2
This evening, thought Anthony, as he stood facing her by the open windows of the drawing-room, Laura Hoode was even less prepossessing than she had seemed on the day before. She had risen at his entry, and though the thin, sharp-featured face was calm, he somehow felt her perturbation.
She waved him to a chair. He sank into it, draping one long leg over its fellow.
“What do you want of me, Mr. Gethryn?” The voice was lifeless as the woman, and Anthony shivered. The sexless always alarmed him.
“A great deal, Miss Hoode.” In spite of his aversion his tone was blandly courteous.
“I cannot imagine——”
“Please—one moment,” said Anthony. “As you know, I came down here to Marling to find out, if possible, who killed your brother. A——”
“That task,” said the woman, “has already been performed.”
“Not quite, I think. In my opinion, young Deacon had no more to do with the murder than I. Each minute I spend in this house increases my certainty. This morning I found something I had been looking for, something that may throw a light where one is badly needed, something which you must tell me about.”
She drew herself yet more upright on her straight-backed chair.
“Mr. Gethryn,” she said, “I like neither your manner nor your manners.”
“Unfortunately,” said Anthony grimly, “neither manner nor manners matter just now. Miss Hoode, I started on this business half out of boredom, half because a friend asked me to; but now—well, I’m going to finish it.”
“But—but I don’t understand at all what you are talking about.” The woman was plainly bewildered, yet there seemed in her tone to be an uneasiness not born of bewilderment alone.
Anthony took from his breast-pocket a thick packet of letters. The paper was a deep mauve, the envelopes covered with heavy, sprawling characters. The bundle was held together by a broad ribbon, this too of deep mauve. He balanced the little bundle in the palm of his hand; then looked up to see white rage on the bony, dull face of the woman. The rage, he thought, was not unmixed with fear; but not the kind of fear he had expected.
“These,” he said, “are what I want you to explain. To explain, that is, who they are from, and why you took them from your brother’s desk and hid them again in your own room.”
She rose to her feet; moved a step forward. “You—you——” she began, and choked on the words.
Anthony stood up. “Oh, I know I’m a filthy spy. Don’t imagine that I think this private inquiry agent game is anything but noisome. It has been nasty, it will be nasty, and it is nasty, in spite of the cachet of Conan Doyle. I know, none better, that to rifle your room while you were at the inquest this morning was a filthy thing to do. I know that brow-beating you now is filthier—but I’m going to find out who killed your brother.”
“It was that boy,” said the woman, white-lipped. She had fallen back into her chair.
“It was not that boy. And that’s why I shall go on thinking and spying and crawling and bullying until I find out who it really was. Now, tell me why you stole those letters.” He moved forward and stood looking down at her.
An ugly, dull flush spread over her face. She sat erect. Her colourless eyes flamed.
“You think—you dare to think I killed him?” she cried in a dreadful whisper.
Anthony shook his head. “Not necessarily. I shall know better what I think when you’ve told me what I want to know.”
“But what have those foul scratchings to do with—with John’s death?” She pointed a shaking finger at the little package in his hands.
“Nothing, everything, or just enough,” said Anthony. “You’re asking me the very questions which I want you, indirectly, to answer.”
She said: “I refuse,” and closed tightly the thin-lipped mouth.
“Must I force your hand?” he asked. “Very well. You must tell me what I want to know, because, if you don’t, I shall go to Scotland Yard, where I have some small influence, and lay these letters and the story of how I found them before the authorities. You must tell me because, if you don’t, you will lead me to believe that you do, in fact, know something of how your brother met his death. You must tell me because, if you don’t”—he paused, and looked at her until she felt the gaze of the greenish eyes set in the swarthy face to be unbearable—“because, if you don’t,” he repeated, “the contents of these letters and their implication are bound to become known to others beside you and me. You will tell me because to keep that last from happening you would do anything.”
Even as he finished speaking he knew that last shot had told, fired though it had been in the dark. The woman crumpled. And in her terror Anthony found her more human than before.
“No, no, no!” she whispered. “I’ll tell. I’ll tell.”
Anthony stood, waiting.
“Did you read those—those letters?” The words came tumbling from her lips in almost unseemly haste.
