by Molly Thynne
Stuart gazed at him in consternation.
“When could they have done it?”
“That’s what Bates is asking,” answered Soames grimly. “He and Girling found them like that when they went to lock up the barn just now. Lord Romsey swears his tyres were all right when he last saw the car, and, as Bates corroborates him, it looks as if he was speaking the truth.”
“Of course he was speaking the truth,” said Stuart impatiently. “Do you mean to say that, during the short time that elapsed between our rescue of Lord Romsey and Girling’s return to the barn, some one got in and slashed the tyres?”
“I mean to say that the chap we’ve been chasing half the night not only got away, but had the nerve to go back again and finish his job,” exclaimed Soames savagely. “Whoever he is, he’s got the laugh of us all along the line. Much good we’ve done by sitting up and watching!”
“He could have got down the back stairs, I suppose, while we were all gathered on the landing,” said Stuart. “But it was pretty quick work. Anyway, you can’t attribute this to the Romseys!”
“I don’t. I saw them into Lord Romsey’s bedroom, and they didn’t come out while I was there. They’re out of this, unless—”
He paused as a thought struck him.
“Did anybody see Miss Ford after we started to fetch Lord Romsey?”
“She went to bed,” Stuart informed him shortly.
Soames’s smile was sufficient to aggravate a less hot-tempered person than Stuart.
“She did, did she? And her bedroom, if you remember, is at the top of the small flight of stairs leading to the back passage. Except for Melnotte, Mrs. Cloude, and Mrs. van Dolen, she’s the only person that was not with us in the passage. We can wipe out the other two ladies, and I’m not putting my money on Melnotte at the moment.”
“But what earthly object could she have in disabling her father’s car?” asked Stuart.
“Why do you suppose your car was left unmolested?” demanded Soames.
“I can’t imagine.”
“Tut! Use your brain, my dear fellow,” put in Constantine unexpectedly. “The lighter the car the easier it will be to manipulate with the roads in their present condition, and yours is the smallest car in the barn. The others were disabled with a view to preventing pursuit. The vandal who slashed the tyres has a quicker brain than the thief who made off with Mrs. Cloude’s jewel-case.”
Soames stared at him, his mind diverted for the moment from the Romseys.
“Then you don’t believe that they are one and the same person?” he asked.
“I doubt it. The jewel-case was found in Lord Romsey’s car, and, according to him, he surprised the thief in the act of starting the engine, so that he evidently intended to use it. He may, of course, have changed his mind before his second visit to the barn; but, considering the little time at his disposal, it doesn’t look as if he could have given much of it to reflection. He would be much more likely to carry on with his original plan.”
Soames hesitated, then returned to his old line of argument.
“It doesn’t follow that Miss Ford hasn’t a quicker brain than her father,” he said.
“It’s an undisputed fact that she has,” returned Constantine. “But, all the same, without in any way supporting your theory, I would point out that if, as you suggest, the robbery of Mrs. Cloude’s jewels was the result of a carefully laid plot on the part of the Romsey family, it’s obvious that they must have discussed it in all its aspects first. Angela Ford, if I know anything of her, would have had her say then. In spite of which, there seems little doubt that the person who purloined Mrs. Cloude’s jewels intended to use the big car.”
“What is your theory about the whole thing, sir?” asked Stuart. “I can see you’ve got one.”
“It’s pure guess-work, of course,” answered Constantine slowly. “But it looks as though the person who has been searching for Mrs. van Dolen’s emeralds had given it up as a bad job, and decided to get away with whatever he could lay his hands on. Hence the theft of Mrs. Cloude’s jewels. If he’s known to the police, it’s probably essential that he should clear out before the arrival of the Scotland Yard man, which is imminent now. No doubt the other thief who, so far as we know, still holds the emeralds, has an equally strong reason for wishing to get away at the earliest opportunity. It speaks well for his intelligence that he should have decided to use the smaller and lighter car.”
