The Terriford Mystery/Chapter 18

IR HAROLD ANSTEY came bustling into his pleasant chambers. He had only just come back from a long week-end, there was a bright fire burning in the attractive, wasteful, eighteenth-century grate, and the famous Old Bailey barrister felt not only fresh and keen, but on the happiest terms with himself and the world.

The great advocate was a big, florid, good-looking man, and so popular a bachelor that it was no wonder he had never made up his mind to become true to one lady.

Like most successful men, he attached great importance to the Press of his country, and he paid considerable court to those newspaper men with whom he came in contact. So of the pile of letters, opened and unopened, on his writing-table, Sir Harold first turned to a bulky envelope from his press-cutting agency.

The enveloped contained a page cut from a popular picture paper, and across the top of the sheet ran: “The Terriford Mystery: Exclusive Photographs.”

Sir Harold smiled when he saw that the pictures were grouped round his own comely, bewigged visage. He noted that a delightful-looking country house was flanked by two portraits, the one being that of a pleasant-faced man in a cricketing cap, while the other was a charming-looking girl in V. A. D. uniform. In somewhat painful contrast below, was a large photograph, evidently taken a great many years ago, of a plain-looking woman in an old-fashioned wedding dress.

The barrister had mastered enough of the story to realize that the handsome cricketer was Harry Garlett, the man about to be tried for his life, and the sweet-faced young nurse Jean Bower, the girl to whom Garlett was now engaged, and who was supposed to have provided the motive for his having poisoned his unattractive-looking wife.

As for the central portrait—the counterfeit presentment of himself—the caption which declared him to be “the most famous criminal lawyer of our day” gave Sir Harold pleasure, though it no longer bore the delicious thrill of novelty.

As he laid the sheet down on his writing table, the door opened and his clerk came in: “A young lady to see you, Sir Harold. She says she would rather not give her name.”

The great advocate looked sharply at his faithful henchman.

“I suppose you told her that I only see people by appointment?”

“I did tell her that, Sir Harold, but she said she did hope you would break your rule this time.”

“A nice young lady—a pretty young lady, Fulford?” asked Sir Harold.

He was fiddling about the papers which were on his table, and he did not look at his clerk as he put the question.

“Well, yes, Sir Harold, a very pretty young lady, quite young, too, if you'll excuse my mentioning it.”

“All right. Show her in.”

While awaiting his visitor he idly opened a letter marked “Urgent and confidential” which lay on the top of the pile of envelopes.

It contained the following words:

Another tribute to his marvellous gift of advocacy! He read the ill-written sentence again, and it was with a broad smile that he greeted the very charming-looking girl who advanced nervously into the big, comfortably furnished room.

“Sit down,” he said with a kindly smile; and timidly his visitor accepted his invitation.

“I hope you will not mind telling me your name? Remember, my dear young lady, that wise people tell everything to their doctor and their lawyer!”

“My name,” she said quietly, “is Jean Bower, and I am engaged to be married to Mr. Henry Garlett.”

As she uttered these words, there was no trace of a smile on her face, and it was then—for perhaps his knowledge of human nature had not gone as far as he thought it had—that Sir Harold Anstey realized for the first time that his visitor looked untterably [sic] sad. Had she not been so young, and, yes, so attractive, he would have seen at once that she was spent with anxiety and suffering.

It must be admitted, though the fact did not redound to his credit, that Sir Harold's manner underwent a quick and subtle change. It became, in place of deferential, familiar.

“Although your coming to see me like this is not at all in order, Miss Bower, I shall not be sorry to have a little talk with you!” he exclaimed, moving his chair just a little forward.

As he did this, Jean Bower, unaware that she was doing it, moved her chair just a little back.

“And so,” he went on, in a jocular tone, “you are the pretty young lady who has brought all this trouble about?”

Poor Jean! She felt as if this man, whom she had thought of as a friend, had struck her straight between the eyes. She made no answer to the half-question, and only gazed at him affrightedly.

“You are by profession a nurse, are you not?” he asked abruptly. He felt annoyed that she had not “played up.”

“No, I am not a nurse,” she spoke in a very low tone.

“But I have seen a picture of you, a very delightful picture, it is, too!—in a nurse's dress.”

Jean Bower looked bewildered; then a painful flush came over her face. She also, for her misfortune, had seen the page now lying on Sir Harold's table.

“The papers have published a head of me taken out of a group of V. A. D.'s,” she said quickly. “I acted as secretary for a while at a war hospital.”

