At ten o’clock the Casanova hack brought up three men. They introduced
themselves as the coroner of the county and two detectives from the city. The
coroner led the way at once to the locked wing, and with the aid of one of the
detectives examined the rooms and the body. The other detective, after a short
scrutiny of the dead man, busied himself with the outside of the house. It was
only after they had got a fair idea of things as they were that they sent for
me.
I received them in the living-room, and I had made up my mind exactly what to
tell. I had taken the house for the summer, I said, while the Armstrongs were
in California. In spite of a rumor among the servants about strange
noises—I cited Thomas—nothing had occurred the first two nights. On
the third night I believed that some one had been in the house: I had heard a
crashing sound, but being alone with one maid had not investigated. The house
had been locked in the morning and apparently undisturbed.
Then, as clearly as I could, I related how, the night before, a shot had roused
us; that my niece and I had investigated and found a body; that I did not know
who the murdered man was until Mr. Jarvis from the club informed me, and that I
knew of no reason why Mr. Arnold Armstrong should steal into his father’s
house at night. I should have been glad to allow him entree there at any time.
“Have you reason to believe, Miss Innes,” the coroner asked,
“that any member of your household, imagining Mr. Armstrong was a
burglar, shot him in self-defense?”
“I have no reason for thinking so,” I said quietly.
“Your theory is that Mr. Armstrong was followed here by some enemy, and
shot as he entered the house?”
“I don’t think I have a theory,” I said. “The thing
that has puzzled me is why Mr. Armstrong should enter his father’s house
two nights in succession, stealing in like a thief, when he needed only to ask
entrance to be admitted.”
The coroner was a very silent man: he took some notes after this, but he seemed
anxious to make the next train back to town. He set the inquest for the
following Saturday, gave Mr. Jamieson, the younger of the two detectives, and
the more intelligent looking, a few instructions, and, after gravely shaking
hands with me and regretting the unfortunate affair, took his departure,
accompanied by the other detective.
I was just beginning to breathe freely when Mr. Jamieson, who had been standing
by the window, came over to me.
“The family consists of yourself alone, Miss Innes?”
“My niece is here,” I said.
“There is no one but yourself and your niece?”
“My nephew.” I had to moisten my lips.
“Oh, a nephew. I should like to see him, if he is here.”
“He is not here just now,” I said as quietly as I could. “I
expect him—at any time.”
“He was here yesterday evening, I believe?”
“No—yes.”
“Didn’t he have a guest with him? Another man?”
“He brought a friend with him to stay over Sunday, Mr. Bailey.”
“Mr. John Bailey, the cashier of the Traders’ Bank I
believe.” And I knew that some one at the Greenwood Club had told.
“When did they leave?”
“Very early—I don’t know at just what time.”
Mr. Jamieson turned suddenly and looked at me.
“Please try to be more explicit,” he said. “You say your
nephew and Mr. Bailey were in the house last night, and yet you and your niece,
with some women-servants, found the body. Where was your nephew?”
I was entirely desperate by that time.
“I do not know,” I cried, “but be sure of this: Halsey knows
nothing of this thing, and no amount of circumstantial evidence can make an
innocent man guilty.”
“Sit down,” he said, pushing forward a chair. “There are some
things I have to tell you, and, in return, please tell me all you know. Believe
me, things always come out. In the first place, Mr. Armstrong was shot from
above. The bullet was fired at close range, entered below the shoulder and came
out, after passing through the heart, well down the back. In other words, I
believe the murderer stood on the stairs and fired down. In the second place, I
found on the edge of the billiard-table a charred cigar which had burned itself
partly out, and a cigarette which had consumed itself to the cork tip. Neither
one had been more than lighted, then put down and forgotten. Have you any idea
what it was that made your nephew and Mr. Bailey leave their cigars and their
game, take out the automobile without calling the chauffeur, and all this
at—let me see—certainly before three o’clock in the
morning?”
“I don’t know,” I said; “but depend on it, Mr.
Jamieson, Halsey will be back himself to explain everything.”
“I sincerely hope so,” he said. “Miss Innes, has it occurred
to you that Mr. Bailey might know something of this?”
Gertrude had come down-stairs and just as he spoke she came in. I saw her stop
suddenly, as if she had been struck.
“He does not,” she said in a tone that was not her own. “Mr.
Bailey and my brother know nothing of this. The murder was committed at three.
They left the house at a quarter before three.”
“How do you know that?” Mr. Jamieson asked oddly. “Do you
know at what time they left?”
“I do,” Gertrude answered firmly. “At a quarter before three
my brother and Mr. Bailey left the house, by the main entrance.
I—was—there.”
