‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929

Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

Copyright

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Thomas Nelson and Sons 1913

Copyright © Estate of E. C. Bentley 1913

Introduction © John Curran 2017

Afterword © Estate of Dorothy L. Sayers 1978

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1913, 2020

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008216269

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008216276

Version: 2020-06-24

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Dedication

I. BAD NEWS

II. KNOCKING THE TOWN ENDWAYS

III. BREAKFAST

IV. HANDCUFFS IN THE AIR

V. POKING ABOUT

VI. MR BUNNER ON THE CASE

VII. THE LADY IN BLACK

VIII. THE INQUEST

IX. A HOT SCENT

X. THE WIFE OF DIVES

XI. HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED

XII. EVIL DAYS

XIII. ERUPTION

XIV. WRITING A LETTER

XV. DOUBLE CUNNING

XVI. THE LAST STRAW

Afterword

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

‘SOME time in the year 1910 it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to write a detective story of a new sort …’

Thus begins E. C. Bentley’s discussion of his famous novel, Trent’s Last Case. In his 1940 autobiography, Those Days, he devotes an entire chapter to the genesis of what has become one of the most famous milestones in the genre. He continues:

‘It should be possible I thought, to write a detective story in which the detective was recognisable as a human being … It was not until I had gone a long way with the plot that the most pleasing notion of all came to me: the notion of making the hero’s hard-won and obviously correct solution to the mystery turn out to be completely wrong … In the result, it does not seem to have been generally noticed that Trent’s Last Case is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.’

In the year 1910 the market for detective short stories was thriving. Sherlock Holmes had dominated for the previous two decades since his first Strand appearance, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891). R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke, one of the earliest, and certainly the most persuasive, of the forensic detectives—Freeman was a medical doctor—had been investigating in both short story and novel since 1907 and, as Bentley was considering his contribution to the genre, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and A. E. W. Mason’s Inspector Hanaud were embarking on their crime-solving careers. Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard and Victor L. Whitechurch’s Thorpe Hazell in Thrilling Stories of the Railway were also among the dozens of detectives—most of them now long forgotten—appearing regularly in the popular magazines. The stage was set for a ‘detective story of a new sort’…

Edmund Clerihew Bentley was born in London in 1875; he won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford and it was while studying Law in London that he began writing for various newspapers and magazines including, for ten years, the Daily News. Although called to the Bar in 1902, most of his working life was spent at the Daily Telegraph, beginning in 1912; although he ‘retired’ from journalism in 1934, with the outbreak of WWII and the call-up of younger men, he returned as literary critic in 1939, eventually leaving in 1947.

More whimsically, Bentley was also the originator of the four-line metrically-irregular verse that became known as the ‘Clerihew’. The earliest example dates from 1905:

‘Sir Humphrey Davy

Abominated gravy

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered sodium.’

He made the acquaintance of G. K. Chesterton while at school and they remained lifelong friends; both were journalists and poets, novelists and short story writers; and, perhaps not surprisingly, their approach to detective fiction, each eschewing the idea of a Great Detective, was also similar. Later in their lives, both also were destined to be President of the Detection Club; Chesterton was its first President and, after his death in 1936, Bentley assumed the Presidential Robes—literally and figuratively—for the next thirteen years. While Bentley, in Those Days, refutes the story that Chesterton had wagered him that he couldn’t write a detective story, he does admit that ‘[Chesterton] urged me to write a story of that sort’; and acknowledges this in an affectionate dedication.

Although he had never written a novel, Bentley felt that ‘It should be possible to write a detective story in which the detective was recognisable as a human being and was not so much the “heavy” sleuth.’ He tried, in his creation of a detective character, to get as far away from Holmes, the ‘Great Detective’, as possible. So, as he explained in a 1935 essay, Philip Trent:

‘… does not take himself at all seriously. He is not a scientific expert; he is not a professional crime investigator. He is an artist … who has strayed accidentally into the business of crime journalism because he found he had an aptitude for it, and without any sense of having a mission. He is not superior to the feelings of average humanity … he even goes so far as to fall in love. He does not regard the Scotland Yard men as bungling half-wits, but has the highest respect for their trained abilities. All very unlike Holmes.’

He planned the novel over a period of six to eight weeks, much of it while walking from his home in Hampstead to the offices of the Daily News; in fact, most of Trent’s Last Case’s creation was done on Bentley’s feet—either walking or writing at his ‘standing-up desk’ in his Fleet Street office. And like—one hopes!—most writers of detective fiction, he began by drafting the last chapter. The eponymous detective was originally called Philip Gasket but this was amended to the monosyllabic ‘Trent’ when the novel appeared in the US, in March 1913 as The Woman in Black (Chapter VII is ‘The Lady in Black’), a title it retained in America for the next eighteen years.

Another famous crime writer, John Buchan, was responsible for the UK publication. Buchan, whose archetypal The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is as celebrated and influential in the thriller genre as Bentley’s book is in the detective genre, was a partner in the British publishing firm, Nelson’s. Both men knew each other from their Oxford days and, when Bentley sought his advice, Buchan was so impressed by the manuscript that he immediately made an offer to publish it. When it appeared, also in March 1913, Nelson’s retained the US amendment to the detective’s name, but restored Bentley’s original title.

In planning the novel Bentley had listed some characters and situations then—and for many years following—considered necessary in a detective story: a murdered millionaire, his widow, her maid, a male secretary, a butler, a gifted amateur detective, a not-too-gifted policeman and a ‘perfect’ alibi; and they all duly appear. But in demonstrating his detective’s susceptibility to ‘the feelings of average humanity’, Bentley, very daringly, has him fall in love with one of the chief suspects. Will this cloud Trent’s deductive abilities? Will it, perhaps, prejudice his dedication to justice? Will it influence his solution?

And while Trent, and the reader, grapple with these conundrums, Bentley slyly detonates a plotting landmine … an even more ground-breaking innovation which immediately qualified Trent’s Last Case for a permanent place on the shelf of The Great Detective Novels. However, as Bentley pointed out: ‘… it does not seem to have been noticed that [the novel] is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.’ (All will become clear after you’ve read the novel.)

