The Hand in the Dark
which khaki lends to some men.
"Good afternoon," he said, and waited for them to announce the object of
their visit.
"Are you Captain Nepcote?" Merrington asked.
"My name is Nepcote," was the response. "May I ask who you are?" His
glance included both his visitors.
"My name is Merrington," responded that officer, answering for himself.
"Superintendent Merrington, of Scotland Yard. This is Mr. Colwyn, a
private detective," he added, as an afterthought. "I wish to ask you a
few questions. I understand you were staying at the residence of Sir
Philip Heredith when young Mrs. Heredith was murdered."
"That is not quite accurate," replied the young man. "I left the
moat-house on the afternoon of the day that the murder was committed,
and returned to London. What is it you wish to ask me? I am afraid I
cannot enlighten you about the crime in any way, for I know nothing
whatever about it. It came as a great shock to me when I heard of it."
"Is this your revolver?" said Merrington, producing the weapon and
laying it on the table.
"Why, yes, it is," said the young man, picking it up and looking at it
in unmistakable surprise. "Where did you get it?"
"Where did you have it last?" was Merrington's cautious rejoinder.
"Let me think," returned Nepcote thoughtfully. "Oh, I remember. The last
time I saw it was at the moat-house on the day before my departure. We
were using it for a little target practice in the gun-room downstairs."
"And what did you do with it afterwards?"
"That I cannot tell you," responded Nepcote. "I have no recollection of
seeing it since. I have never thought about it."
"Nor missed it?"
"No. It is no use to me--it is not an Army revolver. But it seems to me
that I must have left it in the moat-house gun-room after the target
shooting. After we finished shooting some of us had a game of bagatelle
on a table in the gun-room. I must have put the revolver down and
forgotten all about it afterward. I have no recollection of taking it
upstairs, and I have certainly never seen it since. Was it found in the
gun-room?"
"It was found at the moat-house, at any rate. It was the weapon with
which Mrs. Heredith was killed."
"What!" His exclamation rang out in horror and incredulity. "Why, it is
impossible. The thing is a mere toy."
"A pretty dangerous toy--as it turned out," was the grim comment of
Merrington.
"It seems incredible to me," persisted the young man. "It's very
old, and you have to be very strong with the finger and thumb to
make it revolve. And the cartridges are very small; only seven
millimetres--about a quarter of an inch. I've had the old thing for
years, but I never regarded it as a real fire-arm. I'd never have let
the girls use it in the gun-room if I'd thought it was a dangerous
weapon. Perhaps there is some mistake."
"There is no mistake," replied Merrington. "Mrs. Heredith was killed
with that revolver, and no other. We were unable to establish the
identity of the weapon until a day or two ago, and that is one of my
reasons for calling on you to-day--to make quite sure of the identity
and see if you could tell me where you left it."
"I have no doubt now that I must have left it behind me at the
moat-house," responded Nepcote. "I was recalled to France and went away
in a hurry. God forgive me for my carelessness. To think that it
resulted in this terrible murder!" His face had gone suddenly white.
"Did you return to France that night?" asked Merrington carelessly.
"As a matter of fact, I did not. When I returned to London from Sussex I
found another telegram here from the War Office extending my leave until
the following day. I returned to France the next afternoon."
"Thank you, Captain Nepcote." Merrington, as he rose to go, held out his
hand. It was evident that the statement about the telegram had cleared
his mind of any suspicions he may have felt about the young man. As
Nepcote shook hands he added: "You had better hold yourself in readiness
to attend the police court inquiry, which will be held a week from
to-day. I will send you a proper notification of time and place. All we
need from you is the formal identification of the revolver."
"Is it essential that I should attend?" asked the young man anxiously.
"I'd rather not be mixed up in the case at all, you know. Besides, I may
have to return to France."
"Perhaps we shall be able to dispense with your evidence now that we
have the facts," replied Merrington, after a moment's consideration. "I
will see what can be done, and let you know. You had better give me your
address in France, in case you have left England. It is necessary for me
to know that, because the case has to some extent taken a new turn by
the discovery that robbery as well as murder has been committed. A
valuable necklace belonging to the murdered woman is missing."
Captain Nepcote had taken out his pocket-book while Merrington was
speaking, in order to extract a card. As the other uttered the last
sentence, the pocket-book half slipped from his fingers, and several
other cards fluttered onto the table. Nepcote picked them up hastily,
but not before Colwyn's quick glance had taken in their contents. It
seemed to him something more than a coincidence that the name and
address displayed in neat black lettering on one of the cards should be
identical with one of the Hatton Garden addresses given him by Musard at
the moat-house the previous day.
CHAPTER XX
Colwyn spent a couple of hours that night reading the depositions he had
obtained from Merrington, and next morning he studied them afresh with a
concentration which the incessant hum of London traffic outside was
powerless to disturb. He was well aware that a report was a poor
substitute for original impressions, but in the typewritten document
before him lay the facts of the Heredith case so far as they were known.