“That's why you were in France at the hospital to which Harry Garlett was taken when wounded in 1917.”

He thought he was on the right track at last.

“No,” she said again, “I was never in France. I was in a Manchester hospital in the later part of the war. I became secretary to the Etna China Company last April, and as I have not resigned my post, I am that now.”

She spoke with a certain simple directness.

“Then you were secretary to Mr. Garlett's company, and you also took care of his wife?” said the famous advocate, again with a curious, not very pleasant, smile on his face.

“You are confusing me with Miss Cheale, who was Mrs. Garlett's housekeeper and companion,” said Jean.

There had now come over her a terrible feeling of anxious despondency, and of bitter, bitter disappointment. She had expected the great man—he had been described to her as a very great man by Mr. Toogood—to have the whole story at his fingers' ends, and to be, even in everyday life, an ardent, as well as an eloquent, believer in his client's innocence.

Something of what was passing in her mind became apparent to Sir Harold Anstey, and he felt sharply vexed with himself. Vexed for having got the threads of the story so wrong, and vexed, too, that he had broken through his rule of never seeing, excepting at his own request, any one connected with a forthcoming case.

In his happy, prosperous everyday life Sir Harold rarely came across many girls who seemed to him as prudish as the girl now sitting facing him. Besides, with regard to this girl, who had actually driven a man to commit murder for love of her, such a pose was not only absurd, but very hypocritical.

Still, as he had been foolish enough to see her, he told himself that he might as well make the best of it, and improve his own chances of winning what he was beginning to see was going to be a very important case.

His manner changed; it became, if not exactly more pleas ant, then shrewd and business-like—what his visitor vaguely described to herself as “sensible.”

“I want you to tell me in your own words,” he said impressively, “the story of your acquaintance with Henry Garlett, and what led up to your engagement.”

Quietly, straightforwardly, and, he began almost to believe, quite truthfully, Jean told the simple story of that which had come to her to mean everything in the world.

After she had finished Sir Harold leaned forward.

“If I accept all this as true, I must ask you a most important question, Miss Bower. Who can have had the smallest motive for wishing this lady out of the way? Remember that in such a case as this, it is not enough to say, 'This man did not do it.' You must, if you can in any way bring it about, be able to declare, 'But that man did!' I suppose we may put aside the idea that Mrs. Garlett committed suicide?”

“I suppose we may,” said Jean Bower, but she spoke with a certain hesitation which he was quick to detect.

“Have you any doubt of it?” he asked eagerly. “Did the poor woman suffer great pain? What was her mental state? Can we rely on her doctor to give evidence favourable to Mr. Garlett?”

“Dr. Maclean, who attended Mrs. Garlett, is my uncle,” said the girl slowly. “I know that he believes, as does Mr. Garlett himself, that such an idea as suicide never even crossed her mind.”

Sir Harold Anstey felt both perplexed and irritated. He told himself that there is after all such a thing as being too truthful, too scrupulous.

“That's a great pity,” he said dryly. “If you could persuade your uncle, Miss Bower, to given even a slight hint that his patient was sometimes very depressed and, if not suffering actual pain, was yet in constant discomfort, it might be a very great help to me in saving Mr. Garlett's life.”

He was still absolutely convinced that his client was guilty, but somehow he was beginning to feel very, very sorry for this pretty young creature with whom he was holding this curiously unemotional conversation. While she had been telling him the story of her acquaintanceship with the man she now loved, he had suddenly realized that it was pent-up passion, not lack of feeling, that made her speak in so still and quiet a voice.

“So far no arsenic has been traced to Henry Garlett's possession, and of course that is a point in his favour,” he said musingly.

“I suppose that it is quite impossible that sugar and arsenic can be substituted by accident the one for the other?” asked Jean. “I mean at a grocer's, for instance?”

“Quite impossible,” he said firmly. “But tell me why you ask the question?”

“Because Mrs. Garlett seems to have had some strawberries smothered in white sugar just before her suppers”

“Did she say the strawberries had made her ill?”

Jean knitted her white forehead.

“Not that I know of. But Miss Cheale, the lady who was her companion-nurse, at first put down her illness to her having eaten them.”

“Your uncle, I take it, lives close to the Thatched House. Does he make up his own medicines?”

Jean Bower shook her head.

“He did so, I believe, when he first bought the practice, but he gave up doing it years ago.”

“And I take it that everything connected with the dispensary was swept away?”