Chesterton considered Trent’s Last Case ‘… a real detective story that is also a real book’, while Dorothy L. Sayers, in an introduction to a reprint of the novel, asserted that ‘every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence’. Howard Haycraft, author of Murder For Pleasure (1945), the ground-breaking history of detective fiction, credited the novel ‘with changing the whole course of [detective fiction]’. Two later commentators, Leroy Lad Panek, in his 1979 Watteau’s Shepherds: The Detective Story in Britain 1914-1939, thought it ‘the bible of the detective-writer’s craft’; and Eric Routley dubbed it simply, in his The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story (1972) ‘the first great detective novel’.

More than twenty years after Trent’s debut Bentley wrote, in collaboration with H. Warner Allen, Trent’s Own Case (1936) and, alone, a collection of much-anthologised short stories, Trent Intervenes (1938). He contributed to the early collaborative efforts of the Detection Club, Behind the Screen and The Scoop in 1930 and 1931; and in 1938 edited an impressive anthology, The Second Century of Detective Stories. A final novel, the disappointing thriller Elephant’s Work, followed in 1950. But his reputation as a detective story writer rests almost entirely on his first detective novel. He died in London in March 1956.

Trent’s Last Case was filmed in 1920 in a silent version and again in 1929, an adaptation released in both silent and sound versions—both ‘bad beyond description’ according to Bentley—and then in 1952 with Orson Welles, Margaret Lockwood and Michael Wilding.

As one of the earliest defining detective novels of the twentieth century, all detective fiction (as well as ‘every detective writer’) owes a debt to Trent’s Last Case. It established the detective novel, rather than the short story, as the new field of play for writer and reader in which the next refinements in the genre were to occur. Bentley’s experimentation—with a detective who, unlike predecessors, is a fallible human being—within a cleverly constructed plot, culminating in a surprise solution, prepared readers for the advent of an era in which they would learn to expect the unexpected. Trent’s Last Case heralded, in fact, detective fiction’s Golden Age.

DR JOHN CURRAN

November 2016

TO
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

MY DEAR GILBERT,

I dedicate this story to you. First: because the only really noble motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it. Second: because I owe you a book in return for The Man Who Was Thursday. Third: because I said I would when I unfolded the plan of it to you, surrounded by Frenchmen, two years ago. Fourth: because I remember the past.

I have been thinking again today of those astonishing times when neither of us ever looked at a newspaper; when we were purely happy in the boundless consumption of paper, pencils, tea and our elders’ patience; when we embraced the most severe literature, and ourselves produced such light reading as was necessary; when (in the words of Canada’s poet) we studied the works of nature, also those little frogs; when, in short, we were extremely young.

For the sake of that age I offer you this book.

Yours always,

E. C. BENTLEY

‘… So shall you hear

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc’d cause,

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fall’n on the inventors’ heads …’

HAMLET

CHAPTER I
BAD NEWS

BETWEEN what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?

When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honour. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those living in the great vortices of business as if the earth too shuddered under a blow.

In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world. He had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct and augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millions for their labour, had existed before; but in the case of Manderson there had been this singularity, that a pale halo of piratical romance, a thing especially dear to the hearts of his countrymen, had remained incongruously about his head through the years when he stood in every eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability, the stamper-out of manipulated crises, the foe of the raiding chieftains that infest the borders of Wall Street.

The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those chieftains on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand, should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so. While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich man’s proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to him nevertheless much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been called his early bad manner, he had been little more than a gambler of genius, his hand against every man’s—an infant prodigy—who brought to the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than any opposed to it. At St Helena it was laid down that war is une belle occupation; and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous and complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.

Then came his change. At his father’s death, when Manderson was thirty years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god he served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labour in his father’s banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety, and financial weight lifted it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust founded on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite plainly a different man. How the change came about none could with authority say, but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his father, whom alone he had respected and perhaps loved.

He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of Manderson called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in the vast wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of capital, drew together and centralised industries of continental scope, financed with unerring judgement the large designs of state or of private enterprise. Many a time when he ‘took hold’ to smash a strike, or to federate the ownership of some great field of labour, he sent ruin upon a multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steelworkers or cattlemen defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends. Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country. Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.

But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants and certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability in the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when the Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out, the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in his hatband. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuous raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of the offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never carried out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within him and go soberly down to his counting-house—humming a stave or two of ‘Spanish Ladies’, perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow himself the harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had gone by, of pointing out to some Rupert of the markets a coup worth a million to the depredator might have been made. ‘Seems to me,’ he would say almost wistfully, ‘the Street is getting to be a mighty dull place since I quit.’ By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the Colossus became known to the business world, which exulted greatly in the knowledge.

At the news of his death panic went through the markets like a hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide. In Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had become pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them had never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leapt from the Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower. Men stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed it as the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had departed from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.

The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came when Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed ‘scare’—suppressed, because for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be actually controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the effects of the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his plundering of the Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at a time when the market had been ‘boosted’ beyond its real strength. In the language of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the corn-lands had not been good, and there had been two or three railway statements which had been expected to be much better than they were. But at whatever point in the vast area of speculation the shudder of the threatened break had been felt, ‘the Manderson crowd’ had stepped in and held the market up. All through the week the speculator’s mind, as shallow as it is quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in this the hand of the giant stretched out in protection from afar. Manderson, said the newspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication with his lieutenants in the Street. One journal was able to give in round figures the sum spent on cabling between New York and Marlstone in the past twenty-four hours; it told how a small staff of expert operators had been sent down by the Post Office authorities to Marlstone to deal with the flood of messages. Another revealed that Manderson, on the first news of the Hahn crash, had arranged to abandon his holiday and return home by the Lusitania; but that he soon had the situation so well in hand that he had determined to remain where he was.

All this was falsehood, more or less consciously elaborated by the ‘finance editors’, consciously initiated and encouraged by the shrewd business men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could better help their plans than this illusion of hero-worship—knew also that no word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and that Howard B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true organiser of victory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish days, and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath the feet of Mr Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with Etna-mutterings of disquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm, and slowly advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn out but thankfully at peace.

