The shadow of the Wolf

by R. Austin Freeman

“No, he would say nothing about it; but he allowed me, at my request, to examine the envelope.”

Rodney grinned. “He might also have shown you the postman who delivered the letter. But if he won’t tell us anything, we might put him in the witness-box and make him disgorge his secret.”

“Yes, and you may have to if the Court demands to have the letter produced. But I strongly advise you to avoid doing so, if you can. I have the impression that the production of that letter would be very much the reverse of helpful—might, in fact, be fatal to the success of the case—and would in addition be very disagreeable to Mrs. Purcell.”

Rodney looked at him in astonishment. “Then you know what was in the letter?” said he.

“No; but I have formed certain opinions which I have no doubt are correct, but which I do not feel at liberty to communicate. I advise you to leave Mr. Penfield alone. Remember that he is a lawyer, that he is Mrs. Purcell’s friend, that he does know what is in the letter and that he thinks it best to keep his knowledge to himself. But he will have to be approached on the question as to whether he is willing to act for Mrs. Purcell against her husband. If you undertake that office you can raise the question of the letter with him; but I would urge you most strongly not to force his hand.”

Rodney listened to this advice with a slightly puzzled expression. Like Mr. Penfield, he viewed Thorndyke with mixed feelings, now thinking of him as an amateur, a doctor who dabbled ineffectively in law, and now considering the possibility that he might command some means of acquiring knowledge that were not available to the orthodox legal practitioner. Here was a case in point. He had examined the envelope of that mysterious letter “at his own request” and evidently for a specific purpose; and from that inspection he had in some unaccountable way formed a very definite opinion as to what the envelope had contained. That was very curious. Of course, he might be wrong; but he seemed to be pretty confident. Then there was the present transaction. Rodney, himself, had rejected Varney’s suggestion with scorn. But Thorndyke had adopted it quite hopefully, and the plan had succeeded in the face of all probabilities. Could it be that Thorndyke had some unknown means of gauging those probabilities? It looked rather like it.

“You are only guessing at the nature of that letter,” he said tentatively, “and you may have guessed wrong.”

“That is quite possible,” Thorndyke agreed. “But Penfield isn’t guessing. Put the case to him, hear what he says and follow his advice. And if you see Varney again, it would be better to say nothing about that letter. Penfield will advise you to keep it out of the case if you can, and that is my advice, too.”

When Rodney took his departure, which he did a few minutes later, he carried with him a growing suspicion that he had underestimated Thorndyke; that the latter, perhaps, played a deeper game than at first sight appeared and that he played with pieces unknown to traditional legal practice.

For some time after his visitor had left Thorndyke remained wrapped in profound thought. In his heart he was sensible of a deep distaste for this case that he was promoting. If it were to succeed, it could only be by misleading the Court. It is true that the parties were acting in good faith, that the falsities which they would present were falsities that they believed to be true. But the whole case was based on a fiction, and Thorndyke detested fictions. Nor was he satisfied with his own position, in an ethical sense. He knew that the case was fictitious; that the respondent was a dead man and that the documents to be produced in evidence were forgeries. He was, in fact, an accessory to those forgeries. He did not like it at all. And he was not so optimistic as to the success of the petition as he had led Rodney to believe, though he was not very uneasy on that score. What troubled him was that this was, in effect, a bogus case and that he was lending it his support.