Trent's Own Case

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘Mabel,’ he said, ‘you at least will not drive me away as if I were a verminous leper loitering with intent to commit a felony. What is this person doing here? She has been telling me to get to hell out of this, or words to that effect, though anyone can see that I am dying of hunger and thirst. Stamping Bull: will you kindly tell the women in the wigwam that the pale-face would like a fire-water and soda, as he is feeling rather like a wounded buffalo, after his long journey over the trackless prairie.’

  ‘Yes, Bull,’ his mother said. ‘Tell Maggie to bring it to your father out here.’

  ‘Fire-water for my great white father,’ repeated the chief; and dashed into the house with a yell.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me know you were coming, Phil?’ Mabel Trent said. ‘Luckily you are just in time for lunch; and you won’t be starved, because Eunice has eaten hardly anything since she came. You need feeding, too; you are looking thinner.’ She traced two lines of inanition on his cheeks with a slim forefinger. ‘You have been worrying, or overworking—’

  ‘Or painting the town red,’ Eunice suggested. ‘Those are the lines of reckless dissipation, my girl, not the results of pining away because he is separated from you, as you are trying to suggest.’

  ‘They’re the same thing,’ Trent explained. ‘When I attempt from love’s sickness to fly, the first thing I do is to hurl myself into an ocean of drink and debauchery, of course. And if it comes to why-didn’t-yous, why didn’t you warn me that you had an actress in the house?’

  ‘Because she wouldn’t let me. She rang up last week saying she wanted to get away from everybody and everything, and would I give her a roof over her head? So I said I should like nothing better; and when she came she made me vow I would say nothing about her being here, not even to you. So I thought if she was slightly mad, it would be safest to humour her; especially as it didn’t matter in the slightest to you or anybody else.’

  At this point a sturdy and smiling parlourmaid emerged with Trent’s refreshment, announcing that luncheon would be served in a few minutes; and Eunice, remarking that it was time she became tactful, disappeared into the house.

  Mabel looked after her with a troubled eye. ‘You know, my dear, I’m afraid it’s something serious. I’ve known Eunice most of my life, and I’ve never seen her in such a state as she was when she came down last Friday, looking worried and scared and worn out. I have done what I could for her, and she seems much better, but you can see for yourself there is something wrong. I haven’t asked her what it is, but she would have told me by this time if she was going to. And it is rather alarming when she insists on nobody being told she is here, not even you. Perhaps it is a good thing you didn’t say you were coming—she might have rushed off to avoid meeting you. I can’t understand it. Do you think you can induce her to say anything?’

  ‘I mean to have a good try,’ Trent said. ‘I’ve come here on purpose to do that. And I’m glad you did as she asked about not telling me. She has had a bad shock of some sort, evidently, and raising objections would have made her worse.’

  ‘I knew you would say so. It’s just what I felt myself.’

  Trent saw to it, with the able assistance of his little son, that luncheon should not be a too serious affair.

  ‘When I saw you last,’ he said to his wife, ‘our child was going through a stage of being an animal—any sort of animal, so long as it was fierce. He was a fierce chimpanzee when I saw you off in the train, and he had been a fierce antelope just before that. Now, I gather, he is a Choctaw.’

  ‘Not Choctaw—Pottawattomie,’ the chief corrected him with some asperity. ‘Choctaw no good, heap chickenheart, eat snake. Ugh!’

  ‘You can thank Eunice for all that,’ Mabel said. ‘As if he and his little friends were not savages enough already, she has taught him to be the complete redskin. She has dressed him, and painted him, and made him what he calls a bonnet of chicken-feathers, and taught him an entirely new language—including strange names for everybody in the house. She is packed with information on the subject.’

  ‘It is about the only thing I ever learnt properly at school,’ Eunice said, ‘and I always had a good memory.’

  ‘We both went through it at school,’ Mabel said. ‘Only all of us wanted to be braves, of course, and as I was one of the smallest girls I had to be a squaw, and I didn’t take so much interest, I suppose.’

  ‘Your heart wasn’t in it; you were born civilized. It all comes of having a French grandfather,’ Eunice said. ‘You have finished your coffee, Phil, haven’t you? Do you mind if I borrow him for a time, Mabel? I want to talk to him about my troubles.’

  As they made their way to a seat above the house looking out over the plain, Eunice said, ‘I meant that; I do want to talk about my troubles. Now that you are here, and we have got into the old atmosphere, it seems idiotic that I should ever have thought of keeping them from you, or keeping out of your way. I really wasn’t quite in my right senses last week; that’s the only excuse. Let us just sit here and take in the peacefulness of it for a little; then you can start by asking me questions, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Well, why did you disappear like this?’ Trent said at length. ‘You don’t like people interesting themselves in your affairs as a rule—I seem to remember you hinted something of the sort to me in a note a week ago—but when you actually ask me to pry into them, I hope it is because I may be of some good. We are delighted to have you here on any terms—I needn’t tell you that—but I can’t cure myself of wanting to be helpful where you are concerned.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said, looking into the distance. ‘You are not the inquisitive kind, and I don’t believe you care a damn how I behave myself. Nor does Mabel; only she wouldn’t call it a damn. I suppose that is really the reason why I am here—I don’t mean her not swearing, but not caring. There is nobody else I should have dreamed of planting myself on like this—nobody except Judith, that is; and she is abroad.’