In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumour flew round the sixty acres of the financial district. It came into being as the lightning comes—a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be suspected that it was first whispered over the telephone—together with an urgent selling order by some employee in the cable service. A sharp spasm convulsed the convalescent share-list. In five minutes the dull noise of the kerbstone market in Broad Street had leapt to a high note of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the Exchange itself could be heard a droning hubbub of fear, and men rushed hatless in and out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous ‘short’ interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news came of a sudden and ruinous collapse of ‘Yankees’ in London at the close of the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four hours’ trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson as the saviour and warden of the markets had recoiled upon its authors with annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone, listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon had lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding and falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of the finding of Manderson’s body, with the inevitable rumour that it was suicide, was printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached Wall Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B. Jeffrey and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its breath.

All this sprang out of nothing.

Nothing in the texture of the general life had changed. The corn had not ceased to ripen in the sun. The rivers bore their barges and gave power to a myriad engines. The flocks fattened on the pastures, the herds were unnumbered. Men laboured everywhere in the various servitudes to which they were born, and chafed not more than usual in their bonds. Bellona tossed and murmured as ever, yet still slept her uneasy sleep. To all mankind save a million or two of half-crazed gamblers, blind to all reality, the death of Manderson meant nothing; the life and work of the world went on. Weeks before he died strong hands had been in control of every wire in the huge network of commerce and industry that he had supervised. Before his corpse was buried his countrymen had made a strange discovery—that the existence of the potent engine of monopoly that went by the name of Sigsbee Manderson had not been a condition of even material prosperity. The panic blew itself out in two days, the pieces were picked up, the bankrupts withdrew out of sight; the market ‘recovered a normal tone’.

While the brief delirium was yet subsiding there broke out a domestic scandal in England that suddenly fixed the attention of two continents. Next morning the Chicago Limited was wrecked, and the same day a notable politician was shot down in cold blood by his wife’s brother in the streets of New Orleans. Within a week of its rising, ‘the Manderson story’, to the trained sense of editors throughout the Union, was ‘cold’. The tide of American visitors pouring through Europe made eddies round the memorial or statue of many a man who had died in poverty; and never thought of their most famous plutocrat. Like the poet who died in Rome, so young and poor, a hundred years ago, he was buried far away from his own land; but for all the men and women of Manderson’s people who flock round the tomb of Keats in the cemetery under the Monte Testaccio, there is not one, nor ever will be, to stand in reverence by the rich man’s grave beside the little church of Marlstone.

CHAPTER II
KNOCKING THE TOWN ENDWAYS

IN the only comfortably furnished room in the offices of the Record, the telephone on Sir James Molloy’s table buzzed. Sir James made a motion with his pen, and Mr Silver, his secretary, left his work and came over to the instrument.

‘Who is that?’ he said. ‘Who? … I can’t hear you … Oh, it’s Mr Bunner, is it? … Yes, but … I know, but he’s fearfully busy this afternoon. Can’t you … Oh, really? Well, in that case—just hold on, will you?’

He placed the receiver before Sir James. ‘It’s Calvin Bunner, Sigsbee Manderson’s right-hand man,’ he said concisely. ‘He insists on speaking to you personally. Says it is the gravest piece of news. He is talking from the house down by Bishopsbridge, so it will be necessary to speak clearly.’

Sir James looked at the telephone, not affectionately, and took up the receiver. ‘Well?’ he said in his strong voice, and listened. ‘Yes,’ he said. The next moment Mr Silver, eagerly watching him, saw a look of amazement and horror. ‘Good God!’ murmured Sir James. Clutching the instrument, he slowly rose to his feet, still bending ear intently. At intervals he repeated ‘Yes.’ Presently, as he listened, he glanced at the clock, and spoke quickly to Mr Silver over the top of the transmitter. ‘Go and hunt up Figgis and young Williams. Hurry.’ Mr Silver darted from the room.

The great journalist was a tall, strong, clever Irishman of fifty, swart and black-moustached, a man of untiring business energy, well known in the world, which he understood very thoroughly, and played upon with the half-cynical competence of his race. Yet was he without a touch of the charlatan: he made no mysteries, and no pretences of knowledge, and he saw instantly through these in others. In his handsome, well-bred, well-dressed appearance there was something a little sinister when anger or intense occupation put its imprint about his eyes and brow; but when his generous nature was under no restraint he was the most cordial of men. He was managing director of the company which owned that most powerful morning paper, the Record, and also that most indispensable evening paper, the Sun, which had its offices on the other side of the street. He was, moreover, editor-in-chief of the Record, to which he had in the course of years attached the most variously capable personnel in the country. It was a maxim of his that where you could not get gifts, you must do the best you could with solid merit; and he employed a great deal of both. He was respected by his staff as few are respected in a profession not favourable to the growth of the sentiment of reverence.

‘You’re sure that’s all?’ asked Sir James, after a few minutes of earnest listening and questioning. ‘And how long has this been known? … Yes, of course, the police are; but the servants? Surely it’s all over the place down there by now … Well, we’ll have a try … Look here, Bunner, I’m infinitely obliged to you about this. I owe you a good turn. You know I mean what I say. Come and see me the first day you get to town … All right, that’s understood. Now I must act on your news. Goodbye.’

Sir James hung up the receiver, and seized a railway timetable from the rack before him. After a rapid consultation of this oracle, he flung it down with a forcible word as Mr Silver hurried into the room, followed by a hard-featured man with spectacles, and a youth with an alert eye.

