“I asked him if he would acknowledge the girl openly as his daughter. He wouldn’t. I tried to persuade him, and then he answered in the words you put to me.”
Then came a searching cross-examination about the two bills. Baxter explained the second one by saying he was acting for the late Lord Deverell. The other bill, which had reached the money-lenders who had discounted it, with a request written in the name of the firm, Baxter absolutely repudiated any knowledge of. He likewise disclaimed the slightest knowledge of the revolver or the bullets, and emphatically denied having himself hidden them in the suit-case.
Tempest then called clerks in the office of the firm to prove that the letter to the money-lenders was not in the handwriting of Mr. Baxter or of any of the firm’s clerks, and then played his trump card. Calling an expert, he proved that the revolver was of faulty construction, and that it had never been fired, and that it would have been quite impossible for the bullet which killed Sir John Rellingham to have been fired from it.
“What would happen if the attempt had been made?”
“It would have burst.”
“Why?”
“Because the barrel of the revolver is imperfectly bored, and at one point the bullet could not have passed through.”
The revolver, a bullet, and a ramrod were then passed to the jury, to satisfy themselves on the point.
With this disclosure the case for the prosecution practically collapsed; and though it pursued its formal course, to its completion, there remained no further doubt that the verdict would be one of acquittal, as eventually it proved to be. Arthur Baxter left the court a free man, honourably acquitted.
When the partners and Tempest were discussing the trial that evening over the dinner which Marston gave to celebrate the result of the trial, Tempest turned to Baxter and asked: