Man with the Dark Beard (5 page)

The detective nodded.

“It would go in the safe, then. We must search for it there. But first, Sir Felix, I must ask if you really had no idea of the nature of the discovery he had made, or why it was troubling him?”

“Really no knowledge whatever. But naturally one makes surmises – especially in a profession like mine. It is almost unavoidable.”

“Of course.” The detective looked puzzled. “But I am sure you appreciate the importance of this as well as, if not much better than I do, Sir Felix. Do you connect this secret of the doctor's with his murder?”

“N–o,” Sir Felix said slowly. “Not if it is as I surmise. I really don't see that it could have any connexion with his death.”

“You feel sure that you don't know the cause of the worry of which Dr. Bastow was speaking to you?”

“No, I don't,” Sir Felix said bluntly. “I really feel sure of nothing.”

The detective rubbed the side of his nose reflectively.

“I think you will have to tell us the nature of the secret, Sir Felix, or rather of what you surmise the nature to have been. I know you realize the importance of placing every detail in the hands of the police,” he added.

Sir Felix did not hesitate.

“Certainly. The only stipulation I make is that I do not speak until your examination of the household is complete.”

The inspector did not look satisfied. Had the man to whom he was speaking been almost anyone else, he would have insisted on a full disclosure at once, but Sir Felix Skrine was no ordinary person to him.

“Very well, Sir Felix,” he said grudgingly at last. “But now I must ask you something else. Can you tell me the names of any men among Dr. Bastow's friends or acquaintances who wear dark beards?”

“Dark beards!” Sir Felix looked amazed at the question. “There may have been dozens. I don't know.”

“But can you remember the names of any of them?” the detective persisted.

Sir Felix raised his eyebrows.

“Not at the moment. Yet stay – there is Dr. Sanford Morris, noted for his research work, and John Lavery, an old schoolfellow of ours. He lives near Lancaster Gate, but I don't think Dr. Bastow saw much of him; though I have met him here on special occasions – anniversaries, etc. I believe they both have dark beards, but why do you ask?”

“I will show you, Sir Felix, though, mind you, I shall say nothing about it to anyone else at present.” The detective drew a sheet of notepaper from the blotting-book before the dead man's chair; across it was scrawled in big, bold handwriting – like that of the half-finished letter Skrine had just been studying –
“It was the Man with the Dark Beard.”

“What do you think of that, Sir Felix?” Sir Felix stared at the paper in astonishment.

“It is Dr. Bastow's writing. But what does it mean?” he inquired at last.

The detective shook his head.

“I don't know. I can't see how the words could refer to the murder or the murderer. Even if the doctor recognized him death was instantaneous. And yet I can't help fancying that they do refer to the murderer.”

“I don't see how they can,” Sir Felix dissented still in the same perplexed tone. “And there are heaps of men with dark beards –”

“You could only remember two just now,” remarked the detective.

“Not at the moment. But I don't know all Dr. Bastow's acquaintances or patients.”

“Of course not,” the detective assented. “But these two you have mentioned. One is a doctor engaged in the same sort of work as Dr. Bastow, you said. The other – Mr. Lavery – what is he?”

“He is in Somerset House, the Estate Duties Office,” Sir Felix replied. “Still, as I say, I have seen little of him for years. But neither of these men could have had anything to do with the murder.”

“Well, we can't be sure of anything,” the detective returned dogmatically. “I will just finish in this room, and then we will see the household.” Magnifying-glass in hand he went back to the window. Sir Felix followed him.

“What are you doing here? I think it is pretty well established that the murderer entered by the garden door. Footprints and fingerprints you find here will be those of Mr. Wilton, who broke this window to get in.”

“Precisely,” the inspector returned dryly. “But I am not looking for prints of any kind at the present moment, Sir Felix. I was just wondering how this curtain and blind could have been arranged so that anyone in the garden could see into the room. It seems to me that it could only have been done purposely.”

Sir Felix looked at him.

