Trent's Own Case

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘Ah! That, as Monsieur says, is very interesting. If I do not deceive myself, it was a very well-known lady, a lady whose photograph everyone has seen in the papers, a lady whom I myself have seen on the stage more than once.’

  Trent fell back in his seat. Here was another totally unexpected and disabling blow. ‘Do you mean that Mr Randolph was here with Miss Eunice Faviell?’

  ‘I am sure of it, Monsieur.’

  Trent, rallying his senses, rewarded the man generously and went on with a meal for which he now had little appetite, while he considered the new and apparently senseless turn thus given to the affair. If Eunice had been the old man’s guest at this place, in conditions of privacy which pointed to some sort of intimate relations at least, what became of all the fuss made about his disagreeable advances to her? What sort of a figure was cut by the chivalrous character who had been called upon to protect her, and had embraced the task with such generous ardour—by Philip Trent, in fact? He was not by nature sensitive about his personal dignity, but the man has yet to be born who enjoys being made to look a fool without knowing why. He did not like it; and he liked still less that it should be done by a woman whom he had always believed to be incapable of deceit or secretiveness. The Eunice Faviell whom he had learned to know so well was impulsive, impatient, headstrong, emotionally uncontrolled, but he had never met with a character more open and straightforward.

  Whatever might lie behind all this, his next step was decided for him by logic and inclination alike. He must see Eunice as soon as might be. Before leaving Porter’s he had, through the good offices of the wine-waiter, a few words with the ‘little Englishman’ who had attended on Randolph and his guest. The man, his memory refreshed by half a crown, could only say that he too had recognized Miss Faviell; that she had appeared to be on ordinarily good terms with her host until the end of the meal, when she had hurried away by herself, and apparently in a very bad temper; and that what he had heard of the conversation between the two, while he was in the room, seemed to be about theatrical matters.

  When Trent, at a neighbouring post office, rang up Eunice Faviell’s flat in Ovington Street he was answered by her maid. Miss Faviell was not at home. She had been away since Thursday afternoon last. She had refused to say more than that she was going out of town, and did not wish any letters to be forwarded.

  CHAPTER XIV

  GENIUS MUST LIVE

  THIS was not the first time, to Trent’s knowledge, that Eunice Faviell had gone away, cutting her communications with the world for a time. Her disappearances usually had to do with the study of a difficult part; and for all he knew, that might be the reason in this case. He hoped devoutly, at least, that it was so. Each new turn taken by the Randolph affair gave it an appearance more sinister as well as more incomprehensible.

  He could be sure of one thing. If Eunice had really meant to vanish for the time being, she was fully capable of doing it so effectively that any attempt to get on her track was far from hopeful. She could, and on occasion did, make herself quite unrecognizable with a few touches to her appearance and a change of manner; and she had a singular flair, moreover, for places where it was most unlikely that anyone known to the world had ever been seen or heard of by the natives.

  Yet Trent could not accept the possibility of being unable to get in touch with her. For him there could be no question of leaving unturned any stone that might conceal a grain of the truth about the Randolph murder. Eunice had certainly been among the last persons to see and speak with Randolph; and she had done so in circumstances that were more than strange. Trent would have felt it wholly unpardonable, in any ordinary case, to interfere with her desire for privacy: he did not feel so now.

  As he walked slowly westwards through Leicester Square an idea came to him. It was not an agreeable one; but he could not let any personal preference sway him while such an inquiry as this was on foot. If Eunice had intended her place of retreat to be generally unknown, there was one person at least to whom it might have been disclosed. Trent determined to see if anything could be got out of one who headed the list of the few people that he cordially disliked; and he set out at once to find him.

  He was fortunate at the first cast. The big smoking-room at the Cactus Club was well filled, but there was a little island of empty chairs by the window in one corner. In the midst of this emptiness sat Eugene Wetherill. His tongue and reputation would make a void round him in the most crowded rooms; nor did that trouble him at all. He found a pleasure in his unpopularity, which he accepted as the sincerest possible tribute from the groundlings to a superior spirit.