‘I want you to jot down some facts, Figgis,’ said Sir James, banishing all signs of agitation and speaking with a rapid calmness. ‘When you have them, put them into shape just as quick as you can for a special edition of the Sun.’ The hard-featured man nodded and glanced at the clock, which pointed to a few minutes past three; he pulled out a notebook and drew a chair up to the big writing-table. ‘Silver,’ Sir James went on, ‘go and tell Jones to wire our local correspondent very urgently, to drop everything and get down to Marlstone at once. He is not to say why in the telegram. There must not be an unnecessary word about this news until the Sun is on the streets with it—you all understand. Williams, cut across the way and tell Mr Anthony to hold himself ready for a two-column opening that will knock the town endways. Just tell him that he must take all measures and precautions for a scoop. Say that Figgis will be over in five minutes with the facts, and that he had better let him write up the story in his private room. As you go, ask Miss Morgan to see me here at once, and tell the telephone people to see if they can get Mr Trent on the wire for me. After seeing Mr Anthony, return here and stand by.’ The alert-eyed young man vanished like a spirit.

Sir James turned instantly to Mr Figgis, whose pencil was poised over the paper. ‘Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered,’ he began quickly and clearly, pacing the floor with his hands behind him. Mr Figgis scratched down a line of shorthand with as much emotion as if he had been told that the day was fine—the pose of his craft. ‘He and his wife and two secretaries have been for the past fortnight at the house called White Gables, at Marlstone, near Bishopsbridge. He bought it four years ago. He and Mrs Manderson have since spent a part of each summer there. Last night he went to bed about half-past eleven, just as usual. No one knows when he got up and left the house. He was not missed until this morning. About ten o’clock his body was found by a gardener. It was lying by a shed in the grounds. He was shot in the head, through the left eye. Death must have been instantaneous. The body was not robbed, but there were marks on the wrists which pointed to a struggle having taken place. Dr Stock, of Marlstone, was at once sent for, and will conduct the post-mortem examination. The police from Bishopsbridge, who were soon on the spot, are reticent, but it is believed that they are quite without a clue to the identity of the murderer. There you are, Figgis. Mr Anthony is expecting you. Now I must telephone him and arrange things.’

Mr Figgis looked up. ‘One of the ablest detectives at Scotland Yard,’ he suggested, ‘has been put in charge of the case. It’s a safe statement.’

‘If you like,’ said Sir James.

‘And Mrs Manderson? Was she there?’

‘Yes. What about her?’

‘Prostrated by the shock,’ hinted the reporter, ‘and sees nobody. Human interest.’

‘I wouldn’t put that in, Mr Figgis,’ said a quiet voice. It belonged to Miss Morgan, a pale, graceful woman, who had silently made her appearance while the dictation was going on. ‘I have seen Mrs Manderson,’ she proceeded, turning to Sir James. ‘She looks quite healthy and intelligent. Has her husband been murdered? I don’t think the shock would prostrate her. She is more likely to be doing all she can to help the police.’

‘Something in your own style, then, Miss Morgan,’ he said with a momentary smile. Her imperturbable efficiency was an office proverb. ‘Cut it out, Figgis. Off you go! Now, madam, I expect you know what I want.’

‘Our Manderson biography happens to be well up to date,’ replied Miss Morgan, drooping her dark eyelashes as she considered the position. ‘I was looking over it only a few months ago. It is practically ready for tomorrow’s paper. I should think the Sun had better use the sketch of his life they had about two years ago, when he went to Berlin and settled the potash difficulty. I remember it was a very good sketch, and they won’t be able to carry much more than that. As for our paper, of course we have a great quantity of cuttings, mostly rubbish. The sub-editors shall have them as soon as they come in. Then we have two very good portraits that are our own property; the best is a drawing Mr Trent made when they were both on the same ship somewhere. It is better than any of the photographs; but you say the public prefers a bad photograph to a good drawing. I will send them down to you at once, and you can choose. As far as I can see, the Record is well ahead of the situation, except that you will not be able to get a special man down there in time to be of any use for tomorrow’s paper.’

Sir James sighed deeply. ‘What are we good for, anyhow?’ he enquired dejectedly of Mr Silver, who had returned to his desk. ‘She even knows Bradshaw by heart.’

Miss Morgan adjusted her cuffs with an air of patience. ‘Is there anything else?’ she asked, as the telephone bell rang.

‘Yes, one thing,’ replied Sir James, as he took up the receiver. ‘I want you to make a bad mistake some time, Miss Morgan—an everlasting bloomer—just to put us in countenance.’ She permitted herself the fraction of what would have been a charming smile as she went out.

‘Anthony?’ asked Sir James, and was at once deep in consultation with the editor on the other side of the road. He seldom entered the Sun building in person; the atmosphere of an evening paper, he would say, was all very well if you liked that kind of thing. Mr Anthony, the Murat of Fleet Street, who delighted in riding the whirlwind and fighting a tumultuous battle against time, would say the same of a morning paper.

It was some five minutes later that a uniformed boy came in to say that Mr Trent was on the wire. Sir James abruptly closed his talk with Mr Anthony.

‘They can put him through at once,’ he said to the boy.

‘Hullo!’ he cried into the telephone after a few moments.

A voice in the instrument replied, ‘Hullo be blowed! What do you want?’

‘This is Molloy,’ said Sir James.

‘I know it is,’ the voice said. ‘This is Trent. He is in the middle of painting a picture, and he has been interrupted at a critical moment. Well, I hope it’s something important, that’s all!’

‘Trent,’ said Sir James impressively, ‘it is important. I want you to do some work for us.’

‘Some play, you mean,’ replied the voice. ‘Believe me, I don’t want a holiday. The working fit is very strong. I am doing some really decent things. Why can’t you leave a man alone?’

‘Something very serious has happened.’

‘What?’

‘Sigsbee Manderson has been murdered—shot through the brain—and they don’t know who has done it. They found the body this morning. It happened at his place near Bishopsbridge.’ Sir James proceeded to tell his hearer, briefly and clearly, the facts that he had communicated to Mr Figgis. ‘What do you think of it?’ he ended.

A considering grunt was the only answer.

‘Come now,’ urged Sir James.

‘Tempter!’

‘You will go down?’

There was a brief pause.

‘Are you there?’ said Sir James.

