Apparently it had none. Isolate himself as he might, no message shot tingling across his mind. And, besides, Mrs. Wallace, the charwoman, was talking volubly.
“The room was lit and the curtains drawn as though it was still night, and there was the poor gentleman sprawled across the table, and gore—you wanted to be a butcher born, you did, not to feel sickish. Then I screamed and ran out of the room.”
It was not wonderful to Mr. Ricardo that she should feel sickish. He conceived that if his mind had been less alert, he might have felt a trifle sickish himself. Upon his right hand were two french windows opening on to a green and pleasant garden with the great meadow beyond a low hedge. Although birds sang no more, rooks wheeled and cawed about one of the oaks and, as the branches swayed, the sun threw an ever-changing pattern of draperies upon the grass. An idyllic place where lovers could be quiet-like together—especially at night with the curtains drawn and an aromatic log fire burning on the hearth. Now the small table was pushed forward, and blood had splashed even on the enamelled wall and coagulated in what seemed an enormous pool upon the carpet. A blotting-book bound in a buhl cover, ornamented with mother-of-pearl, had tumbled off the table and stood on its edges, like a child’s tent, on the rim of the dried pool. Beside it were the splinters of a broken wineglass. Mr. Ricardo could almost see the heavy figure of the man slumped over the table and the right arm flung forward just over the spot where a cardboard cover had been placed to mark the position. where the knife had fallen.
The table stood close to the fireplace with a chair, against the wall behind it, in which Horbury had been sitting. It was small and there should have been, one would have thought, letters, papers of some sort, scattered upon the floor. For a fountain pen with its nib exposed had peeped out beneath his arm.
“There were no papers,” Inspector Herbert explained. “It struck me as curious.”
The Superintendent walked to the fireplace and, going down on his knees, poked amongst the ashes. Then he sat back upon his heels. “Yes, it’s curious,” he said slowly. “If he burnt papers, he did it thoroughly. There’s nothing here but an old butt of a cigar. He must have tossed that into the fire, and then put an end to everything.”
Hanaud, for his part, was more concerned with the appointments of the room. The table at which Horbury had sat was on the further side of the fireplace from the door, and still further along the wall, in the corner, a cushioned chair with arms was placed. It looked diagonally across the room towards the door, and the cushion at the back of it was crumpled. A long table stood against the wall running between that corner and the windows. Opposite to the fireplace was a sofa with a back, and upon that, too, there were cushions which had been disarranged. At the end of it a round mahogany table was placed, and on it was a glass half full of champagne.
“It seems that at one moment Madame Horbury sat here with her glass of champagne at her elbow and, as that good woman tells us,” Hanaud said with a g1ance towards the charwoman, “she took no more of it than she usually did. And there upon the floor are the splinters of Horbury’s glass. But why should Horbury, of all men, have put the bottle back in the cupboard?”
Superintendent Maltby nodded his head. “We don’t want to make difficulties for ourselves, do we?” To him this was a plain case of suicide by a man of a very stormy history, who might well have found himself with no option between death or a long term of penal servitude. “These are small matters.”
“Yet there is another. May I again interfere?”
Hanaud was all smiles and deference and entirely at Mister the Superintendent’s disposal. Mister the Superintendent, indeed, was beginning to wonder whether he had been wise to invite this burly Frenchman. But he tried not to show it.
“Of course,” he said. “My dear Hanaud, we know of your painstaking methods. A hair on a coat-sleeve, a key lost or found . . . ”
“Lost or found!” cried Hanaud. “Was ever anything more properly, more profoundly said? My dear Monsieur!”
He walked lightly across the room to the table against the end wall. On it stood a telephone instrument of the modem kind, ear and mouthpiece in one, resting on a cradle, and a dial at the foot of the instrument. But it was not the telephone which had attracted him. Almost, but not quite, behind the machine, something had gleamed.
“Yes, another little matter, and that, too, out of place,” and Monsieur Hanaud was not the man to keep a note of triumph out of his voice. He held up a bunch of keys, picking it up daintily by the ring.
