“Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” Mr. Ricardo observed, quoting from Macbeth.
“But he wasn’t old,” said Maltby.
“Mr. Ricardo was quoting from a standard case before the days of finger-prints,” said Claxton.
Mr. Ricardo heaved a sigh of pleasure. He had been feeling rather chilly in that room. Even Hanaud had been too engrossed in some troublesome thoughts of his own to keep his friend constantly within the consultation. Now he had an ally.
“By the way,” said Maltby over his shoulder. “The prints on the knife handle?”
“Horbury’s,” said the doctor.
Maltby removed the cover from the blood upon the floor. The shape of the long knife was as clearly moulded in red as if it had been made in a sculptor’s clay. Maltby took his handkerchief from his pocket and carefully lifted the knife from the box. It fitted exactly in the space. To Mr. Ricardo it looked the most murderous of weapons; one side of the blade was thin and sharp as a razor, the other more than usually broad and heavy, as though it had been loaded; and what gave to it a curiously sinister aspect was the pale blue colour of the handle. It was a weapon of death imitating a child’s toy. Even so unimaginative a woman as Mrs. Wallace had noticed especially that gay bright colour— “Cambridge passing under Hammersmith Bridge.”
“One of the occasions, I suppose,” Mr. Ricardo ruminated, “when Oxford had been embarrassed by their long list of wins and didn’t try.”
He did not pursue this engaging topic for Hanaud turned a pursed and frowning face upon the doctor.
“There seems to be no hinge where the blade joins the handle of the knife.”
“There is none.”
Hanaud nodded his head. He glanced sharply at Ricardo and so back again to the doctor.
“I see. South American, do you think?”
The Superintendent once more began to show signs of impatience at Hanaud’s excursions beyond the strict boundaries of this garden-room; and Dr. Claxton drew back from the dangerous game of conjecture.
“No knowledge. No theories,” he announced curtly, and Maltby nodded. “That’s sound. Speculation may be the soul of conversation, but it’s a will o’ the wisp to a Superintendent of Police.”
Hanaud was not at all abashed. He was darting glances on the floor, on the settee, on the mantelshelf, as if he had not heard one word of the rebuke.
“If it is your hat you look for, my friend you left it in the hall,” Maltby continued sweetly, and Inspector Herbert did audibly snigger. Hanaud smiled apologetically.
“My hat? Yes, there he is. He will not run away. But, Inspector, the sheath, he does.”
“Sheath!” Herbert exclaimed.
“To be sure. The knife, since he does not shut himself, will carry himself in a sheath. It was on the body perhaps?”
“No,” said the doctor and “No,” the Inspector agreed. Maltby cried: “There is a drawer in the table at which Horbury sat. We may have overlooked it.”
He went behind the table and pulled out the drawer with a little more violence than it needed.
“No,” he said and he acknowledged Hanaud’s question with a stiff bow. “But it must be somewhere;” and at once everyone in the room began to search for it.
“It might be of soft leather,” said Herbert.
“Or of stiff leather,” said Mr. Ricardo helpfully. He was down on his knees with the Sergeant. They peered under the chairs and tables, they turned up the edges of the carpet, they swung back the window curtains. Maltby picked up the blotting-book, shook it out and replaced it. Hanaud pushed his hand down at the side and the back of the settee. The few things which Herbert had taken from the dead man’s pockets — a small diary, a gold pencil, a few half-crowns, a black letter-case with some pound notes in the partitions, the steel chain with the tab at the end for the trouser-button — were all arranged upon the mantelshelf. But of any protection for that deadly weapon with the blue handle, there was nowhere any sign.
“It is just another of the little things which do perplex me,” said Hanaud, and then the doctor took him up.
“But there is no doubt that this was the knife he used,” he argued. “No shadow of doubt! He had drawn it from left to right across his throat. He had severed the carotid artery. The blood must have burst from it in great gouts, as though it had been pumped. He would have died very quickly.”
“When?” Hanaud asked sharply; and Mr. Ricardo with a jerk drew himself erect.
