between a wild, tempestuous being like Musard, who rushed through life like a whirlwind, for ever seeking new scenes in primitive parts of the earth, and the tranquil mistress of the moat-house, who had rarely been outside her native county, and revolved in the same little circle year after year, happy in her artless country pursuits and simple pleasures. ”

“ The London visitors found the fixed routine of life in a country house monotonous and colourless, and were looking forward to the termination of their visit. The life they had led for the past fortnight was not their way of life. They met each morning for breakfast at nine o'clock—Miss Heredith was a stickler for the mid-Victorian etiquette of everybody sitting down together at the breakfast table. After breakfast the men wandered off to their own devices for killing time: some to play a round of golf, others to go shooting or fishing, generally not reappearing until dinner-time. ”

“ Colwyn's chief interest lay in the fact that, although the case against Hazel Rath was as strong as circumstantial evidence could make it, the supposed motive for the crime was weak. But he reflected that there did not exist in human life any motive sufficiently strong to warrant the commission of a crime like murder. Probably no great murder had ever been justified by motive, in the sense that incitement is vindication, though human nature, ever on the alert in defence of itself, was prone to accept such excuses as passion and revenge as adequate motives for destruction. ”