“A very excellent actor in his day, Mr. Trent; his name is James Colliver,” replied Cleek. “I came to this place fully convinced that Loti had murdered him; I now know that he murdered Loti, and that to that crime he has added a yet more abominable one by killing his own son!”
“It’s a lie! It’s a lie! I didn’t! I didn’t! I never saw the boy!” screeched out Colliver in a very panic of terror. “I’ve never killed any one. Loti sold out to me! Loti went back to France. I pawned the jewels to get the money to pay him to go.”
“Oh, no, you didn’t, my friend,” said Cleek. “You performed that operation to shut Felix Murchison’s mouth—the one man who could swear, and did swear, that James Colliver never left this building on the day of his disappearance, and who probably would have said more if you hadn’t made it worth his while to shut his mouth and to disappear. You and I know, my friend, that Loti was the last man on this earth with whom you could come to terms upon anything. He had publicly declared that he would have your life, and he’d have kept his word if you hadn’t turned the tables and killed him. You stole his wife, and you were never even man enough to marry her even though she had borne you a son and clung to you to the end, poor wretch! You killed Loti, and you killed your own son. No doubt he is better off, poor little chap, to be dead and gone rather than to live with the shadow of illegitimacy upon him; and no doubt, either, that when he came up here yesterday to meet Giuseppe Loti, he saw what I saw to-day, and knew you as I knew you then—the scar on the wrist, which was one of the marks of identification given me at the time I was sent to hunt you up! And you killed him to shut his mouth.”
“I didn’t! I didn’t!” he protested wildly. “I never saw him. He wasn’t here. The women in the house across the way will swear that they saw the empty room.”
“Not now!” declared Cleek, with emphasis. “I’ve convinced them to the contrary. Mr. Trent, let a couple of your men come over here and take charge of this fellow, please, and I will convince you as well. That’s right, my lads. Lay hold of the beggar and don’t let him get a chance to make a dash for the stairs. Got him fast, have you? Good! Now then, Mr. James Colliver, this is what those deluded women saw—this little dodge, which is going to help Jack Ketch to come into his own.”
Speaking, he walked rapidly across to the long blind, pulled it down to its full length, then with a wrench tore it wholly from the roller and whirled it over, so that they who were within could now see the outer side.
It bore, painted upon it, a perfect representation of the interior of the glass-room, even to the little spindle-legged table with a vase of pink roses upon it which now stood at that room’s far end.
“A clever idea, Colliver, and a good piece of painting,” he said. “It took me in once—last August—just as it took in Mrs. Sherman and her daughter yesterday. The mistiness of the lace curtains falling over it lent just the effect of ‘distance’ that was required to perfect the illusion and to prevent anybody from detecting the paint. As for the boy——Gently, lads, gently! Don’t let the beggar in his struggles make you step on that ‘dead soldier.’ Under the thick coating of wax a human body lies—the boy’s! Hullo! Gone off his balance, eh, at the knowledge that the game is entirely up?” This as Colliver, with a terrible cry, collapsed suddenly and fell to the floor shrieking and grovelling. “They are a cowardly lot these brute-beast men when it comes to the wall and the final corner. Mr. Trent, break this to Miss Larue as gently as you can. She has suffered a great deal, poor girl, and it is bound to be a shock. She doesn’t know that the woman he called his wife never really was his wife; she doesn’t know about Loti or his threat. If she had she’d have told me, and I might have got on the trail in the first case instead of waiting to pick it up like this.”
He paused and held up his hand. Through all this Colliver had not once ceased grovelling and screaming; but it was not his cries that had drawn that gesture from Cleek. It was the sound of some one racing at top speed up the outer stairs, and with it the jar of many excited voices mingled in a babble of utter confusion.
The door of the glass-room swung inward abruptly, and the head bookkeeper looked in, with a crowd of clerks behind him.