“A garage has been put up in the place where he used to make up the medicines.”

“Is there a chemist's shop near by?”

“No,” said Jean quickly. “But the daughter of my uncle's predecessor, a lady called Miss Prince, keeps certain simple medicines in her house, which she gives to the village people.”

Sir Harold made a note of the name on his blotting paper.

“I suppose we may take it,” he observed, “that that lady had no arsenic in her possession?”

“If she had, I feel sure she would have said so,” said Jean. “As a matter of fact, she is Mr. Garlett's tenant.”

“How old is Miss Prince?” he asked abruptly.

“I should think she must be about sixty”

“I see. Now, Miss Bower, I must ask you a delicate question. Can you think of any young woman, apart from yourself, who was on friendly terms with Mr. Garlett at the time of his wife's death?”

To his surprise the girl became first distressingly red and then very pale. A struggle was going on in her mind. Had the big, florid man sitting opposite to her been just a little other than he was, she would have forced herself to tell him of the curious, as she believed utterly untrue, gossip, concerning her lover's meeting with some mysterious young woman in the wood. But somehow she could not bring her self to mention the sordid story to Sir Harold Anstey.

“No,” she said at last. “I can think of nobody; indeed I'm quite sure there was nobody.”

He looked at his watch.

“I should like you to wait while I glance over the brief. It contains a précis of the Garlett case.”

He handed her an unopened daily paper.

“Try to forget what I am doing,” he said kindly. “Switch your mind right off it! We shall get along much better when I have mastered the principal points of the story.”

Deliberately he turned his back on her, and she did her best to follow his advice.

It seemed an eternity to Jean Bower, but it was not more than twenty minutes before Sir Harold Anstey put the wad of sheets he had been holding down on the table and turned toward her, an ugly, sneering frown on his broad, shrewd face.

How extraordinary that this simple country chit should have so bamboozled him! If angry with her, he was also angry with himself, and so, though he did not wish to frighten her, it was in a very cold cutting voice that he observed:

“I see, Miss Bower, that a witness, Lucy Warren by name, will be called by the Crown to prove that before his wife's death you were in the habit of meeting Henry Garlett secretly at night in a wood close to his house.”

“Lucy Warren!” exclaimed Jean Bower, in a tone of utter surprise, as well as of dismayed horror.

She went on excitedly: “We used to wonder who could have told that wicked lie. No one would tell me, not even Mr. Kentworthy!”

Her eyes filled with tears; instinctively she covered her face with her hands.

The great advocate told himself that he was not in the least moved by this display of emotion. Your unsuccessful liar, especially if she be a woman, often covers up her confusion at being found out by shedding quite genuine tears.

“I am sure you understand,” he said firmly, “that this fact, which you very foolishly and dishonourably—if you will forgive my saying so—concealed from me just now, puts a far more serious complexion on our side of the case.”

“I see what you mean,” she said in a low voice; and she looked so unutterably miserable that, in spite of himself, the man's heart softened.

After all, she was a very pretty little girl—far more pitiful and appealing, now that she was showing distress and emotion, than she had appeared when so coldly restrained. He told himself that it was rather beastly that he, Harold Anstey, who was so fortunate, so prosperous, and, as a rule, such a lucky dog with women, should allow himself to be vexed that he had been taken in—for once!

He suddenly began to feel kindly, protective, generous, as well as again shrewdly alive to the importance of winning what was evidently going to be a very big case.

He got up and came and put his big right hand on her slender shoulder: “Now, look here, my dear?”

She shrank back a little, then drying her eyes, she looked up at him, fearlessly and bravely.

“I am going to do my very best to save your lover's life. But you, on your side, must make up your mind to be absolutely truthful with me—eh?”

“I will be, Sir Harold—indeed I will be!”

“Well, we may take it, I suppose, that it was a case of love at first sight; that Mr. Garlett was taken with you from the first (as well he might be!) and then he did persuade you, wrongly I admit, to meet him at night in this wood? When I say night, I am well aware that it was not really night. From what this young servant says, she had to be in by ten, so that fixes the time. Can you give me any kind of reason why you should have met him? Any reason you can think of, or even—hum!—invent, will be of value. I realize that you were working with Mr. Garlett, and that you had plenty to talk about of a—well! ordinary, straightforward kind.”

Jean Bower got up from her chair so suddenly that he felt startled.