‘Look here, Molloy,’ the voice broke out querulously, ‘the thing may be a case for me, or it may not. We can’t possibly tell. It may be a mystery; it may be as simple as bread and cheese. The body not being robbed looks interesting, but he may have been outed by some wretched tramp whom he found sleeping in the grounds and tried to kick out. It’s the sort of thing he would do. Such a murderer might easily have sense enough to know that to leave the money and valuables was the safest thing. I tell you frankly, I wouldn’t have a hand in hanging a poor devil who had let daylight into a man like Sig Manderson as a measure of social protest.’

Sir James smiled at the telephone—a smile of success. ‘Come, my boy, you’re getting feeble. Admit you want to go and have a look at the case. You know you do. If it’s anything you don’t want to handle, you’re free to drop it. By the by, where are you?’

‘I am blown along a wandering wind,’ replied the voice irresolutely, ‘and hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.’

‘Can you get here within an hour?’ persisted Sir James.

‘I suppose I can,’ the voice grumbled. ‘How much time have I?’

‘Good man! Well, there’s time enough—that’s just the worst of it. I’ve got to depend on our local correspondent for tonight. The only good train of the day went half an hour ago. The next is a slow one, leaving Paddington at midnight. You could have the Buster, if you like’—Sir James referred to a very fast motor car of his—‘but you wouldn’t get down in time to do anything tonight.’

‘And I’d miss my sleep. No, thanks. The train for me. I am quite fond of railway travelling, you know; I have a gift for it. I am the stoker and the stoked. I am the song the porter sings.’

‘What’s that you say?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the voice sadly. ‘I say,’ it continued, ‘will your people look out a hotel near the scene of action, and telegraph for a room?’

‘At once,’ said Sir James. ‘Come here as soon as you can.’

He replaced the receiver. As he turned to his papers again a shrill outcry burst forth in the street below. He walked to the open window. A band of excited boys was rushing down the steps of the Sun building and up the narrow thoroughfare toward Fleet Street. Each carried a bundle of newspapers and a large broadsheet with the simple legend:

MURDER

OF

SIGSBEE

MANDERSON

Sir James smiled and rattled the money in his pockets cheerfully.

‘It makes a good bill,’ he observed to Mr Silver, who stood at his elbow.

Such was Manderson’s epitaph.

CHAPTER III
BREAKFAST

AT about eight o’clock in the morning of the following day Mr Nathaniel Burton Cupples stood on the veranda of the hotel at Marlstone. He was thinking about breakfast. In his case the colloquialism must be taken literally: he really was thinking about breakfast, as he thought about every conscious act of his life when time allowed deliberation. He reflected that on the preceding day the excitement and activity following upon the discovery of the dead man had disorganised his appetite, and led to his taking considerably less nourishment than usual. This morning he was very hungry, having already been up and about for an hour; and he decided to allow himself a third piece of toast and an additional egg; the rest as usual. The remaining deficit must be made up at luncheon, but that could be gone into later.

So much being determined, Mr Cupples applied himself to the enjoyment of the view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With a connoisseur’s eye he explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a great pierced rock rose from a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness of the vast tilted levels of pasture and tillage and woodland that sloped gently up from the cliffs toward the distant moor. Mr Cupples delighted in landscape.

He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old, by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his age. A sparse and straggling beard and moustache did not conceal a thin but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him very much of a clerical air, and this impression was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. The whole effect of him, indeed, was priestly. He was a man of unusually conscientious, industrious, and orderly mind, with little imagination. His father’s household had been used to recruit its domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was truthfully described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he had escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an inexhaustible kindness of heart, and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed nothing to humour. In an earlier day and with a clerical training he might have risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded member of the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a widower without children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of professors and curators and devotees of research; at their amiable, unconvivial dinner parties he was most himself. His favourite author was Montaigne.

Just as Mr Cupples was finishing his meal at a little table on the veranda, a big motor car turned into the drive before the hotel. ‘Who is this?’ he enquired of the waiter. ‘Id is der manager,’ said the young man listlessly. ‘He have been to meed a gendleman by der train.’

The car drew up and the porter hurried from the entrance. Mr Cupples uttered an exclamation of pleasure as a long, loosely built man, much younger than himself, stepped from the car and mounted the veranda, flinging his hat on a chair. His high-boned, quixotic face wore a pleasant smile; his rough tweed clothes, his hair and short moustache were tolerably untidy.

‘Cupples, by all that’s miraculous!’ cried the man, pouncing upon Mr Cupples before he could rise, and seizing his outstretched hand in a hard grip. ‘My luck is serving me today,’ the newcomer went on spasmodically. ‘This is the second slice within an hour. How are you, my best of friends? And why are you here? Why sit’st thou by that ruined breakfast? Dost thou its former pride recall, or ponder how it passed away? I am glad to see you!’

‘I was half expecting you, Trent,’ Mr Cupples replied, his face wreathed in smiles. ‘You are looking splendid, my dear fellow. I will tell you all about it. But you cannot have had your own breakfast yet. Will you have it at my table here?’

‘Rather!’ said the man. ‘An enormous great breakfast, too—with refined conversation and tears of recognition never dry. Will you get young Siegfried to lay a place for me while I go and wash? I shan’t be three minutes.’ He disappeared into the hotel, and Mr Cupples, after a moment’s thought, went to the telephone in the porter’s office.

He returned to find his friend already seated, pouring out tea, and showing an unaffected interest in the choice of food. ‘I expect this to be a hard day for me,’ he said, with the curious jerky utterance which seemed to be his habit. ‘I shan’t eat again till the evening, very likely. You guess why I’m here, don’t you?’

‘Undoubtedly,’ said Mr Cupples. ‘You have come down to write about the murder.’

‘That is rather a colourless way of stating it,’ the man called Trent replied, as he dissected a sole. ‘I should prefer to put it that I have come down in the character of avenger of blood, to hunt down the guilty, and vindicate the honour of society. That is my line of business. Families waited on at their private residences. I say, Cupples, I have made a good beginning already. Wait a bit, and I’ll tell you.’ There was a silence, during which the newcomer ate swiftly and abstractedly, while Mr Cupples looked on happily.