Anthony nodded assent.
“Then you must know that this woman—the Thing that wrote them was John’s—John’s—mistress.”
Again he nodded, watching curiously the emotions that supplanted each other in the nondescript face of his victim. Fear he had seen and anxiety; but now there were both these with horror, indignation, tenderness for the dead, and a fervour of distaste for anything which savoured of “loose living.” He remembered what he had been told of the lady’s rigid dissentingness, and understood.
She went on, more confidently now that she had once brought herself to speak of “unpleasantnesses” to this strange man who watched her with his strange eyes.
“You see,” she said, “nearly a year ago I found out that John was—was associating with this—this woman. I will not tell you how I found out—it is too long a story—but my discovery was accidental. I taxed my brother with his wickedness; but he was so—strange and abrupt—his manner was violent—that I had to leave him with my protest barely voiced.
“Afterwards I tried again and again to make him see the folly, the horror of the sin he was committing—but he would never listen. He would not listen to me, to me who had looked after him since he left school! And I was weak—sinfully weak—and I gave up trying to influence him and—and tried to forget what I had learnt. But those letters kept coming and then John would go away, and I—oh! what is the use——” She broke off, covering her face with her hands.
Anthony felt a growing pity; a pity irrationally the stronger for his own feeling of sympathy with the dead man in what must have been a sordid enough struggle against colourless Puritanism.
She dabbed at the red-rimmed eyes with a handkerchief and struggled on.
“There is not much more to tell you except—except that I—stole those letters for the very reason which you used to—to force me to tell you about them. It is wicked of me, but though John did sin, had been living a life of sin, I determined to keep him clean in the eyes of the world; to keep the knowledge of the evil that he did from the sordid newspapers which would delight in making public the sins of the man they are lamenting as a loss to the nation. And he is a loss to the nation. My poor brother—my poor little brother———” She leant her head against the back of her chair and wept, wept hopelessly, bitterly. The tears rolled slowly, unheeded, down the thin cheeks.
Anthony felt himself despicable. A great surge of pity—almost of tenderness—swept over him. Yet the thought of the great-bodied, great-hearted, cleanly-sane man who was like to be hanged held him to his work.
“Do you know,” he asked, leaning forward, “the name of this woman?”
“Yes.” Her tone was drab, hopeless; she seemed broken. “At least, I know that which she goes by.”
Anthony waited in some bewilderment.
“She is a dancer,” said the woman, “and shameless. They call her Vanda.”
“Good God!” Anthony was startled into surprise. He was a fervent admirer, from this side the footlights, of the beautiful Russian. He reflected that politicians were not always unlucky.
He got to his feet. The woman started into life.
“The letters!” she cried. “Give me the letters!”
He handed them to her. “My only stipulation,” he said, “is that they’re not to be destroyed until I give the word.” He looked at her searchingly. “I know that you won’t attempt to be rid of them until then. And please believe, Miss Hoode, that you have my sincere sympathy, and that there will be no idle talk of what we two know.”
“Oh, I believe you,” she said wearily. “And now, I suppose you are happy. Though what good you have done Heaven alone knows!”
Anthony looked down at her. “The good I have done is this: I have added to my knowledge. I know, now, that you had nothing to do with your brother’s death. And I know there is a woman in the business and who she is. She may not be concerned either directly or indirectly, but the hackneyed French saying is often a useful principle to work on.”
The pale eyes of Laura Hoode regarded him with curiosity. He felt with surprise that she seemed every minute to grow more human.
“You are an unusual person, Mr. Gethryn,” she said. “You spy upon me and torture me—and yet I feel that I like you.” She paused; then went on: “You’ll tell me that you know that the young man Deacon did not kill my brother; you tell me that although I have behaved so suspiciously you know also that I had nothing to do with—with the crime. How do you know these things?”
Anthony smiled. “I know,” he said, “because you both told me. I know that neither of you did it as you would know, after talking to him, that the bishop hadn’t really stolen the little girl’s sixpence, even though all the newspapers had said he did. Now I must go. Good-night.”
He left Laura Hoode smiling, smiling as she had not for many months.
