I looked at him with some curiosity. He was smoking furiously - the outburst being produced, I think, by relief. His chief witness had left Sir Walter Storm flat, without a rebuttal in the Attorney-General's nimble brain.
'You don't make a religion of that, do you?' I asked. 'For if you think that things in general are all banded together in a conspiracy to administer a celestial kick in the pants, you might as well retire to Dorset and write novels.'
'Y'see,' said H.M., with ghoulish amusement, 'that goes to show that the only sort of cussedness you can imagine is the kind that lands you in the soup. Like the Greek tragedies where the gods get a twist on some poor feller and he's never got a chance. You want to say: "Hey, fair play I - take a few wallops at him if you must, but don't load the dice so far that the feller can't even go out in a London fog without coram' home with sunstroke." No, son. Everything works both ways, especially cussedness. Cussedness got Answell into this affair, and the same sort of workin' principle handed me the way to get him out of it. The point is that you'll never explain it rationally -as Walt Storm would like to do. Call the whole process by any fancy name you like: call it destiny or Mansoul or the flexibility of the unwritten Constitution: but it's still cussedness.
'Take this case, for instance,' he argued, pointing with his cigar. 'As soon as that girl came to me, I saw what must have happened. You probably did too, when you heard the evidence. Jim Answell had got the wrong message and walked straight into the middle of a scheme designed to nobble Our Reginald. But neither Answell nor the Hume gal could realize that at first. They were too.
close to it; you can't see a piece of grit in your own eye. They only knew the grit was there. But when I sort of dragged the whole story out of her a month ago, and showed what must 'a' happened, it was too late - the case was up for trial. If she had gone to 'em then, they wouldn't have believed her: just as Walt Storm quite honestly and sincerely didn't believe her to-day.' He sniffed.
'But what the blazes, I ask you, was the girl goin' to think at first? She hears her father is dead. She comes home. She finds her fiancé alone with him in a space locked up like a strong-room, with his finger-prints on the arrow and everything pointin" straight to him. How is she goin' to suspect a frame-up against him? How is she goin' to connect it with Our Reginald, unless someone points it out to her?'
'And that somebody was you?'
'Sure. That was the position when I first began to sit and think about the case. Of course, it was clear that old Avory Hume himself had arranged that little bit of hocus-pocus with intent to deceive Our Reginald. You heard it all. He kept ringin' up the flat as early as nine in the morning - though right in the middle of Answell's original statement to the police is the news that Hume knew he wouldn't arrive until 10.45.He gave the cook and the housemaid an unexpected night off. He ordered the shutters in the study to be closed, so that nothin' could be seen. He called the butler's attention to the fact that there was a full decanter of whisky and a full syphon on the sideboard. He bolted the door of the study on the inside, when Answell was alone with him. He sang put the words loud enough for the butler to hear, "What's wrong with you? Have you gone mad?" That was a blunder. For, if you assume Answell really had drunk hocused whisky, no host in the world would ever naturally say: "Have you gone mad?" when he saw a feller topplin' into unconsciousness. He'd say: "Don't you feel well?" or "Are you ill?" or even: "Drunk, hey?"
'Granted, then, that Avory Hume was putting up some game. What did he intend to do? He intended to shut Our Reginald's mouth; but he didn't mean to offer money. Do we know anything about Our Reginald that might give an indication? I got it from the gal - as you tell me you overheard it to-day. Don't we know, for instance, that there was insanity in Reginald's branch of the family?'
For some time there had been in my mind a very vivid memory, of voices rising above the sound of feet shuffling down the stairs of the Old Bailey. Reginald Answell and Dr Hume were descending together; and between them there was a thick hypocrisy for the common good, with an edge of malice showing through. Reginald Answell had made the thrust, as though casually: 'There is insanity in our family, you know. Nothing much. Only like a touch of the tar-brush a few generations back -'
'But enough for the purpose,' continued H.M. 'Oh, quite enough. I wonder what those two chaps were thinking about then? Each of them knowin' the truth; but both
of them ruddy well goin' to keep their mouths shut. In any case, let's go on. There's insanity in Reginald's family. And Avory Hume's brother is a doctor. And a very rummy kind of drug must have been required for the purpose.
And one of Spencer Hume's closest pals is a Dr Tregannon, a mental specialist, who's got a private nursing home. And it takes two doctors to certify -'
'And so, as we know, they were going to lock Reginald up as a lunatic,' I said. H.M. wrinkled his forehead.
'Well, there at the start, I was only considerin' the evidence,' he pointed out, putting the cigar in his mouth and sucking at it in the fashion of a child sucking a peppermint-stick. 'But it looked probable that Avory and Spencer Hume had arranged just that game. Let's see how I the hocus-pocus would have worked out. It's true they made a howlin' error and got Jim instead of Reginald. But did that affect the details as we found 'em? Let's see.
'Reginald is to be invited to the house. Why might he, with insanity in his family, be presumed to go off his rocker? That's easy. He was known to be pretty well tied up with Mary Hume; even Jim Answell knew that.'
'Did he know about the photographs?' enquired Evelyn, with interest.
'Ho ho,' said H.M. 'The photographs. No, he didn't know it at the time; he knew it afterwards, in clink -because I told him. It caused me an awful lot of trouble. Jim Answell is no posturin' young hero who'd walk fat-headedly to the rope rather than let it be known his gal had been havin’ an affair with another man. But that wasn't it. When it came to the question of the pictures, he couldn't - literally and physically couldn't - say all that in court, to be blurted out across the world. He couldn't do it to save his life. Could you?'
'I don't know,' I admitted, with visions which must have risen up before Answell. 'The more you think about it the more devilish it sounds.'
'She could, though,' said H.M. with great glee. 'That's why I like her: she's a perfectly sincere and natural gal. A nosegay also goes to the judge. When Balmy Rankin made that remark about this not bein' a court of morals - burn me, I almost got up and handed him a box of cigars. Thirty years I've been waitin' for a red judge to acknowledge the facts of life without comment; and I told you I had great faith in Balmy. But stop interruptin' me, dammit I I was telling you about the trick to nobble Our Reginald.
'Where was I? Ah, I got it. Well, it was known Reginald and Mary Hume were tied up together. It was also known he had no money at all, and that Avory Hume had squashed to earth any possibility of marriage. And then his rich cousin James gets engaged to her. And Reginald comes to see the old man - and goes berserk.
'You see the plan Avory had? High words are overheard. Presently witnesses (unprepared witnesses) come chasin' in. They find Reginald with his own gun in his
pocket - suggestin' violence. They find his finger-prints stamped on an arrow which has been so obviously (so blinkin' obviously) ripped down from the wall - suggest-in’ violence of a more than sane kind. They find his hair rumpled, his tie pulled out. They find Avory Hume with all the marks of a struggle on him. And what does Reginald himself say to all this, lookin' wild and a little stupid as though he don't know where he is? He says he's been given a drug, and all this is a frame-up. But here's a medical man to swear there's been no drug taken, and the spotless decanter full of whisky on the sideboard. Short of actually showin' the chap with straws stuck in his hair, I don't see what more could have been arranged.