Abrahams' face was a mixture of fear and surprise. He ducked away but Solar Pons brought him down with a well aimed kick behind the knee. He gave a howl of pain and then Jamison was on him and I heard the click of handcuffs.
There was an instant hubbub as all the people in the theatre gathered round. Pons looked at Hardcastle's shaken features and from him to the blazing eyes of Dolly Richmond.
"We cannot talk here, gentlemen. I suggest we leave the explanations until a more private occasion."
"This whole thing is ridiculous!" broke in Sandra Stillwood imperiously. "I demand to know the charges."
"Murder and attempted murder will do to be going on with," said Pons.
6
"You will remember, Parker," said Solar Pons, blowing out a streamer of blue smoke toward the ceiling of our sitting room at 7B Praed Street, "you will remember that when Elijah Hardcastle first called me in I continually spoke of an outside menace threatening the actor. There was a very good reason for that."
I looked at my companion in amazement.
"You suspected Mrs. Hardcastle and the secretary from the beginning, Pons!”
"Hardly that," Solar Pons corrected me. "But from the very nature of the sinister incidents surrounding the family I knew it had to be very close to him indeed. The person who was sending the parcels had to know his movements intimately; even what plays he was in and the theatres where they were being presented. Furthermore, the model work was done with such skill and the whole thing planned with such sadistic pleasure that it immediately directed my mind to three things."
"Three things, Mr. Pons?"
Inspector Jamison screwed up his eyes as he stared at my companion in puzzlement from the other side of the table. It was the following day and both Sandra Stillwood and the secretary had made a full confession before being committed to cells to await a court hearing. Jamison had just come from Scotland Yard to join us for lunch and now we were enjoying coffee and liqueurs while Pons explained his reasoning.
He stabbed the air with the stem of his pipe to emphasize the points.
"Firstly, the models were so exquisite that they indicated a high degree of skill on the part of the modeler. This was so unusual that the perpetrator should not have been too difficult to trace. Secondly, the way the whole affair was planned — both to warn and terrify the victim — indicated great hatred. They say murder begins at home and I at once began to look at Hardcastle's domestic circumstances."
"And the third thing?"
My companion looked at me quizzically.
"Hatred, subtlety and the atmosphere of a cat playing with a mouse. I saw a woman's hand at every turn. I was assisted in my deductions almost immediately after our arrival. It had not escaped my attention that Elijah Hardcastle was hardly the ideal husband, to borrow another theatrical allusion. His numerous affairs and the scandals concerning his various mistresses were the talk of the town. His attractive wife, Sandra Stillwood, was a fiery, jealous and impetuous woman as one has only to see from the public newspapers.
"I knew she would be the last person to stand for such treatment. Furthermore, Hardcastle was a wealthy man. I already had two good motives for his death; jealousy and greed. I looked for a further ingredient, for I knew that no ordinary skills were involved. Assuming Hardcastle's wife to be the prime mover, then she had to have an accomplice. The secretary was an obvious starting point for my assumption. He was good-looking and had not been with Hardcastle all that long. In a brief conversation with Mrs. Hardcastle I learned that she had herself introduced him to the household."
"Remarkable," Jamison mumbled.
Solar Pons chuckled.
"Elementary, my dear Jamison. So far nothing but logical deduction and simple observation. But I also saw a number of glances pass between Mrs. Hardcastle and the secretary. Such things are unmistakable to the trained observer. I rapidly came to the conclusion that she and Abrahams were lovers."
"And you let me go on thinking that Dolly Richmond or her husband might have been responsible," I grumbled.
"Not at all, Parker," said Solar Pons sharply. "Those were entirely your own completely unjustified assumptions. You were working altogether on the wrong premises. Oh, there were other suspects enough in the circle surrounding the couple, I give you. But the thing was crystal clear to me almost from the beginning. Method and motive were the things to, which I now applied my attention. I was convinced that I had seen Abrahams before and that he was not in the Hardcastle household under his own name.
"The face seemed familiar and when I returned to London I applied myself to my newspaper clippings. I soon found what I was looking for, though the name beneath the photograph was that of Cedric Venner. He was a somewhat obscure artist and stage designer who had been given a London exhibition some years ago. The photograph in my file showed him with a beautiful model of a stage set and it became obvious that his was the skilled hand responsible for the gruesome little tableaux dispatched to my client. And it was he, of course, who put the corrosive on the chandelier cable during the performance of The Hound of the Baskervilles."
Pons blew out a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling and turned to the inspector.
"All this was, of course, by way of suspicion and not at all conclusive. I had to trap the pair in the act and that required some finesse. In the meantime I telephoned Inspector Jamieson, Parker, and he put some inquiries in hand. He found that Venner had disappeared from his London studio some months ago and when I put the dates together I found that his disappearance coincided with the employment of Hardcastle's new secretary."
"But would not your retention by Hardcastle put them on their guard, or at least make them abandon their plan, Pons?" I put in.
"Ordinarily, yes. But I was relying on two factors. The first was by putting the couple completely off their guard. I gave it out that I expected any danger to come on the opening night. Therefore, as I conjectured, they moved their murder attempt forward to the final dress rehearsal. And secondly, I also made it plain by my conversation and actions that I believed the menace to come from someone outside the family. I had given a great deal of thought to the method of murder and felt that as the warning and the method had always differed they might for the actual attempt again try the bow and arrow."
"Why was that, Mr. Pons?"
"It was silent, swift and sure and they had a ready method by which they could get close to the intended victim. I had seen enough of the Hardcastles at close quarters to realize that Sandra Stillwood and Venner were very much in love with one another and that Mrs. Hardcastle's hatred, jealousy and greed in equal proportions would be enough to keep her fixed in her murderous course, despite my presence on the scene."
"But what about the parcels?" I put in. "They arrived from distant places when Mrs. Hardcastle was with her husband. And she was in the play with him tonight."
Solar Pons shook his head.
"We shall find nothing difficult about that. Venner stayed in Surrey on numerous occasions, to take care of Hardcastle's business affairs. All the parcels were posted in London. Nothing simpler than for him to come up to post them; it is only half an hour's journey by train. As to Mrs. Hardcastle's part in the plot, I had noticed from perusal of Hardcastle's scripts that she was always offstage when these murderous incidents occurred. Last night her final appearance was some twenty minutes before Hardcastle's strangulation on stage. Ample time for her to retire to her dressing room, disguise herself as one of the musicians with the steel bow concealed in the violin case and take her place at the far end of the orchestra, in the shadows. It took some daring but it was quite simple."