“I married, myself, and came up here. I used to get news of all the old lot from time to time, from a friend who stayed on at the hospital. There were some funny goings on there, I can tell you!”
She rambled on, but the flood of her reminiscences rolled over Fayre’s head unheeded. He sat smoking, his thoughtful eyes fixed on the glowing fire, his mind full of Mrs. Benson’s last revelation. “Christina Mary Draycott.” The name had been given in full at the inquest. And Miss Allen had spoken of her sister as “Tina.” The vicar’s wife had alluded to her divorce from her first husband, but had not mentioned his name. Tina Allen, then Tina Baxter, and finally Tina Draycott! The whole thing fitted in with the precision of the pieces in a jigsaw-puzzle. Not only was her connection with Gregg explained at last, but his obvious venom was more than accounted for. And there was nothing surprising now in her curiosity concerning him, followed by her odd reluctance to meet him. Supposing they had come together at the farm that night! He could imagine what that meeting would be like and what it might lead to, given a man of Gregg’s temperament. He collected his scattered thoughts with an effort and turned to Mrs. Benson, who had paused for a moment for sheer want of breath.
“Would it be giving you too much trouble if I asked for a look at that photograph you spoke of?” he asked. “I’d like to see one of Baxter again.”
Mrs. Benson beat even her own record as a purveyor of information.
“I’ve got it here!” she announced triumphantly. “When I heard that you were an old friend of Baxter’s I said to myself: ‘I expect that photograph will amuse him.’ It was lying on my table where I put it yesterday, so I just picked it up and brought it with me.”
She fumbled in her bag and produced a photograph which she handed to Fayre. He looked at it eagerly and was at once confronted with an unforeseen difficulty. Gregg he spotted at once, younger and a trifle leaner, but unmistakable. He was sitting in the front row of a group of about fifteen men. Any one of the other fourteen might have been Baxter, for all Fayre knew. But which? And he did not dare ask!
It was Henderson who came to the rescue. He had risen and was leaning over the back of Fayre’s chair, studying the photograph, and he grasped the situation almost immediately. Out of sheer devilry he allowed Fayre to sit for some minutes helpless, glowering at Gregg’s not very pleasing features, racking his brains for a way out of the difficulty, before he placed a finger on the portrait of a dark, rather haggard-looking man at the end of the front row and remarked lazily:
“Baxter looks as if he’d been making a night of it! It’s very like him, though.”
“He was always a queer, nervous creature. But he was clever enough. I know they thought a lot of him at St. Swithin’s,” rattled on the unsuspecting Mrs. Benson.
Fayre was busy studying the photograph. The figures in the group were small, but very clearly defined, and Baxter’s head stood out distinctly against the white overall of the man behind him. Fayre could place his type at a glance. Very dark, with a high, narrow forehead and deep-set eyes and the too sensitive mouth of a man whose nerves are perilously near the surface. The kind to fare badly at the hands of a woman like Mrs. Draycott. No wonder the marriage had ended in tragedy, he thought, and was not surprised that Gregg had done his best to spare his friend.