“You will observe that there is a Yale latch-key on the ring. Is not this the bunch of keys which the good Horbury carried on a chain in the pocket of his trousers? Yes? It seems so. Perhaps Mister Herbert will tell us.”
“Them’s his keys,” said Mrs. Wallace. “I’ve seen them over and over.”
Sergeant Hughes, at a nod from Maltby, took the keys and went out of the room. When he returned, he addressed himself to Maltby.
“It is the key of the front door, sir.”
Maltby crossed to the side table and, taking a piece of chalk from his pocket, held it above the spot where Hanaud’s eye had discovered the bunch.
“That the place?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Maltby marked the place and both men stood for a moment in a perplexity. After all, why should Horbury have taken the bunch off the chain on which he usually carried it?
“If the lock of the door had been stiff, for instance,” said Hanaud. “Yes, it would have been easier to turn it:”
“But the lock wasn’t stiff,” replied Hughes. “And why should he put the bunch on the table?”
All three men stared again at the chalk mark on the table. Another little thing. But an unusual thing. And therefore needing explanation.
“It’s certainly odd,” Maltby exclaimed. He turned rather savagely upon the charwoman. “You never saw them off the chain?”
“Never,” she declared. “Cross my thumbs!”
“But it might happen?”
Mrs. Wallace sniggered. “And it might rain pigs and chocolate creams,” she answered, “but it don’t.”
“Of course”—Maltby disregarded the charwoman’s nettled rejoinder—“Horbury might have wanted to telephone. Standing up straight after dialling, the edge of the table may have pressed the bunch into his thigh He may have taken the keys from the spring hook of the chain and tossed them where they fell. A little fanciful?” he asked of Sergeant Hughes, who looked more than a little troubled by this sudden high flight of his superior officer.
“No, sir, not fanciful at all,” he replied, “but”—and he blurted out the uncontroversial fact—“that telephone wasn’t used last night.”
Mrs. Wallace sniggered again. But it was Hanaud who spoke, a little startled perhaps and certainly perplexed.
“I should like to be very sure of that,” he said quietly.
“You may be,” said the Sergeant. “That—well, that handle thing was tested for prints. There wasn’t a mark of any kind upon it.”
“No, and there wouldn’t be,” cried Mrs. Wallace, folding her arms across her body. “Not if it wasn’t used last night. Yesterday morning I dusted it, I did, and when I dusts, I dusts.”
“Did you take the receiver from the cradle?”
“That I did,” she answered. “I holds the spring down, see? With my left hand. Then I takes off the handle thing. Then I slips one of the two telephone books on to them supports to keep them down. Then I dusts the thing thoroughly—earpiece and mouthpiece and all—and slips it back again.”
She contemplated Monsieur Hanaud with an aggressive face, but he answered her with a bow which was quite disarming. “Madame, I do not doubt you for a moment. The whole room is an example for housewives.”
Mrs. Wallace relaxed from her indignation; and the next moment she smiled. For Sergeant Hughes added his tribute of praise.
“That’s true,” he said. “I never saw furniture so clean. There are marks on Mr. Horbury’s chair and table made by him, as we know, and a few on the mantel shelf and the arm of the settee, where Mrs. Horbury sat with her glass of champagne. They correspond with the prints on the telephone in the hall. But, apart from those, nothing at all.”
“Except, perhaps,” Hanaud suggested, “some on the arms of that chair in the corner where the cushion is disarranged?”
Hughes was for the moment taken aback.
“No, sir,” he answered after a pause. “That’s queer, that is. I was here whilst the finger-print men were at work. There were no prints on that chair at all. It may be that the cushion was thrown on to the chair, perhaps by Horbury himself from his chair behind the table.”
It seemed, however, that Hanaud had lost interest in the matter.
“Very likely,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders and a nod of his head. “Little things. As the Superintendent tells us wisely, we must not make too much of them.”
A bell rang in the passage and the knocker rattled upon the outside door.
“It will be the doctor,” said Herbert, and Maltby nodded to the charwoman.
“Will you let him in, please, and then we need not keep you from your duties.”
