by Molly Thynne
Kean met him in the hall and led the way into his study. He had been working and held a closely written manuscript in his hand. He pushed Fayre gently into an armchair and placed a box of cigars at his elbow, then he seated himself at the writing-table.
“I’ve got the whole story here,” he said, pointing to the papers before him. “I suggest that you take it to Grey first thing to-morrow morning. He will know what to do with it. I might have sent it to you. In some ways it would have been easier for me, but I’ve got a feeling I’d rather you heard it from my own lips.”
The amused contempt which had angered Fayre earlier in the day had gone from his voice and had given place to an utter weariness. His face was grey with fatigue, and Fayre, remembering all he had gone through that day, forgot his anxiety about Leslie and was conscious only of compassion. He rose impulsively to his feet.
“Look here, old man,” he exclaimed, all the warmth of their long friendship back in his voice. “Let’s leave the whole thing for to-night. You’re not fit for it. I’ll take that paper home with me and go through it there or, if you’d prefer it, we can have it out tomorrow. I don’t know to what extent it will help Leslie but a few hours’ delay can make little difference to him.”
Kean shook his head.
“We’ll go through with it now,” he said, with a touch of his old vigour. “I shan’t sleep till it’s over and done with.”
He sat for a moment in silence, his eyes fixed on the closely written sheets before him. When he spoke, his voice was as coldly dispassionate as though he were telling a story in which he was in no way concerned.
“As you have no doubt guessed,” he began, “the whole thing dates from the year of my visit to Paris. How you got onto that, I don’t know. You will remember that Gerald Lee and three other men were killed by a shell in the first year of the war. Identification was impossible, but his disk was found close to the spot and it was taken for granted that he was one of the victims.
“The first intimation I had that he was alive came from Mrs. Draycott, almost a year after my marriage to Sybil. She wrote from Paris, enclosing a copy of the snapshot you showed me this morning. It appeared that she had been staying with friends in Germany and, so far as I could make out, had had an affair with a doctor out there. It was like her, with her morbid love of sensation, to persuade him to take her over the local lunatic asylum. She had known Gerald Lee slightly in the days before the war and she recognized him at once and, with characteristic acumen, realized that she might make use of the discovery to her own advantage.
“I found out afterwards that he had been picked up unconscious by the Germans, badly wounded in the head, and that he had been passed from one hospital to another, never once recovering his sanity, until he eventually drifted to the municipal asylum at Schleefeldt. By that time he was in civilian clothes and all efforts to identify him had been in vain. All the authorities could find out about him was that he was an Englishman. They were much interested when Mrs. Draycott recognized him and did all they could to help her, one of the doctor’s taking a snapshot of him for her to send to England.
“On receipt of her letter, I went at once to Paris and we had several interviews. I need hardly say that I had to offer to buy her silence, but I went to Schleefeldt myself and satisfied myself that she was speaking the truth before paying her the money she demanded. I also ascertained from the doctor in charge of the asylum that not only was Lee incapable of recognizing any one, but that he was considered absolutely incurable. Apparently there was some pressure on the brain which could not be removed. I may say that this diagnosis was confirmed after his arrival in England by three of our own brain specialists. So that, however much at fault I may have been, I have robbed Lee of nothing. There, at least, my conscience is clear. I confess that, taking into account Sybil’s state of health, I do not see how I could have acted otherwise.”
He unlocked a drawer at his elbow and, taking out a bundle of cancelled cheques, tossed them onto the table.
“That is what I found I had let myself in for,” he went on bitterly. “For Sybil’s sake, I did not dare appear in the matter, and, going on the principle that the fewer people involved, the better, I left the whole affair in Mrs. Draycott’s hands, and I must say she proved both practical and efficient. Pretending to recognize him as a relation of her own, she had him brought to England and, in the capacity of her legal adviser, I was able to visit him and see to his installation in the best private asylum I could hear of. And then the game began. Mrs. Draycott had only to threaten to go with the story to Sybil and she had me absolutely at her mercy.”
