“Well, sit down, Stella; make yourself comfortable; and then tell me all about it. By the way, did you leave that chauffeur of yours out in the rain? I’d better get him brought under cover.”
“The rain’s quite off. He’s all right; and he probably wants to smoke a cigarette. ‘Sit down; make yourself comfortable,’ as you say; and I’ll tell you all about it. It’s more of the same, of course.”
The Colonel nodded.
“Surely he hasn’t been giving you any more trouble? You got your decree nisi all right; and it’ll be made absolute in another month or so, won’t it? What more do you want?”
Stella stretched a pair of neatly shod feet towards the fire.
“The trouble’s this. Has he any right to come to Carisbrooke House; force his way in there; interview my servants; and make himself generally a nuisance?”
The Colonel found no difficulty in making up his mind on that point.
“The house doesn’t belong to him. For that matter, it doesn’t belong to you, either: it’s Jimmy’s really, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s the trouble. If Jimmy were at hand, I’d turn him on to deal with that man; but Jimmy’s away just now and he hasn’t left any address, even with me. The only person I can get at is his lawyer; and he seems to be a regular old stick-in-the-mud. He ‘can’t take the responsibility’ of doing anything; and he ‘has no instructions providing for the case’; and so on and so forth. So I came to you to see what could be done. I simply won’t have that man approaching the premises.”
“He’s got a certain amount of nerve to put in an appearance at all, it seems to me,” the Colonel commented. “But I don’t think you need fear any further trouble. Of course, if Jimmy were at home, you could have got him to work—he’s the natural person to tackle the business. But since he’s away, I must see what I can do myself. If you like to complain to me formally that Hilton is molesting you, then I’ll see to it that Bolam keeps an eye on the matter; and all you need do then will be to ring up the police station and they’ll send up someone to fling Hilton off your doorstep. I never heard of such a thing!” the Colonel continued, with rising indignation. “What’s he after, anyway?”
“He seems to be trying to get hold of something; I’m not sure what it is. He even had the nerve to tackle my maid and cross-question her about my affairs; but she seems to have sent him off with a flea in his ear: and the result is that she didn’t discover exactly what he was after. And there have been other funny things happening that I don’t like.”
“What, for instance?”
“Well, not long ago, a packet of letters disappeared out of a drawer. I hadn’t much difficulty in tracking down the person who took them—Jeal, a housemaid I had then. I taxed her with it; but she denied taking them, flatly. Of course, I couldn’t prove that she did it—supposition was all I had to go on. But I got rid of her.”
“What sort of letters were they?” inquired the Colonel, rather anxiously.
“Oh, some of Cyril’s. Nothing in them that could interest anyone except our two selves.”
“You’re sure?”
The grey eyes met the Colonel’s blue ones with obvious sincerity.
“Quite sure. As a matter of fact, anybody might read our letters—much good it would do them! Why, I didn’t even keep this packet under lock and key. It was lying in one of the drawers of my writing-desk. There was nothing in the letters but appointments, bulbs I’d asked him to get for me in London when he was up in town, books, and so forth. We see each other almost every day and there’s no need to put anything on paper. I’d have destroyed the things long ago if it weren’t that they were Cyril’s letters. Sentiment, you know.”
“I understand.”
The Colonel knew that he could believe Stella implicitly. She would have had no hesitation in telling him, if the letters had really been important.
“Do you think Hilton bribed the girl to steal them in the hope that he might make something out of them?”
A shadow passed across Stella’s face.
“Possibly he did. Or possibly it may have been something else. I don’t know. But anyway, I don’t like that sort of thing happening. And I’m not going to stand that man prowling around any longer.”
“We’ll see that he doesn’t. Leave it to me and Bolam,” the Colonel reassured her. Then, to change the subject, he bethought himself of another matter. Stella went about a good deal. Why not, without giving her any hint, enlist her in the search for the imperfect non-skid tyre?
“Oh, by the way, Stella, I’m on the look-out for a motor with a defective tyre—a non-skid with one stud missing. You might keep your eyes about you; and if you come across anything of the kind, you might let me know.”
“Why! . . .”
Then, with a change of tone, she demanded:
“What do you want to find it for? Has there been an accident and a car going off without showing its number?”
The Colonel’s mask of impassivity failed to stand him in good stead under the scrutiny of a keen pair of eyes.
“It’s nothing very important; but I’d like to know who owns that particular car.”
“Not an accident?”
“No, nothing worth mentioning.”
Stella looked at him with a puzzled expression.
“I wonder what it is. Can’t you tell me? You don’t usually play the mystery-monger with me. What is it all about?”
But the Colonel refused to be drawn.
“All I want to know is who owns that particular car.”
Stella made no reply for a moment. Something which the Colonel could not identify clouded the grey eyes. When she spoke again, it was evident that she felt hurt at his reticence; and she seemed to be trying to cover up her feelings by a rapid change of subject.
“I’m very nearly starving. Do you mind if I hint that it’s just about tea-time, even if it isn’t really? I had a miserable lunch; and I think I could surprise you with a display of appetite.”
