The landlord looked up with a little start of surprise. “Mr. Billington?” he said, hesitating. “We’ve got no Mr. Billington.”
Gilbert Gildersleeve smiled a sickly smile. It was neck or nothing now. He must go right through with it. “Oh yes,” he answered, with prompt conviction, playing a dangerous card well—for how could he know what name this young man Waring might possibly be passing under? “The gentleman who was talking to me when you came in just now. His name’s Billington—though, perhaps,” he added, after a pause, with a reflective air, “he may have given you another one. Young men will be young men. They’ve often some reason, when travelling, for concealing their names. Though Billington’s not the sort of fellow, to be sure, who’s likely to be knocking about anywhere incognito.”
The landlord laughed. “Oh, we’ve plenty of that sort,” he replied good-humouredly. “Both ladies and gentlemen. It all makes trade. But your friend ain’t one of ‘em. To tell you the truth, he didn’t give any name at all when he came to the hotel; and we didn’t ask any. Billington, is it? Ah, Billington, Billington. I knew a Billington myself once, a trainer at Newmarket. Well, he’s a very pleasant young man, nice-spoken, and that; but I don’t fancy he’s quite right in his head, somehow.”
With instinctive cleverness, Gilbert Gildersleeve snatched at the opening at once. “Ah no, poor fellow,” he said, shaking his head sympathetically. “You’ve found that out already, have you? Well, he’s subject to delusions a bit; mere harmless delusions; but he’s not at all dangerous. Excitable, very, when anything odd turns up; he’ll be calling himself Waring and giving himself in charge for this murder, I dare say, when he comes to hear of it. But as good-hearted a fellow as ever lived, though; only, a trifle obstinate. If you’ve any difficulty with him at any time, just send for me. I’ve known him from a boy. He’ll do anything I tell him.”
It was a critical game, but Gilbert Gildersleeve saw something definite must be done, and he trusted to bluster, and a well-known name, to carry him through with it. And, indeed, he had said enough. From that moment forth, the landlord’s suspicions were never even so much as aroused by the innocent young man with the preoccupied manner, who knew Mr. Gildersleeve. The great Q.C.‘s word was guarantee enough—for any one but himself. And the great Q.C. himself knew it. Why, a chance word from his lips was enough to protect Guy Waring from suspicion. Who would ever believe, then, anything so preposterously improbable as that the great Q.C. himself was the murderer?
Not the police, you may be sure; nor the Plymouth landlord.
He went out into the town, with his mind now filled full of a curious scheme. A plan of campaign loomed up visibly before him. Waring was suspected. Therefore Waring must somehow have given cause for suspicion. Well, Waring was a friend of Montague Nevitt’s, and had evidently been at Mambury, either with him or without him, immediately before the—h’m—the unfortunate accident. But as soon as Waring came to learn of the discovery of the body, which he would be sure to do from the paper that evening at latest, he would see at once the full strength of whatever suspicions might tell against him. Now, Gilbert Gildersleeve’s experience of criminal cases had abundantly shown him that a suspected person, even when innocent, always has one fixed desire in his head—to gain time, anyhow. So Waring would naturally wish to gain time, at whatever cost. There were evidently circumstances connecting Waring with the crime; there were none at all, known to the outer world, connecting the eminent lawyer. Therefore, the eminent lawyer argued to himself, as coolly almost as if it had been somebody else’s case, not his own, he was conducting—therefore, if an immediate means of escape is provided for Waring, Waring will almost undoubtedly fall blindfold into it.
Not that he meant to let Guy pay the penalty in the end for his own rash crime. He was no hardened villain. He had still a conscience. If the worst came to the worst, he said to himself, he would tell all, openly, rather than let an innocent man suffer. But, like every one else, in accordance with his own inference from his observation of others, he, too, wanted to gain time, anyhow; and if he could but gain time by kindly helping Guy to escape for the present, why, he would gladly do so. An innocent man may be suspected for the moment, Gilbert Gildersleeve thought to himself, with a lawyer’s blind confidence; but under our English law he need never at least fear that the suspicion will be permanent. For lawyers repeat their own incredible commonplaces about the absolute perfection of English law so often that at last, by a sort of retributive nemesis, they really almost come to believe them.
Filled with these ideas, then, which rose naturally up in his mind without his taking the trouble, as it were, definitely to prove them, Gilbert Gildersleeve hurried on through the crowded streets of Plymouth town, till he reached the office of the London and South African Steamship Company. There he entered with an air of decided business, and asked to take a passage to Cape Town at once by the steamer “Cetewayo”, due to call at Plymouth, outward bound, that evening. He had looked up particulars of sailing in the papers at the hotel, and asked now, as if for himself, for a large and roomy berth, with all his usual self-possession and boldness of manner. The clerk gazed at him carelessly; that big and burly man with the great awkward hands raised no picture in his brain of the supposed murderer of McGregor in the wood at Mambury as that murderer had been described to him by the police that morning, from a verbal portrait after the landlord of the Talbot Arms. This colossal, red-faced, loud-spoken person, who required a large and roomy berth, was certainly “not” the rather slim young man, a little above the medium height, with a dark moustache and a gentle musical voice, whom the inn-keeper had seen in an excited mood on the hunt for McGregor along the slopes of Dartmoor.
“What name?” the clerk asked briskly, after Gilbert Gildersleeve had selected his state-room from the plan, with some show of interest as to its being well amidships and not too near the noise of the engines.