“Hrrmp!” said the Colonel. “And gets it! George will be there for dinner,”
he added. “George Meir. Cousin of my wife’s. Perhaps you know him? Nerve
specialist.”
“I know him well by reputation, but I’ve never met him.”
“That’s Erica’s doing. Nice fellow, George, but a bit of a bore. Don’t
understand what he’s talking about half the time. Reactions, and things. But
Erica seems to understand the lingo. Good shot, though: George. Nice
fellow.”
Sir George was a nice fellow. Grant liked him at sight, and noticing his
narrow cheekbones, felt that some other attribute in him must weigh very
strongly with Erica to overcome his physical characteristics. He was
certainly a pleasant person, with neither the slight flamboyance nor the
condescension so common in Wimpole Street. That he could commiserate with
Grant on his nonsuccess without making Grant want to hit him, was a test of
his worth. Grant, in fact, turned to him in his sore state, as to someone who
would understand. This was a man to whom human failure must be a very
ordinary affair.
Colonel Burgoyne had forbidden mention of the Clay affair during dinner,
but he might as well have bidden the tides cease. They were all talking
Tisdall, Colonel included, before the fish had disappeared. All but Erica,
who sat at the end of the table in her demure school-supper white dress,
listening quietly. She had powdered her nose, but looked no more grown up
than she did by day.
“We never picked up his trail at all,” Grant said in answer to a question
of Meir. “He just disappeared from the moment he left the hotel. Oh, there
were dozens of accounts of men like him, of course. But they all led to
nothing. We don’t know a thing more than we did last Monday. He might have
been sleeping out, the first three nights. But you know what last night was
like. Torrents. Not even an animal could have stayed out in it. He must have
found shelter somewhere, if he’s still alive. It wasn’t local, the storm.
There are floods from here to the Tyne. And yet another whole day has gone
past and not a hint of him.”
“No chance of his escaping by sea?”
“Not likely. Curiously enough, not one criminal in a thousand escapes that
way.”
“So much for our island race!” laughed Meir. “The sea’s the last thing
they think of. You know, Inspector, I don’t know if you know it, but you have
made the man very vivid in the half hour we’ve been talking. And there’s
something else you’ve made clear, I think; something you probably are not
aware of yourself.”
“What is that?”
“You were surprised in your heart of hearts that he had done it. Perhaps
even sorry. You hadn’t believed it.”
“Yes, I think that’s true. You’d have been sorry yourself, Sir George,”
Grant grinned. “He’s very plausible. And he stuck to truth as far as it
served him. As I told you, we’ve checked his statement from beginning to end.
It’s true as far as it can be checked. But that thin story about stealing the
car! And losing his coat—the all-important coat!”
“Curiously enough, I don’t think the stealing episode is as incredible as
it sounds. His main thought for the past few weeks had been escape. Escape
from the disgrace of his spent fortune, from the crowd (whom he seems to have
begun to value at their proper worth), from the necessity of earning his
living again (tramping was just as mad a notion, in the case of a boy with
influential connections, as stealing a car: the escape motif again), and
latterly escape from the equivocal situation at the cottage. He must have
looked forward, you know, with subconscious dread to the leave-taking that
was due in a day or two. He was in a highly emotional condition due to his
self-disgust and self-questioning (at bottom what he wanted to escape from
was himself). At a moment of low vitality (six in the morning) he is
presented with the means of physical escape. A deserted countryside and
abandoned car. He is possessed for the time being. When he recovers he is
horrified, just as he says. He turns the car without having to think twice,
and comes back at the best speed he can make. To his dying day he’ll never
understand what made him steal the car.”
“Stealing will pretty soon not be a crime at all, what with all you
specialists,” the Colonel remarked with a sort of tart resignation.
“Not a bad theory, sir,” Grant said to Meir. “Can you make the thin tale
about the coat thicker too?”
“Truth is often terribly thin, don’t you think?”
“Are you taking the view that the man may be innocent?”
“I had thought of it.”
“Why?”
“I have an excellent opinion of your judgment.”
“
My
judgment?”
