“Because he told me at the time that a woman had been in the rooms, but he wouldn’t say any more, except that she was red-haired, or fair-haired, and well dressed. I wondered how he knew that, but he wouldn’t tell me.”
“He has never told me,” Southbourne said complacently. “Though I guessed it, all the same, and he couldn’t deny it, when I asked him. She dropped hairpins about, or a hairpin rather,—women always do when they’re agitated,—an expensive gilt hairpin. That’s how he knew she was certainly fair-haired, and probably well dressed.”
I remembered how, more than once, I had picked up and restored to Anne a hairpin that had fallen from her glorious hair. Jim and Mary Cayley had often chaffed her about the way she shed her hairpins around.
“What sort of hairpins?” I asked.
“A curved thing. He showed it me when I bowled him out about them. I know the sort. My wife wears them,—patent things, warranted not to fall out, so they always do. They cost half a crown a packet in that quality.”
I knew the sort, too, and knew also that my former suspicion was now a certainty. Anne had been to Cassavetti’s rooms that night; though nothing would ever induce me to believe she was his murderess.
“Well, I fail to see how that clue could have led him to me,” I said, forcing a laugh. I didn’t mean to let Southbourne, or any one else, guess that I knew who that hairpin had belonged to.
“It didn’t; it led him nowhere; though I believe he spent several days going round the West End hairdressers’ shops. There’s only one of them, a shop in the Haymarket, keeps that particular kind of hairpin, and they snubbed him; they weren’t going to give away their clients’ names. And there was nothing in the rooms to give him a clue. All Cassavetti’s private papers had been carried off, as you know. Then there was the old Russian you told about at the inquest. He seems to have vanished off the face of the earth; for nothing has been seen or heard of him. So, as I said, Freeman was on a cold scent, and thought of you again. He came to me, ostensibly on other business. I’d just got the wire from Petersburg—Nolan of The Thunderer sent it—saying you’d walked out of your hotel three nights before, and hadn’t been seen or heard of since. It struck me that the quickest way to trace you, if you were still above ground, was to set Freeman on your track straight away. So I told him at once of your disappearance; and he started cross-questioning me, with the result,—well—he went off eventually with the fixed idea that you were more implicated in the murder than had appeared possible at the time, and that your disappearance was in some way connected with it. Wait a bit,—let me finish! The next I heard was that he was off to St. Petersburg with an extradition warrant; and, from what he told me just now, he was just in time. Yes, it was the quickest way; they’d never have released you on any other consideration!”
“No, I guess they wouldn’t,” I responded. “You’ve certainly done me a good turn, Lord Southbourne,—saved my life, in fact. But what about this murder charge? Is it a farce, or what? You don’t believe I murdered the man, do you?”
“I? Good heavens, no! If I had I shouldn’t have troubled to set Freeman on you,” he answered languidly. I’ve met some baffling individuals, but never one more baffling than Southbourne.