The Skeleton Key/Chapter 11

the day following the Inquest, the plot thickened. It became really entertaining. One did not know whether to appear the more scandalised or amused. On the one hand there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that the last word was apparently not said in what had seemed to be a perfectly straightforward affair, on the other one's sense of fitness had received a severe blow. In short, the impeccable Cleghorn had been arrested, and was detained on suspicion. I saw him go off in a fly in charge of a couple of policemen, and never did hooked cod-fish on the Dogger Bank look more gogglingly stupefied than he over the amazing behaviour of the bait he had swallowed. Sir Calvin stormed, and blasphemed, and demanded to know if the whole household of Wildshott was in a conspiracy to shame him and tarnish his escutcheon; but his objurgations were received very civilly and sensibly by the detective, who explained that he must act according to his professional conscience, that detention did not necessarily mean conviction, or even indictment, and that where a sifting of the truth from the chaff imposed precautionary measures, he must be free to take them, or abandon his conduct of the case. Whereon the wrathful General simmered down, and contented himself only with requesting sarcastically a few hours' grace to settle his affairs, when it came to be his turn to wear the official bracelets.

And so, for the while, we were without a butler; nor could one, on reviewing the evidence, be altogether surprised, perhaps, over that deprivation. Certainly Cleghorn's account of his own movements could not be considered wholly satisfying or convincing, and he had admitted his lack of any witness to substantiate it. It seemed incredible, with a man of his substance and dignity; but is not the history of crime full of such apparent contradictions? After all, he had had the same provocation as the other man, and had departed, apparently, the same way to answer it; and, as to his moral condition after the event, all testimony went to prove that it was worse than that of the Gascon. Anyhow, this new development, however it was destined to turn out, added fifty per cent, to the excitement of the business. Cleghorn! It seemed inexpressibly comic.

As day followed day succeeding this terrific event, however progressively other things might be assumed to be moving, no ground was made in the matter of tracing out the dead girl's origin or connexions—and that in spite of the publicity given to the affair. It was very strange, and I was immensely curious to know what could be the reason. Her portrait was published in the Police Gazette, and exhibited outside the various stations, but without result. I saw a copy of it, and did not wonder. It had been reproduced, enlarged, it seemed, from a tiny snapshot group, taken by one of the grooms, in which she had figured quite inconspicuously, and was like nothing human. I spoke to Ridgway about it, and he said it was the best that could be done, that no other photograph of her could be traced, though all the photographers in London had been applied to, and he owned frankly that there seemed some mystery about the girl. I quite agreed with him, and hinted that it was not the only one that remained to be cleared up. He did not ask me what I meant, but I saw, by his next remark, that he had understood what was in my mind.

'Why don't you persuade him, sir,' he said, 'to throw this business off his chest, and get back to his old interests? He takes it too much to heart.'

It was to Hugo he referred, of course, and I did not pretend to misapprehend him. To tell the truth, I was a little smarting from my friend's treatment of me, and not in the mood to be indulgent of his idiosyncrasies. I might have my suspicions as to his involvement in a discreditable affair, but I had certainly not made him a party to them, or even touched upon the subject of the scandal to him save with the utmost delicacy and consideration. If he had chosen to give me his confidence then and there, I would have honoured it; as it was, since he showed no disposition to keep his promise to me made on the day of the shoot, I considered myself as much at liberty to canvass the subject as any one else who had heard, and formed his own conclusions, from the doctor's evidence. It was true that, to me at least, Hugh was doing his best to give his case away by his behaviour. He seemed to make little attempt to rally from the gloom with which the tragedy had overcast him, but mooned about, silent and aimless, as if for the moment he had lost all interest in life. It was only that morning that, moved by his condition, I had come at last to the resolution to remind him of his promise, and get him to share with me, if he would, the burden that was crushing his soul. His answer showed me at once, however, the vanity of my good intentions. 'Thanks, old fellow,' he had said; 'but a good deal has happened since then, and I've nothing to confide.' Now, that might be true, in the sense that the danger was past, and I could have forgiven his reticence on the score of the loyalty it might imply to a reputation passed beyond its own defence; but he went on with some offensive remark about his regret in not being able to satisfy my curiosity, and ended with a suggestion which, however well-meaning it might have been, I considered positively insulting.

'You are wasting yourself here, old boy,' he said. 'I'm not, truth to tell, in the mood for much, and we oughtn't to keep you. I feel that I got you here under false pretences; but I couldn't know what was going to happen, could I? and so I won't apologise. I think, I really think, that, for the sake of all our feelings, it would be better if you terminated your visit. You don't mind my saying so, do you?'

