“ I thought for a minute or two before speaking.
“ ‘You have only mentioned three people,’ I said. ‘It obviously wasn’t yourself, and it wasn’t Spencer. The third was his wife.’
“ ‘It certainly wasn’t her. It was a man. Besides, she is still alive.’
“ ‘Then I have absolutely nothing to start upon.’
“I was silent for a little longer, and then I said—
“ ‘I must think it over, Mr. Wickley. Leave me your address.’
“He left me thinking very hard, I can assure you.”
II: The Stockbroker’s Wife
Carrington lit a fresh cigarette and began the second part of his story.
“Wickley left my office only a little before my usual lunch hour, and I sat on over my fire for some time, thinking, but not seeing a ray of light. That made me rather late in getting back after lunch, and when I came in my clerk handed me a card and told me a gentleman was waiting in my room. On the card I read the name, ‘Mr. A. D. Spencer.’
“When I glanced up from it and caught my clerk’s eye, I could see that he evidently thought I had done myself too well at lunch. I suppose I had been standing for the whole of five minutes gazing at that card. The appearance of Mr. Spencer immediately on top of Mr. Wickley seemed a thing hardly in the course of nature. I began to wonder whether there was some sort of a conspiracy between the two men. I tried to see in advance what line this man Spencer was going to take. And then I recovered my wits and walked into my room.
“I found a heavy-looking man of rather above middle height, clean-shaved, with a blue chin, baggy eyes, and very black hair. He had the skin of a man who, as Wickley said, did himself a little too well, and I could also quite believe that he could be a sulky ill-tempered devil if things went wrong.
“ ‘We didn’t exactly meet last night, Mr. Carrington,’ he began, and there was quite a dash of geniality about the man when he made the effort, ‘but I was at the Devorset dinner and heard you speak. I also came across an old acquaintance there. Meeting him set me worrying about an old problem, and seeing you put it into my head to come and consult you on the matter.’
“And then I realised that there was no conspiracy at all, nor even any very extraordinary coincidence, but, as I told you at the start, just a series of quite natural events that had produced this startling result. My second thought was — ‘What a bit of luck! The solution to the insoluble problem walks into my office!’ However, you’ll see how far out I was there.
“ ‘Of course you’ll understand that this is strictly confidential,’ said he.
“ ‘Naturally,’ I said; and I noted that though he was evidently keen on secrecy, he didn’t show the same extreme anxiety as Wickley.
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll begin my story eleven years back. Or perhaps I should first mention that some years before that I had purchased an estate in Devorset. I’m a stockbroker, by the way: Spencer, Spencer & Luderman is my firm, and I’m the senior partner. Eleven years ago an old fellow in the neighbourhood called Wickley died, and his nephew came into the property and settled down next door to me. By next door I mean rather under a couple of miles away; but we had no other neighbours — of that class, I mean — within six or seven miles, and we didn’t know them either. Consequently Wickley and I saw a lot of one another.’
“ ‘What sort of a fellow was he?’ I inquired, with my most truth seeking expression.
“ ‘I wish you had noticed him at the dinner last night,’ said he, ‘and you’d have understood better what kind of a proposition he was. A reddish-haired, heavy-chinned sort of fellow, with queer eyes, and the word “past” stamped all over him.’
“ ‘What do you mean exactly?’
“ ‘Well, I mean that he had a past, and I soon began to guess as much from his very appearance and manner, though at first I only felt vaguely that there was something unusual about him. I may mention that he isn’t the kind of person one would naturally suspect of a shady record, for the Wickleys are a very good old Devorset family, and if family pride would keep people straight, well, it ought to have kept him. He didn’t show that feature either to begin with, but you’ll see in a minute the sort of too-good-for-a-damned-stock-broker gentleman he was. My place was about twice the size of his, I may add, and he was deuced glad to have as many days shooting with me as he could get. Some precious rotten days he gave me in exchange; but of course shooting with a two-penny-halfpenny squire was always an honour!’
“This speech naturally didn’t prejudice me much in favour of Mr. Spencer. Little though he realised it, he was making me look at things more and more from Wickley’s point of view — bad hat though Mr. W. may have been, and respectable as Mr. S. no doubt was.
“ ‘I am coming to a very painful part of my story now, Mr. Carrington,’ he continued. ‘In fact it’s so infernally unpleasant that it has kept me from telling the facts to a living soul up to this moment. I had a wife, in fact she’s legally my wife still, and I was very fond of her. I can assure you on that point — I was desperately fond of her! She was an uncommonly beautiful girl. She was on the stage at one time, I may say, and might have gone very far on her looks alone, but I married her and took her away from it. She was a lady by birth, but she hadn’t a penny, and it was a love marriage pure and simple — love marriage on my part at least, for I don’t believe she ever really loved me. We had no children, either, and that was a fatal mistake.’
“He paused and stared moodily at my fire. I was much more in sympathy with Mr. Spencer now.
“ ‘Well, to get over an unpleasant business as quickly as possible, we began to drift apart pretty fast. I still loved her to distraction — in a way; but we both had tempers and she led me the devil of a dance, and it was cat and dog half the time. When I bought this place in Devorset she kicked at living there permanently — too slow for her. She’d stay for some months and we’d have house parties and so on, and then back to town again. And then all of a sudden she quite changed round. Perfectly agreeable to living all the year in the country she became now, so we gave up our flat in town and settled in Devorset; even though it meant her being quite a good bit by herself, for I generally had to spend part of my week in town on business.’
“ ‘Then, like a thunderclap, came the suspicion that there was something behind this change of tune. One needn’t go into all the details, but several little things made me morally certain that Elise was being unfaithful to me. We were having worse rows than usual at that time, and in one shindy I charged her with it. In order to hit me back hard she actually admitted it!’
“Spencer was quite carried away by his own story by this time, and I could judge exactly the kind of dangerous revengeful man he was.
“ ‘The only question was, who was the man? And there couldn’t be any question about that either. Wickley was the only possibility!’
“ ‘Ah!’ I exclaimed, and he looked at me sharply. ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘I begin to see the position now.’
“I saw it a lot clearer than he had any notion of. This of course accounted for Wickley’s first mystery — the unexplained hatred that Spencer showed for his neighbour.
“ ‘There could be no doubt about it,’ said he. ‘He was the only man in the neighbourhood of our own position in life whom we knew in the very least intimately. And he lived inside of two miles from us. Six miles away there was a fat fellow of fifty with a wife and large family — a dull bore of a fellow. Seven miles away were two maiden ladies. Nine miles away was an invalid of seventy. Those were the only alternatives, and we scarcely ever saw any of them. Besides, I had grown more and more convinced that Wickley had something shady in the background. I knew him now to be a blackguard!’