'Sir Henry and I have been associates for a good many years, Dr Hume,' I said truthfully.
He looked interested. 'You are not appearing in the case, though?'
'No.'
'H'm, yes. May I ask (strictly between ourselves) what you think of this unfortunate business?'
'Oh, he'll be acquitted undoubtedly.'
There was a silence. Only the firelight illumined this room; the day had turned black and windy. What effect I was having in pursuing my instructions to 'spread a little mysterious disquiet' I could not tell. But Dr Hume thoughtlessly took a pair of black-ribboned eye-glasses out of his waistcoat pocket, fitted them on his nose with some care, and looked at me.
'Guilty but insane, you mean?'
'Sane and not guilty.'
'But that's preposterous I Utterly preposterous! The boy is mad. Why, his evidence about the whisky alone -I beg your pardon; I suppose I really shouldn't be discussing this. I believe they expect to call me as a witness this afternoon. By the way, I always had an impression that witnesses were herded together and kept under surveillance like jurymen; but I learn that this is so only in some cases. The prosecution does not think this is one of them, considering that the - er - issue is so clear.'
'If you're a witness for the prosecution, Uncle Spencer,' said the girl, 'will they let you say Jimmy is crazy?'
'Probably not, my dear; but I shall manage to suggest it I owe you that much, at least.' Again he looked at me meaningly. 'Now see here, Mr Blake. I quite appreciate your position. I know you want to give Mary all the comfort you can, and keep her spirits up at a time of great trial. But to encourage false hopes is - confound it, sir, it's heartless! That's what I said: heartless, and there's no other word for it. Just remember, Mary, that your poor old father is lying out there, dead and murdered and under ground; and that will be all the support you need.' He allowed a pause, after which he consulted his watch. 'I must be getting on,' he added briskly.' "Time and tide wait for no man," as they say. Er - by the way, Mary, did I understand you to be talking some nonsense about my brown tweed suit, that old suit?'
She was sitting on the fender-seat, her hands clasped round her knees. Now she looked up briefly.
'It was a very good suit, Uncle Spencer. It cost twelve guineas. And you want to get it back, don't you?'
He regarded her with concern. 'Now there, Mary, is a fine example of the way people will catch at trifles at a time of - of bereavement! Good Lord, my dear, why are you so concerned over that suit? I've told you I sent it to the cleaner's. Naturally, afterwards, I was not concerned with an old golf-suit when there were so many other things to think of! I simply neglected to call for it, and it's still at the cleaner's, so far as I know.'
'Oh! '
'You understand that, do you, my dear?'
‘Yes,' she said. 'Did you send it to the cleaner's with the ink-pad and the rubber stamps still in the pocket? And what about the Turkish slippers?'
There would seem nothing in this calculated to disturb anyone, though it was not very intelligible. But Dr Hume removed his eye-glasses and put them back into his pocket At the same time. I noticed that the draperies at the doorway had stirred, and a man was looking through. The light was not strong enough to see him welclass="underline" he appeared to be a thin man with white hair and a nondescript face: but one hand was holding to a fold of the curtain, and seemed to be twisting it.
‘I suppose I must have done so, my dear,' said Dr Hume, in such an altered voice that it was like the sudden grip of that hand on the curtain. Yet he was trying to speak lightly. ‘I shouldn't trouble about it, if I were you. They are honest people, these cleaners. Well, well, I must be getting along. Er -? Oh, I beg your pardon. This is Dr Tregannon, a friend of mine.' 1
The man in the doorway dropped his hand and bowed slightly.
'Dr Tregannon is a mental specialist,' explained the other, smiling. 'Well, I still must be getting along. Good day, Mr Blake. Don't stuff up Mary's head with nonsense, and don't let her do the same thing to you. Try to get some sleep this afternoon, my dear. I'll give you some medicine to-night, and it will make you forget all your troubles. "Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care," doesn't Shakespeare say? Yes. Quite so. Good day.'
VI
'A Piece of Blue Feather'
THE man in the witness-box of Court-room Number One, Central Criminal Court, had a large and confident voice. He was in the middle of a sentence when I came creeping in.
‘and so, of course, I thought of the ink-pad. Like "precautions to take before the doctor comes", you know. Only this was a policeman.'
Mr Randolph Fleming was a large, burly man with a stiff red moustache which forty years ago would have been remarkable even in the Guards. He had a bearing of the same sort, and was not abashed. With the darkening of the day, the concealed lights under the cornices of the oak panelling threw a theatrical glow up over its white dome. But, crawling in some minutes after proceedings had begun, I thought not so much of a theatre as a church.
Evelyn glowered at me, and then whispered excitedly: 'Sh'hl He's just confirmed all Dyer said about finding the body, up to the time Answell swore he had taken a drugged drink; and they found none of the whisky or the soda had been tapped. Sh-h! What was the blonde like?'
I shushed her in reply, for heads were turning towards us, and that mention of an ink-pad had caught me. Mr Randolph Fleming took a deep breath, expanding his chest, and looked round the court with interest. His enormous vitality seemed to enliven counsel. Fleming's large face was somewhat withered, with a pendulous jowl dominated by .the stiff red moustache; his eyelids were wrinkled, and the eyes very sharp. You felt that there should be a monocle in one of them, or some sort of helmet on his stiff brown hair. At intervals in the questioning - when there was a cessation of movement like the clogging of a motion-picture film - he would study the judge, study the barristers, and look up to study the people in the gallery. When he spoke, Fleming's jowl moved in and out like a bull-frog's.
Huntley Lawton was examining.
'Explain what you mean about the ink-pad, Mr Fleming.'
'Well, it was like this,' answered the witness, drawing in his jowl as though he were trying to smell the flower in the button-hole of his pepper-and-salt suit. 'When we had looked at the sideboard and seen that the decanter and the syphon were both full, I said to the prisoner, I said - pause, as though for consideration - ' "Why don't you be a man and admit you did it? Look at that arrow over there," I said. "You can see there are finger-prints there; and they'll be yours, won't they?"'
'What did he say to that?'
'Nothing. Ab-so-lutely nothing I Consequently, I thought of taking his finger-prints. I'm a practical man; always have been; that's how I came to think of it. I said to Dyer that if we had an ink-pad - you know the sort of thing: one of those little pads that you press rubber stamps on - we could get a good clear set. He said that Dr Hume had just recently bought some rubber stamps and an ink-pad, and that they were upstairs in one of the doctor's suits. He remembered because he had intended to take the stamps out in case they soiled the pocket, so he offered to go upstairs and fetch -'
‘We quite understand, Mr Fleming. Did you get the ink-pad and take the prisoner's finger-prints?'
The witness, who had been thrusting out his neck with earnestness, seemed ruffled at the interruption.
'No, sir, we did not. That is, not that particular ink-pad. Dyer couldn't find the suit, it seems, or it wasn't there. But he did manage to fish up an ofd one from the desk, in violet ink, and we got a set of the prisoner's finger-prints on a piece of paper.'