As he entered the hall from the passage, a woman rushed at him. She was tall, and suspiciously beautiful. She drooped and made eyes. She was shy and daring and coy.
“Oh!” she gasped. “Is it Colonel Gethryn? Is it? Oh, you must be? Oh, Colonel, how thrilling to meet you! How too thrilling!”
Mrs. Roland Mainwaring pleased Anthony not at all. It is to be deplored that he was at no pains to conceal his distaste.
“Mrs. Mainwaring?” he said. “Madam, the thrill is yours.”
She stood blocking his path. Perforce he stood still.
“Oh, colonel, do tell me you don’t think that sweet boy—oh! the beastly police—it’s all too, too horrible and awful!”
Anthony laughed. The thought of Deacon as a “sweet boy” amused him. The lady regarded his mirth with suspicion.
Anthony became ponderously official. “Your questions, madam, are embarrassing. But my opinions are—my opinions; and I keep them”—he tapped his forehead solemnly—“here.”
Awe-stricken eyes were rolled at him. “Oh, colonel,” she whispered. “Oh, colonel! How won-derful!” Then, coyly: “How lucky for little me that I’m a poor, weak woman!”
“I have always,” said Anthony gravely, “believed in equal rights for women. They occupy an equal footing with men in my—opinions.” He bowed and brushed past her, crossing the hall.
Chapter XI.
The Bow and Arrow
Without a glance behind him at the beautiful lady, Anthony make for the study, entered it, and closed the door behind him.
The great room bore an aspect widely different from that of his first visit. Down the centre ran the long trestle table of the coroner’s court. Two smaller ones were ranged along the walls. The far end of the room was blocked with rows of chairs.
Anthony realised, with something of surprise, what a vast room it was. Then he banished from his mind everything save his immediate purpose, and turned to the little rosewood table which stood between the door and the grandfather clock.
He bent to see more clearly the scar on the table-top, the scar which he had noticed on his second visit to the room and which had, in some vague way he could not define, been persistently worrying him during the day. It was an even more perfect impression of the wood-rasp than he had remembered it to be, an orderly series of indentations which made a mark two inches wide and nearly a foot in length.
That something kept jogging in his mind; something about the mark that was indefinably wrong because the mark itself was so undoubtedly right.
Beside him the door opened. He straightened his back and turned to see Sir Arthur.
“Hallo, Gethryn. Can I come in? Thought you might be in here. Turn me out if you’d rather be alone.”
“No, no,” said Anthony. “Come in. I’m here because I wanted to look at something and because it was the best way of escape. What sweetness! I feel quite sticky, I do!”
Sir Arthur smiled. “Dodo Mainwaring, eh? I caught a glimpse of her. What d’you think?”
Anthony raised one eyebrow.
“Exactly,” said Sir Arthur. “If that woman doesn’t go soon I won’t wait for Laura, I’ll pack her off myself.”
“Ah, yes,” Anthony said vaguely, looking down at the table. “I say, have you seen the Bow and Arrow?”
“Eh? What?”
“The wood-rasp.”
Sir Arthur shivered. “Oh, yes. Yes, I have. It was an exhibit at the inquest.”
“What was the size of it?”
“Well, I believe it’s about the biggest made. Usual short, thick handle with a blade of about a foot long and perhaps two inches wide.”
Anthony pointed to the table. “Did it make this mark?” he asked.
“Of course. Why, all that came out at the inquest. Weren’t——”
“I’ve got it!” cried Anthony, and slapped his thigh.
“What’s that? What’s that? Have you thought—found something?”
“I have and I have. Now, another thing: was the handle of the thing old and battered and worn at the edges and filthy and split?”
Sir Arthur smiled. “No; I’m afraid you’re wrong there, Gethryn. It was almost brand-new.”
“Exactly!” said Anthony. “Exactly. All polished and convenient. Oh, ours is a nice case, ours is!”
“My dear boy, I’m afraid you go too fast for me.” Sir Arthur was puzzled.
“That’s nothing,” Anthony said. “I go a damn sight too fast for myself sometimes.”
“But what are you driving at? What’s all this about the wood-rasp?”
