“What do you mean?”
“In case any of us are accused.”
“Oh, certainly. Fix it up with my clerk in the morning. Book it as in re Rellingham. Now, don’t do anything to draw suspicion upon yourselves, but do your utmost to account for how you all spent that particular night. Of course, I may be quite wrong in what I’ve said. I hope I am, but I can’t help seeing the risk.”
The four men separated, each going his lonely way home. But justification of all Tempest had said was to follow quickly. Step by step, on the very lines the barrister had indicated, the case was argued the following day in a leader in the same paper that had previously taken up the matter, and the article wound up with a definite demand for the arrest and trial of the three surviving partners in the firm.
That a conviction could be obtained was a proposition which few cared to admit; but, on the other hand, the bulk of the public were quite willing to commit themselves to the ready admission that “there might be something in it after all.” And, day by day, as the suspicion grew, the position of the three solicitors became almost unbearable. They felt themselves slowly but only too certainly drifting into the position of social lepers. And there was nothing more that they could do. They thought of libel, and the thing went to Lake Rodgers, K. C., for an opinion. His opinion was that the article had been so carefully written that it contained no libel, and the opinion ended with the friendly hint that a failure to obtain a verdict would probably be more damaging under the circumstances than inaction.
CHAPTER IV
The summer of 1902 slowly slipped away. Twenty years had now passed since Ashley Tempest had hung up the miniature of the dead Dolores in his chambers—to him twenty busy and eventful years. He was by now one of the leading members of his profession—the busiest junior at the bar. The courts had risen for the vacation which Tempest was to spend with the Shifnals. Securing his seat in the train at Euston, he had bought the evening papers and pitched them in a heap in the corner he had appropriated, and after doing so was standing in the fresh air until the last moment, smoking one of his perpetual cigarettes.
As the doors were being noisily slammed along the train, he jumped in and soon was smoothly gliding towards his destination. He heaved a sigh of relief, for with the start from London he felt his holiday had begun, and he could put the worries of his work behind him. Opening a copy of the Globe his attention was caught by the leaded capitals announcing a “Sensational Tragedy.” The report that followed was not very lengthy:
“A gruesome discovery has been made this afternoon at the Charing Cross Hotel. A chambermaid, on entering one of the bedrooms in the annexe which had not been let and which was supposed to be unoccupied, was horror-struck to find lying upon the bed the dead and nude body of a young woman. On the table by the bedside was an opened half-bottle of champagne and a glass, evidently that from which the wine had been drunk. We are informed that the victim of this tragedy, the facts of which plainly point to suicide, was of surpassing beauty, but is unknown in the hotel. No one can identify the body, and all the staff of the hotel emphatically declare the lady was not registered there as a visitor. Life had only been extinct for a short time, as the body, when found, was still warm.”
Tempest read the account with amazement, for in every detail it reproduced the story which was so deeply engraved on his memory. Here was what he had been waiting for for twenty years—a case of suicide, with a nude body. Save in cases of drowning, that one detail had differentiated the case of Dolores Alvarez from all others he had ever heard of, and it had always puzzled him. He had waited and waited for a similar case, hoping that by some chance the motive or some other circumstance might give him the clue to an answer to the perpetual Why? which was ever in his mind as often as his eyes turned to the miniature over his mantelpiece. He had waited in vain, until here at last was what he had looked for, and that a more exact reproduction of the former story than his wildest dreams had ever led him to imagine could possibly occur. He put the paper down, and as the train ran into Willesden his mind was made up. Calling a porter to look after his luggage he wired to Lady Shifnal, postponing his visit, and returned to town by the underground. Leaving the train at Westminster Station he walked into Scotland Yard and asked for Inspector Parkyns.