“No, his people had a house near here, which has been pulled down since. His mother, of course, was an Oatvile.”
“To be sure.” Reeves sucked his pencil, and wrote down “Mr. Davenant senior m. Miss Oatvile.” Then a light burst upon him—“Good heavens!” he said, “then that’s why he knew about the secret passage?”
“He would, of course. He’s told me that he used often to play here when he was a boy. Then there was a coolness between his people and the Oatviles, I think because his people became Catholics. No quarrel, you know, only they didn’t see so much of each other after that. Anyhow, Mr. Davenant was badly in love with me and wanted me to marry him. I wouldn’t—partly because I wasn’t quite sure whether I liked him, partly because my father was very Low Church, and he’d have been certain to make trouble over it. Then the Davenants left the place, and I did too after my father died; and we didn’t see any more of one another.”
“When was that?”
“Three or four years before the war—1910 I suppose it must have been. I started out to work for a living, because my father hadn’t left us very well off. And then, quite soon, I met this man Brotherhood. He proposed and I accepted him—you mustn’t ask me why, Mr. Reeves. That’s a thing even detectives can’t find out about, why women fall in love with men. I’ll only mention that at that time he wasn’t a bit rich. After I married we lived in a rather horrid house in Kensington. I never knew anything about his Stock Exchange business much, though I always had an idea that it wasn’t very safe, if it was even honest. He began to make money quite soon; and then, you see, he made the whole of it over to me. He was afraid, of course, that he might go bankrupt, and he wanted to have a good reserve which his creditors couldn’t touch. I was always rather a fool about business, or I suppose I should have minded the arrangement. As it was, I just thought it very nice of him, and we made arrangements to take a house in the country. I wanted Binver, because it was one of the few places where I’d any friends.
“Then, quite suddenly, I found out about him. I don’t mean about his business; I mean about his private life. There are lots of atheists who are very nice people; my husband wasn’t one of them. I somehow feel that he chucked over morals first and religion afterwards, if you know what I mean, not the other way about.”
Reeves wrote down “Brotherhood not only – God but – morals”; then he scratched it out again. Miss Rendall-Smith went on:
“I didn’t want a divorce: you see, I’d been rather strictly brought up about those things. And of course he didn’t want one, because of the money. Just when I wanted help and advice, I met Mr. Davenant again; and he was furious when I told him about it all. He set to work to try and find out something about my husband’s business, and he did discover something (I don’t know what it was) which would have ruined him if it had come out. Then he went to my husband and put a pistol to his head, so to speak—blackmailed him really, I suppose. He made my husband take a solemn oath to let me go my own way and never, without my express consent, publish the fact that he’d married me. Then I came down here and took the house in Binver and thought it was going to be all right.
“Quite soon afterwards my husband rented a bungalow, as you know, and came to live at Paston Whitchurch. I think he wanted to keep a watch over me; I think he also wanted to give me the impression that he was behaving better. But, as he always went away for the week-ends, I didn’t feel much interested about that. Once or twice he asked me to come back to him, but of course I wouldn’t. When Mr. Davenant came back from the war, he took a house at Paston Whitchurch too, but he could only come there from Saturday to Monday because of his work up in London. I think he just wanted to be near me, and to be able to help me if I was in trouble. And that was the state of things up to last Tuesday. Only my husband had foreseen his bankruptcy, and was making desperate efforts to get me to come back to him. The horrible thing was that I had no hold over him—the secret which would have ruined him once had no terrors for him then—so I’d nothing but his bare word to depend on. And I’m afraid that wasn’t much to go upon.
“I knew nothing about what happened on Tuesday till I saw it in the papers. I still don’t know how or why the police got the idea that it was Mr. Davenant who murdered my husband. Of course, if they came to know all that I’ve been telling you now, they’d think it was a certainty. But I’ve told you about it, because I thought it was best to let you know everything, and then perhaps you could help.”