He picked up the packet of cheques and balanced it in his hand.
“Every one of these is made out to ‘self,’” he said. “I was absolutely helpless and she was too clever to accept anything but cash. For six years I have been trying to trap her, in vain. And then, last January, I succeeded. Until then she had steadfastly refused to accept a cheque or give a receipt for anything I paid her. All the payments were in notes and I had no evidence that she had ever attempted to blackmail me.
“Then, last January, I caught her. She was at Nice and had been gambling heavily at Monte Carlo. When she wrote to me she was desperate and in such a hurry for the money that she accepted the cheque I sent her. As soon as I ascertained that she had cashed it I knew that I had a hold over her at last. On her return I went to see her and offered her a lump sum down, on condition that she did not molest me again, pointing out that, if she went to Sybil, I was prepared to take the matter into the courts and, on the evidence of the Nice cheque, she would not stand the ghost of a chance if she were sued for blackmail. She had begun to realize that Sybil might die and that I might then prefer exposure to the constant drain on my purse. Anyhow, she gave in, but for nearly a month she haggled over the terms and in the end agreed to accept seven thousand pounds down.
“Even then I did not trust her. She was a vindictive woman as well as a greedy one and, as you may imagine, our liking for each other had not progressed during our intercourse. I knew that, in a fit of malice or cupidity, she was capable of burning her boats and going to Sybil. Also, it was anything but convenient for me to realize so large a sum just then. At best, it would cripple me financially for some time to come, and retrenchment of any kind meant discomfort for Sybil. Just before my final interview with Mrs. Draycott I received the news that one of my investments had failed and I realized that I was going to have considerable difficulty in raising the seven thousand.”
He paused and sat for a moment in thought, as though he were taking stock of his own past actions and appraising them.
Then his eyes drifted to where his wife’s photograph, in its heavy silver frame, stood in the full glare of the reading-lamp.
“It was then,” he went on, “that I made up my mind to kill Mrs. Draycott.
CHAPTER XXV
There was a tense silence, broken only by the sound of the distant traffic in Victoria Street. Fayre made an ineffectual effort to speak, but no words came. There was nothing he could say. His mind was a chaos of contending emotions, the strongest of which, even now, was pity: pity for the man who, in his blind arrogance, had wrecked the life of the one being he had hoped to save.
Something of what he felt must have reached Kean, for when he spoke again there was a gentler, almost apologetic note in his voice.
“I’m sorry, Hatter,” he said. “Of all my friends you are the one I can least afford to lose. If it had not been for Farrer’s appalling blunder in not letting me know in time that the case in which John Leslie was to appear had been postponed things would have turned out very differently. Luck was against me from the beginning.
“When Eve invited us to Staveley and told me that Mrs. Draycott was to be there I realized that my opportunity had come at last. I laid my plans carefully and thought I had covered any possible emergency; but I did not realize that I should have you to reckon with, Hatter. You were too intimately connected with us all to be
a safe antagonist.
“On the plea that there had been a delay in the selling of certain securities I persuaded Mrs. Draycott to go on from Staveley’s to her sister’s, arranging to meet her while she was there and hand the money in cash over to her. We arranged to meet at the corner of the Greycross lane at six o’clock on the evening of March 23rd. Meanwhile I had brought the car from London and garaged it at the garage at Whitbury. If you remember, Sybil was the first to arrive at Staveley and I followed her four days later, that is to say, on March 14th. I wired the time of my arrival and was met by the Staveley motor in the usual way and you all took it for granted that I had come by train. As a matter of fact, I drove the car myself from London to Whitbury, garaged it there and then went on by train to Staveley Grange. Unfortunately my sidelights gave out at York and I was held up. I had had the forethought to borrow my chauffeur’s licence, on the plea that I had mislaid my own and might have occasion to use the car while he was on his holiday, and it was that licence that the policeman who stopped me saw. That was where you proved my undoing, Hatter. If it had not been for your long memory and the fact that you took the trouble to interrogate my chauffeur your suspicions would never have been aroused. Grey, who knew nothing of my supposed movements at that date, certainly wouldn’t have jumped to it. As it was, that Y.0.7. number you were looking for was under your very nose and you never saw it!”