“Which, being of a cheaper and more popular make, would be less easy to trace,” assented Stuart, shamelessly decrying his new toy.
“It’s all very well as a theory,” broke in Soames impatiently. “But what I want to know is, where the devil are these people? It’s absurd that this sort of thing should go on under our very noses, and that we shouldn’t be able to spot one of them! You’ve turned down my Romsey theory, but have you any other to put in its place?”
“If I have, I’m keeping it to myself for the present,” said Constantine calmly. “And I admit frankly that I find myself very much at sea on certain points. To go back to the chess problem analogy, some of my pieces seem to have been making some curiously unnatural moves. From a psychological point of view they are impossible, and I refuse to accept a problem in which the castles move obliquely and the bishops in a straight line, which is what they seem to be doing at present!”
“Are you sure that it isn’t the knights who have been misbehaving themselves?” suggested Soames maliciously.
“Lord Romsey is one of the few barons of the United Kingdom who would bitterly resent being taken for a knight, and his moves, though ponderous, are invariably correct,” retorted Constantine calmly. “Also, I can honestly assure you that neither he nor his family have anything to do with my perplexity. The person I have in mind is far more astute than Lord Romsey.”
“Then it certainly isn’t Melnotte, unless he’s a very dark horse indeed!” exclaimed Stuart.
Constantine smiled.
“I’m giving nothing away at present,” he said. “If I’m on the wrong tack altogether, which is still possible, I shall at least have the advantage of being able to blush unseen. Meanwhile, I don’t wish to hasten Soames’s departure, but I doubt if it is wise to leave Lord Romsey’s door unguarded for so long.”
Soames took the thrust in good part.
“There’ll come a time when you’ll, both of you, eat your words,” he threatened, as he left the room.
“He’s wrong about the Romseys, of course,” said Stuart. “But I must say he’s managed to make out a pretty good case against them. Especially over this business, of the tyres. Miss Ford could easily have reached the barn without being seen.”
“So could I, for the matter of that, or Mrs. Cloude, or Melnotte, or Mrs. van Dolen. I have an idea that by to-morrow evening we shall have elucidated the Romsey problem, and a very shrewd suspicion as to what the explanation will be.”
Stuart stared at him.
“I’ve got an inkling myself as to how matters stand,” he said; “but how you’ve managed to tumble to it, I don’t know. One thing I do feel certain about, is that Geoffrey Ford had nothing to do with either of the thefts.”
“Am I to gather from that that you do suspect his sister?” asked Constantine, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
Stuart met his gaze squarely, though he felt his cheeks grow warm.
“I don’t suspect any member of the family, least of all Lord Romsey,” he answered stoutly.
Constantine sighed.
“I shall never cease to regret that I did not see him to-night,” he said sadly. “If I had known of the spectacle that awaited Miss Adderley downstairs, a blizzard would not have kept me away.”
The rest of the night passed uneventfully enough. Stuart tried in vain to persuade Constantine to go to bed and leave him to keep watch; but the old man flatly refused to be dismissed, and, when the first house-maid clattered sleepily down the stairs, he was undoubtedly the fresher of the two, Stuart climbed tha
nkfully into bed, leaving instructions that he was not to be disturbed until he rang.
It was past midday when he opened his eyes, and he reached the lounge just as the house-party was trooping in to lunch. Soames reported that his suspects had made no move during the night, and were now engaged in lunching decorously in their private sitting-room. He confessed to being half asleep, and even Constantine announced his intention of spending the greater part of the afternoon on his bed.
Stuart hung about the lounge for a while in the hope of capturing Angela Ford; then, concluding that she too was sleeping off the effect of the events of the night before, he spent a boring half-hour chatting with Melnotte, whose company he had tried his best to put up with since he had discussed the dancer with Constantine. But he was not an enlivening conversationalist, and Stuart was glad to escape to his room and the work that awaited him there.
It was close on tea-time, and he had reached the last long, unwieldy page of galley-proof, when he became aware of voices just outside his door. Certain isolated words penetrated his absorption, and, with an exclamation, he sprang to his feet and made for the passage.