“I won’t give you a direct answer—it’s against the rules of the Detectives’ Union—but I invite you to bring your intellect to bear on the position of this scar here. You’ll see that it’s roughly twelve inches by two and lies ten inches from all four edges of the table—right in the middle, in fact. Then think of the nice new handle on the wood-rasp.” Anthony appeared well pleased. “ ‘O frabjous day, Calloo callay!’ Rappings from Doyle!”
Sir Arthur shook his head. “I suppose you’re not mad?” he said, smiling.
“ ‘No, not mad, said the monkey.’ ”
There fell a long silence, broken at last by the elder man.
“God!” he cried in a whisper. “Let’s get out of this room. Gethryn, it’s horrible! Horrible! Where poor old John was killed—and here we are cracking jokes and laughing!” He took Anthony by the arm and pulled him to the door.
They went into the garden through the verandah. By the windows of the study Anthony stopped and stood staring at the creeper-covered wall; staring as he had stared on the afternoon before. Sir Arthur stood at his elbow.
“Splendid sight, that creeper,” said Anthony. “Ampelopsis Veitchii, isn’t it?”
“So you’re a botanist? It may be what you say. I’m afraid it’s just creeper to me.”
Anthony, turning, saw Boyd walking towards them, and waved a hand.
“Damn!” Sir Arthur growled. “The Scotland Yard man. He arrested the boy. Officious fool!”
“Oh, Boyd’s a good chap. I like Boyd. He’s done his best. On the evidence he couldn’t do anything but take Deacon.”
“I know, I know,” said Sir Arthur impatiently. “But all the same, he——” He broke off, turning to go.
Boyd came up to them. “Good evening, gentlemen.”
“Evening, Boyd,” said Anthony.
Suddenly, “By Gad!” Sir Arthur cried, and turned a bewildered face upon them. “I didn’t think of that before!”
“Think of what, sir?” asked Boyd.
“Why, something that may change everything! Look here, that’s the window of my sitting-room up there— the one over the window of the study which you say the murderer must have got in by!”
Anthony was silent. Boyd said stolidly: “Well, sir?”
“But don’t you see, man? Don’t you see, Gethryn? I was sitting up in my room, by that window, all the time. I should have been bound to hear something. Bound to!”
“But you didn’t, sir,” said Boyd.
“Ach!” Sir Arthur turned on his heel and flung away from them and into the house.
“He’s very upset because he thinks you’ve taken the wrong man, Boyd,” said Anthony.
“I know, sir. Do you?”
Anthony laughed. “I do, I do. By the way, can I see him?”
“You can, sir. He asked for you. That’s really what I came up for. That and the walk.”
“Thanks. I’ll take you down in the car. How long before Deacon’s moved to the county jail?”
“He’ll be going to-morrow sometime, sir. Afternoon or evening.”
They walked in silence to the car. Anthony drove out of the gates and down the hill very slowly. Boyd sighed relief: he knew “the colonel’s” driving of old.
“I’m afraid, sir,” he said at last, “that this case has been a disappointment to you, so to speak.”
Anthony looked round at him. “Why so fast, Boyd? Why so fast?” After a moment he added: “Pumps not working too well to-day, are they?”
The detective gave a rumbling chuckle. “I suppose it was a bit obvious, sir,” he said. “But you’re puzzling me, that you are.”
“What am I that I should flummox one of the Big Four? Oh, Fame! Oh, Glory! I stand within your gates.”
Boyd reddened. “Oh, don’t josh, sir. What I mean is, here are we with as clear a case as ever there was, and yet there are you, a gentleman who’s no amateur, still searching around and—and trying to make another criminal, so to speak.”
“It’s not a bit of good trying to get me to explain what I’m doing, Boyd, because I don’t know myself. I’m groping—and it’s devilish dark. There is a little light, but I don’t know where it’s coming from—yet. But I will.” He fell silent; then added in a different tone: “Look here: we’ll take it that I’m mad and that the law is sane. But will you help me in my madness? Just one or two little things?”
“As far as I can, sir,” Boyd said solemnly, “of course I will.”
“You’re a good fellow, Boyd,” said Anthony warmly, “and you can start now.” He stopped the car and turned in his seat. “Where’s the Bow—I mean the wood-rasp?”