‘Your manager here,’ said the tall man at last, ‘is a fellow of remarkable judgement. He is an admirer of mine. He knows more about my best cases than I do myself. The Record wired last night to say I was coming, and when I got out of the train at seven o’clock this morning, there he was waiting for me with a motor car the size of a haystack. He is beside himself with joy at having me here. It is fame.’ He drank a cup of tea and continued: ‘Almost his first words were to ask me if I would like to see the body of the murdered man—if so, he thought he could manage it for me. He is as keen as a razor. The body lies in Dr Stock’s surgery, you know, down in the village, exactly as it was when found. It’s to be post-mortem’d this morning, by the way, so I was only just in time. Well, he ran me down here to the doctor’s, giving me full particulars about the case all the way. I was pretty well au fait by the time we arrived. I suppose the manager of a place like this has some sort of a pull with the doctor. Anyhow, he made no difficulties, nor did the constable on duty, though he was careful to insist on my not giving him away in the paper.’

‘I saw the body before it was removed,’ remarked Mr Cupples. ‘I should not have said there was anything remarkable about it, except that the shot in the eye had scarcely disfigured the face at all, and caused scarcely any effusion of blood, apparently. The wrists were scratched and bruised. I expect that, with your trained faculties, you were able to remark other details of a suggestive nature.’

‘Other details, certainly; but I don’t know that they suggest anything. They are merely odd. Take the wrists, for instance. How was it you could see bruises and scratches on them? I dare say you saw something of Manderson down here before the murder.’

‘Certainly,’ Mr Cupples said.

‘Well, did you ever see his wrists?’

Mr Cupples reflected. ‘No. Now you raise the point, I am reminded that when I interviewed Manderson here he was wearing stiff cuffs, coming well down over his hands.’

‘He always did,’ said Trent. ‘My friend the manager says so. I pointed out to him the fact you didn’t observe, that there were no cuffs visible, and that they had, indeed, been dragged up inside the coat-sleeves, as yours would be if you hurried into a coat without pulling your cuffs down. That was why you saw his wrists.’

‘Well, I call that suggestive,’ observed Mr Cupples mildly. ‘You might infer, perhaps, that when he got up he hurried over his dressing.’

‘Yes, but did he? The manager said just what you say. “He was always a bit of a swell in his dress,” he told me, and he drew the inference that when Manderson got up in that mysterious way, before the house was stirring, and went out into the grounds, he was in a great hurry. “Look at his shoes,” he said to me: “Mr Manderson was always specially neat about his footwear. But those shoe-laces were tied in a hurry.” I agreed. “And he left his false teeth in his room,” said the manager. “Doesn’t that prove he was flustered and hurried?” I allowed that it looked like it. But I said, “Look here: if he was so very much pressed, why did he part his hair so carefully? That parting is a work of art. Why did he put on so much? For he had on a complete outfit of underclothing, studs in his shirt, sock-suspenders, a watch and chain, money and keys and things in his pockets. That’s what I said to the manager. He couldn’t find an explanation. Can you?”

Mr Cupples considered. ‘Those facts might suggest that he was hurried only at the end of his dressing. Coat and shoes would come last.’

‘But not false teeth. You ask anybody who wears them. And besides, I’m told he hadn’t washed at all on getting up, which in a neat man looks like his being in a violent hurry from the beginning. And here’s another thing. One of his waistcoat pockets was lined with wash-leather for the reception of his gold watch. But he had put his watch into the pocket on the other side. Anybody who has settled habits can see how odd that is. The fact is, there are signs of great agitation and haste, and there are signs of exactly the opposite. For the present I am not guessing. I must reconnoitre the ground first, if I can manage to get the right side of the people of the house.’ Trent applied himself again to his breakfast.

Mr Cupples smiled at him benevolently. ‘That is precisely the point,’ he said, ‘on which I can be of some assistance to you.’ Trent glanced up in surprise. ‘I told you I half expected you. I will explain the situation. Mrs Manderson, who is my niece—’

‘What!’ Trent laid down his knife and fork with a clash. ‘Cupples, you are jesting with me.’

‘I am perfectly serious, Trent, really,’ returned Mr Cupples earnestly. ‘Her father, John Peter Domecq, was my wife’s brother. I never mentioned my niece or her marriage to you before, I suppose. To tell the truth, it has always been a painful subject to me, and I have avoided discussing it with anybody. To return to what I was about to say: last night, when I was over at the house—by the way, you can see it from here. You passed it in the car.’ He indicated a red roof among poplars some three hundred yards away, the only building in sight that stood separate from the tiny village in the gap below them.

‘Certainly I did,’ said Trent. ‘The manager told me all about it, among other things, as he drove me in from Bishopsbridge.’

‘Other people here have heard of you and your performances,’ Mr Cupples went on. ‘As I was saying, when I was over there last night, Mr Bunner, who is one of Manderson’s two secretaries, expressed a hope that the Record would send you down to deal with the case, as the police seemed quite at a loss. He mentioned one or two of your past successes, and Mabel—my niece—was interested when I told her afterwards. She is bearing up wonderfully well, Trent; she has remarkable fortitude of character. She said she remembered reading your articles about the Abinger case. She has a great horror of the newspaper side of this sad business, and she had entreated me to do anything I could to keep journalists away from the place—I’m sure you can understand her feeling, Trent; it isn’t really any reflection on that profession. But she said you appeared to have great powers as a detective, and she would not stand in the way of anything that might clear up the crime. Then I told her you were a personal friend of mine, and gave you a good character for tact and consideration of others’ feelings; and it ended in her saying that, if you should come, she would like you to be helped in every way.’

Trent leaned across the table and shook Mr Cupples by the hand in silence. Mr Cupples, much delighted with the way things were turning out, resumed:

‘I spoke to my niece on the telephone only just now, and she is glad you are here. She asks me to say that you may make any enquiries you like, and she puts the house and grounds at your disposal. She had rather not see you herself; she is keeping to her own sitting-room. She has already been interviewed by a detective officer who is there, and she feels unequal to any more. She adds that she does not believe she could say anything that would be of the smallest use. The two secretaries and Martin, the butler (who is a most intelligent man), could tell you all you want to know, she thinks.’

