He thanked Mrs. Strangway—alias Madame Coralie—for her politeness, and asked to be allowed to offer her a ten-pound note as a trifling acknowledgment of the favour she had done him. She promptly accepted this offering, and was only the more convinced that there was “property” involved in the lawyer’s researches.
“If there is anything to come to me from any of his relations, I hope nobody will try to keep me out of it,” she said. “I hope his friends will remember that I gave him my last shilling, and nursed him when there wasn’t many would have stayed in the room with him?”
Theodore reiterated his assurance that no question of money or inheritance was involved in his mission to the Island, and then bade the Captain’s widow a respectful adieu, and threaded his way through the avenue of tables to the door, and out of the garlic-charged atmosphere into the fresh autumnal air.
He stayed one night in Jersey, and left at eleven o’clock the next morning on board the Fanny, and slept in his chambers in Ferret Court, after having written a long letter to Juanita with a full account of all that he had learnt from the lips of the widow, and from the letters of the dead.
“I do not surrender my hope of finding the murderer,” he wrote finally, “but you must now agree with me that I must look elsewhere than among the remnants of the Strangway race. They can prove an unanswerable alibi—the grave.”
He went to the office of the Imperial next morning, saw the secretary, and ascertained that the amount of the policy upon Colonel Strangway’s life had been paid to Lady Millicent Strangway, his widow, in April, 1863, after the directors had received indisputable evidence of his death.
“I remember the case perfectly,” said the secretary. “The circumstances were peculiar, and there was a suspicion of suicide, as the man had just left Monte Carlo, and was known to have lost his last napoleon, after a most extraordinary run of luck. There was some idea of disputing the claim; but if he did make away with himself he had contrived to do it so cleverly that it would have been uncommonly difficult to prove that his death was not an accident—more particularly as Lord Dangerfield brought an action against the steamboat company for wilful negligence in regard to their gangway and deficient lighting. The policy was an old one, too, and so it was decided not to litigate.”
“There could be no doubt as to the identity of the man who was drowned at Nice, I conclude?”
“No, the question of identity was carefully gone into. Lord Dangerfield happened to be wintering at Cannes that year, and he heard of his son-in-law’s death in time to go over and identify the body before it was coffined. You know how quickly burial follows death in that part of the world, and there would have been no possibility of the widow getting over from Ajaccio before the funeral. We had Lord Dangerfield’s declaration that the body he saw at Nice was the body of Colonel Strangway, and we paid the £3,000 on that evidence. We have never had any reason to suspect error or foul play.”