“Stop! Write all this down.” She sprang to her feet and leant heavily against the table, rocking as she stood. “Write it all out, and I'll sign it, and then we'll see if those blood-suckers get off with only a couple of months. Months! While I . . .”
“You'd better see a solicitor,” suggested the Chief Inspector half-heartedly, but remembering the jury's passion for every advantage to be given to the criminal, as he pulled out the sheets, which were burning his fingers.
“No, no! Is that it? Let me read it over.”
“If you want to sign it, just add a line at the foot to say that you have read it through and that it is correct.”
“I'll put more than that in. I want to say that these three blackmailers instigated Robert Erskine's death. They told me what to do. Ever since yon Baker found me one day asleep with my wig awry she's lived on me, she and Vaughan, who was her lover at the time, and the man she calls her husband now.”
“And Miss West, what were you going to do to her?” Carter spoke for the first time—he had been literally spellbound till then. “What of her?”
For a second the woman blinked at him as though hardly remembering to whom he referred.
“I'm writing that down, too. When I told them that she had discovered something wrong with the letters—letters they drafted for me, mind you they insisted on drugging her, and—and—they told me that she was to be put ashore somewhere. I thought she was to be kept till we could get away safely.” Her eyes flickered uneasily, and fell to the paper.
In a fury of vengeance which burned away all thought of personal safety for the moment if only she could engulf the others deep enough, Janet Fraser wrote nearly two pages before she signed her name, with Carter and Watts as witnesses.
The Chief Inspector drew a deep breath of relief, and motioned Carter to precede him out of the room.