“It would be very good of you.”
It was with considerable uneasiness that French saw Colonel Domlio drive off from the hotel in Ashburton. He had backed his judgment that the man was innocent, but he recognised that he might easily have made a mistake. At the same time Domlio could scarcely escape otherwise than by suicide, and he felt sure that his mind had been so much eased that he would not attempt anything so drastic. As soon, however, as the car was out of sight he walked to the police station and asked Daw to have a watch kept on the man’s movements.
Chapter Sixteen: Certainty at Last
That night as French was writing up his diary the question he had asked Domlio recurred to him. “Tell me, Colonel,” he had said, “did it not strike you as strange that Mrs. Berlyn should stumble at just the point which ensured her falling into your arms?” He had asked it to test the colonel’s belief in the incident. Now it occurred to him that on its merits it required an answer.
Had the incident stood alone it might well have passed unquestioned. But it was not alone. Two other matters must be considered in conjunction with it.
First there was the coincidence that at the precise moment a watcher armed with a camera should be present. What accident should take a photographer to this secluded glen just when so compromising a tableau should be staged? Was there here an element of design?
Secondly, there was the consideration that if suspicion were to be thrown on Domlio he must be made to take out his car secretly on the fatal night. And how better could this be done than by the story of the photograph? Once again, did this not suggest design?
If so, something both interesting and startling followed. Mrs. Berlyn was privy to it. And if she were privy to it, was she not necessarily implicated in the murder? Could she even be the accomplice for whom he, French, had been searching?
There was, of course, her alibi. If she had been at the party at her house at ten o’clock she could not have drugged Gurney’s tea. But was she at her house?
Experience had made French sceptical about alibis. This one certainly seemed watertight, and yet was it not just possible that Mrs. Berlyn had managed to slip away from her guests for the fifteen or twenty minutes required?