"All right. You win" said Betty Depping.
The Mauser pistol rolled over a hand weirdly encased in a yellow rubber glove, and fell on the floor. Dr. Fell caught the girl as she slid down in a dead faint.
CHAPTER XIX
A Highly Probable Story
The story, it is to be feared, has already been told too many times. It has been featured in the public prints, made the subject for leading articles, controversies in women's magazines, homilies, sermons, and the tearful "humanists" of the family pages. Betty Depping — whose name was not Betty Depping, and was no relation to the man she murdered — told the story herself a week before she poisoned herself at Horfield Gaol in Bristol. And that is why Dr. Fell insists to this day that the case was not one of his successes.
"That was the key fact of the whole business," he will say. "The girl wasn't his daughter. She had been his mistress for two years during the time he lived in America. And this was the explanation I had only begun to guess at the end. From the evidence on hand, it was easy to fix on tar as the killer; that was fairly obvious from the beginning. But her motive puzzled me.
"Now we have the answer, which would appear to lie in Depping's character as well as her own. You see, she was the one woman who had ever succeeded in holding Depping's fancy. When he grew tired of making cutthroat money in the States, and decided to chuck it up and create another character for himself in England (I do not, at this juncture, make any comparisons), he took her along with him. She, by the way, was the 'high-class dame with the Park-Avenue manner’ of whom Spinelli spoke to us.
"I think we can read between the lines of her confession. She maintains that his original intention was to present her as his wife when he assumed his new character, but that chance prevented it. She says that Depping, in his desire for terrific respectability, overdid it. When he was just completing arrangements to buy a share in the publishing firm, without having said anything of his domestic arrangements, quite by accident J. R. Burke encountered him and the girl unexpectedly in a London hotel. (You may remember that she told us a rather similar story, while pretending she really was his daughter?) Depping, playing his part clumsily, and flustered at being discovered with a young and pretty girl without a wedding ring, imagined that it might hurt his chances for social respectability; and at a somewhat crucial time. So he blurted out that she was his daughter, and was afterwards obliged to stick to his story. Hence, if scandal were to be averted, the girl must live abroad.
If she lived in the same house, he might forget himself and become too lover-like where others — such as servants — could observe it. The scandal attendant on a supposed father’ making love to his daughter would make the other affair seem innocuous by comparison.
This, as I say, is her version. You may accept it if you like, but I should have thought Depping to have been too careful and far-seeing a plotter to have been forced, by an unexpected encounter, into such an awkward strategem. I think he maneuvered the girl into this position so as to be quit of her — except on such occasions as he could forget his role of country gentleman and pay her amorous visits at not-too-frequent intervals. Hence the flat in Paris, the supposed lady companion' (who did not exist), and the whole fiction manufactured about her past life. Depping, you see, really believed that he could will himself into his new character. He saw no necessity for putting her out of his life. His arrangement, he thought, was ideal. He had a genuine love of scholarship and his new pursuits; and, if he placed her in this position, no mistress could make awkward demands on his time. He could see her when he-wished; at other times, she would be kept a convenient distance away. A good deal of Depping's character is in that proceeding.