"But surely," I now broke in, seeing that the Old Man in the Corner threatened to put away his piece of string and to leave me without the usual epilogue to his interesting narrative, "surely General Sir Arkwright Jones cannot be blamed for the scandal which undoubtedly has dimmed the fortunes of the Woodforde Institute?"
"Cannot be blamed?" the Old Man in the Corner retorted sarcastically. "Cannot be blamed for entering into a conspiracy with his secretary and his head-master to defraud the Institute, and then to silence for ever the one voice that might have been raised in accusation against him."
"Sir Arkwright Jones?" I exclaimed incredulously, for indeed the idea appeared to me preposterous then, as the General's name was almost a household word before the catastrophe. "Impossible!"
"Impossible!" he reiterated. "Why? He murdered Janet Smith; of that you will be as convinced within the next few days as I am at this hour. That the three men were in collusion I have not the shadow of doubt. Marston only made love to Janet Smith in order to secure her silence; but in this he failed, and the girl boldly accused him of roguery as soon as she found him out. It would be inconceivable to suppose that being the bright, intelligent girl that she admittedly was, she could remain for ever in ignorance of the defalcations in the books; she must and did tax her lover of irregularities, she must have and indeed did threaten to put the whole thing before the governors. So much for the lovers' quarrel overheard by Mrs. Rumble.
"I believe that the fate of the poor girl was decided on then and there by two of the scoundrels; it only remained to consult with their other accomplice as to the best means for carrying their hideous project through. Janet had announced her determination to go to Kurtmoor that self-same evening, the only question was which of those three miscreants would meet her in the darkness and solitude of the Lovers' Walk. But in order at the outset to throw dust in the eyes of the public and the police and not appear to be in any way associated with one another, Marston and Gubbins made pretence of a violent quarrel which Peryer overheard; then Gubbins, in order to make sure that the poor girl would carry out her intention of going over to Kurtmoor that evening, went to her house with the supposed message from Marston, and incidentally secured thereby his own alibi. This made him safe.
"Marston in the meanwhile went to arrange matters with Arkwright Jones. His position was, of course, more difficult than that of Gubbins. If there was to be murder—and my belief is that the scoundrels had been resolved on murder for some time before—the first suspicion would inevitably fall on the secretary who had kept the books and who had had the handling of the money. The miscreants had some sort of vague plan in their heads: of this there can be no doubt; they were only procrastinating, hoping against hope that chance would continue to favour them. But now the hour had come, the danger was imminent; within the next four-and-twenty hours Janet Smith, being promised no redress on the part of the President, would place the whole matter before the governors. Unless she was effectually made to hold her tongue.
"We can easily suppose that Marston would be clever enough to arrange to meet Arkwright Jones, without arousing suspicion. We do know that soon after he finally quarrelled with Janet Smith he walked over to Kurtmoor; the two witnesses who spoke with him stated that they met him whilst they themselves were walking to Broxmouth. It was then past eight o'clock. Arkwright Jones had either dined at his hotel or not; we do not know, for it never struck the police to inquire at once how the popular General had spent his time on that fateful evening. You know what those unconventional seaside places are: people spend most of their time out of doors, and there would be nothing strange, let alone suspicious, in any visitor going out for an hour after dinner, even if it rained.
"Then surely you can in your mind see those two scoundrels putting their villainous heads together, and as suspicion of any foul play would of necessity at once fall on Marston, Jones decided to take the hideous onus on himself. He went to the Dog's Tooth Cliff to meet Janet Smith himself, and borrowed Marston's stick to aid him in his abominable deed. He was clever enough, however, to throw it over the edge of the cliff some distance away from the scene of his crime. We do not know, of course, whether the poor girl recognised him, or whether he just fell on her in the dark; she gave only one scream before she fell.
"They were clever scoundrels, we must admit, but chance favoured them, too, especially in one thing: she favoured them when she prompted Arkwright Jones to put a muffler round his throat. This one fact, as you know, saved Marston's neck from the gallows, but for the strands of wool in the girl's hatpin, and Hoggs's brief view of a man manipulating a muffler, nothing but Jones's own confession could have saved his accomplice. Whether he would have confessed remains a riddle which no one will ever solve. But as to the whole so-called mystery, I saw daylight through it the moment I realised that Marston's despair and humiliation during the inquest was a pretence. If he feigned despair it was because he desired temporarily to be the victim of circumstantial evidence. From that point to the unravelling of the tangled skein was but a step for a mind bent on logic."
"But," I argued, for indeed I was bewildered, and really incredulous, "what will be the end of it all? Surely three scoundrels like that will not go scot free. There will be an enquiry into the affairs of the Institute: the governors——"