“Quite so. Consequently it was jolly lucky for Baxter the terms of the trust are not public.”
“God! Tempest. What a risk I ran!”
“You did at first, old man. But there was somebody else who would benefit. If Evangeline were illegitimate, the person whose secret was at stake might desire her death. If Evangeline were legitimate, her heir would benefit. In either case it is the mother. Now, didn’t I tell you once before—argued from a totally different standpoint—that Evangeline’s mother had murdered her?”
“But it’s such a horrible thought, Tempest, that a mother would murder her own child!”
“I know it is; but horrible or not, Marston, it’s a thing done every day. Scarcely a session at the Old Bailey goes by that some poor wretched girl or other isn’t taking her trial for it. We generally get them let off as Not Guilty, or else only guilty of concealment of birth, and then they are usually discharged. But it’s generally murder all the same. We all know it—the police know it—and the judge knows it; but there is a kind of unwritten code that in cases of infanticide the girl is to get off, if the facts can in any way be sufficiently twisted.”
“But Evangeline wasn’t an infant.”
“No; but you were objecting only on the score of maternal feeling. With an infant, the maternal feeling is often overcome; and as Evangeline’s mother got rid of her as an infant, the maternal feeling can’t have been any greater. It never had any opportunity of growing.”
“Then you think, Tempest, that if we find Evangeline’s mother, that we shall have got to the solution of the girl’s murder?”
“You’ll have got the guilty person; but assuming you do get hold of her, I don’t see how you will ever convict her or get a full solution, except by means of a confession.”
“Tempest, how about the murder of Sir John? That is what we are most concerned about.”