“Do you mean that anyone outside could see into this room – that they witnessed the murder?”

Inspector Stoddart went on arranging the curtain, pulling it back, twisting it to one side.

“I don't know what anybody witnessed, Sir Felix. I shouldn't be surprised if it was – just that! What I want to know is – was it purposely arranged? And if so why was it arranged for this particular night?”

Sir Felix passed his hand over his forehead wearily.

“I can't understand what you are talking about. Why do you imagine that anyone saw anything through this window?”

“Because Miss Lavinia Priestley saw the body in the chair through this window before Mr. Wilton broke in,” the detective went on. “Yes, I think I can see how it was managed. But could it have been accidental? It does not look to me as if it could be. But I will just take a glance at it from the outside.”

Sir Felix Skrine appeared about to speak, but the detective did not wait to hear what he had to say.

Skrine did not attempt to follow him into the garden. He waited beside his dead friend's chair, the horror and pity in his eyes deepening. Presently Stoddart came back.

“Yes; quite easy to see what they said they did,” he remarked. “But I wonder who wanted to look through. That girl who was the first to say Dr. Bastow was in his chair?”

“What girl? Whom are you speaking of?” Sir Felix questioned.

“The parlourmaid,” the detective answered, still looking at his spy-hole among the curtains. “She went round to the garden window when they found both doors locked and told them the doctor was in the chair. The question to my mind is, did she know she could see into the room, or was it just guess-work?”

“Yes, the inquest is to be opened tomorrow,” Miss Lavinia said tartly. “Today this detective seems to be holding a sort of Grand Inquisition of his own. For my part I shouldn't have thought such a thing was legal in England, which we used to be told was a free country, though I am sure I don't know what we are coming to.”

Skrine's troubled face relaxed into a smile.

“Why should this man be allowed to treat the house as if it belonged to him?” she continued crossly. “There he sits at a table in the morning-room, his papers all spread out – ruining the polish, of course, but that is a detail – and there we have to go in to him one by one like schoolchildren and tell him what we know of last night's doings. He wouldn't even have Hilary and me in together. As if we should be likely to tell him lies.”

“It is the rule,” Sir Felix remarked mildly, “for the witnesses to give their evidence separately, or rather I should say the statements upon which they will be examined later on.”

“I call it a ridiculous proceeding,” Miss Lavinia said, turning her shoulder on him. “The servants are going in now like the animals into the Ark, only one by one instead of two by two. Of course they resent it! I don't wonder that one of them has run away.”

Sir Felix pricked up his ears.

“Has one of them run away? I didn't know.”

“None of us did know until just now,” Miss Lavinia went on testily. “Till she was rung for and didn't arrive to answer the bell and couldn't be found. It seems she was one this officious policeman particularly wanted too. Should have taken care to have had her looked after better, I say.”

“But the doors are all guarded,” Sir Felix said in a puzzled tone.

Miss Lavinia snapped her fingers.

“That for your noodles of policemen. The girl put on her best clothes and walked out of the front door. The man spoke to her and she said she was a friend who had been staying the night with Miss Bastow. Your brilliant policeman beckoned a taxi and held the door open for her politely. What do you think of that?” Apparently Sir Felix Skrine did not think anything of it – apparently he was not paying any attention to Miss Lavinia's remarks. His eyes, straying over the garden, had focused themselves on the gate – the gate through which the murderer must have come.

Miss Lavinia looked at him impatiently.

“I see you haven't lost your old trick of day-dreaming, Sir Felix.”

Sir Felix awoke from his abstraction with a start.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Priestley. You were speaking of the missing maidservant – is it the parlourmaid?”

“Yes, it
is
the parlourmaid,” returned Miss Lavinia irritably. “Though why you should pitch on her I don't know. A forward-looking minx she was! Calling herself Mary Ann Taylor, which I don't believe was her name any more than it is mine. I'm not at all sure I haven't seen her somewhere before, but I can't remember where.”

