“Even then I did not trust her. She was a vindictive woman as well as a greedy one and, as you may imagine, our liking for each other had not progressed during our intercourse. I knew that, in a fit of malice or cupidity, she was capable of burning her boats and going to Sybil. Also, it was anything but convenient for me to realize so large a sum just then. At best, it would cripple me financially for some time to come, and retrenchment of any kind meant discomfort for Sybil. Just before my final interview with Mrs. Draycott I received the news that one of my investments had failed and I realized that I was going to have considerable difficulty in raising the seven thousand.”
He paused and sat for a moment in thought, as though he were taking stock of his own past actions and appraising them.
Then his eyes drifted to where his wife’s photograph, in its heavy silver frame, stood in the full glare of the reading-lamp.
“It was then,” he went on, “that I made up my mind to kill Mrs. Draycott.”
Chapter XXV
There was a tense silence, broken only by the sound of the distant traffic in Victoria Street. Fayre made an ineffectual effort to speak, but no words came. There was nothing he could say. His mind was a chaos of contending emotions, the strongest of which, even now, was pity: pity for the man who, in his blind arrogance, had wrecked the life of the one being he had hoped to save.
Something of what he felt must have reached Kean, for when he spoke again there was a gentler, almost apologetic note in his voice.
“I’m sorry, Hatter,” he said. “Of all my friends you are the one I can least afford to lose. If it had not been for Farrer’s appalling blunder in not letting me know in time that the case in which John Leslie was to appear had been postponed things would have turned out very differently. Luck was against me from the beginning.
“When Eve invited us to Staveley and told me that Mrs. Draycott was to be there I realized that my opportunity had come at last. I laid my plans carefully and thought I had covered any possible emergency; but I did not realize that I should have you to reckon with, Hatter. You were too intimately connected with us all to be a safe antagonist.
“On the plea that there had been a delay in the selling of certain securities I persuaded Mrs. Draycott to go on from Staveley’s to her sister’s, arranging to meet her while she was there and hand the money in cash over to her. We arranged to meet at the corner of the Greycross lane at six o’clock on the evening of March 23rd. Meanwhile I had brought the car from London and garaged it at the garage at Whitbury. If you remember, Sybil was the first to arrive at Staveley and I followed her four days later, that is to say, on March 14th. I wired the time of my arrival and was met by the Staveley motor in the usual way and you all took it for granted that I had come by train. As a matter of fact, I drove the car myself from London to Whitbury, garaged it there and then went on by train to Staveley Grange. Unfortunately my sidelights gave out at York and I was held up. I had had the forethought to borrow my chauffeur’s licence, on the plea that I had mislaid my own and might have occasion to use the car while he was on his holiday, and it was that licence that the policeman who stopped me saw. That was where you proved my undoing, Hatter. If it had not been for your long memory and the fact that you took the trouble to interrogate my chauffeur your suspicions would never have been aroused. Grey, who knew nothing of my supposed movements at that date, certainly wouldn’t have jumped to it. As it was, that Y.0.7. number you were looking for was under your very nose and you never saw it!”