  Genius is often strangely housed. Wetherill’s success with women was counted by the gossips as a wonder of the world, for he was atrociously ugly. The coarse black hair had retreated far from his bulging forehead. The heavy, ill-shaped nose and the thick lips made an effect of grossness not redeemed by the clipped beard and moustache, with their hint of Elizabethan swagger. One of his frosty grey eyes had a repulsive inward cast; but there was no common fire—often even a touch of madness—in the glance that shot out from beneath the bushy, overhanging eyebrows. His voice was harsh and disagreeable. What beauty the man had was in his tall and well-built frame, kept by constant exercise in athletic condition.

  As Trent, sighting his quarry, walked through the room, he was hailed by several acquaintances who offered him a seat on a chairarm or space on a sofa; but with a cheerful salute he made his way to the corner. Wetherill, who was studying a small notebook through the monocle that was a part of his pose, looked up as he approached and greeted him with surprising affability.

  ‘Ah! Trent,’ he said. ‘The very man I wanted to see.’

  Trent could not imagine why Wetherill should want to see him, unless it were for the simple pleasure of inflicting his society on a man who did not desire it. That was a feeling which Trent had never tried to conceal, and he had marked it often enough by a discourtesy which would have led most men to ignore his existence for the future. But their occasional meetings had always left him with an exasperating sense that no word of his could make the slightest dent on Wetherill’s impenetrable armour of self-esteem. Incivility, irony, laughter itself were powerless against a prodigious vanity that offered them not the smallest loop-hole. The worst of it was that Wetherill in his way was a poetic genius; as playwright and prosaist he had at command a beauty of imagery and a power of word-magic that carried all before them. His critics might say that behind all that felicity in externals there was nothing but a rubble of demoded hedonism; they could not deny the glamour of the façade.

  Trent stretched his long legs in an armchair beside Wetherill and took a cigarette-case from his pocket. ‘The last time we met,’ he said as he proffered the case, ‘I was in too much of a hurry to have a drink with you. Will you have one with me now?’

  Wetherill met his eye with a faint smile that told more plainly than any words his mistrust of this hospitality; then, with a rasping laugh, he took a cigarette and opened a line of conversation which, as instinct truly told him, would make short work of Trent’s patience. ‘To be a splendid sinner,’ he said, ‘a man should deny himself. The great lover must be an ascetic, having little to do with drink or nicotine. I never taste alcohol, unless it is to take possession now and then of the soul of a noble wine, that blushes like a virgin.’

  ‘When I saw you last,’ Trent said briefly, ‘you were talking about having an absinthe cocktail.’

  ‘As for tobacco,’ Wetherill went on, precisely as if Trent had made no remark at all, ‘the extent of my abstinence is never to smoke anything that I have paid for myself. I allow myself the dissipation of one of your cigarettes.’

  ‘You may be a great sinner,’ Trent admitted. ‘I remember Saint Augustine insisted that he was one, so you are probably correct. Anyhow, you do your best, by all accounts, and which of us can do more? As for love—how much does a caterpillar know of the beauty of a rose?’

  Wetherill grinned delightedly, displa
ying a row of great teeth as white as an animal’s. ‘An excellent line!’ he exclaimed. ‘You surpass yourself, dear friend. People often do when talking to me, I have observed.’ He reopened his notebook. ‘Do you mind if I write that down for my own use?—you can stand it me instead of a drink.’ He scribbled with his pencil. ‘My memory is the one thing about me that does not satisfy me. There! It is recorded—a really nasty remark. My compliments! Men,’ he added reflectively, ‘are always jealous of me; and no wonder. But pardon me, I haven’t yet said why I wanted to see you. What do you know about this Randolph case? It interests me. The last time I saw you, in the lobby downstairs, was the very day after I had got a good, round, comfortable sum of money out of the old man.’

  Trent looked hard at Wetherill, who met his gaze with complete equanimity.

  ‘I remember you said something about having done a good stroke of business. And that time we met was the same evening that Randolph was murdered. How could you have got his cheque through in time?’

