Crow's Inn Tragedy (17 page)

Mrs. Bechcombe hesitated. Aubrey Todmarsh sprang to his feet.

“I must go, Aunt Madeleine. I have to see about bail for Hopkins, and that he is legally represented. And, besides, I don't really feel that I can stand any more to-day.”

His face was working as he spoke, and they all looked at him sympathetically as he hurriedly shook hands with Mrs. Bechcombe. His absorption in Hopkins's backsliding was so evidently of first consideration, rendering him oblivious even of his fiancée. As for the poor little Butterfly, her spirits, which had been gradually rising, seemed to be finally damped by this last contretemps. She raised no objection to her lover's abrupt departure, but sat silent and depressed until the Carnthwackes were ushered into the room.

One glance was enough to show John Steadman that both the American and his wife were looking strangely disturbed. They went straight up to Mrs. Bechcombe.

“I am obliged to you, ma'am, for receiving us,” Mr. Cyril B. Carnthwacke began, while his wife laid her hand on Aubrey Todmarsh's vacant chair as though to steady herself.

“You said it was important,” Mrs. Bechcombe's manner was distant. She did not glance at Mrs. Carnthwacke.

“So it is, ma'am, very important!” the American assented. “Sure thing that, else I wouldn't have ventured to butt in this morning. Though if I had gathered your guests were so numerous”—looking round comprehensively and making a slight courteous bow to Steadman and Collyer—“but I don't know. It is best that a thing of this importance should be settled at once.”

As he spoke he was slowly removing the brown paper covering from a small parcel he had taken from his breast pocket. Watching him curiously Steadman saw to his amazement that when the contents were finally extracted they appeared to be nothing more important than the day's issue of an illustrated paper.

Cyril B. Carnthwacke spread it out. Then he looked back at Mrs. Bechcombe.

“Sure I don't want to hurt your feelings, ma'am. And it may be that some one else belonging to the house, perhaps that gent I saw down at the Yard”—with a gesture in Steadman's direction—“would just look in this picture.”

Steadman stepped forward. But Mrs. Bechcombe's curiosity had been aroused. She leaned across.

“I will see it myself, please.”

Cyril B. Carnthwacke laid it on the table before the astonished eyes of the company. A glance showed John Steadman that the centre print was a quite recognizable portrait of Luke Bechcombe. There were also pictures of the offices in Crow's Inn, both inside and out, an obviously fancy likeness of Thompson “the absconding manager,” and of Miss Cecily Hoyle, the dead man's secretary.

Steadman half expected to find Mrs. Cyril B. Carnthwacke figuring largely, but so far as he could see there was nothing to account for that lady's excessive agitation.

She passed her handkerchief over her lips now as she sat down sideways on the chair that Tony Collyer placed for her, and he noticed that she was trembling all over and that every drop of colour seemed to have receded from her cheeks and lips. Her admirers on the variety stage would not have recognized their idol now.

Cyril B. Carnthwacke cleared a space on the table and spread out his paper carefully, smoothing out the creases with meticulous attention. Then he pointed his carefully manicured forefinger at the portrait of Luke Bechcombe in the middle.

“Would you call that a reasonably good picture of your late husband, ma'am?”

Mrs. Bechcombe drew her eyebrows together as she bent over it.

“Yes, it is—very,” she said decidedly. “I should say unusually good for this class of paper. It is copied from one of the last photographs he had taken, one he sat for when we were staying with his sister in the country. You remember, James?” appealing to the rector.

Mr. Collyer smiled sadly.

“Indeed I do. We were all sitting on the lawn and that friend of Tony's, Leonard Barnes, insisted on taking us all. Poor Luke's was particularly good. Why are you asking, Mr. Carnthwacke?”

Cyril B. Carnthwacke wagged his yellow forefinger reprovingly in the direction of the rector.

“One moment, reverend sir. It may be, ma'am, that you have another portrait of your lamented husband that you could let us glimpse?”

Mrs. Bechcombe hesitated a moment and glanced nervously at John Steadman. In spite of all her preconceived notions, the American was beginning to impress her. There was something in his manner, restrained yet with a sinister undercurrent, that filled her with a sense of some hitherto unguessed at unnamable dread. At last, moving like a woman in a dream, she went across to the writing-table that stood between the two tall windows overlooking the square, and unlocking a drawer took out a cabinet photograph.