Fayre looked up suddenly.
“Then Page—?”
Kean nodded.
“Page was the name I gave when I garaged the car at Whitbury. It was there that the woman noticed my hands. I was startled when Grey told me that, I admit.”
He spread out his hands on the blotter before him and regarded them thoughtfully. They were characteristic enough, with their long, clean-boned, sensitive fingers, and hard, muscular palms.
“Fortunately they are not marked in any way, or it might have been awkward. Apart from that, I had covered my tracks well. On the evening of the 23rd I was driven to the station from Staveley. There I took a ticket to London and got into the local train from Staveley Grange to Whitbury. At Whitbury, as you know, there is an hour’s wait before the London express comes in. I had only a small suitcase with me and this I carried to the Whitbury garage, where I picked up the car. I drove to the corner of the Greycross lane, where I was joined by Mrs. Draycott. I had prepared a packet of notes, tied up in batches of one thousand pounds. The uppermost packet only was genuine, the rest were made up of sheets of paper, cut to the correct size.”
He paused for a moment.
“Here I knew I was up against my one real difficulty, that of persuading Mrs. Draycott to go to the farm. Fortunately, the weather was on my side. She hated the country, at the best of times, and had suffered considerably during her short walk to the corner of the lane. So as not to arouse her sister’s suspicions she had come out in the thin dress and slippers she had been wearing in the house, and it had been no joke struggling against a bitter wind in inadequate garments. I put it to her that she would have to count the notes in my presence before I could undertake to hand them over to her and that, in view of the size of the payment, I had no intention of making it without a receipt. I had some argument with her over the last point, but she had seen the notes in the light of my head-lamps and her cupidity had been aroused. Also, she knew that, since the affair of the cheque, I already had a hold over her. It was blowing a gale and bitterly cold and, while she was hesitating, a big branch came down with a crash in the field quite close to us. I think that decided her. I explained that, as we could not go to her sister’s, I proposed to drive her to Leslie’s farm, where we could complete our transaction under cover, telling her that he was away and that I had the run of the place. Leslie had let drop one day that he invariably left either the front or the back door open and I had taken stock of the place when Sybil and I had gone over to tea with him and Cynthia there. I knew that, if, by any chance, we found the door locked I could run the car into the barn and complete my plans there.
“As it turned out, the door was unlocked and I led the way into the sitting-room by the light of an electric torch I had brought with me. Mrs. Draycott sat down at the writing-table and I stood behind her, holding the torch in one hand so that its light fell on the table. I handed her the packet of notes and she began to count them. My revolver was in the right-hand pocket of my overcoat.”
His eyes contracted as though, for a moment, the whole scene were vividly before him.
“The rest was easy. The thing was over in a moment. She fell forward without uttering a sound. I made sure that she was dead, then I picked up the bundle of notes and thrust the torch and the revolver into my pocket. Then I felt my way out in the dark. I must have left the front door open, but I only found that out after Leslie had been arrested. At the gate I undid my coat and placed the notes in an inside pocket. It must have been then that Sybil’s ‘Red Dwarf’ pen rolled out onto the path where you found it.”
Fayre drew in his breath sharply.
“Good God!” he muttered.
Kean’s fixed gaze shifted for a moment to Fayre’s face.
“You never guessed it was Sybil’s. And yet she had used one for years. That wretched ‘Red Dwarf’ gave me more than one bad quarter of an hour. For one thing, I was terrified that you would mention it to her. She lent it to me on the morning of the 23rd, and I must have slipped it into my pocket; when I got back to Staveley on the 26th one of the first things she did was to ask me for it. I made the excuse that I had left it in London. If you had spoken to her about it after that she might possibly have put two and two together.”