  ‘There was no cheque, dear friend. Among the lessons life has taught me is the truth that, in some transactions, the actual money in the pocket is better than a cheque. A cheque takes time to be cleared. The drawer may be visited by a second thought, and stop the cheque. Or other things may happen. Once—it is a long time ago now—I won a quite acceptable sum, nearly £400 in English money, from a young countryman of ours in a pleasant little game of baccarat at Ostend. I took his cheque; I knew he was a rich man, and that he would not repudiate a debt of honour. What happened? He left the club that night driving his own car; he had had too much to drink; he dashed his brains out running into a lamp-post on the digue; the cheque was useless; and his executors refused to pay a gambling debt. No, dear friend; I took no cheque from Randolph. At my suggestion, we drove round to his bank, where he handed me the sum in notes; and within the hour I had paid them into my own account at Henson’s. But this is wandering from our subject. Tell me, why did this fellow Fairman shoot the old man?’

  Trent affected an astonishment that he was far from feeling. He had foreseen what turn gossip must inevitably take. ‘Fairman shoot him! What do you mean? He has never been accused of it, as far as I know.’

  Raising a long, well-tended hand, Wetherill shook his head reproachfully. ‘Give me credit for a little intelligence, dear friend. I am sure—everyone is sure, for that matter—that though they are detaining Fairman on a charge of attempting suicide, they are really holding him for the murder. And you have your friends in the police, as we all know. I assume you are better informed than the rest of us. Why did he do it?’

  ‘Well, if my opinion matters so much,’ Trent said unpleasantly, ‘I don’t believe he did, whatever you think or the police think. Why are you so anxious to take his guilt for granted? I didn’t know you had ever even met him.’

  ‘I never saw him in my life; though of course I cannot help knowing that he fosters a hopeless passion for a certain friend of ours, which she is not in a position, alas! to return.’ Wetherill polished his eyeglass, then placed it in his eye and gazed tranquilly at Trent as he went on, ‘I could quite understand his murdering me; but why Randolph? I am really curious. So would Eunice be, I am sure; for she has a high regard for him.’

  Trent felt the blood rising in his face; and Wetherill’s smile showed that he had observed it. He mastered his feelings and asked quietly, ‘Did you never see the old man again after you had got your money?’

  ‘Never again, dear friend. It was not I who did the deed, if your thoughts are taking that direction. Curiously enough, though, I did threaten to kill him; I did so just before we parted. You see, after I had got the money, he saw fit to make himself very disagreeable to me; and as I was really quite seriously displeased by what he said—it was not a simple matter of deliberate rudeness, my dear Trent, such as I find merely amusing—I told him that one of these days I would shoot him like a dog. How these quaint old phrases leap to the lips when one is deeply moved! Yes, I told him that.’ Wetherill, who had not failed to note the effect on Trent’s temper of his assumption of Fairman’s guilt, added lazily, ‘I should have smiled, I think, if I could have foreseen that Fairman was going to shoot him for me.’

  Trent disregarded the thrust. ‘You are being very frank about it. That means, I suppose, that your own position is quite secure—I mean, that you can give a satisfactory account of the way you spent your time on the evening Randolph was murdered?’

  Wetherill raised his hands. ‘What language you pick up, dear friend, from that Scotland Yard set! “Give a satisfactory account …” Soon you will be telling me that I am not obliged to make any statement, but that anything I may say … and the rest of the jargon. You know, you would look rather well in a dark blue helmet, Trent; it would go with your eyes, and lend just that little needed touch of austerity to your expression. Well, I will tell you. I stayed a few minutes only at the club here after our meeting; then I returned to my rooms to work until daybreak. I was having a fearful struggle—indeed, it continues still—with the last act of my Crucifixion of Aphrodite. No,’ Wetherill continued musingly, ‘I did not kill Randolph; but if I had really felt that there lay any advantage for me in doing so, how perfect might I not have made the crime? The criminal, you will say, always makes a mistake—a senseless catchword, surely. It is those who are detected, and only they, who make mistakes. As well say that a meteor is always visible, although space is known to be swarming with lightless bodies. If with my imagination I can create a world of my own, could I not devise an insoluble criminal problem? But pardon me; this is soliloquy. My dear Trent, I have answered your questions; you have evaded my one question to you. I will put another, a grossly practical one. Do you happen to have heard anything about the terms of Randolph’s will?’