“Did I hear you say that Dr. Constantine had been hurt?” he demanded.
The housemaid, who was standing waiting at Miss Adderley’s door, reassured him.
“I don’t think it’s much, sir,” she said. “Mr. Melnotte had an accident with a spirit-lamp, and Dr. Constantine got his hand a bit burnt putting it out.”
At that moment Miss Amy appeared, a bottle in her hand.
“Here it is, Maggie,” she said. “I meant to give it back to you yesterday. My sister does not need it any more.”
Stuart was already on his way down the passage.
He found Constantine endeavouring to stem the confused apologies of Melnotte. His left hand was wrapped in a handkerchief; otherwise, to Stuart’s relief, he seemed more amused than hurt. On the arrival of the housemaid Melnotte took his departure, and Stuart watched her while she administered first aid to an angry-looking burn on the back of Constantine’s hand.
“I’m sorry to have been so long, sir,” she explained, “but I couldn’t find the oil at first. I’d forgotten that Miss Adderley asked for it some days ago to rub her sister’s chest with when she was bad.”
“Well, it’s an old saying that there’s some good in all things evil,” remarked Constantine thoughtfully.
The girl looked puzzled.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
Constantine, who was seated on the edge of his bed, looked up at her with a very charming smile.
“What I should have said is that it is only when we old people get into trouble that we are looked after so delightfully. You’ve got a very gentle way with you, my dear.”
She flushed with pleasure.
“There was a First Aid Course at the Village Institute, and we all of us took a course, not knowing when it might come in useful. I think you’ll find that’s quite comfortable now, sir. I’ll come and do it up again last thing to-night.”
When she had gone Stuart turned to Constantine.
“What on earth have you been up to?” he asked reprovingly.
Constantine chuckled.
“Melnotte has been having a little private conflagration. He appears to have started by upsetting a spirit-lamp on to the window curtain. Then, characteristically, he lost his head and threw open the window, thereby creating a thorough draught. Fortunately his next move was to batter madly on my door, and I arrived on the scene in time to pull the thing down and smother the flames. If it hadn’t been a flimsy muslin affair we should have had the whole place alight. I don’t think I’ve ever met any one with so little presence of mind in an emergency. Of course he’s full of apologies now.”
“I don’t see anything funny in that,” was Stuart’s rather grim comment. “It might have been a good deal worse, and, as it is, you’ve got a nasty burn.”
“You will in a minute, though,” said Constantine, his eyes dancing with mirth. “It’s a shame to give him away, but he deserves it for being such an incredible fool. I very nearly laughed in his face when I caught him picking up the tongs. He so evidently hoped I hadn’t seen them!”
For a moment Stuart was baffled, then his face lit up with joyful recognition.
“You don’t mean to say that he was curling his hair?” he exclaimed.
“I do,” answered Constantine. “It was that kind of spirit-lamp, and, what’s more, if you’d observed him more closely just now you’d have seen that it was only half finished.”
He waited till Stuart’s appreciation had subsided, then, with his uninjured hand, extracted a letter from his pocket.
“It’s curious it should have happened just now,” he said. “I was reading this when he knocked at my door. It came by the afternoon post. You remember I told you I had written about him to a theatrical agent I know. Well, he’s just sent his complete dossier.”
He handed the letter to Stuart, who glanced through it. He could not resist a smile at the discovery that Melnotte’s real name was Spadger, though, in view of his profession, he could hardly blame him for having abandoned it. The son of a small Manchester shopkeeper, he had gone on the films, but had had to leave them owing to his lack of nerve. The legitimate drama being closed to him on account of his accent, which he had obviously been at great pains to improve since, he had taken up ballroom dancing, and had managed to achieve something of a reputation in that line. Owing to his reliability, he was seldom out of an engagement, and had the reputation among his fellow artists of being a hard worker and generous to his people, though he was known to be morbidly sensitive as to his origin.
