The prospect he had conjured up, however, was terrible enough to keep his mother awake long into the night; and when, during the following day, it became apparent that the police were pursuing their investigations very strictly, and were fast bringing to light even circumstance which the family would have wished to bury in decent oblivion, she began to look so hag-ridden, that Charmian observed dispassionately that she would probably end up in a Home for Nervous Breakdown Cases.
It was amazing how easily the police seemed to be able to ferret out information. A chance word led them to question first this member of the household, and then that one discovered, to one’s dismay, how little had ever taken place in the family of which the servants had not had the fullest cognizance. The between-maid had heard Clay say that he would go mad if his father forced him to work in his cousin’s office; all the housemaids remembered perfectly being sent to find Mr Bart, and send him to his father’s room, and recounted with zest the rage Penhallow had been in at the time; Martha disclosed that Penhallow had, previously to that occasion, summoned Loveday Trewithian to his presence, and had also questioned her on the relationship between. Loveday and Bart. Martha, who had no love for Faith, told too of the occasion when Penhallow had rung for her to remove his weeping wife from his sight. Encouraged by Inspector Logan, she dilated upon this theme, with the result that the Inspector formed the opinion that her stories, were greatly exaggerated. As he had by that time reached an understanding of the peculiar position she had held in the house ever since the first Mrs Penhallow’s death, he had no difficulty in concluding that she was actuated largely by jealousy of haith. That Penhallow had often reduced his meek, laded wife to tears he did not doubt: he had already had evidence of the astonishing ease with which Faith shed tears. He did not exclude her from his list of possibles, but he did not consider it likely that, having borne patiently with Penhallow for twenty years, she should suddenly have taken it into her head to murder him. That she might have done it on her son’s behalf did not appear to him to be a tenable theory. The fate Penhallow had had in store for Clay did not strike Inspector Logan as being at all terrible. He could appreciate that a young gentleman might object strenuously to being removed from college (where he had obviously been wasting his time), but he set very little store by the various accounts he heard of his hysterical pronouncements. Young gentlemen of Clay’s type were much given, in the Inspector’s experience, to talking a lot of wild nonsense, and behaving as though the end of the world had come when they had to do things they didn’t fancy doing. To be articled to his own cousin, well known to be a very nice and sporting gentleman, and to be kept at home, with nothing to pay for his board, and every agreeable luxury of horses and cars and such-like at his disposal, could hardly be expected to impress the Inspector as being anything but a very pleasant life; and even if he had been able to believe that Clay, who seemed to him a silly, spoilt sort of a young man, might not have liked the career planned for him, it would have been quite incomprehensible to him that his mother should not have perceived the advantages of having him so well provided for, and, moreover, kept at home under her fond eye.
Inspector Logan had heard a great deal about Penhallow’s tyranny, but from never having encountered him, nor experienced life at Trevellin under his rule he did not arrive at any real understanding of the circumstances which had driven Faith and Vivian to distraction. From all he was told, he formed a picture of a jovial old ruffian, of autocratic temperament, casual morals, quick rages, and apparently boundless generosity. The very fact that so many of his children lived under the parental roof seemed to him to show that Penhallow could not have oppressed them very badly. It even appeared that he condoned the wild exploits of their riotous youth, and had always been ready to rescue them from the consequences of their lawlessness. His despotism seemed, in fact, to have been a benevolent one; and although the Inspector could readily imagine that his rages and his excesses might make him at times an awkward man to deal with, he could not perceive that there had been anything in his behaviour to drive even two such highly-strung women as Faith and Vivian to poison him.
His suspicions, then, pending the apprehension of Jimmy the Bastard, began to centre upon Raymond, and upon Loveday Trewithian, who, alone amongst the suspects, seemed to him to have had adequate motives for committing murder. The possibility that Bart might have had some hand in the affair he kept at the back of his mind, but did not consider very probable. He thought Bart’s grief at his father’s death was real enough, and hardly believed him to be the type of man who would murder anyone in cold blood, and by such means as poison. Loveday, on the other hand, had she decided to get rid of the only barrier to her marriage, might naturally have been expected to choose poison as her weapon, particularly since poison was ready to her hand. On the face of it, she seemed to be the most likely suspect, and might have absorbed all the Inspector’s attention had not Phineas Ottery paid a call on Penhallow on the day of his death, and had not Raymond denied having seen him upon that occasion.
It did not take the Inspector long to discover what had been the main cause of the quarrels which he knew had constantly cropped up between Raymond and his father. To one who was heir to the estate, Penhallow’s crazy extravagance must have been more than galling. Had Raymond not committed a violent assault upon his father on the very morning of the date of his death, the Inspector would have considered him the most obvious man to suspect of having poisoned Penhallow. But the two circumstances did not, in his experience, dovetail together. To start with, he thought, men who blatantly attempted to choke their victims did not resort to poison; to go on with, to poison a man having been prevented, earlier in the day from strangling him, would have been the act of a lunatic, and Raymond, so far from being a lunatic, bore all the appearance of being a level-headed man long past the age of youthful folly. It might be that the explanation given him of Phineas Ottery’s visit, and of Raymond’s denial of having seen him, was the true one. But every time the Inspector reached this point in his cogitations, his intuition stirred uneasily, and he could not rid himself of the feeling that there was something behind that episode which he had not so far discovered.
“I’m not one to talk a lot of hot air about my instinct,” he told Sergeant Plymstock, “but the further I go into this case, the more certain I am that there’s something being hidden from me that I can’t get hold of. What’s more, I’ve got a hunch it’s got something to do with Mr Ottery’s visit.”
“Well, I don’t know, sir,” said the Sergeant dubiously. “It don’t seem likely Mr Ottery could have had anything to do with the case, not on the evidence.”
“What I’m telling you is that I haven’t got all the evidence. I wish I knew what it was that set Raymond Penhallow on to his father’s throat!”
“They all seem to think it was the old trouble about the money Mr Penhallow got away with, don’t they, sir? That’s what he said himself.”
“Oh, yes! He wouldn’t cash his father’s cheque, and all the rest of it! It might be true; I don’t say it wasn’t, but I do say I’m not satisfied.”