“Gertrude,” I said excitedly, “you are dreaming! Why, at a
quarter to three—”
“Listen,” she said. “At half-past two the downstairs
telephone rang. I had not gone to sleep, and I heard it. Then I heard Halsey
answer it, and in a few minutes he came up-stairs and knocked at my door.
We—we talked for a minute, then I put on my dressing-gown and slippers,
and went down-stairs with him. Mr. Bailey was in the billiard-room. We—we
all talked together for perhaps ten minutes. Then it was decided
that—that they should both go away—”
“Can’t you be more explicit?” Mr. Jamieson asked.
“Why did they go away?”
“I am only telling you what happened, not why it happened,” she
said evenly. “Halsey went for the car, and instead of bringing it to the
house and rousing people, he went by the lower road from the stable. Mr. Bailey
was to meet him at the foot of the lawn. Mr. Bailey left—”
“Which way?” Mr. Jamieson asked sharply.
“By the main entrance. He left—it was a quarter to three. I know
exactly.”
“The clock in the hall is stopped, Miss Innes,” said Jamieson.
Nothing seemed to escape him.
“He looked at his watch,” she replied, and I could see Mr.
Jamieson’s snap, as if he had made a discovery. As for myself, during the
whole recital I had been plunged into the deepest amazement.
“Will you pardon me for a personal question?” The detective was a
youngish man, and I thought he was somewhat embarrassed. “What are
your—your relations with Mr. Bailey?”
Gertrude hesitated. Then she came over and put her hand lovingly in mine.
“I am engaged to marry him,” she said simply.
I had grown so accustomed to surprises that I could only gasp again, and as for
Gertrude, the hand that lay in mine was burning with fever.
“And—after that,” Mr. Jamieson went on, “you went
directly to bed?”
Gertrude hesitated.
“No,” she said finally. “I—I am not nervous, and after
I had extinguished the light, I remembered something I had left in the
billiard-room, and I felt my way back there through the darkness.”
“Will you tell me what it was you had forgotten?”
“I can not tell you,” she said slowly. “I—I did not
leave the billiard-room at once—”
“Why?” The detective’s tone was imperative. “This is
very important, Miss Innes.”
“I was crying,” Gertrude said in a low tone. “When the French
clock in the drawing-room struck three, I got up, and then—I heard a step
on the east porch, just outside the card-room. Some one with a key was working
with the latch, and I thought, of course, of Halsey. When we took the house he
called that his entrance, and he had carried a key for it ever since. The door
opened and I was about to ask what he had forgotten, when there was a flash and
a report. Some heavy body dropped, and, half crazed with terror and shock, I
ran through the drawing-room and got up-stairs—I scarcely remember
how.”
She dropped into a chair, and I thought Mr. Jamieson must have finished. But he
was not through.
“You certainly clear your brother and Mr. Bailey admirably,” he
said. “The testimony is invaluable, especially in view of the fact that
your brother and Mr. Armstrong had, I believe, quarreled rather seriously some
time ago.”
“Nonsense,” I broke in. “Things are bad enough, Mr. Jamieson,
without inventing bad feeling where it doesn’t exist. Gertrude, I
don’t think Halsey knew the—the murdered man, did he?”
But Mr. Jamieson was sure of his ground.
“The quarrel, I believe,” he persisted, “was about Mr.
Armstrong’s conduct to you, Miss Gertrude. He had been paying you
unwelcome attentions.”
And I had never seen the man!
When she nodded a “yes” I saw the tremendous possibilities
involved. If this detective could prove that Gertrude feared and disliked the
murdered man, and that Mr. Armstrong had been annoying and possibly pursuing
her with hateful attentions, all that, added to Gertrude’s confession of
her presence in the billiard-room at the time of the crime, looked strange, to
say the least. The prominence of the family assured a strenuous effort to find
the murderer, and if we had nothing worse to look forward to, we were sure of a
distasteful publicity.
Mr. Jamieson shut his note-book with a snap, and thanked us.
“I have an idea,” he said, apropos of nothing at all, “that
at any rate the ghost is laid here. Whatever the rappings have been—and
the colored man says they began when the family went west three months
ago—they are likely to stop now.”
Which shows how much he knew about it. The ghost was not laid: with the murder
of Arnold Armstrong he, or it, only seemed to take on fresh vigor.
Mr. Jamieson left then, and when Gertrude had gone up-stairs, as she did at
once, I sat and thought over what I had just heard. Her engagement, once so
engrossing a matter, paled now beside the significance of her story. If Halsey
and Jack Bailey had left before the crime, how came Halsey’s revolver in
the tulip bed? What was the mysterious cause of their sudden flight? What had
Gertrude left in the billiard-room? What was the significance of the cuff-link,
and where was it?