Trent finished his breakfast with a thoughtful brow. He filled a pipe slowly, and seated himself on the rail of the veranda. ‘Cupples,’ he said quietly, ‘is there anything about this business that you know and would rather not tell me?’

Mr Cupples gave a slight start, and turned an astonished gaze on the questioner. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

‘I mean about the Mandersons. Look here! Shall I tell you a thing that strikes me about this affair at the very beginning? Here’s a man suddenly and violently killed, and nobody’s heart seems to be broken about it, to say the least. The manager of this hotel spoke to me about him as coolly as if he’d never set eyes on him, though I understand they’ve been neighbours every summer for some years. Then you talk about the thing in the coldest of blood. And Mrs Manderson—well, you won’t mind my saying that I have heard of women being more cut up about their husbands being murdered than she seems to be. Is there something in this, Cupples, or is it my fancy? Was there something queer about Manderson? I travelled on the same boat with him once, but never spoke to him. I only know his public character, which was repulsive enough. You see, this may have a bearing on the case; that’s the only reason why I ask.’

Mr Cupples took time for thought. He fingered his sparse beard and looked out over the sea. At last he turned to Trent. ‘I see no reason,’ he said, ‘why I shouldn’t tell you as between ourselves, my dear fellow. I need not say that this must not be referred to, however distantly. The truth is that nobody really liked Manderson; and I think those who were nearest to him liked him least.’

‘Why?’ the other interjected.

‘Most people found a difficulty in explaining why. In trying to account to myself for my own sensations, I could only put it that one felt in the man a complete absence of the sympathetic faculty. There was nothing outwardly repellent about him. He was not ill-mannered, or vicious, or dull—indeed, he could be remarkably interesting. But I received the impression that there could be no human creature whom he would not sacrifice in the pursuit of his schemes, in his task of imposing himself and his will upon the world. Perhaps that was fanciful, but I think not altogether so. However, the point is that Mabel, I am sorry to say, was very unhappy. I am nearly twice your age, my dear boy, though you always so kindly try to make me feel as if we were contemporaries—I am getting to be an old man, and a great many people have been good enough to confide their matrimonial troubles to me; but I never knew another case like my niece’s and her husband’s. I have known her since she was a baby, Trent, and I know—you understand, I think, that I do not employ that word lightly—I know that she is as amiable and honourable a woman, to say nothing of her other good gifts, as any man could wish. But Manderson, for some time past, had made her miserable.’

‘What did he do?’ asked Trent, as Mr Cupples paused.

‘When I put that question to Mabel, her words were that he seemed to nurse a perpetual grievance. He maintained a distance between them, and he would say nothing. I don’t know how it began or what was behind it; and all she would tell me on that point was that he had no cause in the world for his attitude. I think she knew what was in his mind, whatever it was; but she is full of pride. This seems to have gone on for months. At last, a week ago, she wrote to me. I am the only near relative she has. Her mother died when she was a child; and after John Peter died I was something like a father to her until she married—that was five years ago. She asked me to come and help her, and I came at once. That is why I am here now.’

Mr Cupples paused and drank some tea. Trent smoked and stared out at the hot June landscape.

‘I would not go to White Gables,’ Mr Cupples resumed. ‘You know my views, I think, upon the economic constitution of society, and the proper relationship of the capitalist to the employee, and you know, no doubt, what use that person made of his vast industrial power upon several very notorious occasions. I refer especially to the trouble in the Pennsylvania coal-fields, three years ago. I regarded him, apart from all personal dislike, in the light of a criminal and a disgrace to society. I came to this hotel, and I saw my niece here. She told me what I have more briefly told you. She said that the worry and the humiliation of it, and the strain of trying to keep up appearances before the world, were telling upon her, and she asked for my advice. I said I thought she should face him and demand an explanation of his way of treating her. But she would not do that. She had always taken the line of affecting not to notice the change in his demeanour, and nothing, I knew, would persuade her to admit to him that she was injured, once pride had led her into that course. Life is quite full, my dear Trent,’ said Mr Cupples with a sigh, ‘of these obstinate silences and cultivated misunderstandings.’

‘Did she love him?’ Trent enquired abruptly. Mr Cupples did not reply at once. ‘Had she any love left for him?’ Trent amended.

Mr Cupples played with his teaspoon. ‘I am bound to say,’ he answered slowly, ‘that I think not. But you must not misunderstand the woman, Trent. No power on earth would have persuaded her to admit that to anyone—even to herself, perhaps—so long as she considered herself bound to him. And I gather that, apart from this mysterious sulking of late, he had always been considerate and generous.’

‘You were saying that she refused to have it out with him.’

‘She did,’ replied Mr Cupples. ‘And I knew by experience that it was quite useless to attempt to move a Domecq where the sense of dignity was involved. So I thought it over carefully, and next day I watched my opportunity and met Manderson as he passed by this hotel. I asked him to favour me with a few minutes’ conversation, and he stepped inside the gate down there. We had held no communication of any kind since my niece’s marriage, but he remembered me, of course. I put the matter to him at once and quite definitely. I told him what Mabel had confided to me. I said that I would neither approve nor condemn her action in bringing me into the business, but that she was suffering, and I considered it my right to ask how he could justify himself in placing her in such a position.’

‘And how did he take that?’ said Trent, smiling secretly at the landscape. The picture of this mildest of men calling the formidable Manderson to account pleased him.

‘Not very well,’ Mr Cupples replied sadly. ‘In fact, far from well. I can tell you almost exactly what he said—it wasn’t much. He said, “See here, Cupples, you don’t want to butt in. My wife can look after herself. I’ve found that out, along with other things.” He was perfectly quiet—you know he was said never to lose control of himself—though there was a light in his eyes that would have frightened a man who was in the wrong, I dare say. But I had been thoroughly roused by his last remark, and the tone of it, which I cannot reproduce. You see,’ said Mr Cupples simply, ‘I love my niece. She is the only child that there has been in our—in my house. Moreover, my wife brought her up as a girl, and any reflection on Mabel I could not help feeling, in the heat of the moment, as an indirect reflection upon one who is gone.’