The Colonel rang the bell and ordered tea. Stella rose and walked over to the window, where she stood for a time looking out.
“The rain’s over for the day, I think,” she commented, as she turned back towards the room again. “By the way,” she added, as though by an afterthought, “could you lend me a pencil and a sheet of paper? I want to send Hales with a message into the village. He can go down while we’re having tea; and that will save me some time.”
The Colonel got writing-materials out of his escritoire; and she scribbled a note.
“If you’ll ring for the maid, she can take it to Hales.”
When the maid appeared, Stella handed her the note.
“Please ask Hales—the chauffeur at the door—to do what is in this note and come back again for me as soon as he is finished.”
In a few moments they heard the engine of the car starting.
“And now, tea,” said Stella. “I’m dying for it.”
But in spite of her eagerness, she seemed to have the very poorest appetite. She toyed with her bread and butter, making it last as long as possible.
“I think I’d rather have a cigarette,” she admitted, when the Colonel hospitably attempted to force cakes on her attention. “I suppose I must have got to the over-hungry condition when one really doesn’t want to eat much after all.”
She selected a cigarette from the Colonel’s box and allowed him to light it for her.
“Do you know, I must be losing my nerve. I know it’s silly and all that; but somehow I wish that decree nisi were made absolute and that I were done with that man completely. I’ve a sort of haunting feeling that things may not come right in the end; something may come in the way at the last moment. It’s pure fancy; but it worries me all the same.”
The Colonel, too wise to make an articulate comment, contented himself with a sympathetic murmur. Stella was obviously troubled; and he found it hard to blame her. It must be a very irksome business to have Hilton sneaking about the place, interviewing
her servants behind her back, possibly even attempting to arrange thefts of her letters. There could be nothing in it, really; for Stella was not the sort of girl who would go off the rails, no matter how strong the temptation might be; but merely to be suspected of such a thing would be enough to irritate her in her most sensitive spot. And all these doings of Hilton’s pointed to something of the kind. One doesn’t gossip with maids or attempt to steal letters unless one thinks that there is something to be gained by it all. Hilton must imagine that he was on the track of something. And the Colonel, with a mixture of wonder and indignation, reflected how little this man must have known of his wife when he could suppose such a thing. If Cyril Norton was sure of Jimmy Leigh’s innocence in one field, the Colonel was equally certain of Stella’s innocence in another. There must have been a good deal more of this privy persecution than she had described; for she was not the sort of girl who would take a thing of that kind meekly. She was very well able to look after herself, the Colonel remembered.
“Hilton’s an idiot!” was his final conclusion; and he was surprised to find that he had uttered it aloud.
Stella seemed taken aback by the remark. Evidently she had not been following that train of thought.
“An idiot?”
She appeared to get her bearings.
“Oh, yes, an idiot of course. I wasn’t thinking of it in that way. You know, somehow I look on him from the outside, now; he doesn’t seem to be in my life at all. Funny, isn’t it? And that’s what makes all this peering and poking about so annoying. It’s just as if a stranger were doing it. The whole of that affair seems to have been wiped out. I can’t persuade myself nowadays that I was ever in love with him. Perhaps I never was.”
The Colonel attempted to get away from an unpleasant subject.
“Have you seen Cyril lately? He was here this afternoon. You just missed him.”
“What a pity. When did he go?”
“Just before you drove up. I wonder you didn’t meet him in the avenue.”
“I came round by the back road, through Upper Greenstead, otherwise I’d have met him in the village, I suppose. It doesn’t matter. We see each other almost every day. And we haven’t long to wait now, anyway.”
Her quick ear caught the sound of her car in the avenue.
“There’s Hales back again with my parcel. I must fly now. Thank’s so much for the tea; I was dying for it. And thanks for getting Bolam to work, too. I’ll be able to sleep in peace now without having nightmares of that man crawling down the chimney.”
“Was it as bad as all that?” inquired the Colonel, smiling.
“Quite bad enough,” she retorted soberly, “It’s not so much his actually coming, you know; it’s just the feeling that he may be coming: prying about, suspecting one of all sorts of things—a beastly feeling! It gets on my nerves.”
The Colonel opened the study door for her and together they went out to the front of the house where her car was waiting. Colonel Sanderstead shut the tonneau door behind her, waved a farewell as the car moved off, and stood watching as it disappeared down the avenue.
When it had vanished round the bend, he cast his eyes mechanically on the ground before him, and as he did so he saw something which made him stoop in order to see more clearly. The surface of the drive was wet and the soil had taken a sharp impression of the car’s tracks. There, before him, he saw, clean-cut and vivid beyond a doubt, the impress of the imperfect non-skid tyre which in his mind had become associated with the key to the mystery. It was Stella’s car that had driven up to the door of Swaythling Court on the night that Hubbard died.
For some moments the Colonel stood looking blankly at the damning tracks. Stella mixed up in the business! It seemed unthinkable. What possible part could she have played in the affair? How could an absolutely straight girl like Stella come to associate with a blackmailer? Incredible! And would any girl go voluntarily to the house of a man like Hubbard at that time of night? The Colonel refused to let himself believe it. There must be some other explanation.
