“A personal in reply which ran, ‘Take him first and then I will.’ You know he said in one of the other letters that if we would arrest Thoyne he would supply the evidence.”
“No, you can’t do that,” I agreed. “And now,” I added, “if you’ll sit still and not interrupt I’ll tell you a long story.”
And I proceeded to recount the past history of Sir Philip Clevedon and Tulmin, and Thoyne’s connection with it. Pepster heard me to the end in silence.
“This case,” he said, when I had finished, “is the very devil. I’m half inclined to think Tulmin did it after all. At any rate there are three of them in it—Tulmin, Thoyne and Nora Lepley, but which is which—or are they all three in it?”
It was a possibility that had occurred to me more than once.
CHAPTER XXIII
TULMIN’S QUEER STORY
During my journey to London I devoted careful and prolonged thought to the difficult problem of Mr. Ronald Thoyne, whose exact place in the story I had by no means satisfactorily determined. He had played a very curious game all through, and though there was an explanation in his anxiety to help Kitty Clevedon and relieve her anxiety regarding her brother, the facts as I knew them would equally have fitted a desire to throw pursuers off his own scent.
I did not attach undue importance to the series of anonymous letters received by Pepster, and yet, in the light of Thoyne’s queer and frequently mysterious actions, I did not feel inclined entirely to ignore them. I was fully aware that so far I had not found the key to the mystery. Did Thoyne hold that or was it Nora Lepley? Thoyne was an American and, as far as I had been able to gather, came of a wealthy and highly respectable family in Chicago. There was absolutely nothing of any sort against him and yet it seemed queer that he had settled down in England and had apparently no intention of returning to America. Even Kitty Clevedon was not sufficient to account for that. She would certainly have gone with him had he asked her. Even if he had not actually encompassed Clevedon’s death, was he privy to it? Then I remembered suddenly—the first time it had occurred to me—what the Vicar’s wife had told me. Thoyne, when he first went to Cartordale, had lodged at Lepley’s farm and gossip had coupled his name with Nora’s. What was there in that? Little, probably; perhaps nothing.
And so I maundered on, my thought flitting from one thing to another and back again, but with no tangible or coherent result. I could not fit Thoyne into the picture anyhow. If he had set out to fool me he had succeeded, for all I had tripped him up so many times. That again was curious. Practically everything he had told me had been dragged out of him. Very little had come from him voluntarily. He became confidential enough when he knew that I knew, but he offered nothing.
I walked to the address in Bloomsbury Stillman had given me. He met me on the doorstep, and taking me into his room made a few minor alterations in my appearance, not sufficient to merit the word disguise, but enough to prevent Tulmin from recognising me. I had never spoken to him, but I had been on the jury when he was a witness and he might know me again.