‘Very well, now: we have got so far as to convict Sergeant Ridgway of murder, following on a plot to disinherit, with the help of a confederate, the very man whom he schemed to charge with the crime. So we arrive necessarily at the question, who was this Annie Evans, whom he had chosen for his accomplice in the business, and whom he had ended by so foully doing to death? To get at the whole truth of the story, it was essential that the mystery of their connexion should be traced to its source.
‘To anyone not possessed of the clues which Fortune had placed in my hands, it must have appeared nothing less than astonishing that, with all the wide publicity given to the case, the victim should have remained virtually unidentified and unclaimed. She was beautiful, she was in domestic service—two facts, one might have thought, favourable to an easy solution of the riddle. Still her origin remained a mystery, and so remains, to all but the few instructed, to this day.
‘But that very mystery which, to those wanting the master-key, appeared so insolvable, was to me who possessed the key, illuminating. That the girl was in domestic service at the time of her death was no proof that she had ever been in domestic service before. It would be much more in accord with my conception of the astute and far-seeing detective to suppose that he had anticipated that danger of recognition by assigning to his confederate a part through which it would be impracticable, should difficulties arise, to trace her. She had not been in service before, in fact. The business of the photograph confirmed me in that view. You will remember that travesty of Annie’s likeness which appeared, enlarged and reproduced from a snap-shot, in the official prints? It was completely unrecognizable, and was intended by Ridgway to be unrecognizable. He knew that no other recent photograph of her existed at all, and for the very good reason that she had not for some time been in a position to be photographed. You will understand why in a moment. It was of paramount importance to him, both first and last, that his accomplice should be and remain unidentifiable. Essential to that condition were her innocence of former service, the absence of any photographic record, and the employment of a false name.
‘It was of no use, consequently, my thinking of running Annie Evans, so called, to earth: I must look for her under another title. How was I to ascertain that title?
‘It was here again that chance, or Providence, came—I will not say in a totally unforeseen way, but at least in a most obliging way—to my assistance. It occurred to me that at this stage of the proceedings it would be well for me to pay a visit to my Parisian Jean Ridgway, and endeavour to extract from him, if he could be persuaded to part with them, the fullest details possible of the story with whose outline he had already acquainted me. Something, it might be much, I felt, had remained untold which, if revealed, would possibly throw such a light upon the obscure places of my quest as would enable me from that moment to present my case without a flaw. I went—to Paris, Mr Bickerdike; not to London, as you supposed—only to learn from Jean’s bosom friend—that Caliste Ribault, of whom I have already spoken—that his loved comrade had departed this life in June of this year. That was a blow, I confess: my hopes seemed baffled, my journey in vain. Yet it was so far from being the case that not the artist’s living lips could have more shouted the truth into my soul than did the evidence of his dead hand. I will tell you how:
‘One day, shortly before Jean’s death, Caliste informed me, there had come to visit him a step-brother, an Englishman, of whom he, Caliste, had never before heard nor Jean spoken. This step-brother bore the same Christian and surname as Jean, and he had come accompanied by a girl of such beauty that the dying man could not dismiss the thought of her face from his mind until he had made from memory a coloured drawing of it on the white-washed wall, writing her name beneath. Now, his step-brother being dead, John Ridgway had come once more to arrange about the funeral and the disposition of the deceased’s effects, and, perceiving the face on the wall, had been very angry—so angry, that he had immediately seized a cloth and completely effaced the drawing, so that not a vestige of it remained. Why, you ask? You will understand later.
‘Thus again Fortune seemed to laugh at me; but it was laughter like that of a mother who dangles over the mouth of her child a cherry—to be his in a moment. And sure enough in such a moment Caliste informed me that, though the picture was destroyed, a copy of it remained in the shape of a photograph which he himself had taken of the original. He showed me the photograph; and the face I saw was the face of Annie Evans, but Ivy Mellor was the name written underneath.