He knew that here was the question to which Hanaud had been working up from the first moment when he had entered the room. “When?” Just that! All the rest, the small particulars discovered which made suicide a verdict difficult to accept, were the knitting of a pattern to which the answer to his question was the key. He had no wish, as Ricardo knew, to see his small affair of the pearls merging in the ever so much bigger crime of murder. But the plain reason for his life had driven him irresistibly. Murder must be revealed any where, upon whomsoever the blame fell. When did Horbury die then? At what hour? Answer!
The doctor answered:
“It is not always possible to be exact. But within limits one is justified, and in this case Mr. Cornish, a famous surgeon, agreed absolutely with me. We examined the body of Daniel Horbury in the mortuary at ten o’clock this morning and we agreed that death had taken place between ten and twelve hours before.”
“Not after midnight then?”
“Certainly not after midnight,” Doctor Claxton stated firmly, “and not before ten. We cannot be more precise.”
Hanaud’s eyes dropped from the doctor’s face, and he stood so with his eyes on the ground. Then he slipped into an armchair below the fireplace and stared moodily into the ashes. He was not acting. His disarmament was as apparent as his honesty. There was no one in that room who interrupted him, no one indeed who stirred.
“My friend, I beg your pardon,” he said to Maltby very gently. “Yet perhaps, in the end, you will say, ‘That Hanaud! He was the nuisance, but he helped.’”
“I should not say he was the nuisance,” Maltby returned with a smile.
“Although one might think it,” Hanaud answered. “But I will not keep you on the tip-toes. No! I was very anxious yesterday to settle my little dispute with this Horbury. So, on arriving in London by the Continental train, I rang up his office. I did not give my name, but I said my business was urgent. Horbury was not in his office, but the telephone number of White Barn was given to me. I dined with you, my friend Maltby, and I went home to Grosvenor Square. But I could not sleep. I said to myself, ‘That is a slippery one, that Horbury! How do I know that he has not caught the night train to Rome?’ There are reasons besides why he might. So at half-past two in the morning...”
“Twenty-five minutes to three,” Mr. Ricardo interrupted.
“You heard me?”
“I heard you go down the stairs and call up a number on the telephone, but what number I did not hear.”
“Good! I have the corroboration,” cried Hanaud. “This was the number — White Barn.”
“You called up this house?” exclaimed Maltby.
“I did.”
“At twenty-five minutes to three in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“And you got an answer?”
“I tell you what happened. I got cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck, like a clock. Then that ceased. So someone had lifted the receiver from the cradle. I said ‘It is Mr. Horbury? Excuse please the hour. It is most urgent.’ There was no answer, and I began to wonder whether the receiver had not been lifted just to stop the bell ringing through the house. Then, after a moment or two, I heard a little rattle as the handle was replaced on the spring — and the line went dead.”
Again Hanaud received the tribute of silence. Then the detective-inspector suggested: “Mrs. Horbury perhaps?”
Hanaud shook his head.
“You heard the woman Wallace. There are only two instruments in the house. One in the hall, the o
ther here. On the telephone in the hall, there were old prints of hers and one set — mind, only one set — of Mrs. Horbury’s, made this morning when she rang the police.”
Nobody wished to accept the consequence of his argument. Not even Hanaud himself. He looked at the bright and inviting room with its enamelled walls, its deep cushioned seats, the delicate tracery of the plaster on the ceiling and the long windows opening on to trim lawn and wide meadow, where the sunlight and the oaks played a swiftly-moving game in black and gold.
“So then?” Maltby challenged, himself the first to grasp the nettle.
“So then,” Hanaud repeated, “at half-past two this morning, in this room — perhaps the lamps were lit and the curtains drawn and the fire bright upon the hearth; perhaps the room was dark and the windows open to the shadows and the silver, as now to the shadows and the gold — someone stood by that table and with a covered hand lifted the earpiece, mouthpiece, what you will, and held it, — not to listen to a message, but to stop the call jangling through the house.”
“Some one?” Herbert repeated. “Mrs. Horbury then?”