'On the contrary, I mind very much,' I answered. 'Have you forgotten how, at considerable inconvenience to myself, I responded at once to your invitation, and came down at a moment's notice? The reason, as you ought to know, Hugh, was pure regard for yourself and a desire to help, and that desire is not lessened because I find you involved in a much more serious business than I had anticipated.'

'O, if you put it in that way'—he began.

'I do put it in that way,' I said, 'and I don't take it very friendly of you that you should talk of denying me a privilege which you were ready enough to grant to that precious new Baron of yours—even pressing him to stay.'

'It was not I who asked him,' he murmured.

'No,' I insisted, 'I came to be helpful, and I am going to remain to be helpful. I don't leave you till I have seen this thing through.'

'Well,' he said very equivocally, 'I hope that will be soon'—and he left me to myself to brood over his ingratitude. I was sore with him, I confess, and my grievance made me more unguarded perhaps in my references to him than otherwise I should have been.

'I dare say he does,' I answered the detective; 'but after all, I suppose, it is his heart that is affected.'

He looked at me keenly.

'You mean, sir?'

'O! what you mean,' I answered, 'and that I can see that you mean. What's the good of our beating about the bush? My friend wouldn't be the first young fellow of his class to have got into trouble with a good-looking servant girl.'

'No,' he said, 'no' in a hard sort of way. 'They are not the kind to bother about the consequences to others where their own gratification is concerned. I've knocked up against some pretty bad cases in my time. So, that's what you gather from the medical report?'

'Partly from that; not wholly.'

'Ah! I dare say now, being on such friendly terms with Mr Kennett, you've been taken into his confidence?'

'Not directly; but in a way that invited me to form my own conclusions. What then? It doesn't affect this case, does it, except in suggesting a possible motive for the crime on the part of some jealous rival?'

'That's it. It's of no consequence, of course—except to the girl herself—from any other point of view.'

His assurance satisfied me, and, taken by his sympathetic candour, I could not refrain from opening my rankling mind to him a bit.

'The truth is,' I said, 'that the moment I came down, I saw there was something wrong with my friend. Indeed, he had written to me to imply as much.'

'He was upset like, was he?' commented the detective.

'He was in a very odd mood,' said I—'an aggravated form of hysteria, I should call it. I had never known him quite like it before, though, as I dare say you have gathered, his temperament is an excitable one, up and down like a see-saw. He talked of his dreaming of sitting on a gunpowder barrel smoking a cigarette, and of the hell of an explosion that was coming. And then there was his behaviour at the shoot the next day.'

'I've heard something about it,' said Ridgway. 'Queer, wasn't it?'

'More than queer,' I answered. 'I don't mind telling you in confidence that I had reason at one time to suspect him of playing the fool with his gun, with the half intention—you know—an accident, and all the bother ended. He swore not, when I tackled him about it; but I wasn't satisfied. I tried to get him to go home, leaving his gun with the keeper, but he absolutely refused; and he refused again to part with it when, in the afternoon, he finally did leave us, saying he was good for nothing and had had enough of it. If only then he had done what I wanted him to do, and left his gun behind, this wretched business might never have happened.'

'Ah!' said the detective, 'he feels that, I dare say, and it doesn't help to cheer him up. Well, sir, I'd get him out, if I was you—distract his thoughts, and make him forget himself. He won't mend what's done by moping.'

'All very well,' I answered, 'to talk about making him forget himself; but when I'm forced to affect an ignorance of the very thing he wants to forget—if we're right—what am I to do? You might think that after having had me down for the express purpose of advising him—as I have no doubt was the case—in this scrape, he would take me more into his confidence, and not at least resent, as seemingly he does, any allusion to it.'

'Well, you see,' said the detective, 'from his point of view the scrape's ended for him, and so there isn't the same need for advice. But I'd keep at it, if I was you, and after a time you may get him to unburden himself.'

I had not much hope, after what had passed between us; but I held the Sergeant's recommendation in mind, and resolved to watch for and encourage the least disposition to candour which might show itself on my friend's part. Perhaps I had gone a little further than I should have in taking the detective into my confidence about a scandal which, after all, was no more than surmise; but it was so patent to me that his judgment ran, and must run, with my own, that it would have been simply idle to pretend ignorance of a situation about which no two men of intelligence could possibly have come to differing conclusions. And, moreover, as Ridgway himself had admitted, true or not, the incident had no direct bearing on the case.