“There, that is the most recent, and I think the best we have. It was taken at Frank and Burrows, the big photographers in Baker Street.”

“Allow me, ma'am.” Cyril B. Carnthwacke held out his hand. He studied the photograph silently for a minute or two, laying it beside the paper and apparently comparing the two. Everybody in the room watched him with curious, interested eyes. His wife sat crouching against the table, leaning over it, her handkerchief, crushed into a hard little ball, pressed against her lips.

At last Mr. Carnthwacke laid both the portraits down together and stood up with an air of finality.

“Mrs. Cyril B. Carnthwacke, I rather fancy the moment to speak has come. Now, don't fuss yourself, but just tell these ladies and gentlemen what you have to say simply, same way as you did to me.”

It seemed at first, as Mrs. Carnthwacke appeared to struggle for breath and caught convulsively at her husband's hand, that she would not be able to speak at all. But his firm clasp drew her up. The magnetism of his gaze compelled her words.

“If that is Mr. Bechcombe,” she said very slowly, “that portrait, I mean, and if it is a really good likeness of him, I can only say”—she paused again and gulped something down in her throat—“that that is not the man I saw at the office, not the man to whom I gave my diamonds.”

A tense silence followed this avowal—a silence that was broken at last by a moan from Mrs. Bechcombe.

“What do you mean? What does she mean?”

There was another momentary silence, broken this time by John Steadman. He had remained standing since the Carnthwackes came in, on the other side of the table. He came round towards them now.

“I think you must give us a little further explanation, Mrs. Carnthwacke,” he said courteously.

Mrs. Carnthwacke was pressing the little ball that had been her handkerchief to her lips again. She turned from him with a quick gesture as though to shut him, the other guests, the whole room, out of her sight.

Cyril B. Carnthwacke laid his hand on her shoulder, heavily yet with a certain comfort in its very contact.

“That is all right, old girl. You just keep quiet and leave it to me. She can't give you any explanation. That is just all she can say,” he went on in a determined, almost a hostile voice. “As soon as she saw that portrait, she knew, if that was Luke Bechcombe, that she never saw him at all on the day of his death—that she gave the diamonds to some one else, some one impersonating him.”

“And who,” inquired John Steadman in that quiet, lazy voice of his, “do you imagine could have impersonated Luke Bechcombe?”

The American looked him squarely in the eyes.

“Sure, that's for you legal gentlemen to decide. It is not for me to come butting in. But I can put you wise on one thing that stares one right in the face, so to speak, that I can say before I quit. I don't guess who it was who impersonated Luke Bechcombe, or where he came from or how he got right there. But there is only one man it could have been, and that is the murderer!”

He looked from one to another as he spoke and as he met John Steadman's glance his grey eyes were as hard as steel and his thin lips were drawn and pinched together like a trap.

The horror in his hearers' faces grew and strengthened. Mrs. Bechcombe alone tried to speak; she leaned forward; in some inscrutable fashion her figure seemed to have shrunk in the last few minutes. She looked bent and worn and old, ten years older than Luke Bechcombe's handsome wife had done. Her face was white and rigid and set like a death-mask. Only her eyes, vivid, burning, looked alive. No sound came from her parted lips for a moment, then with a hoarse croak she threw up her hands to her throat as though she would tear the very words out:

“What was he like?”

Mrs. Carnthwacke cast one glance at her and began to tremble all over, then she clutched violently at her husband's hand.

“It—it is easier to say that he wasn't like that portrait,” she confessed, “than to tell you what he really was like. He gave me the impression that he was a bigger man; his beard too was not neat and trimmed like that—short, stubbly and untidy-looking. His hair grew low down on his forehead. That—that man's hair,” pointing with shaking fingers to the paper portrait, “grows far back. He is even a little bald. I don't know that I can point out any other differences, but the two faces are not a bit alike really. Oh, if I had only known Mr. Bechcombe by sight this dreadful thing might never have happened! She leaned back in her chair trembling violently.”