Hanaud replied thoughtfully: “Yet I do not think it was Madame Horbury. Imagine it! Horbury has been dead for three to four hours. Someone in this room hears the telephone, lifts the receiver, does not answer, and replaces it.” He pointed across the room to the table. “Was it then, do you think, that someone tossed the keys on the table?”
Maltby bent down.
“You have in your mind, Monsieur Hanaud,” he stated rather than asked, “a picture, and perhaps the name of that someone.”
“Picture, no! Name, perhaps yes. There was one who — and again I say, perhaps — had great reason to hate Daniel Horbury.”
A look of bewilderment passed over Maltby’s face.
“Devisher?” he said.
“Bryan Devisher,” said Hanaud.
“But — but — we both know. At Gravesend, he was not on board. He was lost at sea during the night.”
“And that also is true. But he could have been in this house last night. Let Mr. Ricardo tell us.”
He swung round upon Ricardo with the outstretched forefinger of melodrama; and everyone turned about and stared, incredulous, ready at a word to contradict.
“Really, really,” Mr. Ricardo stammered. He swallowed hurriedly. He was not averse to his proper share of the limelight. But he preferred that it should glow brighter and brighter upon him gradually, that he should, as it were, slide into it. But to stand one moment obscure, and the next moment lit up like the ghost of Sir Marmaduke — well, really, really! It was the penalty one paid for the friendship of Hanaud. However, it was an hour to be registered. He looked at his watch He gave himself twelve minutes, and as the clock struck twelve he finished.
“Thank you,” said the superintendent warmly. “That is very important, and, if I may say so who have listened to many stories, very closely told.”
Mr. Ricardo was delighted and would have been more delighted still if Hanaud had not with a bow and a smirk taken the commendation to himself. “Really I might be his ventriloquist’s dummy,” he reflected acidly.
Superintendent Maltby moved to the fireplace and rang the bell. “There is no evidence that Devisher was here,” he said.
“None,” Hanaud agreed.
“We shall hear now what Mrs. Horbury has to tell us,” said Maltby and the charwoman opened the door.
“Will you ask Mrs. Horbury if she will receive us?” he asked and, when she had gone upon her errand, he resumed. “It will be best, I think, that no mention of Bryan Devisher should be made, no hint given of that story of the sea which Mr. Ricardo has told to us.”
These words were not a hint. They were a definite order, and Maltby looked to each of his companions in tutu for a promise of obedience.
“Good!” he said and Mrs. Wallace came back with a message that Mrs. Horbury would receive them at once. Mr. Ricardo hung back, but Maltby took him by the arm with a smile.
“You have been very good. You never spoke out of turn. Will you be my secretary for half an hour? Let us go!” And they filed out of the room.
The one word murder, of which all had for so long been thinking, had never once been spoken.
CHAPTER 10
OLIVIA
SHE WAS STANDING in the room with the windows looking upon the holly hedge. But there was space enough between the hedge and the windows for the sunlight to fall golden upon the gravel path between and to fill the room with a serene and quiet light.
“I don’t want to distress you more than must be,” said Maltby gently; and Olivia Horbury gravely acknowledged his courtesy.
“You have your duty, Superintendent.”
She was tall and dressed in a coat and skirt of dark blue and a white shirt with a collar. Her hair, which was black but had the blue sheen of a raven’s wing, was parted in the middle and drawn softly back, masking the tops of her ears. Beneath its heavy mass her face was very pale and her eyes, enormous under the long, upturned lashes, were black as night, too, and as night unfathomable. Prepared as Mr. Ricardo had been for someone of a closer kinship with the house than with her gross bandit of a husband, he was none the less surprised. The broad forehead, the wide spacing of her eyes, the delicacy of nose and nostril, the short upper lip and the curve of cheek and jaw gave her beauty; but the supple grace of her movements, the slenderness of her figure, the long white hands, made her exquisite besides... She was neither of the Lambeth Walk nor of bankrupt gentility. He was inclined, with a rare spurt of fancy, to think that she was born at Sèvres, and there had got lost amongst images with the colours of pale flowers as lovely as herself. There Horbury, on an off day between Longchamps and Auteuil, bought her, noticing that she was alive and so worth more of his money than the others. Her voice, however, upset Ricardo’s fairy tale. For it was not silvery and light, as it should have been, but full and low.
