“He’s been sent for. Lady Kean has been taken ill again. I doubt if he’ll be back this morning. You’d better cancel any engagements he had for to-day.”
The old man made a clucking sound with his tongue against his teeth.
“It’s a pity she’s so delicate, sir,” he ventured.
And Fayre, overwrought to the verge of hysteria, almost laughed aloud at the utter inadequacy of the remark.
Chapter XXIV
The report of Sybil Kean when Fayre rang up at lunch-time was not reassuring. The heart attack had been less violent than either of those that had preceded it, but she had not rallied well. Fayre, remembering the letter she had sent him and the conviction she had expressed in it that the next attack would prove her last, wondered whether the wish to live had not forsaken her. In his heart he knew it would be better, both for her and for Edward, if she died. The connection between the unopened letter in his note-case and the Draycott trial was becoming clear to him at last. There was only one person for whom Kean cared enough to shield at the expense of his professional honour; that was Sybil, and Sybil, as was now evident from her letter to Fayre, had some secret knowledge of the case which she may or may not have been aware that she shared with her husband.
Fayre went over the events of the evening of March 23rd. So far as he could remember, he had parted from Sybil Kean in the drawing-room at Staveley shortly before six o’clock. From then onwards she had been invisible, presumably in her room, and had not appeared again until she joined the party in the drawing-room just before eight. He knew the country round Staveley well enough to realize that this would leave her ample time to reach Leslie’s farm by six-thirty, or thereabouts. It seemed incredible that any one in her state of health should have been capable of such an effort and, in Sybil’s case, doubly so, for, apart from her delicacy, she had always been indolent and easy-going to a fault, the last person to screw herself up to such a pitch of nervous tension as such an expedition would entail.
There was one other, and on the whole more probable, solution of the problem. Evidently Mrs. Draycott had become in some way possessed of a photograph of Gerald Lee. It was more than possible that she had had dealings with him in the past and that, in his distorted brain, he had harboured a grudge against her. Supposing Kean had been aware of this obsession and had received news of his escape from the asylum in which he had placed him? If Lee had managed to waylay the unfortunate woman and had murdered her, Kean would have every reason to wish to keep his guilt secret. Once the affair got into the courts it would be impossible to hide the fact of his existence from Sybil. Where and how Lee and Kean had met on the fatal night, Fayre was unable to determine, but the complete lack of motive for the crime had pointed, from the first, to an act of almost insane malice, and that there was some connection between the events at the farm and the survival of Sybil Kean’s first husband Fayre was becoming more convinced each moment.
He tried to picture the consequences of the inevitable disclosure which would follow should this second solution prove the correct one, and his heart sank. That it would mean the end of Edward Kean’s career seemed certain. Not only was the part he had played in the grim drama bound to appear, but with the discovery of the identity of the murderer would come the disclosure of the damning fact that, during six years of his marriage to Sybil, he had been aware of the existence of Gerald Lee. And insanity is not recognized as a ground for divorce! If Sybil, knowing of Lee’s existence, had concealed it from her husband it seemed hardly likely that she would leave him for Lee, who, according to Kean, was not even in a condition to recognize his wife should she return to him. And if she decided to stick to Kean? Fayre could picture them dragging out their existence, probably in Italy or the south of France, Kean bereft of the work that was as his life’s blood to him and Sybil cut off forever from her friends and the world to which she belonged. He did not think she would long survive under such conditions and, Sybil once taken from him, what would become of Kean?
In a vain effort to get away from his own thoughts, Fayre went out and walked the busy streets until he was tired, but the exercise brought no relief and he was driven at last by sheer fatigue back to the club again.