The charwoman brought into the parlour a minute afterwards a big-boned, loose-limbed man, with a genial, bluff manner, and a suit of dark clothes even looser than his limbs.
“Dr. Claxton,” said the charwoman.
“And very many thanks for your help, Mrs. Wallace,” Maltby said gratefully. “When I ring, will you ask Mrs. Horbury if she is ready to receive us?”
Before Mrs. Wallace was out of the room, Claxton held out to Maltby a narrow longish cardboard box. “The Inspector at the station wanted you to see this.”
Maltby took off the lid and all could see the gleam of a long-bladed knife. Hanaud took a step towards it and Maltby made him an apology.
“I forget my manners. Dr. Claxton, I present you to Monsieur Hanaud of the Paris Sûreté.”
“It is an honour,” returned Dr. Claxton with a keen glance at the Frenchman.
“And Mr. Ricardo,” added Maltby with a wave of the hand a little too careless.
But Dr. Claxton turned with a smile and an extended hand.
“Of Grosvenor Square?” he asked, and lifted Mr. Ricardo into a heaven of delight. He wondered whether, if by any chance he should ever fall ill, it would seem unusual if he were to send to Lordship Lane for a doctor. He had no time to solve this important problem at the moment. For Maltby was kneeling down by that clotted mush of blood on the floor.
“Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” Mr. Ricardo observed, quoting from Macbeth.
“But he wasn’t old,” said Maltby.
“Mr. Ricardo was quoting from a standard case before the days of finger-prints,” said Claxton.
Mr. Ricardo heaved a sigh of pleasure. He had been feeling rather chilly in that room. Even Hanaud had been too engrossed in some troublesome thoughts of his own to keep his friend constantly within the consultation. Now he had an ally.
“By the way,” said Maltby over his shoulder. “The prints on the knife handle?”
“Horbury’s,” said the doctor.
Maltby removed the cover from the blood upon the floor. The shape of the long knife was as clearly moulded in red as if it had been made in a sculptor’s clay. Maltby took his handkerchief from his pocket and carefully lifted the knife from the box. It fitted exactly in the space. To Mr. Ricardo it looked the most murderous of weapons; one side of the blade was thin and sharp as a razor, the other more than usually broad and heavy, as though it had been loaded; and what gave to it a curiously sinister aspect was the pale blue colour of the handle. It was a weapon of death imitating a child’s toy. Even so unimaginative a woman as Mrs. Wallace had noticed especially that gay bright colour—“Cambridge passing under Hammersmith Bridge.”
“One of the occasions, I suppose,” Mr. Ricardo ruminated, “when Oxford had been embarrassed by their long list of wins and didn’t try.”
He did not pursue this engaging topic for Hanaud turned a pursed and frowning face upon the doctor.
“There seems to be no hinge where the blade joins the handle of the knife.”
“There is none.”
Hanaud nodded his head. He glanced sharply at Ricardo and so back again to the doctor.
“I see. South American, do you think?”
The Superintendent once more began to show signs of impatience at Hanaud’s excursions beyond the strict boundaries of this garden-room; and Dr. Claxton drew back from the dangerous game of conjecture.
“No knowledge. No theories,” he announced curtly, and Maltby nodded. “That’s sound. Speculation may be the soul of conversation, but it’s a will o’ the wisp to a Superintendent of Police.”
Hanaud was not at all abashed. He was darting glances on the floor, on the settee, on the mantelshelf, as if he had not heard one word of the rebuke.
“If it is your hat you look for, my friend you left it in the hall,” Maltby continued sweetly, and Inspector Herbert did audibly snigger. Hanaud smiled apologetically.
“My hat? Yes, there he is. He will not run away. But, Inspector, the sheath, he does.”
“Sheath!” Herbert exclaimed.
“To be sure. The knife, since he does not shut himself, will carry himself in a sheath. It was on the body perhaps?”
“No,” said the doctor and “No,” the Inspector agreed. Maltby cried: “There is a drawer in the table at which Horbury sat. We may have overlooked it.”