Fayre opened his lips to say that he had mentioned it, with ominous results, but Kean interrupted him. Afterwards he was thankful that he had not been given the chance to speak.
“I suppose you must have opened the drawer of the table at my Chambers and seen the two pens or you wouldn’t have produced them as you did this morning. You probably also realized what I had been doing. I was afraid she would ask me for it again and, somehow, I could not bring myself to return her own to her, apart from the fact that I might have been called upon to produce it and did not dare let it out of my possession. So I bought another and stained it with ink, meaning to return it to her as her own. You guessed that?”
Fayre nodded.
“I knew, naturally, that you had been trying to fake a duplicate, but I was entirely at sea as to your object.”
“I think, all along, Sybil was the person I feared most. She has more intuition than any one I have ever met and I was in terror that something in my manner or attitude towards the case would rouse her suspicions. Thank goodness she never dreamed that anything was wrong.”
This time Fayre deliberately held his peace, but his heart turned sick within him, for, bit by bit, the patterns in the puzzle were beginning to slip into their places and, among them, Sybil’s letter and the enclosure.
“There’s not much more to tell,” pursued Kean. “It was too late to pick up the London train at Whitbury, so I drove straight to Carlisle, counting on the fact that the express waited there for an hour. I just had time to garage the car and catch the train, arriving in London at the same hour and by the same train I should have arrived by had I taken it direct from Whitbury. I made a point of speaking to the three men who shared my table in the dining-car and went out of my way to give them a clue as to my profession, mentioning the fact that I had been staying at Staveley. I did not anticipate any trouble, but, had I been forced to prove an alibi, I have no doubt they would have come forward and it would have been taken for granted that I had travelled over the entire distance by train. But, from the time I left the farm, luck was against me. There was the collision with the farm-cart that put you onto the track of the mythical Page. You were right, by the way, about the number-plate. I broke it myself as a precaution. I had it replaced and the mudguard mended in Carlisle. You took it for granted that, when the car was removed from the first garage in Carlisle on March 2
6th it was driven to London. As a matter of fact, I simply moved it to one on the other side of the town, where I had the repairs executed and it stayed there till I picked it up on April 1st on my way to Staveley. The news that the case in which Leslie was to appear had been postponed and that he had already been notified was, I think, the greatest shock I have ever had. I had been so absolutely certain that he was in London. It was as though an abyss had opened under my feet. Until I actually saw the papers and read the first description of the case I hoped that he might not have received the notification in time. As soon as I saw them I knew that, unless I could manage to get him off, I was faced with disaster.”
He raised his clasped hands and brought them down so heavily on the table that it shook.
“Everything was against me,” he exclaimed with uncontrollable bitterness. “If the police had not found Leslie’s revolver or if that wretched cat had not got caught in a trap, just at that particular moment in the whole of Leslie’s career, I could have got him off without a stain on his character. As it was, I was helpless from the beginning.”
He rose, picked up the sheets of manuscript from the table, and joined Fayre.
“The whole thing is here,” he said, handing them to him. “It is signed and witnessed by two of the servants. I believe they thought it was my will,” he added ironically. “I want you to take it to Grey first thing to-morrow.”
Fayre sprang to his feet and laid his hand on the other man’s arm.
“What are you going to do, Edward?” he asked.
Kean hesitated.
“Make a bolt for it, I suppose,” he said grimly. “I may bring it off with luck.”
“Where will you go?”
Kean looked at him curiously.
“I don’t know,” he said. “On my word, Hatter, I don’t know.”
“Edward,” began Fayre impulsively; but Kean cut him off.
“There’s one thing you can do for me, old chap,” he said swiftly. “I want to see Cynthia. I’ve got something I must say to her, something that I cannot leave unsaid. It’s early still and she won’t have gone to bed. Will you go round there now and ask her if I can see her? What I’ve got to say won’t take more than ten minutes.”