“At present it’s at the station. Where we’re going. To-morrow it’ll be taken up to the Yard.”
“Can I see it this evening?”
“You can, sir, seeing that you’re an old friend, if I may say so.”
“Excellent man!”
“Look here, sir,” Boyd took a wallet from his pocket; from the wallet some photographs. “You might care to see these. Enlargements of the finger-prints.”
Anthony took the six pieces of thin pasteboard and bent eagerly to examine them. They had been taken, these photographs, from three points of view. They showed that the handle of the rasp had been marked by a thumb and two fingers—all pointing downwards towards the blade.
“And these were the only marks?” Anthony said.
“Enough, aren’t they, sir?”
“Yes,” murmured Anthony. “Oh, yes. What lovely little marks! How kind of Archibald!”
“What’s that, sir?”
“I was remarking, Boyd, on the kindly forethought which Mr. Deacon showed for Scotland Yard. He couldn’t bear to think of you wasting your time detecting all the wrong people, so he left his card for you.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at at all, sir.” Boyd shook his head sadly.
Anthony handed back the photographs and started the car. In less than a minute they had finished the descent and turned the corner into the village of Marling. Boyd caught his breath and clung to his seat. The High Street streamed by them. At its far end Anthony pulled up, outside the little police station. Marling was proud of its police station, an offensive affair of pinkish brick. To Anthony, coming upon it in the midst of the little leaning houses, the low-browed shops and thatched cottages, it was like finding a comic postcard of the Mother-in-law school in an exhibition of pleasing miniatures.
He shivered, and dragged Boyd inside. Here he was received by the local inspector. At a word from Boyd the inspector produced keys, opened locks and at last laid on the table the wood-rasp.
It was, as Sir Arthur had said, the biggest of its kind—a foot-long bar of serrated iron, looking like a file whose roughnesses have been ten times magnified. To the points of these roughnesses clung little scraps of stained and withered flesh, while in the corresponding hollows were dark encrustations of dried blood. The handle was new, of some light-coloured wood, and was perhaps four inches long and three and a half in circumference.
“Now that’s not at all pretty,” said Anthony, with a grimace. “Can I pick it up? Or would that spoil the marks?”
Boyd said: “Oh, that’s all right, sir. The coroner’s jury have passed it about. And we’ve got the official record and the photos.”
Anthony took it from the table; peered at it; shook it; weighed it in his hand.
Boyd pointed to the blade. “Not much doubt that’s what did the trick, is there, C—Mr. Gethryn?”
“Never a doubt,” said Anthony, and shook the thing with vigour.
There was a sudden clatter. The blade had flown off, struck the table, and fallen to the floor.
“Bit loose,” said Anthony, looking at the handle in his fingers.
He stooped and picked up the blade, holding it gingerly.
“Those blows that broke in the deceased’s skull,” said Boyd, “must’ve been hard enough to loosen anything, so to speak.”
“Possibly.” Anthony’s tone was not one of conviction. “Aha! Now what are you doing here, little friends?” He picked, from a notch in the thin iron tongue upon which the handle had been fitted, two threads of white linen. “And you, too, what are you?” He stopped and picked up from the floor a small, thin wedge of darkish wood. “There should be another of you somewhere,” he murmured, and peered into the handle. He shook it, and there dropped out of the hollow where the tongue of the blade had been another slip of wood, identical with the first.
He turned to the two men watching him. “Boyd, I give these, the threads and the woods, into your official keeping. You and the inspector saw where they came from.” He took an envelope from his pocket, slipped his discoveries into it and laid it upon the table beside the dismembered rasp.
The inspector looked at the man from Scotland Yard, and scratched his head.
“That’s all, I think,” Anthony said. “Can I see the prisoner now?”
Chapter XII.
Exhibits
The door of the cell clanged to behind Boyd. From a chair, Deacon unfolded his bulk to greet Anthony. They shook hands.
“Wasn’t long before I yelled for you,” the criminal grinned. “Take the chair. I’ll squat on the gent’s bedding.”