“She was a very good-looking woman,” Sir Felix said dreamily.

Miss Lavinia opened her eyes.

“You don't mean to say that you have noticed that! I am sure I never gave you credit for even knowing that such people as parlourmaids existed. But there! It's no use deluding oneself with the idea that any man, monk or dreamer or what not, does not keep his eyes open for a pretty face.”

Sir Felix did not look quite pleased.

“How is Hilary now?”

“As well as she is likely to be after having her father murdered last night, and having been catechized for goodness knows how long by a brute of a detective this morning,” Miss Lavinia retorted. “At the present moment she is in the drawing-room, being consoled by her young man I presume, till his turn comes to go in.”

Sir Felix frowned.

“Do you mean Wilton?”

Miss Lavinia stared at him.

“Well, of course. Anybody can see they are head over ears in love with one another.”

“A boy and girl affair,” Sir Felix said impatiently.

“Boys and girls know their own minds nowadays,” was Miss Lavinia's conclusion.

Meanwhile in the morning-room Detective Inspector Stoddart was turning papers over impatiently. Matters were not going quite to Inspector Stoddart's liking. So far his examination of the household had not elucidated the mystery surrounding Dr. John Bastow's death at all. And yet the detective had the strongest instinct or presentiment, whatever you may like to call it, that the clue which would eventually lead him through the labyrinth was to be found amongst them.

At last, pushing the papers from him impatiently, he walked to the door.

“Jones, ask Mr. Wilton to step this way.”

The policeman saluted and went off; in another minute Basil Wilton appeared.

“You want to take my statement, I understand, inspector?”

The inspector frowned.

“Yes. Rather an important one, in view of the fact that you were the last person to see the late Dr. Bastow alive.”

“You are forgetting the murderer, aren't you?” Wilton questioned with a wry smile.

“I should have said the last person
known
to have seen the late Dr. Bastow alive,” the inspector corrected himself. “I shall be glad to hear your account of that interview if you please, Mr. Wilton.”

“It was short and not particularly agreeable,” Wilton told him in as calm and unemotional a tone as if he had no idea how terribly the statement might tell against him in the detective's eyes. “Dr. Bastow gave me notice.”

“On what ground?” The inspector's tone was stern.

Wilton paused a moment before replying.

“I cannot tell you,” he said at last.

The inspector made a note in the book in front of him.

“I should advise you to reconsider that answer, Mr. Wilton.”

There was silence again for a minute, and then Wilton spoke slowly:

“Well, I expect I may as well make a clean breast of it. I had proposed to Miss Bastow, and the doctor objected. My dismissal followed as a matter of course.”

“Hm!”

The detective glanced through his notes. That Wilton should be angry at the rejection of his advances to the doctor's daughter and also at his dismissal was natural enough, but his anger would scarcely carry him so far as the shooting of her father. He scratched the side of his nose reflectively with the end of his fountain pen.

“How did you leave the doctor?”

“Just as usual. He was sitting in the chair in which he was found – later. As I went towards the door he made a few technical remarks about a case I was attending. Afterwards I was called out, and was away about an hour.”

“Then – you found the body, I think?”

“Yes. I forced the window and got into the room,” Wilton assented. “But the parlourmaid, Taylor, had previously told us that she had looked through a hole in the curtain and had seen the doctor sitting in his chair in an odd, huddled- up position. So she may be termed the first who saw the body.”

“Just so!” the inspector assented. “That hole or peep-hole between the curtain and the blind was a curious affair, Mr. Wilton. Did it strike you that it had been purposely arranged?”

“I don't know that it did at the time,” Wilton said slowly. “But, looking back, it certainly seems odd that it should be there, and on that particular evening too. Was it arranged so that some one should watch that interview with the doctor which ended in his death? It almost looks as though it must have been so. And yet –”

“And yet –” the inspector prompted as Wilton paused.

“That would presuppose two people knowing what was going to happen, wouldn't it?” the young man finished.