“Yes. You were surprised the man had done it. That means that your first
impression was clouded by circumstantial evidence.”
“In fact, I’m logical as well as imaginative. Mercifully, since I’m a
police officer. The evidence may be circumstantial but it is very satisfying
and neat.”
“Much too neat, don’t you feel?”
“Lord Edward said that. But no policeman feels that evidence is too neat,
Sir George.”
“Poor Champneis!” the Colonel said. “Dreadful for him. Very devoted they
were, I’m told. A nice fellow. Didn’t know him, but knew the family in my
young days. Nice people. Dreadful for them!”
“I traveled up from Dover with him on Thursday,” Meir said. “I had come
over from Calais—I’ve just come back from a medical conference in
Vienna—and he joined the boat train with the usual Champneis lordliness
at Dover. He seemed very happy to be back. Showed me some topazes he had
brought from Galeria for his wife. They corresponded every day by telegram,
it seemed. I found that more impressive than the topazes, if I must be frank.
European telegrams being what they are.”
“Just a moment, Sir George. Do you mean that Champneis hadn’t come over on
the boat from Calais?”
“No, oh, no. He came home by yacht. The
Petronel
. It belongs to his
elder brother, but he lent it to Edward for the voyage back from Galeria. A
charming little ship. She was lying in the harbor.”
“Then when had Lord Edward arrived in Dover?”
“The night before, I believe. Too late to go up to town.” He paused and
looked quizzically at Grant. “Neither logic nor imagination will make Edward
Champneis suspect.”
“I realize that.” Grant went on calmly to prise the stone from a peach, an
operation he had suspended abruptly at Meir’s phrase about Champneis joining
the boat train. “It is of no importance. The police habit of checking
up.”
But his mind was full of surprise and conjecture. Champneis had distinctly
let him understand that he had crossed from Calais on Thursday morning. Not
in words but by implication. Grant had made some idle remark, something about
the accommodation in the new steamers, and Champneis in his reply had implied
that he had been on board that morning. Why? Edward Champneis was in Dover on
Wednesday night, and was reluctant to have the fact known. Why? In the name
of all that was logical, why?
Because an awkward pause had succeeded the revelation of Champneis’s
presence in England, Grant said lightly, “Miss Erica hasn’t produced the
puppies, or whatever it was I was to be shown.”
To everyone’s surprise Erica grew pink. This was so unheard-of a happening
that all three men stared.
“It isn’t puppies,” she said. “It’s something you wanted very much. But
I’m terribly afraid you’re not going to be happy about it.”
“It sounds exciting,” admitted Grant, wondering what the child had
imagined he wanted. He hoped she hadn’t brought him something. Hero worship
was all very well, but it was embarrassing to be given something in full view
of the multitude. “Where is it?”
“It’s in a parcel up in my room. I thought I’d wait till you had finished
your port.”
“Is it something you can bring into a dining room?” her father asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“Then Burt will fetch it.”
“Oh, no!” she cried, arresting her father’s hand on the bell. “I’ll get
it. I shan’t be a minute.”
She came back carrying a large brown paper parcel, which her father said
looked like a Salvation Army gift day. She unwrapped it and produced a man’s
coat, of a grayish black.
“That is the coat you wanted,” she said. “But it has all its buttons.”
Grant took the coat automatically, and examined it.
“Where in Heaven’s name did you get that, Erica?” her father asked,
astonished.
“I bought it for ten shillings from a stone breaker at Paddock Wood. He
gave a tramp five shillings for it, and thought it such a bargain that he
didn’t want to part with it. I had to have cold tea with him, and listen to
what the Border Regiment did on the first of July, and see the bullet scar on
his shin, before he would give up the coat. I was afraid to go away and leave
him with it in case he sold it to someone else, or I couldn’t find him
again.”
“What makes you think this is Tisdall’s coat?” Grant asked.
“This,” she said, and showed the cigarette burn. “He told me to look for
that.”
“Who did?”
“Mr. Tisdall!”
“Who?” said all three men at once.
“I met him by accident on Wednesday. And since then I’ve been searching
for the coat. But it was great luck coming across it.