‘I had found out what I wanted—and more. I had discovered that the two John Ridgways were step-brothers, and light and still light broadened on the path before me. I got Ribault to part with the photograph to me, cautioning him to say nothing about his possessing the negative to anyone, and with my prize I came on the following day to London. Thereafter my task was an easy one. Possessing that face and that name, and associating both with the name of a famous Scotland Yard detective, I had only to place the matter in the hands of a very clever and trustworthy private inquiry agent of my acquaintance to find out all that I needed. His investigations—with the details of which I need not trouble you—yielded the following information:
‘Ivy Mellor had been not many months discharged from a reformatory, to which she had been committed for three years for procuring a situation as nursery governess with a forged character, and obtaining goods by false pretences. She was the illegitimate daughter of an actress now dead, and was possessed herself of some decided histrionic ability. Upon her discharge, Ridgway had somehow got hold of her, or had been got hold of by her, with the result that he had fallen a complete slave to her attractions. It was probably she who had been his evil genius from the first; probably she who had planned and perpetrated the “written character” which had procured her an entrée to Wildshott. He promised her great things in the event of success, and, in view of those great things, she held him at arms’ length; there were to be no questionable relations between them. The man was hopelessly infatuated; he used to visit her under an assumed name; probably “kept her”, in the unequivocal sense. I am giving here not only the agent’s report, but some of my own conclusions drawn therefrom. Summarized, they showed my case complete, so far as effect was concerned. I had only now to penetrate to the cause. It could be fathomed, I believed, but fathomed in one direction alone. I determined to go boldly to the fountain-head, and challenge there a decision. In Sir Calvin’s hands lay the final verdict. I could hardly doubt what it would be, or that for the sake of the whole truth he would yield at last to daylight the guarded secret of a long-past episode. I judged him rightly, and I need say no more. He told me the story, produced for my examination the written evidence, and left me to deal with the matter as I would.
‘But one remark more I have to make before running, as briefly as I can, through the main points of the narrative unfolded to me. While in Paris I had procured from my very good friend, M. Despard, the head of the secret police, an introduction to our own First Commissioner. I saw the latter, confided to his interested, and rather horrified, ears the whole truth of the case, so far as I had then conceived and mastered it, and arranged with him the little trap which was to entice John Ridgway into our midst again—conditional always on my procuring that supplementary evidence which was to prove his guilt beyond any possibility of doubt. The rest you know.
‘We come now to the final chapter, which, like the postscript to a lady’s letter, contains, in Hazlitt’s phrase, the pith of the whole. In relating it I choose my own words, and must not be understood to aim at reproducing the actual terms in which it was revealed to me by Sir Calvin. I wish to give a mere brief or abstract of a painful story, and I wish, moreover, to warn you once more that certain reflections and conclusions of mine, not affecting the main body of the narrative, were and are conjectural, and must so remain unless and until the accused himself shall confirm their accuracy; and that, in my soul I anticipate, will be the case. Here, then, is the story:
‘I am quite prepared to believe that George Ridgway made his wife a good husband during the few years which remained to them in company, for he did not very long survive his marriage. Moreover, Sir Calvin’s liberality had placed the two in such comfortable circumstances that no excuse for discontent existed. The Quartermaster-Sergeant adhered honourably to his part of the bargain, and it was not until long after his death that the question arose in the widow’s mind as to whether or not she was justified in continuing to mislead her son in the matter of his origin. Of that in a moment.
‘In the meantime the two children, step-brothers in fact, were brought up together, and considered themselves as half brothers. They were both christened John—the younger through some unconquerable perversity of the mother in insisting on calling him after her seducer’s second name—an anomaly which, however open to curious comment at first, was soon no doubt lost sight of in the inevitable nicknames which affection would come to bestow on the pair. Still, for the purposes of distinction, I will continue to call the one John and the other Jean. Jean was popularly regarded as the Ridgways’ child, though in truth no child was born of their union.
‘John, though the elder by some three years, was frequently, as time went on, mistaken, by those who did not know, for the younger of the two boys—an error also not without its bearing on subsequent events. Jean from the outset betrayed, if it could have been guessed, an unmistakable sign of his origin in the use of his second for his digit finger—an inherited trick due to the shock caused to his mother by the sight of Sir Calvin’s mutilation, associated as it had been with all the agony and despair of that time. He was a dreamy boy, and early developed artistic proclivities. I have no means or intention of tracing the career of either of the children up to and beyond manhood. At some period, as we know, Jean went to Paris; at some period John joined the Metropolitan Police force, with subsequent promotion to a valued position in the Criminal Investigation Department. I pass from these ascertained facts to an estimate of the circumstances which first engendered in the latter’s mind a thought of the daring project which has ended by bringing him to his present situation.
