Miss Silver coughed. She could not possibly approve such sentiments, but like Miss Falconer she could not feel that this was the moment to say so.
“Did she say anything which would lead you to suppose that she knew of an attempt on the part of Flaxman to blackmail Mr. Trent?”
Humphreys lifted one of his big square hands and let it fall again upon his knee.
‘That she did, ma’am! Said as how Flaxman told her he’d as good as come into a gold mine. And when she arst him what he meant by that, he up and laughed and said it was just a little bit of something he knew, and maybe there was some that would pay good money for him to keep a still tongue about it.”
Miss Silver had become very grave indeed.
“To blackmail a criminal is an extremely dangerous thing. When that criminal is quite possibly a murderer, the attempt may very well prove fatal. A person who has killed once will not feel the same reluctance to kill again. If he has killed twice without incurring suspicion, his conscience will have become indurated and he will be in a dangerous state of self-confidence.”
“Too clever by half-that’s what he’ll be thinking he is-thinking he’s diddled everyone, and putting the blame on my poor Tom! Tom’s pruning-knife, that’s what they say as that Flaxman was stabbed with. But there’s other pruning-knives aside of Tom’s, and here’s what I found in my potting-shed.” He pulled a newspaper parcel out of his pocket and spread it open across his knees. The light shone down on a knife with a sharp, bright edge. “ ’Tis my knife certain sure, but I keeps it on the shelf, and ’twasn’t there. ’Twas shoved in with a lot of old muck where I’d never keep nothing as has got an edge on it same as this. What ’tracted my ’tention to it was the way there was a fly a-buzzing round the thing. These warm days we’ve had there’s been one or two of ’em about, but ’twasn’t natural the way that fly kept a-buzzing round this here knife. So I takes a look, and there’s a brown smear right up by the handle, and what with the fly and the colour of it, it come to me as it was blood.” He pointed with a horny finger. “There, ma’am, you can see for yourself! The blade it was clean enough-looked to me as if it had been pushed into the earth to clean it. But right up by the handle there’s the stain. So I thinks about they fingerprints as the police is so set on, and I wraps it up in a bit of paper and I brings it along. And maybe you’ll tell me what I’m to do with it, ma’am.”
He sat there with the newspaper across his knees and the bright edge of the knife under the light.
Without any hesitation at all Miss Silver said, “You must take it to the police, Mr. Humphreys.”
CHAPTER 29
It was next morning that Ione Muir betook herself down the drive and along the village street to Miss Falconer’s cottage. After three sleepless nights she had come to a point from which she felt that she could not go on. Geoffrey and Jacqueline Delauny who had certainly been his mistress once whatever she was now! And Geoffrey so frank about the whole thing-or should the word be plausible? An old affair which ought never to have been, but all quite over and done with now. Anything she had overheard the fruit of a temporary hysterical breakdown. So why not let the dead past bury its dead? She didn’t know whether she believed him or not. She didn’t even know whether she ought to try to believe him. The matters involved were too weighty. She had no scales to weigh them in. The balance could tip too violently, too dangerously, for her handling.
On the one side, and in the light of that whispered conversation in the fog, that near escape from death in Wraydon, could it be safe for Allegra to go on living in the house with the woman who had demanded so passionately of Geoffrey Trent, “If you were free, would you marry me?… You were in love with me once, and you could be again. Try-and see!… I can give you your heart’s desire-not me nor any other woman, but the Ladies’ House! You won’t get it without me… You may do your damnedest but you won’t!” A bait and a threat, and a woman who thought her own heart’s desire might be within her grasp. “If you were free-” And in what way was he to be free? Ione had the same thought as Frank Abbott-how easy to say that a morphia addict had somehow contrived to get hold of an overdose? Matter heavy enough to weigh a scale down into the depths!
And on the other side herself as the home-wrecker, dragging up a dead and gone affair out of Geoffrey’s past to thrust between him and Allegra and shatter their marriage. Whichever way you looked at it, the tipping of the scale could so easily be fraught with disaster. As she pressed the electric bell which supplemented Miss Falconer’s old-fashioned knocker she was, in fact, in that state of mind which had brought Miss Silver so many of her clients. She no longer felt that she could go on alone.
It was Miss Silver herself who opened the door. Miss Falconer had gone out to visit a blind woman, and her very efficient daily was busy in the kitchen. Ione was taken into the pleasant living-room and ensconced in a comfortable chair. Since it was no use beating about the bush, she came directly to the point, and a very interesting point Miss Silver found it. She listened with profound attention to a description of the shaft in the wall between the study and the sitting-room next door.
“I suppose I really should not have listened, but I am afraid I would do it again. You see, Jacqueline Delauny was speaking, and the very first words I heard her say were ‘Oh, Geoffrey, my darling!’ ”
In the course of her professional career Miss Silver had frequently been obliged to draw a distinction between the code of a gentlewoman and the duty owed by a detective to her client. Repugnant as it might be to her feelings to listen to a private conversation, she had quite often felt obliged to do so, and where it was a question of a life to be saved, an innocent person cleared, or a criminal brought to justice, she had no compunction in the matter. She therefore diffused a very comforting atmosphere of approval as she said,
“Pray proceed, Miss Muir.”
Ione proceeded.
When she had heard everything Miss Silver looked very grave indeed.
“Certainly Miss Delauny should go,” she said. “It is not at all suitable that she should be there.”
Ione had to suppress a laugh. Suitability and Jacqueline Delauny were by now such poles apart!
“Geoffrey won’t send her away. He says it isn’t fair. The whole thing has been over and done with for years, and if she had this outburst, it was because she was so overdone and upset about Margot.” She changed colour and hurried a little over her next sentence. “He just digs his toes in and says how wonderful she was with Margot, and how good she is with Allegra. And how difficult it would be to replace her. Of course that is just what he would say if there was something between them. But at the same time, isn’t it just what a decent man would say if he was speaking the truth and didn’t think it fair to send Jacqueline away for an old affair which was just as much his fault as hers? You know, the time I came nearest to believing him was when he stuck it out that he was fond of her. He kept saying she had been so wonderful with Margot, and he really did sound as if he meant it.” She propped her chin in her hand and gazed at Miss Silver out of those big eyes of hers. “But of course that is what the really first-class liar does-he sounds as if he was telling the truth.”
Miss Silver had a new grey stocking on her needles. Johnny’s three pairs had been completed, and this was the first of Derek’s. She was knitting in her usual smooth and rapid manner, her hands low in her lap, and her attention apparently entirely given to Ione.
“Miss Muir, I do not think that you have told me everything.”
“What do you mean, Miss Silver?”
She received the smile with which Miss Silver had been wont to encourage the backward pupil.