It was a clear and colourless transcription of the narrative of the
witnesses, set down with a painstaking regard for the value of
departmental records, and chiefly valuable to Colwyn because it
contained the expert evidence which sometimes reveals, with the pitiless
accuracy of science, what human nature endeavours to hide. In the
balance of the scales of justice it is the ascertained truth which
weighs heavier than faith, reason, or revealed religion.
When he had finished his study of the depositions, he sat awhile
pondering over his own discoveries since he had been called into the
case by the husband of the dead woman. These discoveries, due apparently
to chance, invested the murder with a complexity which stimulated all
the penetrative and analytical powers of his fine mind, because they
brought with them the realization that he was face to face with one of
those rare crimes where the solution has to be unravelled from a tangle
of false circumstances, which, by their seeming plausibility, make the
task of reaching the truth one of peculiar difficulty. As Colwyn sat
motionless, with his chin resting on his hand, brooding over the sullen
secretive surface of this dark mystery, the feeling grew upon him that
the murder had been preconceived with the utmost cunning and caution,
and that the facts so far brought to light, including his own
discoveries, did not penetrate to the real design.
The one conviction in his mind at that moment was that the man he and
Merrington had interviewed on the previous afternoon had some connection
with the mystery, and that an investigation of Nepcote's actions was the
first step towards the solution of the murder. Colwyn based that belief
on the apparently detached facts of the revolver, the patch of khaki he
had found in the woods near the moat-house, and the accident which
disclosed that Nepcote was carrying the address of a Hatton Garden
jeweller in his pocket-book. These things, taken apart, had perhaps but
slight significance, but, considered as links in a chain of events which
started in Philip Heredith's statement that he had first met his wife at
a friend's house where Nepcote was also a guest, and finishing with the
knowledge that Nepcote had not returned to France on the night of the
murder, they assumed a significance which at least warranted the closest
investigation.
Colwyn was not affected by the fact that Superintendent Merrington
looked at the case from an entirely different point of view. He did not
want the help of Scotland Yard in solving the crime. He had too much
contempt for the official mind in any capacity to think that assistance
from such a source could be of value to him. He always preferred to work
alone and unaided. It was the Anglo-Saxon instinct of fair play which
had prompted him to tell Merrington about the missing necklace, so that
there might be no unfair advantage between them. Merrington had received
the information with the imperviable dogmatism of the official mind,
strong in the belief in its own infallibility, resentful of advice or
suggestion as an attempt to weaken its dignity. It seemed to Colwyn that
not only had Merrington's ruffled dignity led his judgment astray in an
attempt to fit the discovery of the missing necklace into his own theory
of the case, but it had caused him to commit a grave mistake in putting
Nepcote on his guard at a moment when the utmost circumspection of
investigation was necessary.
To Colwyn, at all events, the discovery of the missing necklace was of
the utmost importance because it substituted another motive for the
murder, and a motive which carried with it the additional complication
that the thief had some motive in trying to keep its disappearance
secret as long as possible by locking the jewel-case after the jewels
had been abstracted. If Hazel Rath had not stolen the necklace, the
whole of the facts took on new values. It was quite true that the
mystery of Hazel Rath's actions on the night of the murder, her
subsequent silence after the recovery of the brooch and the handkerchief
and the revolver in her mother's rooms, remained as suspicious as
before, but the changed motive caused these points to assume a different
complexion, even to the extent of suggesting that she might be a lesser
participant in the crime, perhaps keeping silence in order to shield the
greater criminal.
Merrington, stiff-necked in his officialism, had been unable to see this
changed aspect of the case, and, strong in his presumption of the girl's
guilt, had acted with impulsive indiscretion in going to see Nepcote
before attempting to trace the missing necklace.
Colwyn's reflections were interrupted by the appearance of the porter
from downstairs to announce a visitor. The visitor, partly obscured
behind the burly frame of the porter in the doorway, was Detective
Caldew, of Scotland Yard. Colwyn had met him at various times, and
invited him to enter. As Colwyn had once said, his feelings towards all
the members of the regular detective force were invariably friendly; it
was not their fault, but the fault of human nature, that they were
sometimes jealous of him. So he made Caldew welcome, and offered him a
cigar.
Caldew accepted the cigar and the proffered seat a little nervously. His
was the type of temperament which is overawed in the presence of a more
successful practitioner in the same line of business. He had long envied
Colwyn his dazzling successes, but at the same time he had sufficient
intelligence to understand that many of those successes stood in a class
which he could never hope to attain.
At the present moment, Caldew's feelings were divided between resentment
at Colwyn's action in conveying information to Scotland Yard which had
earned him a reprimand from Superintendent Merrington, and the anxious
desire to ascertain what the famous private detective thought of the
Heredith case.