Cyril B. Carnthwacke placed himself very deliberately between her and the rest of the room. His clasp of her cold hands tightened.

“Now, now, be a sensible girl!” he admonished, giving her a little shake as he spoke, yet with a very real tenderness in his gruff tones. “Quit crying and shaking and just say what you have to say as quietly as possible. Nobody can hurt you for that. And if they do try to, they will have to reckon with Cyril B. Carnthwacke. Now, sir.” He looked at John Steadman. “I guess there will be other questions you will have to ask, and it may be as well to get as much as we can over at once.”

The barrister cleared his throat.

“I am afraid it will be impossible to do that here. The very first thing to be done is to inform Scotland Yard of Mrs. Carnthwacke's tragic discovery.”

The American bent over his wife for a minute then drew aside.

“I guess it will have to be as the gentleman says, Mrs. Carnthwacke. Now just as plain as you can put it, and remember that Cyril B. Carnthwacke is standing beside you.”

Mrs. Carnthwacke drew one of her hands from his and passed her handkerchief over her parched lips. Then she looked at Steadman.

It seemed to him that it was only by a supreme effort that she became articulate at all.

“I knocked at the door—I knew how to find it, Mr. Bechcombe had told me how on the phone. Down the passage to the right, past the clerks' office. It—it wasn't opened at once—I heard some one moving about rather stumblingly, and I was just going to knock again when the door was opened, and—” She stopped, shivering violently.

“Now then, now then!” admonished her husband. “You just quit thinking of what you are wise about now, and tell us just what took place as quickly as you can.”

Mrs. Carnthwacke appeared anxious to obey him.

“He—he opened the door, the man I—I told you about. ‘Come in, Mrs. Carnthwacke,' he said. I never doubted its being Mr. Bechcombe—why should I? He knew my name and my errand. Certainly I thought he had an unpleasant voice, husky—not like what I had heard when I rang him up. But he said he had a cold.” She stopped again.

This time John Steadman interposed.

“Now the details of your interview you have told us before—”

“Ever so many times,” she sobbed. “I can't say anything but what I told you at the inquest.”

“But, now that this extraordinary new light has been thrown upon everything, do you recollect anything—anything that may help us? You know the veriest trifles sometimes provide the most successful clues—a mark on hands or face, for example.”

“There wasn't any,” Mrs. Cyril B. Carnthwacke answered, shaking visibly. “Or if there was, I didn't see it. But my eyesight isn't what it was, and the room was very dark, so I couldn't see very well.”

“Dark! I shouldn't call it a dark room,” contradicted John Steadman. “And the day was a clear one, I know.”

“The room itself mightn't be dark,” Mrs. Carnthwacke said obstinately. “But the blinds were drawn partly down and that heavy screen before the window nearest the desk would darken any room.”

“Screen!” John Steadman repeated in a puzzled tone. “I have seen no screen near the window.”

“Oh, but there is one,” Mrs. Carnthwacke affirmed positively. “A big heavy screen, stamped leather it looked like. It was opened out, and stood right in front of the window nearest the desk, I remember wondering he should have it there. It blocked out so much of the light.”

“What a very curious thing!” The rector interjected. “Often as I have been in to see my lamented brother-in-law, I have seen no screen. Nor have I found him with drawn blinds.”

“It was not Mr. Bechcombe who was so found by Mrs. Carnthwacke,” John Steadman corrected. “Of course the semi-darkness of the room was purposely contrived for one of two reasons, either that the murderer should not be recognized or that his disguise should not be suspected.”

“Your two reasons seem to me to mean the same thing, my dear sir,” Mr. Cyril B. Carnthwacke drawled. “But there, if that is all—”

“They do not mean the same thing at all,” John Steadman retorted. “Anybody might suspect a person of being disguised. But only some one who was personally acquainted with the murderer could recognize him. Now what we have to discover is which of these reasons was operating in this case. Or whether, as is possible, we have to reckon with both.”

Cyril B. Carnthwacke's sleepy-looking eyes were opened sharply for once.

“I don't understand you,” he drawled. “But I can put you wise on one of your points. Mrs. Cyril B. Carnthwacke ain't acquaint with any murderers. So she could not have recognized the man.”