“Quite likely,” Giles said. “I see what's coming, though, and I confess I can't offer a solution.”
“Of course you see it. What should induce any such woman to murder him? You've seen the knife. It's a curious sort of dagger - might have come from Spain, or South America. Not the sort of thing you carry about with you in the normal course of events. That proves the murder was premeditated.”
“Some woman who had a grudge against him,” suggested Giles.
“Must have been a pretty large size in grudges,” said Hannasyde. “And one, moreover, that Vereker didn't set much store by. If he'd done any woman an injury big enough to give her a motive for cold-blooded murder, do you suppose he would quite unsuspectingly have put himself into a helpless position at her instigation?”
“No. On the whole he had rather a suspicious nature,” replied Giles. “And in justice to a somewhat maligned man I'm bound to say that I don't think he would have done a woman any serious injury. He was amorous, but not ungenerous to his fancies, and not unkindly.”
“That's rather the impression I gathered,” said Hannasyde. “I don't rule out the possibility of an unknown woman in the case - but my department hasn't been idle, you know, and so far we can't discover any woman who had the least reason for wanting to murder Vereker. I don't mind telling you that we checked up on several, too. That shabby stranger the butler described to us made me think there might be some woman who'd been got into trouble, because there's a smell of blackmail about that odd visit. But I haven't discovered anything of the kind. On the contrary, Vereker seems to have been pretty decent, and his women were the sort who can look after themselves.”
Giles sat on the arm of his chair. “Yes, I should think they were. Arnold was no fool. And I'm ready to admit that you've made it seem highly improbable that the murder was done after Arnold was in the stocks. But do you mind looking at the other side of the picture? Does it seem to you probable that having stabbed a man to death the murderer conveyed his body to the stocks - the most conspicuous place he could well think of- and arrange it most carefully in a natural position there, which I imagine must have been not only a gruesome, but also a somewhat difficult task? Impossible for Miss Vereker to have done it; too macabre for Mesurier; too senseless for Kenneth.”
“It may not have been senseless,” said Hannasyde. He glanced at his wrist-watch, and got up. “That's what I've got to try and find out - amongst other things. By the way, we've been trying to trace those notes Vereker had on him the day he was killed. You remember we found the counterfoil of a cheque for a hundred pounds drawn to self, and only thirty pounds in his pocket? Well, only one of these has come in, to date, and that one is a tenpound note which a man in a blue suit handed to a waiter at the Trocadero Grill in payment of his bill for dinner on Saturday evening. The suit might have been a dark grey, I may mention, and the waiter really couldn't call the gentleman's face to mind, because there were a lot of people dining that night. You can't say we policemen get much help! Look here, I must be going! Many thanks for by far the most pleasant hours I've spent on this case yet.”
Giles laughed. “Well, I hope they'll prove to have been profitable ones.”
“You never know,” said Hannasyde. “It's always good to get another point of view.”
Mr Charles Carrington, hearing something of the visit next day from his son, paused in his search for the pencil he distinctly remembered placing on his desk not five minutes earlier, and said: “Absurd! You can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, or if you can you shouldn't. An Eversharp pencil - you must have seen me use it hundreds of times! Use your eyes, Giles! Use your eyes! So Superintendent Hannasyde doesn't know what to make of those Vereker brats! Now I come to think of it the boy baffled me too. More in him than I thought. God bless my soul, a pencil can't walk away!”
Kenneth, getting wind of Hannasyde's visit, loudly endorsed his uncle's verdict, adding a rider to the effect that if there was any double-crossing going on he should immediately change his solicitor. When Giles gave every evidence of regarding such a happening in the light of a Utopian dream, he forgot his original complaint in pointing out his own virtues as a client. He was in one of his more incalculable moods at the time, and his cousin's somewhat unwise rejoinder that the vaunted virtues had escaped his notice provoked him to give a trenchant resume of his own case. He walked up and down the studio, with his eyes very bright, and with what Antonia called his elf-smile on his lips, and held his cousin partly in dismay, partly in admiration, of the ingenuity with which he postulated various fantastic ways in which he might, had he been feeling like it at the time, have murdered his half-brother.
With the Superintendent's remarks in mind, Giles demanded a reason for putting Arnold Vereker's body in the stocks. The result of this, though entertaining, was not helpful, for Kenneth threw himself into what he conceived to be the spirit of the inquiry with huge zest, and, abandoning the dramatisation of himself as the murderer, advanced a quantity of the most astonishing theories, not the least brilliant of which involved the reputation of the Vicar of Ashleigh Green, a gentleman entirely unknown to him.
Giles gave it up. There was nothing to be made of Kenneth, who, if he were indeed playing a dangerous game, obviously preferred (and Giles could only applaud his wisdom) to play it alone.
A more immediately pressing anxiety than the question of whether or not he was guilty of murder was, in the estimation of his entourage, the problem of how to induce him to attend Arnold Vereker's funeral. Exhaustive, and at times heated, discussions, into which tiles was dragged, raged throughout the evening, Murgatroyd, Violet, Leslie and Giles being banded upon the side of respectability, against Kenneth, who was supported by his sister, and his own quite irrefutably logical arguments. The contest was won eventually by Violet, who, though lacking Murgatroyd's stern piety, was quite as insistent that Kenneth must at least appear to accord a proper respect to the dead. Finding that he was unmoved by argument or entreaty, she got up in a cold anger that was only partly feigned, and signified her intention of departing without permitting him to kiss her, or even touch her hand. Some spark of wrath kindled in his eyes, but was quenched by the closing of the door behind her. He hurried after her; what passed between them in the hall the others had no means of knowing; but in a few moments they came back together, Kenneth meekly bound by his word to attend the funeral, and Violet as charming and as sweet-tempered as she had been angry before.
“If Kenneth marries that young woman he won't be able to call his soul his own,” Giles remarked later to Antonia at the door of the flat.
“I know; it's sickening,” she agreed. “He isn't really in love with her, either. He's in love with what she looks like.”
“Which reminds me,” said Giles. “What has become of your intended?”
“I don't know, but I'm beginning to be afraid he's going to jilt me,” replied Antonia, with undiminished cheerfulness.
This theory, however, proved to be incorrect, for Mesurier attended the funeral the following afternoon, and returned with Kenneth to the flat afterwards. He had recovered his poise, and nothing could have been more graceful than his apology for having left Antonia in anger when they had last met. He apparently considered that his action in seeking out Superintendent Hannasyde at Scotland Yard with the revised version of his story exempted him from any future inquiry, but Kenneth did what he could to disillusion him on this point, and succeeded so well that within two days of being reconciled to his fiancée, Rudolph's nerves began to show signs of fraying, and he exclaimed, in exasperation at the Verekers' absorption in other and more everyday matters: “I don't know how you two can go on as though nothing had happened, or was likely to happen!”