Then a flood of relief poured into his mind as an alternative explanation occurred to him. Stella’s car had undoubtedly been at Swaythling Court on the fatal night; but that did not necessarily imply that she herself had been there. The car might have been driven by someone else. Why, her chauffeur might easily have taken it out for purposes of his own. He might be the “supernumerary man” of whom the Colonel was in search. And as the Colonel reflected again, this idea gained ground. All this spying, stealing of letters, and so forth. Suppose that Hubbard had taken a hand in the game as well as Hilton. If there had been something to rouse Hilton’s suspicions it might just as easily have caught Hubbard’s attention, whatever it was. And Hubbard might have suborned the chauffeur to do his spying for him; and the chauffeur might have gone to the Court to report progress that night. That would account for the whole of the facts—and leave Stella out of it.
But just as the Colonel had reached this satisfying conclusion, he saw something further on the ground before him which demolished his line of reasoning. The only tracks before him were those of Stella’s car—and they were not identical. Two of them showed the imprint of the tyre with a missing stud; the other two displayed instead the track of a fresh tyre.
“So that was what she wanted when she sent the car into the village. She ordered Hales to change the tyre before coming back. And that was why she wrote down her instructions—because she didn’t want me to hear them, as I would have done if she’d given them verbally. The first two tracks, with the non-skid tyre, were made when she came here first and when the chauffeur went off to the village; the second two tracks, with the plain tread, are the ones made by the chauffeur coming back and going off again afterwards with her. That clinches the business. Whether she was in the car herself that night or not, she knew the car had been out on some fishy affair; and when I asked about the tyre she remembered the missing stud and got it changed right away, so as to leave no more of these infernal tracks behind her. O Lord! Little Stella mixed up in this affair! This is a bad business!”
Chapter Twelve
One Part of the Story
THE Hubbard case had already given Colonel Sanderstead some uncomfortable half-hours; but the discovery of the non-skid tyre increased his troubles ten-fold. He had been perturbed when he thought that Jimmy Leigh was connected with the affair at Swaythling Court; but in that instance his anxiety had been partly on account of the fact that the ruling caste of Fernhurst Parva was implicated. After all, Jimmy Leigh was a man; and a man could be expected to look after himself in a thing of that sort. Benevolent neutrality was all that could be demanded from Jimmy’s friends; and that neutrality the Colonel had already adopted as his policy in the affair.
But when the net extended its folds to enclose Stella Hilton, the Colonel found that he could not force himself to maintain a passive attitude. Girls were incalculable creatures. One never could tell what they might do in given circumstances. Jimmy Leigh, for all his erraticness, could be depended on to take a clear line and follow it out consistently; but Stella’s probable course of action was by no means a certainty in the Colonel’s mind.
Quite obviously she had got mixed up in the business in some way or other. Equally obviously, she must have known the importance of the non-skid tyre. And, learning the facts suddenly, she had acted immediately—correctly enough in the circumstances, so far as the Colonel could see. She had avoided leaving any more dangerous tracks behind her car.
It was that very rapidity of action that perturbed Colonel Sanderstead.
“As it so happens, she did the right thing in this case; but she might quite well have done the wrong thing. And she acted on the spur of the moment without having time to think out the affair in detail and follow the possible results. That changing of the tyre might have been a damning affair if it happened to come out. And for all one knows, there may be other things she left behind.”
He lay back in his chair and thought for a
long time.
“That’s it!” he said to himself at last. “Probably she did leave something else behind, something that I didn’t see. And Cyril spotted it. I knew he must have seen something that I missed. And of course that accounts for his attitude in the business. He’s keeping his mouth shut on her account, just as I kept quiet about the Lethal Ray machine to prevent Jimmy Leigh being dragged into the business. That’s that, anyway. Things are growing a shade clearer.”
But on further meditation, the Colonel did not find them any more satisfactory on that account.
“One thing’s certain. This isn’t the kind of affair to be handled in a slap-dash way. Stella’s too much inclined to take the shortest cut in a difficulty; and in a case of this sort that impulsive way of doing things may land her in terrible difficulties. She wants a steadier mind behind her to keep her from rushing at things. Cyril’s the man for the job.”
Before he had got half-way through his next pipe, however, the Colonel had discovered the difficulties of that solution.
“I can’t go to Cyril and say to him: ‘Look here, the girl you’re going to marry has been mixed up in some very fishy work.’ After all, I don’t know for certain that Cyril has any idea that she is mixed up in it at all. That’s only a possibility. The less mud one stirs up the better. I’ve got to leave Cyril out of it. And she mustn’t get any idea that Cyril does know anything—still assuming that he does know. That would make things just as bad, if not worse. And yet she ought to have a man behind her in this affair; and she ought to be warned against doing things in a hurry, like that tyre-changing. If only Jimmy Leigh were available, I’d talk it over with him; after all, she’s his sister and he’d stand up for her and give her a hand. But there’s no getting at him. Cyril’s out, Jimmy Leigh’s out: there’s nobody but myself left to tackle the business. I’ll have to take it on. But it’s a most damnably awkward thing to do.”
Death at Swaythling Court Page 19