“Will you sit down, Superintendent — and your friends, of course.”
Was there a hint of a question in her use of the word friends? Mr. Ricardo hoped not. The very last thing for which he wished was to be turned out of the room. The Superintendent took it up indirectly.
“I don’t want any misunderstanding, Mrs. Horbury,” he said. “You have a perfect right to refuse to tell me anything, with or without a solicitor present. The only person you will definitely be called upon to answer is—”
“The coroner,” she interposed. “But I have nothing to hide from you, Superintendent.”
She sat upon the opposite side of the table, the bright green hedge beyond the window behind her. The men began to take their seats opposite, like so many directors at a board meeting. But Superintendent Maltby was not satisfied. He had his country’s belief in fair play, except, perhaps, so far as Bryan Devisher was concerned.
“This,” he said, laying his hand for a moment on Hanaud’s arm, “is Monsieur Hanaud of the Sureté in Paris. You might object to his presence. I am in your hands.”
Olivia Horbury’s eyes moved slowly towards the burly Frenchman. There was no hostility in them, no change in the stillness of her face.
“I think, of all men, Monsieur Hanaud should be here,” she said. “He is far more in this “ — she paused, as though she hated to use high-sounding words— “tragedy, than perhaps he knows.”
Hanaud was disconcerted. He looked inquiringly at Mrs. Horbury; he bobbed his head at her; he sat down rather heavily. “Dee-flated,” said Mr. Ricardo, but he only said it to himself.
“I should be obliged, madam, if you would tell us what happened here last night,” said Maltby, and the detective-sergeant at once produced a notebook and an indelible pencil.
“Beginning with — ?” she asked.
“Your reason for spending the night at White Barn. I understand that it was not unusual for you and your husband to come here unexpectedly. But was there yesterday any special reason?”
“Yes,” she answered at once. “Dan rang me up yesterday aft
ernoon from King Street.”
“King Street, St. James,” said Maltby.
“Yes.”
“From his offices?”
“Yes Witherton’s Rooms, where, in the thirties of last century, the select dined and gambled, and yesterday Daniel only drank a glass of Pommery ‘06 and gambled.”
A slow and wistful smile changed surprisingly Olivia Horbury’s face. It lost its hard calm and with the calm something of its pallor. A rose-leaf pink softened it and a tender humour shone in her eyes. She might have been watching, with more amusement than disapproval, the antics of a not very well-behaved boy.
“And he was in some trouble?” Maltby asked.
Mr. Ricardo saw the tears suddenly flood her eyes and glisten on her lashes. He heard her voice check and, for a second, tremble.
“Perhaps. Would I drive him down to White Barn? So many dangers had there conjured themselves into nothing. Of course, I would! There were no special arrangements to be made. Daniel changed into his dinner jacket at the office. I picked him up there and drove him to the Milan Grill, where we dined. It was, perhaps, half-past seven. He told me nothing at dinner, but drank — see, I am frank with you, Superintendent! — more than he usually did. We left the hotel at a few minutes before nine. I noticed the clock in the small hall. It was the time when the theatres were filling. But beyond Battersea Bridge there was very little traffic, and I reached White Barn well before half-past nine.”
“You noticed no one in Lordship Lane whom you knew?”
Mrs. Horbury looked at Maltby in surprise. “No. There was no one to notice,” she answered at once. “Not a soul. The gate was open. It is left open. I drove the car into the space in front of the door and left it so that it could be backed into the garage. Dan got out and opened the door of the house with his latchkey.”
“That was on his ring of keys?” Maltby asked carelessly.
“Yes,” said Olivia, dwelling for a second on the monosyllable. “No doubt.”
“And he carried the ring in his pocket on a chain?”
The even flow of Mrs. Horbury’s narrative was checked. She did not take her eyes from Maltby’s face, but suddenly they were wary.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 156