‘You turned upon him,’ suggested Trent in a low tone. ‘You asked him to explain his words.’

‘That is precisely what I did,’ said Mr Cupples. ‘For a moment he only stared at me, and I could see a vein on his forehead swelling—an unpleasant sight. Then he said quite quietly, “This thing has gone far enough, I guess,” and turned to go.’

‘Did he mean your interview?’ Trent asked thoughtfully.

‘From the words alone you would think so,’ Mr Cupples answered. ‘But the way in which he uttered them gave me a strange and very apprehensive feeling. I received the impression that the man had formed some sinister resolve. But I regret to say I had lost the power of dispassionate thought. I fell into a great rage’—Mr Cupples’s tone was mildly apologetic—‘and said a number of foolish things. I reminded him that the law allowed a measure of freedom to wives who received intolerable treatment. I made some utterly irrelevant references to his public record, and expressed the view that such men as he were unfit to live. I said these things, and others as ill-considered, under the eyes, and very possibly within earshot, of half a dozen persons sitting on this veranda. I noticed them, in spite of my agitation, looking at me as I walked up to the hotel again after relieving my mind for it undoubtedly did relieve it,’ sighed Mr Cupples, lying back in his chair.

‘And Manderson? Did he say no more?’

‘Not a word. He listened to me with his eyes on my face, as quiet as before. When I stopped he smiled very slightly, and at once turned away and strolled through the gate, making for White Gables.’

‘And this happened—?’

‘On the Sunday morning.’

‘Then I suppose you never saw him alive again?’

‘No,’ said Mr Cupples. ‘Or rather yes—once. It was later in the day, on the golf-course. But I did not speak to him. And next morning he was found dead.’

The two regarded each other in silence for a few moments. A party of guests who had been bathing came up the steps and seated themselves, with much chattering, at a table near them. The waiter approached. Mr Cupples rose, and, taking Trent’s arm, led him to a long tennis-lawn at the side of the hotel.

‘I have a reason for telling you all this,’ began Mr Cupples as they paced slowly up and down.

‘Trust you for that,’ rejoined Trent, carefully filling his pipe again. He lit it, smoked a little, and then said, ‘I’ll try and guess what your reason is, if you like.’

Mr Cupples’s face of solemnity relaxed into a slight smile. He said nothing.

‘You thought it possible,’ said Trent meditatively ‘—may I say you thought it practically certain?—that I should find out for myself that there had been something deeper than a mere conjugal tiff between the Mandersons. You thought that my unwholesome imagination would begin at once to play with the idea of Mrs Manderson having something to do with the crime. Rather than that I should lose myself in barren speculations about this, you decided to tell me exactly how matters stood, and incidentally to impress upon me, who know how excellent your judgement is, your opinion of your niece. Is that about right?’

‘It is perfectly right. Listen to me, my dear fellow,’ said Mr Cupples earnestly, laying his hand on the other’s arm. ‘I am going to be very frank. I am extremely glad that Manderson is dead. I believe him to have done nothing but harm in the world as an economic factor. I know that he was making a desert of the life of one who was like my own child to me. But I am under an intolerable dread of Mabel being involved in suspicion with regard to the murder. It is horrible to me to think of her delicacy and goodness being in contact, if only for a time, with the brutalities of the law. She is not fitted for it. It would mark her deeply. Many young women of twenty-six in these days could face such an ordeal, I suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products of the higher education of women today which would carry them through anything, perhaps.

‘I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the conditions of feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is not like that. She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering misses that used to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains; she is full of character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it is all mixed up’—Mr Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture—‘with ideals of refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is not a child of the age. You never knew my wife, Trent. Mabel is my wife’s child.’

The younger man bowed his head. They paced the length of the lawn before he asked gently, ‘Why did she marry him?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Cupples briefly.

‘Admired him, I suppose,’ suggested Trent.

Mr Cupples shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have been told that a woman will usually be more or less attracted by the most successful man in her circle. Of course we cannot realise how a wilful, dominating personality like his would influence a girl whose affections were not bestowed elsewhere; especially if he laid himself out to win her. It is probably an overwhelming thing to be courted by a man whose name is known all over the world. She had heard of him, of course, as a financial great power, and she had no idea—she had lived mostly among people of artistic or literary propensities—how much soulless inhumanity that might involve. For all I know, she has no adequate idea of it to this day. When I first heard of the affair the mischief was done, and I knew better than to interpose my unsought opinions. She was of age, and there was absolutely nothing against him from the conventional point of view. Then I dare say his immense wealth would cast a spell over almost any woman. Mabel had some hundreds a year of her own; just enough, perhaps, to let her realise what millions really meant. But all this is conjecture. She certainly had not wanted to marry some scores of young fellows who to my knowledge had asked her; and though I don’t believe, and never did believe, that she really loved this man of forty-five, she certainly did want to marry him. But if you ask me why, I can only say I don’t know.’

Trent nodded, and after a few more paces looked at his watch. ‘You’ve interested me so much,’ he said, ‘that I had quite forgotten my main business. I mustn’t waste my morning. I am going down the road to White Gables at once, and I dare say I shall be poking about there until midday. If you can meet me then, Cupples, I should like to talk over anything I find out with you, unless something detains me.’

‘I am going for a walk this morning,’ Mr Cupples replied. ‘I meant to have luncheon at a little inn near the golf-course, The Three Tuns. You had better join me there. It’s further along the road, about a quarter of a mile beyond White Gables. You can just see the roof between those two trees. The food they give one there is very plain, but good.’

‘So long as they have a cask of beer,’ said Trent, ‘they are all right. We will have bread and cheese, and oh, may Heaven our simple lives prevent from luxury’s contagion, weak and vile! Till then, goodbye.’ He strode off to recover his hat from the veranda, waved it to Mr Cupples, and was gone.

The old gentleman, seating himself in a deck-chair on the lawn, clasped his hands behind his head and gazed up into the speckless blue sky. ‘He is a dear fellow,’ he murmured. ‘The best of fellows. And a terribly acute fellow. Dear me! How curious it all is!’

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