“That wipes out Melnotte, as far as I am concerned,” said Stuart as he handed the letter back to Constantine.
“I never really suspected him,” answered the old man. “And, if I had, his performance just now would have cleared him. He hasn’t got the nerve to kill a fly, and is quite incapable of planning and carrying through a robbery, much less a murder. By the way, Soames and I had an interview with another of our suspects this morning while you were sleeping off your night’s work.”
Stuart looked up sharply.
“Geoffrey Ford?” he exclaimed.
Constantine nodded.
“He said he thought he owed us an explanation. As you know, his father could not find him when he went to his room.”
Stuart smiled. For once he felt that he had beaten Constantine at the post.
“I fancy I can guess where he was, though,” he observed.
Constantine’s eyebrows rose.
“So you have been keeping something up your sleeve,” he said. “I felt it in my bones. That’s the worst of you Scotsmen. Then you won’t be as surprised as Soames was at his explanation.”
“If you mean that he and Mrs. Orkney Cloude knew each other before they came here, I’d tumbled to that already.”
“Then there is something you don’t know,” said Constantine complacently. “My dear fellow, he married Mrs. Orkney Cloude over a month ago. And Lord Romsey is still ignorant of the fact!”
CHAPTER XIV
Stuart’s mind ran swiftly back over the data he had collected concerning Geoffrey Ford and Mrs. Orkney Cloude.
“So that’s it,” he said slowly. “I’m afraid I credited him with a baser motive. This accounts for a good many things. Mrs. Goude’s collapse when she first caught sight of Lord Romsey, for instance, and the conversation Soames overheard between Miss Ford and her brother on the stairs. I can imagine Mrs. Cloude’s feelings when she found herself marooned in the same hotel with her father-in-law!”
Constantine nodded.
“It spelt ruination to all their plans,” he said. “They had arranged to spend Christmas at Redsands, but not, of course, in the same hotel. The idea was to introduce Mrs. Cloude to Lord Romsey and break the news of their marriage to him after he had been suitably impressed with her charm and beauty. I don’t think it would have worked, though he’s more susce
ptible than you would think, and Mrs. Cloude’s a clever woman. As it turned out, their hand was forced and Ford had to confide in his sister, who tried in vain to persuade him to go to his father. As you’ve no doubt grasped, she’s the one member of the family who doesn’t stand in awe of Lord Romsey.”
“But why on earth should he take exception to Mrs. Cloude?” demanded Stuart.
“Because Mrs. Cloude comes of an old Roman Catholic family, and, to make matters worse, Geoffrey Ford joined the Catholic Church when he married her. And Lord Romsey is one of the few people who still allude to the Church of Rome as ‘The Scarlet Woman.’ This marriage will be the tragedy of his life. My own opinion is that, if they had carried this plan through before their marriage, he might have given his consent, provided it remained a mixed marriage. Mrs. Cloude would probably have given way there, and this deadlock might have been avoided. As it is, I feel sorry for them all.”
And that’s why Miss Ford was on the watch last night.”
“Yes. She got it into her head that her brother was going to try to get Mrs. Cloude, or rather Mrs. Ford as she is now, away at the earliest opportunity. She honestly thought that he was in the barn, and that her father had surprised him in the act of taking the car. She ran down in the hope of preventing a rupture between them. As soon as she realized that the intruder was not Geoffrey Ford, she guessed where her brother was probably to be found.”
“Then her father’s plight really did go out of her head?”
“Completely. I’m sure she’s genuine there, and she’s thoroughly ashamed of herself. She saw the man and gave chase. In her excitement she entirely forgot her father.”
“That wipes the Fords off, then. Is Soames convinced at last?”
Constantine laughed.
“Soames is busy looking for another victim. As he sapiently remarks, ‘If they didn’t do it, some one else did.’ He’s now divided in his mind between young Trevor and Melnotte, in spite of my agent friend’s letter.”
“I can’t bring myself to suspect Melnotte. As for Trevor—”