He went behind the table and pulled out the drawer with a little more violence than it needed.
“No,” he said and he acknowledged Hanaud’s question with a stiff bow. “But it must be somewhere”; and at once everyone in the room began to search for it.
“It might be of soft leather,” said Herbert.
“Or of stiff leather,” said Mr. Ricardo helpfully. He was down on his knees with the Sergeant. They peered under the chairs and tables, they turned up the edges of the carpet, they swung back the window curtains. Maltby picked up the blotting-book, shook it out and replaced it. Hanaud pushed his hand down at the side and the back of the settee. The few things which Herbert had taken from the dead man’s pockets—a small diary, a gold pencil, a few half-crowns, a black letter-case with some pound notes in the partitions, the steel chain with the tab at the end for the trouser-button—were all arranged upon the mantelshelf. But of any protection for that deadly weapon with the blue handle, there was nowhere any sign.
“It is just another of the little things which do perplex me,” said Hanaud, and then the doctor took him up.
“But there is no doubt that this was the knife he used,” he argued. “No shadow of doubt! He had drawn it from left to right across his throat. He had severed the carotid artery. The blood must have burst from it in great gouts, as though it had been pumped. He would have died very quickly.”
“When?” Hanaud asked sharply; and Mr. Ricardo with a jerk drew himself erect.
He knew that here was the question to which Hanaud had been working up from the first moment when he had entered the room. “When?” Just that! All the rest, the small particulars discovered which made suicide a verdict difficult to accept, were the knitting of a pattern to which the answer to his question was the key. He had no wish, as Ricardo knew, to see his small affair of the pearls merging in the ever so much bigger crime of murder. But the plain reason for his life had driven him irresistibly. Murder must be revealed any where, upon whomsoever the blame fell. When did Horbury die then? At what hour? Answer!
The doctor answered:
“It is not always possible to be exact. But within limits one is justified, and in this case Mr. Cornish, a famous surgeon, agreed absolutely with me. We examined the body of Daniel Horbury in the mortuary at ten o’clock this morning and we agreed that death had taken place between ten and twelve hours before.”
“Not after midnight then?”
“Certainly not after midnight,” Doctor Claxton stated firmly, “and not before ten. We cannot be more precise.”
Hanaud’s eyes dropped from the doctor’s face, and he stood so with his eyes on the ground. Then he slipped into an armchair below the fireplace and stared moodily into the ashes. He was not acting. His disarmament was as apparent as his honesty. There was no one in that room who interrupted him, no one indeed who stirred.
“My friend, I beg your pardon,” he said to Maltby very gently. “Yet perhaps, in the end, you will say, ‘That Hanaud! He was the nuisance, but he helped.’”
“I should not say he was the nuisance,” Maltby returned with a smile.
“Although one might think it,” Hanaud answered. “But I will not keep you on the tip-toes. No! I was very anxious yesterday to settle my little dispute with this Horbury. So, on arriving in London by the Continental train, I rang up his office. I did not give my name, bur I said my business was urgent. Horbury was not in his office, but the telephone number of White Barn was given to me. I dined with you, my friend Maltby, and I went home to Grosvenor Square. But I could not sleep. I said to myself, ‘That is a slippery one, that Horbury! How do I know that he has not caught the night train to Rome?’ There are reasons besides why he might. So at half-past two in the morning . . . ”
“Twenty-five minutes to three,” Mr. Ricardo interrupted.
“You heard me?”
“I heard you go down the stairs and call up a number on the telephone, but what number I did not hear.”
“Good! I have the corroboration,” cried Hanaud. “This was the number—White Barn.”
“You called up this house?” exclaimed Maltby.
“I did.”
“At twenty-five minutes to three in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“And you got an answer?”
“I tell you what happened. I got cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck, like a clock. Then that ceased. So someone had lifted the receiver from the cradle. I said ‘It is Mr. Horbury? Excuse please the hour. It is most urgent.’ There was no answer, and I began to wonder whether the receiver had not been lifted just to stop the bell ringing through the house. Then, after a moment or two, I heard a little rattle as the handle was replaced on the spring—and the line went dead.”