These days at Wildshott, otherwise a little eventless for me as an outsider, found a certain mitigation of their dullness in the suspicion still kept alive in me regarding the Baron's movements, and in the consequent watchfulness I felt it my duty to keep on them. I don't know how it was, but I mistrusted the man, his secretiveness, the company he kept, the mystery surrounding his being. Who was he? Why did he play chess for half-crowns? Why had he come attended—as, according to evidence, never before—by a ruffianly foreign man-servant, ready, on the most trifling provocation, to dip his hands in blood? That had been outside the programme, no doubt: men who use dangerous tools must risk their turning in their hands; but what had been his purpose in bringing the fellow? Throat-cutting? Robbery?—I was prepared for any revelation. Abduction, perhaps: the Baron was for ever driving about the country with Audrey in the little governess cart. In the meanwhile, following that miscarriage of his master's plans, whatever they might be, Mr Louis Victor Cabanis had been had up before a full bench of magistrates, and, the police asking for time in which to compact their evidence, had been remanded to prison for a fortnight. The delay gave some breathing space for all concerned, and was, I think, welcomed by every one but Hugo. I don't know by what passion of hatred of the slayer my friend's soul might have been agitated. Perhaps it was that, perhaps mere nervous tension; but he appeared to be in a feverish impatience to get the business over. He did not say much about it; but one could judge by his look and manner the strained torment of his spirit. We were not a great deal together; and mostly I had to make out my time alone as best I could. Sometimes, in a rather pathetic way, he would go and play chess with his father, a thing he had never dreamed of doing in his normal state. I used to wonder if the General had guessed the truth, and how he was regarding it if he had. According to all accounts, he had been no Puritan himself in his younger days.

I have said that Audrey and the Baron were about a good deal together. They were, and the knowledge troubled me so much that I made up my mind to warn her.

'You appear to find his company very entertaining,' I said to her one day.

Audrey had a rather disconcerting way of responding to any unwelcome question with a wide-eyed stare, which it was difficult to undergo quite stoically.

'Do I?' she said presently. 'Why?'

'You would hardly favour it so much otherwise, would you?' 'Perhaps not. You see I take the best there is. I can't help it if the choice is so limited.'

'That's one for me. But never mind. I'm content he should do the entertaining, if I can do the helpful.'

'To me, Mr Bickerdike?'

'I hope so—a little. As Hugo's friend I feel that I ought to have some claim on your forbearance, not to say your good will. I think at least that, on the strength of that friendship, you need not resent my giving you a word of advice on a subject where, in my opinion, it's wanted.'

'I have a father and brother to look after me, Mr Bickerdike.'

'I'm aware of it, Audrey; and also of the fact that—for reasons sufficient of their own, no doubt—they leave you pretty much as you like to go your own way. It may be an unexceptionable way for the most part; but the wisest of us may occasionally go wrong from ignorance, and then it is the duty—I dare say the thankless duty—of friendship to interpose. You are very young, you know, and, one can't help seeing, rather forlornly situated'

'Will you please to leave my situation alone, and explain what this is all about?'

'Frankly, then—I offer this in confidence—I don't think the Baron very good company for you.'

'Why not?'

'It's a little difficult to say. If you had more knowledge of the world you would understand, perhaps. There's an air about him of the shady Continental adventurer, whose purpose in society, wherever he may seek it, is never a disinterested purpose. He's always, one may be sure, after something profitable to himself—in one word, spoil. What do we any of us know about the Baron, except that he plays chess for money and consorts with doubtful characters? Your father knows, I believe, little more than I do, and that little for me is summed up in the word "suspect." One can't say what can be his object in staying on here when common decency, one would have thought, seeing the trouble he has been instrumental in causing, should have dictated his departure; but, whatever his object, it is not likely, one feels convinced, to be a harmless one, and one cannot help fearing that he may be practising on your young credulity with a view to furthering it in some way. I wish you would tell me—will you?—what he talks to you about.'

She laughed in a way which somehow nettled me. 'Doesn't it strike you,' she said, 'as rather cheek on the part of one guest in a house to criticize the behaviour of another to his hostess?'

'O, if you take it in that way,' I answered, greatly affronted, ' I've nothing more to say. Your power of reading character is no doubt immensely superior to mine.' 'Well, I don't think yours is very good,' she answered; 'and I don't see why the question of common decency should apply to him more than to another.'

"Don't you?' I said, now fairly in a rage: 'then it's useless to prolong the discussion further. This is the usual reward of trying to interpose for good in other people's affairs.'

'Some people might call it prying into them,' she answered, and I flung from her without another word. I felt that I really hated the girl—intolerable, pert, audacious young minx; but my rebuff made me more determined than ever to sift the truth out of this questionable riddle, and face her insolent assurance with it at the proper time.