“Good; and in reference to the servant-girl—you are sure that she became suddenly very earnest when she said she believed Laidlaw was not guilty, and that she and some one named Mary had ‘seen something,’ but you don’t know what, owing to a sudden interruption?”
“Right again, sir.”
“Now, then,” said Mr Dean, rising, “we will go up and see Mrs Morley.”
They found the old woman alone, knitting in her rustic chair in her floral bower on the roof. Mr Dean sat down to have a chat and Tommy seated himself on a stool to gaze and listen, for he was fascinated, somehow, by the detective.
It was really interesting to observe the tact with which the man approached his subject and the extreme patience with which he listened to the somewhat garrulous old woman.
Being a Briton he began, of course, with the weather, but slid quickly and naturally from that prolific subject to the garden, in connection with which he displayed a considerable knowledge of horticulture—but this rather in the way of question than of comment. To slide from the garden to the gardener was very easy as well as natural; and here Mr Dean quite won the old woman’s heart by his indirect praise of Susy’s manipulation of plants and soils. To speak of Susy, without referring to Susy’s early history, would have been to show want of interest in a very interesting subject. Mr Dean did not err in this respect. From Susy’s mother he naturally referred to the family in which she and old Liz had been in service, and to the return of the only surviving member of it to England.
All this was very interesting, no doubt, but it did not throw much light into the mind of Mr Dean, until old Liz mentioned the fact that Mr Lockhart, besides being solicitor to the Brentwoods, was also solicitor to old Mr Weston, who had left his property to Colonel Brentwood. She also said that she feared, from what Mrs Brentwood had recently said to her, there was some difficulty about the will, which was a pity, as the only people she knew besides Mr Lockhart who knew anything about it were a footman named Rogers and a butler named Sutherland, both of whom had been witnesses to the will; but the footman had gone to the bad, and the butler had gone she knew not where.
Then Mr Dean began to smell another rat, besides that which he was just then in pursuit of, for the Colonel had incidentally mentioned to him the circumstance of the estate passing away from him, owing to a new will having been recently discovered. Although the matter was not the detective’s present business, he made a mental note of it.
After quitting the garden, and promising soon to return, the detective had an interview with Mr Trumps in the parlour of the thieves’ missionary. Many a fallen and apparently lost man and woman had been brought to the Saviour in that parlour by that missionary—the same whom we have introduced to the reader in the thieves’ den. Through the medium of Tommy Splint the interview was brought about, and no sooner did Trumps ascertain the object that Dean had in view than he became suddenly confidential.
“Now, look here,” he said, when he found himself alone with Mr Dean, “I knows more about them Brentwoods and Westons than you think for.”