Again Hanaud received the tribute of silence. Then the detective-inspector suggested: “Mrs. Horbury perhaps?”
Hanaud shook his head.
“You heard the woman Wallace. There are only two instruments in the house. One in the hall, the other here. On the telephone in the hall, there were old prints of hers and one set—mind, only one set—of Mrs. Horbury’s, made this morning when she rang the police.”
Nobody wished to accept the consequence of his argument. Not even Hanaud himself. He looked at the bright and inviting room with its enamelled walls, its deep cushioned seats, the delicate tracery of the plaster on the ceiling and the long windows opening on to trim lawn and wide meadow, where the sunlight and the oaks played a swiftly-moving game in black and gold.
“So then?” Maltby challenged, himself the first to grasp the nettle.
“So then,” Hanaud repeated, “at half-past two this morning, in this room—perhaps the lamps were lit and the curtains drawn and the fire bright upon the hearth; perhaps the room was dark and the windows open to the shadows and the silver, as now to the shadows and the gold—someone stood by that table and with a covered hand lifted the earpiece, mouthpiece, what you will, and held it,—not to listen to a message, but to stop the call jangling through the house.”
“Some one?” Herbert repeated. “Mrs. Horbury then?”
Hanaud replied thoughtfully: “Yet I do not think it was Madame Horbury. Imagine it! Horbury has been dead for three to four hours. Someone in this room hears the telephone, lifts the receiver, does not answer, and replaces it.” He pointed across the room to the table. “Was it then, do you think, that someone tossed the keys on the table?”
Maltby bent down.
“You have in your mind, Monsieur Hanaud,” he stated rather than asked, “a picture, and perhaps the name of that someone.”
“Picture, no! Name, perhaps yes. There was one who—and again I say, perhaps—had great reason to hate Daniel Horbury.”
A look of bewilderment passed over Maltby’s face.
“Devisher?” he said.
“Bryan Devisher,” said Hanaud.
“But—but—we both know. At Gravesend, he was not on board. He was lost at sea during the night.”
“And that also is true. But he could have been in this house last night. Let Mr. Ricardo tell us.”
He swung round upon Ricardo with the outstretched forefinger of melodrama; and everyone turned about and stared, incredulous, ready at a word to contradict.
“Really, really,” Mr. Ricardo stammered. He swallowed hurriedly. He was not averse to his proper share of the limelight. But he preferred that it should glow brighter and brighter upon him gradually, that he should, as it were, slide into it. But to stand one moment obscure, and the next moment lit up like the ghost of Sir Marmaduke—well, really, really! It was the penalty one paid for the friendship of Hanaud. However, it was an hour to be registered. He looked at his watch He gave himself twelve minutes, and as the clock struck twelve he finished.
“Thank you,” said the superintendent warmly. “That is very important, and, if I may say so who have listened to many stories, very closely told.”
Mr. Ricardo was delighted and would have been more delighted still if Hanaud had not with a bow and a smirk taken the commendation to himself. “Really I might be his ventriloquist’s dummy,” he reflected acidly.
Superintendent Maltby moved to the fireplace and rang the bell. “There is no evidence that Devisher was here,” he said.
“None,” Hanaud agreed.
“We shall hear now what Mrs. Horbury has to tell us,” said Maltby and the charwoman opened the door.
“Will you ask Mrs. Horbury if she will receive us?” he asked and, when she had gone upon her errand, he resumed. “It will be best, I think, that no mention of Bryan Devisher should be made, no hint given of that story of the sea which Mr. Ricardo has told to us.”
These words were not a hint. They were a definite order, and Maltby looked to each of his companions in turn for a promise of obedience.
“Good!” he said and Mrs. Wallace came back with a message that Mrs. Horbury would receive them at once. Mr. Ricardo hung back, but Maltby took him by the arm with a smile.
“You have been very good. You never spoke out of turn. Will you be my secretary for half an hour? Let us go!”; and they filed out of the room.
The one word murder, of which all had for so long been thinking, had never once been spoken.