  ‘That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worth while—that we don’t care a damn how you behave yourself. Not that you have tested us very severely.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I will tell you. I wanted to get away out of sight if I could. I was afraid. If only Judith had been in England, I should have gone to her, and she would have told me what to do. But there was Mabel.’

  ‘There was me too,’ Trent observed. ‘In other words, there was I also; and in London—within your very grasp, as it were.’

  ‘Yes, I know; but you were mixed up in the very thing I was trying to escape from. You see, it was when I saw about Randolph’s death, and poor old Bryan trying to commit suicide, that I felt I couldn’t face things any longer. I wanted to get away from the police.’

  Trent coughed dubiously. ‘That isn’t very easy—certainly not for an amateur. If they want you, they probably won’t be long in catching up with you. But why on earth should they?’

  ‘But surely you can guess! I know Judith told you about my being pestered by letters from Randolph which I didn’t understand—at least, I thought I did understand them, and I resented them much more than I do that sort of nuisance as a rule. I never answered them, and he still went on, begging me to see him, because he had something of the greatest importance to say, that it concerned my whole future—hinting that I should never know troubles and uncertainties again—it was all that sort of thing. And when a rich old man writes to a woman in my position in that sort of prose style, she knows well enough what to think. Or she thinks she does. And who wouldn’t?’

  ‘You are trying to tell me,’ Trent suggested, ‘that you got him wrong?’

  ‘Well, you will see. I am going to make a clean breast of it. But what I was saying was that I told Judith, and Judith told you; and then she wrote that you were going to have a row with Randolph, and that you could put a stop to it. I didn’t see how you could; and anyhow I objected to having that sort of thing about me passed round without my leave; and so, as usual, I went in of
f the deep end, and wrote you a perfectly beastly letter. At least, I meant it to be—I don’t remember what I said.’

  ‘Oh, it was. You succeeded admirably. I was raked from stem to stern. Poking my nose into what was none—’

  ‘Don’t be a cad, Phil. You know how sorry I am; don’t rub it in. I always am sorry after making a pig of myself; but I was a very special pig to write like that to you. But that isn’t the worst. You see, some time before that I had been writing to Bryan—one of those letters about nothing in particular that we exchange from time to time—and I said something, not seriously at all, about the old man bothering me with silly letters. It was all mixed up with a lot of other personal chatter, and I never thought about it again—until—until I heard the news about Randolph, and about Bryan too. People were saying he must have done it; I heard it everywhere. Can you imagine what I felt?’

  Trent digested this information with a clouded brow; for he himself had written to Fairman about that same ‘bothering.’ He could indeed imagine how Eunice felt; imagine, too, how much worse she would feel if she could know that their friend had confessed to the murder. But that could be told to no one without breach of a confidence that he had always been very careful to respect. Even if it were otherwise, what would be the good of turning Eunice’s fears to certainty?—for so she would inevitably take it.

  ‘You understand, don’t you?’ she said miserably. ‘If Bryan did it, it may have been all my fault. Of course I know it would be idiotic to go off and kill a person for a thing like that; but all the same, it is the sort of thing that would make Bryan perfectly furious, and I was an utter fool ever to have mentioned it to him. That is why I was frightened. That is why I dreaded the police asking me questions. Everything I could say would have been against him. Even if I said nothing, they might have found my letter—he may have kept it.’

  ‘That’s highly probable, I should say,’ Trent admitted with a wry smile.

  ‘But, Phil, do you believe he did it? Tell me what you really think, whatever it is.’

  ‘All I can tell you is that I don’t know what to think. That isn’t just a way of speaking; I really don’t. There are too many infernal complications about the case; things I can make nothing of. What I can say is that I am working on the line that Bryan is not guilty. But it is going to take me all my time to get him out of the mess, if I ever do.’

  Eunice clapped her hands. ‘What, have you turned detective again? And you hope to get him out of the mess? Bless you, my dear, you can’t say fairer than that! If I know that you are working at the thing, and doing all you can for him, it makes me feel—oh, I can’t tell you how much better!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have relapsed. Meet Philip Trent, the celebrated werewolf, who has been a man for some years, and is now a sleuth-hound once more. But I didn’t want to be. I was dragged into it.’

  ‘You mean Bryan being suspected.’

  ‘That was only one thing. Among the other things was the discovery that Miss Eunice Faviell was floating vaguely around the outskirts of the case. I found that out before you told me. In fact, that’s why I am here.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘I am not asking whether you murdered Randolph yourself,’ he reassured her, ‘because something in your manner tells me that you would be rather put out if I suggested such a thing. But you have been very much annoyed with him. And you were, I gather, very much annoyed with him again only a few hours before he was found shot. And besides that, there is the little matter of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Didn’t Randolph tell you that his death would make you inordinately rich, whether he made a will or not?’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Eunice gasped. ‘Then you mean—but I never thought of that side at all! You mean they might get to suspecting me?’