“I don't know if anything I say will convince you that I am telling the truth,” she said desperately. “But I swear to you most solemnly before God that I never met Mr. Garlett, either before his wife's death or since, secretly at night, in that wood or anywhere else. What is more, I am convinced that he never did such a thing, and I can't believe that Lucy Warren thinks that he did!”

He was impressed in spite of himself.

“What sort of a girl is Lucy Warren? Do you know her?” he asked abruptly.

“I know her quite well. In fact, the day before Mrs. Garlett's death I was actually present when, as a result of something she had done, she was given notice to leave the Thatched House.”

“I admit,” said Sir Harold slowly, “that that does provide from our point of view a useful complication. The evidence of a dismissed servant is always regarded as tainted.”

He looked, for the first time, really puzzled and ill at ease.

“Let me see,” he said. “Kentworthy, who was for so many years employed by the Home Office, is the detective we are employing, isn't he?”

Jean Bower came up closer to him. Somehow she no longer felt afraid of this big, to her singularly unattractive-looking, man.

“We all like Mr. Kentworthy, and I am sure he is honest. But oh! he is not a clever man, Sir Harold. The only thing that makes me happy to be with him”—tears came into her voice—“is that even now he does believe Harry to be innocent. He really does—I do wish you believed it too!”

He was taken aback, touched, and rather amused, by her frankness.

“How dare you accuse me of not believing in the innocence of a man I'm going to defend?” he exclaimed half jokingly. “Of course I believe my client to be innocent until he is proved guilty!”

“Sir Harold,” she said piteously, “tell me if I can help Harry in any way? Is there nothing—nothing that I can do? I would do anything.”

“Sit down,” he said briefly.

She sat down, and he began walking up and down the room. Though she did not know it, that was a good sign. It showed that he was becoming really interested, putting his powerful mind to the solution of a problem that was not, after all, as simple as he had believed it to be.

If this girl told the truth—if her relations with this man she now passionately loved had been what she had just sworn them to have been before his wife's death—then what could have been Garlett's motive in poisoning the poor woman? He was also impressed by the detective Kentworthy's belief in Garlett's innocence.

Sir Harold Anstey had had a great deal to do with Kentworthy in another murder mystery case and it had been Kentworthy's passionless, honest, clear evidence in the box which had hanged Anstey's guilty client. Kentworthy might not be a clever man—not the Sherlock Holmes every young lady expects a detective to be—but his opinion, especially when it was in favour of a man actually under arrest on a charge of murder, was of great value in the famous barrister's eyes.

“This is going to be a very difficult, complicated, and anxious case,” he said at last. “All the more difficult because it appears so absolutely simple.”

He saw a look of astonishment flash across Jean Bower's flushed face.

“To you,” he exclaimed, “who believe this man to be innocent, the case is perfectly simple. But if we can produce nothing better than what we have now got, Miss Bower, judge, jury, in fact” he hesitated and then went on firmly, “everyone in the case will believe that Harry Garlett undoubtedly poisoned his late wife.”

She answered in a low voice: “I do understand that,” and though she did not flinch, a sensation of numb despair took possession of her heart.

“It follows that we must produce something, anything, that will shake the belief of those. on whose opinion, Miss Bower, your lover's life will hang as by a thread.”

She stared at him, fascinated. The real power of the man was beginning to impress her, to make her feel a kind of confidence in him.

He stopped in his pacing and gazed fixedly down into her troubled, quivering, upturned face.

“Will you give me your word of honour that you will never reveal to anybody the fact that I gave you, personally, any advice concerning your own association with the case?”

“I give you my word of honour,” she said quietly.

“It is because I believe you will keep it,” he said seriously, “that I am going to tell you how I think you can help your lover.”

She waited silently till he spoke again.

“I am one of the few people in my line of life who believe in the amateur detective—and especially in the woman amateur detective. Not for nothing were the most dangerous spies in the great war—women.”

A look of pain came into Jean Bower's face. Unheeding of that, he went on, weighing his words:

“Kentworthy can be trusted thoroughly to get up a case of the straightforward, normal kind. But for this sort of delicate, difficult, dangerous work, I fear he is of little use.”

He wheeled round, and once more began walking up and down the long room.

“And now I'm going to assume that you are right, Miss Bower—that Henry Garlett is absolutely innocent.”

He turned and cast a quick, measuring glance at his visitor.

He was wondering, deep in his heart, if she really did absolutely believe in Garlett's innocence? If not, he was not only wasting valuable time, but they two were playing at a tiresome game of make-believe.