Anthony sat, running his eye over the cell. There was the chair he sat on, the truckle bed, a tinware wash-stand, a shelf, a dressing-case of Deacon’s, and, in one corner, a large brown-paper parcel.
“Pretty snug, brother, isn’t it?” Deacon smiled. “I languish in comfort. ’D’ve been pretty glad of this at times during the recent fracas in France. I say, wouldn’t you like to write the story of my life? Some Criminals I have Known: Number One—The Abbotshall Murderer. You know the sort of thing.”
Anthony laughed. “Well, you take it easily enough. I’m afraid I should alternate fury and depression.”
For a moment Deacon’s blue eyes met his; and in them Anthony saw a kind of despairing horror. But only for the half of a second. And then the old laughing look was in them again. More than ever, Anthony felt admiration and a desperate desire to get this large man out of this small cell; to make him free again—as free as the hot, gleaming streak of the setting sun which pierced the little barred window and painted a broad line of gold upon the drab floor. But to get him out one must work.
“What about those finger-prints?” he asked suddenly.
“You have me,” said Deacon, “on the hip. That’s the most amazing bit of jiggery pokery about all this hocus pocus. What about ’em to you?”
“They certainly savour,” Anthony said, “of hanky panky. In fact, since I know they’re yours and that you didn’t kill Hoode, I know they must be. Now, have you seen that wood-rasp?”
“Yes. At the inquest.”
“Never before?”
“Not as I knows on, guv’nor. In fact, I’d almost swear to ‘never.’ But then I’m the most amazing ass about tools. A fret-saw or a pile-driver, they’re all one to me.”
“Did you notice the handle?” Anthony asked.
“With interest; because they said it had my paw-marks on it.”
“Ever seen that before? By itself, I mean.”
Deacon shook his head. “Never.” He fell silent, then said: “I suppose those prints couldn’t be any one else’s, could they?”
“I’m afraid they couldn’t,” said Anthony. “You see, it’s as near proved as a thing like that can be that no two men have the same markings on the fingers. They compared those on the wood with those on the bit of paper Boyd got you to hold, and their experts don’t make mistakes. By the way, I suppose you realised at the inquest how you’d been caught?”
Deacon smiled. “Not at the inquest, brother, but at the time. I’ve read too many spot-the-murderer serials in my time not to know what a sleuth’s up to when he hands me a bit of paper and asks me whether I ever saw it before. But I didn’t mind at the time, you see, not knowing about that blasted file thing. I say, Gethryn, are we mad? Or is this all a bloody nightmare? I tell you, I didn’t kill the boss, and yet the thing he’s killed with is all over the marks of my fingers! And as far as I know I never even saw the gadget before! It doesn’t work out, does it?”
“It’s got to,” Anthony said. “I’ll damned well make it. Now, what d’you know about the incomparable Vanda?”
Deacon whistled. “How did you get hold of that?” he asked, wonderingly.
“You know my methods, my dear Deacon. But what d’you know about Vanda? Beyond the fact that she’s the most wonderful dancer of all time.”
“I don’t really know anything; but I’ve a shrewd little suspish that she was the boss’s mistress.”
“She was. But as you didn’t actually know anything, I gather you can’t help me further there.”
“ ’Fraid not. For one thing my suspicion was founded on something that happened by accident, and for another I’ve not the foggiest idea of what you’re driving at.”
“They will all say that!” Anthony sighed. “And it’s just what I want some one to tell me. Never mind, we’ll get on with the exhibits. Have you ever seen this?” He took from a swollen hip pocket a small paper package, unfolded it, and handed the contents to Deacon.
They were a coil of filthy, black-smeared silk cord. Curiously, the prisoner shook it out, letting one end fall to the floor. He saw now that it was knotted at regular intervals along its length, which was a full sixteen feet.
“Never saw it in my natural.” He looked up at Anthony. “What is it?”
“Obviously a length of silk cord,” Anthony said, “with, as you would probably say, knobs on.”
“I mean, where did you find it? What bearing’s it got?”
“I found it,” said Anthony slowly, “in your bedroom at Abbotshall.”
“What?”
“In your room. On a ledge inside that wonderful old chimney; about six inches higher than the mantelpiece. That accounts for the filth. You can see the rope was white once, and not so long ago.”