  ‘Not necessarily that; but putting you on the list of possibles. In fact, I rather think you are there already. The last time I saw the officer in charge of the case he was taking a sort of faint interest in you that I couldn’t quite account for. I can see now, from other things he said, what was in his mind. I didn’t know then about your being Randolph’s niece, and having expectations from his death; but he knew, and the old badger didn’t tell me. I am sure he knew.’

  ‘And you have found it out for yourself.’

  ‘No I haven’t,’ Trent said tartly. ‘I never had the slightest notion of it, or of your being related to the old man. I was told all that yesterday—told by Eugene Wetherill, who knew a lot more about the whole thing than I did. For instance, he knew where you were, and was kind enough to tell me. I was quite interested to hear that.’

  ‘Devil!’ Eunice murmured, as if confiding a secret to the landscape. ‘I mean you,’ she added, glancing at Trent.

  ‘Never mind about what species I belong to,’ Trent said warmly. ‘It is no joke to get nipped in the machinery in a case of this kind, and I didn’t like the idea of its happening to you, especially when I had already got Bryan and—er—other people to bother about. So if there is nothing against it, could you clear up one little point for me?’

  ‘Of course I will if I can,’ she said. ‘I told you I was going to make a clean breast of it, you know, and I haven’t really begun yet. I don’t feel so much like running away from the whole beastly business, now I know you are taking a hand. What is your one little point?’

  ‘Perhaps it is hardly worth mentioning,’ Trent said apologetically. ‘It’s this. After complaining bitterly about the way Randolph was persecuting you, and blasting the poor old chap’s reputation, and generally behaving like Lucrece in the clutches of Tarquin—’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ she said, ‘but it sounds improper.’

  ‘Well, anyhow, after kicking up all that fuss, how did it happen that you were having a cosy little tête-à-tête luncheon with him on the same day that he was murdered? You see, I am putting it in simple terms; the kind of terms it would be discussed in if the facts were to become generally known. Come on then, Eunice; how about it?’

  She sighed whimsically. ‘Yes; this affair has certainly got you going again. So you know about that, do you?—when it was, and where it was, and what I was wearing, and how late I was for it, and what flowers there were on the table, and what the waiter’s first name was, and what we had to drink—’

  Trent mentioned what they had had to drink.

  She nodded; then said reflectively: ‘When I was learning my job, acting in the sort of places you never saw in your life, the public were very fond of those plays in which heroes were heroes, and villains were villains, and comic men were comic, and people were always getting tied down on railway lines, or turned out in the snow with their babies, or melting the heart of the prison governor by saying “I am inno-scent!” What you have just said is the cue for me to clutch you by the wrist and whisper through my clenched teeth, “How much do you know?” I shan’t do it, though, because I don’t care how much you know. I want you to know the whole thing, so I may as well tell it from the start, though you evidently know a lot of it already.’

  ‘You’ll tell me the whole thing,’ Trent emphasized.

  ‘Cross me ’eart,’ Eunice said vulgarly; and told her tale.

  She had first met Randolph about a year before, at a vast hotel in Scotland, to which she had taken Miss Yates as her guest for a brief visit. He had appeared a short time after their arrival; they had fallen into conversation with him, and he had done his not very successful best to make himself agreeable. Eunice had been struck by the fact that he made no reference at all to her work in the theatre—‘though every one knew who I was, of course,’ she said simply. Once he had mentioned that a portrait of him was to be painted, and had asked her if there was any artist whom she believed in for that sort of work. He said she must often have had her own portrait painted; which was the nearest he ever went to making a complimentary speech. Eunice told him that the right man for him was Philip Trent. ‘I tried,’ she said, ‘to give him the impression that you were a
most extraordinary genius, whose work would be fought for by collectors for ages to come. I heard afterwards that you had landed the job; but I was too much of a lady to ask you for the usual ten per cent.’ Soon afterwards they had left the hotel, and Eunice had seen no more of him.

  It was soon after this that unpleasant things had begun to happen to her professionally. Something seemed to have happened to her prestige—‘with the accent on the press.’ An important group of papers did not hide their disappointment with her work in one new play; of another they had nothing good to say. Faintly malicious paragraphs in gossip columns reached her from the press-cutting bureau; it was hinted that her reputation was being somewhat severely strained.

  ‘You don’t know,’ she said to Trent, ‘what a difference that kind of thing makes to anyone who is before the public. It is like something poisonous in the air. I told myself it wasn’t going to kill me; it couldn’t really shake my position, even, so long as it wasn’t widespread. I knew I was as good as I had ever been, and I knew the public knew it. But I hated it like sin all the same. And just when it was beginning to worry me, I found I had to provide a considerable sum of money. It wasn’t anything to do with the theatre; simply a private affair. It was utterly unexpected and very painful, and there was no getting out of it—not if I was ever to hold up my head again. But it’s no use talking to you about it, because you don’t know, and I can’t explain.’