known to be a very nice and sporting gentleman, and to be kept at home, with nothing to pay for his board, and every agreeable luxury of horses and cars and such-like at his disposal, could hardly be expected to impress the Inspector as being anything but a very pleasant life; and even if he had been able to believe that Clay, who seemed to him a silly, spoilt sort of a young man, might not have liked the career planned for him, it would have been quite incomprehensible to him that his mother should not have perceived the advantages of having him so well provided for, and, moreover, kept at home under her fond eye.
Inspector Logan had heard a great deal about Penhallow’s tyranny, but from never having encountered him, nor experienced life at Trevellin under his rule he did not arrive at any real understanding of the circumstances which had driven Faith and Vivian to distraction. From all he was told, he formed a picture of a jovial old ruffian, of autocratic temperament, casual morals, quick rages, and apparently boundless generosity. The very fact that so many of his children lived under the parental roof seemed to him to show that Penhallow could not have oppressed them very badly. It even appeared that he condoned the wild exploits of their riotous youth, and had always been ready to rescue them from the consequences of their lawlessness. His despotism seemed, in fact, to have been a benevolent one; and although the Inspector could readily imagine that his rages and his excesses might make him at times an awkward man to deal with, he could not perceive that there had been anything in his behaviour to drive even two such highly-strung women as Faith and Vivian to poison him.
His suspicions, then, pending the apprehension of Jimmy the Bastard, began to centre upon Raymond, and upon Loveday Trewithian, who, alone amongst the suspects, seemed to him to have had adequate motives for committing murder. The possibility that Bart might have had some hand in the affair he kept at the back of his mind, but did not consider very probable. He thought Bart’s grief at his father’s death was real enough, and hardly believed him to be the type of man who would murder anyone in cold blood, and by such means as poison. Loveday, on the other hand, had she decided to get rid of the only barrier to her marriage, might naturally have been expected to choose poison as her weapon, particularly since poison was ready to her hand. On the face of it, she seemed to be the most likely suspect, and might have absorbed all the Inspector’s attention had not Phineas Ottery paid a call on Penhallow on the day of his death, and had not Raymond denied having seen him upon that occasion.
It did not take the Inspector long to discover what had been the main cause of the quarrels which he knew had constantly cropped up between Raymond and his father. To one who was heir to the estate, Penhallow’s crazy extravagance must have been more than galling. Had Raymond not committed a violent assault upon his father on the very morning of the date of his death, the Inspector would have considered him the most obvious man to suspect of having poisoned Penhallow. But the two circumstances did not, in his experience, dovetail together. To start with, he thought, men who blatantly attempted to choke their victims did not resort to poison; to go on with, to poison a man having been prevented, earlier in the day from strangling him, would have been the act of a lunatic, and Raymond, so far from being a lunatic, bore all the appearance of being a level-headed man long past the age of youthful folly. It might be that the explanation given him of Phineas Ottery’s visit, and of Raymond’s denial of having seen him, was the true one. But every time the Inspector reached this point in his cogitations, his intuition stirred uneasily, and he could not rid himself of the feeling that there was something behind that episode which he had not so far discovered.
“I’m not one to talk a lot of hot air about my instinct,” he told Sergeant Plymstock, “but the further I go into this case, the more certain I am that there’s something being hidden from me that I can’t get hold of. What’s more, I’ve got a hunch it’s got something to do with Mr Ottery’s visit.”
“Well, I don’t know, sir,” said the Sergeant dubiously. “It don’t seem likely Mr Ottery could have had anything to do with the case, not on the evidence.”
“What I’m telling you is that I haven’t got all the evidence. I wish I knew what it was that set Raymond Penhallow on to his father’s throat!”
“They all seem to think it was the old trouble about the money Mr Penhallow got away with, don’t they, sir? That’s what he said himself.”
“Oh, yes! He wouldn’t cash his father’s cheque, and all the rest of it! It might be true; I don’t say it wasn’t, but I do say I’m not satisfied.”
His conviction that a possibly vital clue was eluding him led him to interrogate still more closely the various members of the household, amongst them being Faith, who was, by that time, so obsessed by the fear that Clay, or Loveday, or one of her stepsons, or even Vivian, might be arrested for her crime, that she almost lost sight of her own danger, and consequently answered Logan’s questions in a manner far more calculated to allay any suspicions of her which he might have nourished than the most studied defence could have done. She perceived that the two persons whose activities most interested the Inspector were Raymond and Loveday, and she did her best to paint their characters in such colours as must convince him that neither would have so much as contemplated murdering Penhallow. She had never liked any of her stepchildren very much, but of them all Raymond and Bart had been the least inimical to her, Bart’s good nature having precluded his treating her with anything but careless kindness; and Raymond having generally refrained from criticising or condemning either her actions or her opinions. His attitude was largely one of indifference, but whereas the rest of the family more often than not behaved as though she did not exist, he had always accorded her a curt civility, and had more than once sternly checked attempts on the parts of Eugene, Conrad, and Aubrey to exercise their wits at her expense. Nor did he bully Clay; and while his habit of almost entirely ignoring his half-brother scarcely indicated any liking for him, Faith was grateful to him for not reducing Clay to that state of stammering nervousness which was usually the result of any intercourse with the rest of the family.
As soon as she realised that she had unwittingly placed Raymond in a position of considerable danger, Faith began insensibly to exaggerate these somewhat negative qualities, and to see in him the only one of her stepsons who had ever been kind to her, or had sympathised (tacitly, of course) with her misfortunes. She saw that he was looking more than ordinarily grim, and her conscience reproached her painfully. She had never meant to place him — nor indeed anyone else — in so dreadful a situation; she had thought that in hastening Penhallows end she would be bringing peace to his whole family. Instead of this, and by what she could not but believe to have been the mischance of Doctor Lifton’s indisposition, the consequences of her action were as appalling as they had been unforeseen. When she saw the frown in Raymond’s eyes, and knew that he was being harried by the Inspector; when she became aware of Ingram’s barely disguised hope; when she realised that Clara and Bart had loved Penhallow, and bitterly mourned him; and most of all when she saw the growing suspicion of one another in the faces of her stepsons, she regretted her mad deed as she had never thought it possible that she could. If she could have called Penhallow back to life, she would have done it. He had epitomised for her all that she most hated at Trevellin, but without him chaos, uneasy tension, and dissensions far more serious than the cheerful quarrels which had flared up under his auspices made the house gloomy as it had never been in his lifetime. She had loathed the noisy gatherings in his bedroom, but the silence that now reigned in the room seemed to her more unendurable than the noisiest gathering had been, and she could almost have wished to hear his loud, bullying voice accost her from the great bed.
She clung desperately to the hope that the police would not succeed in finding Jimmy the Bastard, that they would be forced through lack of evidence to abandon the case; for it seemed to her that if only the menace of their presence could be removed from Trevellin, some part at least of the horror now lurking in every corner of the old house would vanish. But on the third day the police found Jimmy the Bastard.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jimmy had been arrested in Bristol, whither he had made his way, with the intention of working his passage out to America. Upon reading the news Penhallow’s death in one of the cheaper newspapers, panic had not unnaturally seized him. He had abandoned his plan of signing on as one of a ship’s crew, and had made up his mind to stow away instead.
The paths down which this information travelled to Trevellin were varied and circuitous, but the Penhallows had heard several versions of it by the time they were formally told it by Inspector Logan, who came up to Trevellin to report to the head of the family that most of the stolen money had been discovered upon Jimmy’s person.
There were present at this brief interview not only Raymond, but Faith, and Charmian, and Ingram as well.