‘Now I have already told you how Jean, on the occasion of a visit to England, had been at last made acquainted by his mother with the true story of his paternity. She told it him, being herself under the fear of death at the time; and there is no doubt that the poor woman still believed perfectly honestly in the legality of her first marriage, not only before heaven, but on the practical testimony of the little Catholic vade-mecum in which the names of the contracting parties, with their clerical witness, had been inscribed. She believed, moreover, on the strength of some muddled innuendo gathered from the Quartermaster-Sergeant, that the creature Barry Skelton had deceived, as much as she herself had been deceived by, Sir Calvin, and that he had actually been an ordained priest at the time of the marriage. It was not true, I think, the ordination having occurred subsequently, as the General took pains to make known to her; for she wrote to him on the subject of the vade-mecum, begging him to return it to her hands, whence he had appropriated it when he deserted her. Why, you may ask, had he, after securing possession of, persisted in retaining through all these years that damning witness to his guilt? For the very same reason of the evidence it contained, which to her stood for proof, to him for disproof, of the legality of the marriage. Wherefore he could not make up his mind to destroy it. But he thought it well to pay a visit to his correspondent, to assure her that she was completely mistaken in her surmise, and that the continuance of his support depended upon the utter future abandonment by her of any such attempts on his forbearance.
‘Still thinking for her boy, the fond soul was not convinced. So little was she convinced that, when her death came actually to be imminent, she called John to her side and confided to him the whole story, begging him to look after his step-brother’s interests, and to vindicate, if possible, his true claim to the name and estates of Kennett, something about which, she told him, Jean already knew. And John promised—she was not his mother, remember; he may have been, for all we are aware to the contrary, a cold and undutiful stepson. But he promised, we know; for he went after her death to Paris, to visit the other, to acquaint him of his mother’s end, and to discuss with him the strange story she had committed to his keeping: he went accompanied by a beautiful young creature of his acquaintance—whom he had brought with him probably for no other reason than her pleasure and his own infatuation—only to find Jean himself at the point of death.
‘Was it then for the first time that a daring idea began to germinate in his mind? I think so. Whether spontaneously, or at his companion’s instance, I believe the conception of the plot dated from that moment. Jean dead, what was to prevent him, John, from personating his step-brother, from claiming himself to be Sir Calvin’s son, from profiting by the evidence which was said to prove that son’s legitimacy? As to that he had only Mrs Ridgway’s word, but it had been uttered with such solemnity and conviction, by a dying woman, as to leave little doubt of its truth. At worst the thing would be a
gamble; but there was that in the very romantic hazard of it to appeal to his imagination: at best it would be prosperity beyond his dreams. And what were the odds? To consider them was to find them already curiously in his favour. The similarity of their names; the fact that he himself had always been regarded as the younger; the early death of the Quartermaster-Sergeant, and the consequent long removal of the one most damaging witness to the truth; Jean’s prolonged absence from home in a foreign city; his own more apparent devotion to the woman to be claimed as his mother—he could find nothing in it all inimical to the success of the plot. Only the first essential would be to obtain possession of the vade-mecum. There was full reason to believe, from what Sir Calvin had told Mrs Ridgway, that the book to this day was jealously retained by him, for the reason stated, in his secure keeping. How to recover it?
‘So the conspiracy was hatched. Ivy Mellor was to be the means, the condition of her success the bestowal of her spotless hand upon the rightful heir of Wildshott—a splendid dream, a transpontine melodrama. But John saw at once that a first condition of its success lay in a scrupulous obliteration of all clues pointing to the identity of his confederate: hence his anger on discovering the portrait, and the immediate measures taken by him to wipe it out of existence.
‘Well, we know the rest—how the beautiful accomplice betrayed her trust; how she developed a passion for the very man whom she was scheming to disinherit; how, to be sure, she came to recognize that she could much more fully and satisfactorily realize her own ambitions by baulking than by furthering the designs of her fellow-plotter. To be the wife of the problematic heir of Wildshott might be a good thing; to be the wife of the heir of Wildshott in esse, a gentleman, a soldier and an Antinous was certainly a better. So, having surrendered to love, she played for the greater stake—and she lost. We can pity her: she was frankly an adventuress. We could pity him, were it not for the thought of that inhuman revenge. Yet he had provocation perhaps beyond a gambler’s endurance. To find the very woman, for worship of whom he had been scheming away his position, his reputation, his soul of truth and honour, not only turned traitor to his best interests, but faithless in the worst sense, and for his rival’s sake, to her pledge to him—well, one must pause before utterly condemning. And after all it was only a moment’s madness served by opportunity. Yes, I can pity him. I have a notion, too, that she told him what was not the truth—that she had already destroyed for her love’s sake the evidence of the prayer-book. If she had—it was the last touch. Yes, I can pity him.
The Mystery of the Skeleton Key Page 20