  Trent, who was far from being impressed by Wetherill’s conversational fopperies, could not help being taken aback by the direct simplicity of this inquiry; nor could he guess what might lie behind it. He was disagreeably reminded, moreover, that the direct and simple question which he himself had come there to ask of Wetherill had not yet been put to him, and that his shameless allusion to his relations with Eunice Faviell had made it more than ever difficult to turn to him for that information. He answered, then, with equal plainness, ‘I understand that he died intestate.’

  ‘He did!’ Wetherill sat up with the first manifestation of unaffected interest that he had yet given. ‘Dear friend, are you sure of what you say?’ He stared at Trent with an evidently genuine anxiety.

  ‘There isn’t any doubt about it. He was just about to make a will when he was killed, but he never did so. That is what his lawyers say. But what has it got to do with you, Wetherill? Did you hope that he admired you to the extent of putting you down for a substantial legacy? Or did you think you had wormed your way into his affections by threatening to shoot him?’

  Wetherill, his eyes half closed in deep consideration, only waved a hand vaguely, and for a few moments was silent. At last he said, ‘Forgive me, dear friend. I was obliged to arrange my ideas on hearing what you tell me. It is good news to me; not a disappointment by any means, but an unexpected piece of good fortune. On the strength of it, I have just made up my mind to a very serious step. I am going to marry Eunice; and you, if you will, shall be the first to congratulate her.’

  Astonishment and disgust went near to overcoming Trent’s resolve to keep his temper. He drew a deep breath, then said, ‘I haven’t the least idea what all this means.’

  Wetherill, still thoughtful, fingered his moustache. ‘No, I suppose you haven’t,’ he replied coolly. ‘But when I say that, dear friend, don’t imagine that I look upon you as a fool. On the contrary, you have the very uncommon talent of being able to defeat my utmost efforts to infuriate you. No: you could not know what all this means. But you can make your mind easy about the main thing. I really am going to marry Eunice.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Trent said bluntly. ‘You are assuming too much. She has had no
thing to do with you for some time, I know. All her friends believe she has done with you for good and all,’ he added somewhat inexactly; then, looking Wetherill candidly in the eyes, ‘How she could ever bring herself to associate with such a ruffian as you are is quite incomprehensible to me.’

  Wetherill turned to polishing his eyeglass once more. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘You do not understand women, dear friend. That is a commonplace remark, I know; the sort of thing one alderman might say to another alderman. But it is true of you, just as it would incontestably be true of the other alderman. Perhaps you are to be envied your ignorance; who can say? As for my being a ruffian—do you know, dear friend, I rather like your choice of an epithet? So many men, and so many women, have done their best to find searing names for me; but none of them ever hit upon anything at all apt and significant. Really, the subject is an interesting one. When I am likened to one of the lower animals, or to some inferior social type, by some dolt whose neck I could break with one hand, I naturally am not impressed; and I always have the feeling, too, that my denouncer is not satisfied with his own efforts. But I wander from the point. Forgive me again, dear friend; with you I become loquacious. You were speaking of Eunice having done with me. You misconceive the situation—deliberately, perhaps. It was I who had done with Eunice. Now, however, I intend to marry her—make her an honest woman, as the saying is. You cannot disapprove of that.’

  ‘You think not?’ Trent asked. ‘I assure you, I have disapproved of much less revolting brutalities of yours. If I believed what you say was possible, I should not only disapprove of it; I should do my best to prevent it. But I don’t believe it.’

  Wetherill smilingly waved his doubts aside. ‘Well, dear friend, you shall see, and you may do your best. This evening I shall write to her.’ He eyed Trent through his glass with an air of gentle amusement. ‘She shall receive my wholly honourable proposal at your own house.’