“You met him! Where?”
“In a lane near Mallingford.”
“And you didn’t report it?” Grant’s voice was stern.
“No.” Hers quavered just a little, and then went on equably. “You see, I
didn’t believe he had done it. And I really do like you a lot. I thought it
would be better for you if he could be proved innocent before he was really
arrested. Then you wouldn’t have to set him free again. The papers would be
awful about that.”
There was a stunned silence for a moment.
Then Grant said, “And on Wednesday Tisdall told you to look for this.” He
held forward the burned piece, while the others crowded from their places to
inspect.
“No sign of a replaced button,” Meir observed. “Do you think it’s the
coat?”
“It may be. We can’t try it on Tisdall, but perhaps Mrs. Pitts may be able
to identify it.”
“But—but,” stammered the Colonel—“if it is the coat do you
realize what it means?”
“Completely. It means beginning all over again.”
His tired eyes, cold with disappointment, met Erica’s kind gray ones, but
he refused their sympathy. It was too early to think of Erica as his possible
savior. At the moment she was just someone who had thrown a wrench into the
machinery.
“I shall have to get back,” he said. “May I use your telephone?”
MRS. PITTS identified the coat. She had dried it at the
kitchen fire one day when a thermos bottle of hot water had leaked on it. She
had noticed the cigarette burn then.
Sergeant Williams, interviewing the farmer who had identified Tisdall’s
car, found that he was color blind.
The truth stuck out with painful clarity. Tisdall had really lost his coat
from the car on Tuesday. He had really driven away from the beach. He had not
murdered Christine Clay.
By eleven that Friday evening Grant was faced with the fact that they were
just where they were a week previously, when he had canceled a theater seat
and come down to Westover. Worse still, they had hounded a man into flight
and hiding, and they had wasted seven days on a dud investigation while the
man they wanted made his escape.
Grant’s mind was a welter of broken ends and unrelated facts.
Harmer. He came into the picture now, didn’t he? They had checked his
story as far as it went. He really had made inquiries from the owner of the
cherry orchard, and from the post office at Liddlestone at the times he said.
But after that, what? After that no one knew anything about his movements
until he walked into the cottage at Medley, sometime after eight the next
morning.
There was—incredibly!—Edward Champneis, who had brought back
topazes for his wife, but who, for some reason, was unwilling that his
movements on that Wednesday night should be investigated. There could be no
other reason for his desire to make Grant believe that he had arrived in
England on Thursday morning. He had not come to England secretly. If you want
to arrive secretly in a country, arriving in a populous harbor by yacht is
not the way to do it. Harbor master and customs’ officials are a
constitutionally inquisitive race. Therefore it was not the fact of his
arrival that he wanted to hide, but the way in which he had occupied his time
since. The more Grant thought about it, the queerer it became. Champneis was
at Dover on Wednesday night. At six on Thursday morning his well-loved wife
had met her death. And Champneis did not want his movements investigated.
Very queer!
There was, too, the “shilling for candles.” That, which had first caught
his interest and had been put aside in favor of more obvious lines of
inquiry, that would have to be looked into.
On Saturday morning the newspapers, beginning to be bored with a
four-day-old manhunt, carried the glad news that the hunted man was innocent.
“New information having come to police.” It was confidently expected that
Tisdall would present himself before nightfall, and in that hope reporters
and photographers lingered around the County police station in Westover; with
more optimism than logic, it would seem, since Tisdall was just as likely to
present himself at a station miles away.
But Tisdall presented himself nowhere.
This caused a slight stirring of surprise in Grant’s busy mind when he had
a moment to remember Tisdall; but that was not often. He wondered why Tisdall
hadn’t enough sense to come in out of the wet. It had rained again on Friday
night and it had been blowing a northeaster and raining all Saturday. One
would have thought he would have been glad to see a police station. He was
not being sheltered by any of his old friends, that was certain. They had all
been shadowed very efficiently during the four days that he was “wanted.”
Grant concluded that Tisdall had not yet seen a newspaper, and dismissed the
thing from his mind.