“Well, my dear, that’s that! This case—” he placed the dispatch case by the side of the huge open hearth “—contains a few purely personal knicknacks you might like to keep. I’ll leave it.” He got up to go.
“Will you be caught, Harold?”
“Yes, I think so. Someone will bring them to this cottage, and then they’re bound to find me. I wish I could have seen Aileen.”
“If they come here I shall do everything I can to put them off. You may say you do not wish me to make sacrifices on your behalf. I am thinking of Aileen and — frankly — my public, small though it is. If you are tried, and if you give your reason for — doing what you did — the scandal will hurt us both. I want to do everything we can both do — to ensure your escape.”
Three quarters of a mile away, the village police sergeant was advising Scotland Yard of the existence of the seventeenth century cottage, known as Whiddon Cottage, identical in appearance with that in the published picture.
There are more seventeenth century cottages in England than many Englishmen would believe. By midday, local police had reported eighty, of which thirty-three were “possibles.” By the end of the week, the grand total for all Britain stood at one hundred and seventy-three “possibles.”
In sorting, three features beside the cottage itself were deemed essentiaclass="underline" oaks on left of cottage; contiguous, sloping meadow; brook from which it would be possible for an animal, such as a cow, to drink. Sixty of the hundred and seventy-three contained these essentials. But the balance included cottages, of the correct period and dimensions, whose oaks had been felled, whose meadow had been built over, whose brook had been diverted.
Within a week, the sixty “probables” had been inspected, without noteworthy result. In another fortnight, the balance of “possibles” had been eliminated. Detective Inspector Karslake felt that he had been handed a raw deal.
Within twenty-four hours identification of the cottage had become the solitary line of investigation. The comb had been run through all Henshawk’s business and social acquaintances. The telegram to Mrs. Henshawk had been telephoned from a call box at the Redmoon Restaurant. This started new hope — until a client reported that he had lunched there with Henshawk, who had excused himself for a few minutes before lunch in order to telephone.
At the end of the month the Press, somewhat grudgingly, complied with the request to reprint the photograph of the model and the police appeal. They helped its newsvalue and at the same time got their own back by writing up the absurdity of such a cottage being untraceable. The comic artists were allowed free play. There was a rather unkind picture of a cow goggling at a model of Scotland Yard on an outstretched palm.
In short, Karslake was unable to advance in any direction. At the end of April the case was allowed to drift into the Department of Dead Ends.
By its very nature it was impossible for the Department to originate any investigation. Cases sent there were, in effect, put into cold storage against the chance of some other case accidentally criss-crossing, the chance of some unrelated circumstance happening to throw a sidelight.
A day or so after the statuette of Henshawk, the model under its glass dome, and the empty picture frame had been sent to Detective Inspector Rason, Karslake made a perfunctory inquiry and received a somewhat voluble answer.
“Well, sir, since you ask me, I think that, instead of looking for the cottage, we ought to have looked for that cow.”
It was a dangerous moment, for there had been a comic picture in the Daily Record rather in that sense.
“I mean, I think there’s something funny about this case — something psychological, if you understand me.”
“I don’t,” said Karslake.
“There’s that remark in the girl’s statement about what he calls ‘that damned cow.’ Why was it a ‘damned’ cow? And why should it spoil the whole thing? A cow is just what you’d look for in those surroundings. You’d miss it if it wasn’t there. Now, suppose that man had been frightened by a cow when he was very little — too young to remember? All his life, though he doesn’t know why—”
“Now look here, Rason, if you talk to the Press with a tale of a man frightened of cows, there’ll be trouble good and hot, and all of it for you.”
“I was thinking of the mental hospitals—”
“So was I — only I don’t mean what you mean. It’s facts we want, Rason. And if you’re lucky enough to find any, then we’ll fix ’em up with a theory.”
Lucky enough! Rason’s past successes in linking apparently unconnected events, in perceiving method in that which seemed blind chance, had never earned him a pat on the back for anything but his “luck.” Even when he found Harold Ledlaw, Karslake ungenerously asserted that success was thrown into his lap solely because he chanced to go to a particular picture theatre on a particular night with his sister-in-law.
He had invited his niece, whom he regarded, since his brother’s death, as an honorary daughter; but her mother had come instead.
They had arrived too early and were afflicted with a “short,” advertising a breakfast food, in which a spirit voice whispered to a young wife that her husband could not do a hard day’s work on just tea or coffee. What, therefore, should she put in his cup, held in a slender bejeweled hand? Trick photography then showed a huge cow galloping into the picture and leaping into the breakfast cup.
“Sorry, Meg,” said Rason. “I’ve got to go.”
“Why, George, what is it?”
“That damned cow!” chuckled Rason, and left her.
That was not luck, in Karslake’s sense. The whole of Scotland Yard might have seen that film without learning anything from its apparent irrelevance. But it was lucky that Ledlaw happened to be at Whiddon Cottage when Rason took Karslake there — though they would have caught him just the same if he had been elsewhere.
The day after his visit to Whiddon, Ledlaw had met his daughter. They had met as strangers and had approved of each other. When a month had gone by and the chances of his escape now seemed overwhelming, Mrs. Ledlaw consented to another meeting.
After the failure of the second Press campaign, Ledlaw was convinced that the trail was utterly lost, and Mrs. Ledlaw concurred. He reasoned that, if the police ever succeeded in finding the cottage, they would inevitably reach him through Mrs. Ledlaw. Therefore he risked nothing by taking his daughter home — which he did one evening in June. The efficient domesticity he witnessed awakened dormant longings.
“I have been thinking, Ruth,” he said at the end of June, “that if anything were to happen — not that we need fear it now — but if it were to happen, you would be in a dangerous position for having shielded me. You would certainly go to prison. But if we were married, you could successfully plead that you acted under my domination — absurd, my dear, though it may sound.”
On the understanding that it was to be a marriage of companionship only and on the further understanding that he would take steps to pursue his profession of engineering, Mrs. Ledlaw re-married him on July 11th.
By this time he had long lost all sense of peril. Indeed his crime, when he thought of it, seemed no more than a bad dream, of which the details were already blurred.
In August there was a strike at the engineering works, leaving nothing for the supervising engineer to do. So Ledlaw was pottering in the garden when the car containing the detectives arrived towards the end of the morning. Mrs. Ledlaw, hearing the car, came out of the cottage.