Deacon frowned at the floor. “Well, it’s either been there up the chimney since I went to the house—last May, that is—or else it’s been planted there. I never set eyes on it before.”
“Good!” Anthony coiled up the cord, wrapped it up in the paper, and returned the parcel to his pocket.
“But what’s the beastly bit of string mean? What’s it got to do with me or you or anything in this business? Tell me that!”
“Shan’t,” said Anthony. “I’m not sure yet myself. You’ll have to wait.”
Deacon shrugged his great shoulders. “Right-o. Next, please.”
Anthony’s hand went to his breast pocket. From a leather wallet he took a bunch of newspaper cuttings.
“These,” he said, “I found in a really-truly secret drawer in your late chief’s desk. Know anything about ’em? Or why they were there?”
In silence, Deacon read each slip. When he had finished,
“Well?” Anthony said.
“They mean nothing in my young life. These three rags—The Searchlight, The St. Stephen’s Gazette, and the weekly one, Vox Populi—always were dead agin the boss. I can’t make head or tail of what you’re driving at, Gethryn, I can’t really!”
Anthony groaned. “There you go again. Never mind that, but tell me, did you know Hoode was keeping these cuttings?”
“No.”
“Did he ever mention the persistent attacks of these three papers?”
“No.”
“No? Pity.” Anthony got to his feet. “I must move. Anything you want? Books? Food? Tobacco?”
Deacon smiled. “Nothing, thanks awfully. Our Arthur—old Digby-Coates, you know—has done all that. Brought me down a sack of books, a box of cigars, and arranged for decidedly improved victuals to be brought over from the White Horse by quite a neat line in barmaidings. Also, he’s fixed up the solicitors and trimmings. They’re going to try to get Marshall, K.C.”
“Excellent! Marshall’s about the best counsel there is. There’s nothing you want, then.”
“Nothing. Shall I see you to-morrow?”
Anthony nodded. “You will. Early afternoon, probably, as I hear they’re moving you later. Good-night; and don’t forget I’m going to get you out of this—somehow.”
They shook hands. A minute later Anthony was walking slowly back towards his inn up the cobbled street. The sun was sinking behind the gables of a twisted house at the top of the rise, and the road which had been gold was splashed with blood-red blotches.
He shivered. In all this morass of doubt and wilderness of evil—a wilderness wherein innocent men had obviously committed crimes they had nothing to do with, where every one was sure except Anthony Ruthven Gethryn—he felt alone. Not even the golden-dark background to his thoughts which was the perpetual image of the Lady of the Sandal could compensate for the blackness of bewilderment—the blackness through which he could see light but not yet the way to light.
Then his thoughts turned to Deacon, his cheerfulness, his ease of manner, his courage which surely masked a hell of distress. Suddenly the admiration which he felt somehow cheered him. His step quickened.
“By God!” he muttered, “that’s a man and a half——” and broke off sharply. He had collided with something softly hard. A girl, running. A girl with wild, red-rimmed eyes and hatless, dishevelled, golden head.
Before he could voice apology; almost before he was aware of the collision, she had passed him and was stumbling down the uneven little road with its splashes of crimson painted by the dying sun. From a doorway a slatternly woman peered out, curious with the brutal, impersonal curiosity of the yokel.
Anthony struggled to adjust his memory. Ah, yes! It was the sister. Her sister. Dora Masterson. He turned; caught up with four long strides; laid a hand upon the girl’s shoulder. She shook it off, turning to him a face disfigured by desire for more tears, tears that would not come.
“You were going to the police-station, Miss Masterson?” Anthony asked.
She nodded.
“You mustn’t—not like this.” He took her gently by the arm. “You could do nothing—and you’d make him feel as if things were unbearable.”
“I must see him.” She spoke dully, an unnatural pause between each word.
“Not now,” said Anthony firmly. “Not when I want your help.” He wondered if the lie showed through his words; cursed that he should have to hamper himself with an hysterical girl.
She swallowed the bait. “Help you?” she asked eagerly. “About—about Archie? How can I do that?
“I can’t tell you here. You must come up to the inn.” He led her back up the hill.