And then she said so humbly, so touchingly, “Thank you, Sir Harold,” that he felt his question answered.

He went on speaking, swaying slightly as he did so, wholly absorbed in the problem before him. “If this man is innocent, then we must concentrate on the fact that some one else is guilty of the crime of which he is accused. Some human being—man or woman—gave Mrs. Emily Garlett a large dose of arsenic with intent to kill her.” He looked at her fixedly. “Now who was that person? It is up to you, Miss Bower, to find that out, and you have only a month and a few days to do it in, so there's no time to lose.”

“Tell me how to set about it,” exclaimed Jean Bower, “and I'll do exactly what you tell me to do!”

“I wonder if you will?” he exclaimed. “I know you mean now to do what I advise, but the worst of amateurs is that they are prone to act from the heart rather than from the head. You won't like the first job I'm going to put you to.”

“I will do anything,” she said firmly.

“Wait till you hear what it is! The moment you get back to Terriford get an order to see Mr. Garlett alone, or within sight, but not within hearing, of a warder. And then, however disagreeable the job, you must get out of him whether or not this Lucy Warren told the truth concerning his mysterious interviews with some woman in the wood near his house.”

“I am absolutely sure it is a lie!”

Sir Harold shook his head.

“This won't do at all. If you begin by assuring him that you are sure he never did such a thing—then he will find it impossible to admit that he did do it. What you must say is that you can see no reason in the world why he shouldn't have met and walked with some young lady.”

“How can I do that when I feel sure he never did do it?”

He looked at her kindly.

“Forgive me, Miss Bower! I was a fool to think that you could bring yourself to act the part of even the most amateur of detectives. Put the idea out of your mind, and rest asured [sic] that I will do everything in my power to save your lover's life.”

Jean rose from her chair.

“No, no, no!” she cried, “of course I'll do exactly what you advise. I'll tell Harry that his meeting a girl in that way and in that place was not so very strange—nay, more, I'll try and force myself to believe it!”

“That's right,” he said heartily, “now you're acting like a brave, sensible girl, and not like a foolish, obstinate woman.”

“But supposing he says it was all an invention of Lucy Warren's?” She looked at him anxiously. “Then I suppose I must get Lucy Warren to say she told a lie?”

“Yes, that will be the next step, and if you fail I shall succeed when I have got her in the witness-box,” he said grimly. “That is supposing she did tell a lie. But, Miss Bower?”

“Yes?”

“Suppose that Garlett admits that he did meet a lady in the wood—what then?”

He answered his own question.

“You have then what we are looking for—a second human being with an interest in Mrs. Garlett's death. I suppose,” he said suddenly, “that it has not occurred to you that the young woman may have been no other than Lucy Warren herself?”

“There are things, Sir Harold, which I suppose even you would admit are impossible,” she said quietly.

He looked at her, and remained silent. How make this girl understand that innumerable men of a superior social caste have made love, will make love, are making love all the time, to girls like Lucy Warren? From the moment he had read the notes made by Kentworthy, he had asked himself whether after all, Lucy Warren, in her obstinate determination not to reveal the name of the woman with whom she said she had seen her master, might not have had the very best of reasons for her obstinacy.

“We will suppose,” he went on, measuring his words, “that Mr. Garlett, while admitting he was in the wood, refuses to give up the name of his companion. Well, if you fail to extract that information from Lucy Warren you must try and think of some other way of discovering who the woman was. To do that, you must, if you will forgive the expression, stick at nothing.”

She said timidly: “I suppose you've seen the anonymous letters—the letters which started the whole trouble?”

“The anonymous letters?” he exclaimed. “There isn't a word about them here!”

Sir Harold Anstey went over to his writing table and sat down.

“Have you copies of these letters in your possession?” he asked.

“Yes, I have them here,” she said in a low voice, “but I don't want to get Mr. Kentworthy into trouble, Sir Harold. I'm afraid he ought not to have kept these facsimiles.”

“Thank God, he did! Show them to me at once.”

He spoke in a peremptory tone.

Jean Bower opened her bag and silently laid the three sheets of paper before him.

He bent over them for what seemed to her a very long time, but at last he looked up.

“It's a monstrous thing,” he exclaimed, “that these were not put in among the exhibits connected with the case.”

“So Mr. Kentworthy says,” observed Jean. “He thinks them an integral part of the story—that was his expression.”

“Miss Bower?”

He turned, and faced her squarely.

“Find the human being who wrote these three dastardly letters—and I will undertake to save your lover's life!”