'Yes.'
He gripped the telephone tightly, and muttered something like a prayer before he spoke. 'She's all right, isn't she?'
'All right?' thundered Dr Fell. 'Of course she's all right! She's sitting here in the room with me now.' 'Then what- ?’
' But we have, as a matter of fact,' pursued Dr Fell,' some rather important news. We've identified the dead man.'
CHAPTER 13
IN the northern wing on the ground floor at Ashe Hall, along a musty dark little passage carpeted with matting, was a room which Lord Ashe used as a study. Four persons were waiting here when Dick arrived.
A green-baize door muffled this room from domestic noises. Over the small cavern of the fireplace hung a portrait now so age-darkened, even where the light splashed it, that little emerged except a spindle-shanked ghost with a curious collar. A line of narrow windows, of crinkly bottle-glass with ancient rings, looked out on a walled garden which had once been a Ladies' Retiring Garden. Against these windows, pushed so that the light would fall across the left shoulder of anyone sitting there, was a big table covered with papers.
In a creaky swivel-chair at this table sat Lord Ashe, half turning out into the room.
Across from him, bolt upright, sat Lesley Grant.
Dr Fell was enthroned in a huge wooden chair, a very emperor's chair, which gave him some resemblance to Old King Cole. And with his back to the fireplace stood 'a tall military-looking man - Dick had seen him in the High Street not half an hour before - with hard eyes and a hard jaw, whistling between his teeth.
Lesley jumped to her feet.
' If you don't mind,' Lesley observed,' I shall just go out while you tell him. You can call me in afterwards. I just don't want to be here when you tell him.'
And she was smiling.
People would not, Dick was reflecting, behave as you expected them to behave.
Only a short time ago he had seen the rather unimaginative Cynthia Drew go through such an emotional tumult as you might not have believed possible. The nerve-strain of the day considered, its effect on Lesley should have been much worse. And yet this was not so.
Nerve-strain existed, certainly. But most of all you felt a lessening of tension, a radiance of relief, which touched on the borders of happiness. Lesley walked straight towards Dick.
'Hello, darling,' she said. Laughter twinkled in the brown eyes. 'You
And, after ducking a mocking curtsy to Dr Fell - who responded by waving the crutch-handled cane and chuckling with an alarming violence which threatened to become a coughing-fit - Lesley slipped demurely out of the room, closing the green-baize door after her.
'Ah, well, gentlemen!' remarked Lord Ashe, and drew a deep breath.
'Admirable!' roared Dr Fell. 'Admirable!'
'Idiotic,' curtly commented the military-looking man by the fireplace. 'And damned risky too. But women are like that.'
Dick held hard to reason.
'I don't want to butt in, Dr Fell,' he said; 'but you asked me over here, and here I am. If you could manage to tell me...'
Dr Fell blinked at him.
' Eh, my boy ? Tell you what ?'
' Tell me what this is all about!'
'Oh, ah! Yes!' cried Dr Fell, enlightened. The Gargantuan doctor was not trying to be mystifying; he had merely slipped ahead into some obscure mental calculation, and forgotten all about what had been on his mind a few minutes before. 'By the way, let me introduce you to my friend Superintendent Hadley. Mr Markham, Superintendent Hadley.'
Dick shook hands with the military-looking man.
'Hadley, of course,' pursued Dr Fell, 'recognized the dead man as soon as he clapped eyes on him.'
'I'm rather sorry to lose Sam, in a way,' said Hadley, chopping his teeth together in a way that meant trouble for somebody. 'He had his points, Sam had. Though I sometimes wanted to kill him myself, I admit.' Then Hadley grinned.' Steady, Mr Markham! You want to know who this fellow really was ?' 'Yes!'
'He was a professional crook named Samuel De Villa,' replied Hadley. 'Probably the cleverest confidence- man in the business.'
'Imagination, Hadley,' said Dr Fell, shaking his head. ' Imagination! Oh, my eye!'
'Too much imagination,' retorted Hadley. 'It killed him.'
'Perhaps, my dear boy,' interposed the thoughtful voice of Lord Ashe,' it would interest you to see this.'
Pushing back the creaky swivel-chair, he pulled open the long drawer of the table at which he was sitting. From the drawer he took out a largish square of dark-coloured velvet, folded together like a bag, and spread it out on the table.
' Gaudy, eh ?' inquired Dr Fell.
'Gaudy' was a mild word. Outside a musical comedy, Dick had never seen anything like the objects which lay against that dark square of velvet There were only four of them: a triple-tiered necklace, a bracelet, a single earring, and what looked like a collar. But they stunned the eye with their antique combination of what can only be called beauty with vulgarity.
And now Dick realized why a certain heraldic device seemed to have been haunting him. He had seen the Ashe arms, a griffin and ash-tree, often enough on the entrance-gates of the Hall. He had seen it on the small signet-ring which Lord Ashe usually wore. He had even seen it, heaven knew, on the sign of the local public- house.
But it was all over these exhibits as a convict's uniform used to be starred with broad-arrows. It decorated the clasp of the bracelet, it was woven into the design of the gold collar. It marked and stamped them as the property of the Ashe family.
Of course, Dick thought to himself, such flamboyant jewels couldn't possibly be real. The pearls of the triple-tiered necklace, opalescent and alive when light through the windows fell on them; the intense hard malignant glitter of diamond on the bracelet; the fluid red glow of ruby on that antique, curiously wrought gold collar...
Interpreting his expression, Lord Ashe glanced up.
'Oh, yes,' said Lord Ashe. 'The jewels are real enough.'
Delicately he touched first the necklace and then the bracelet.
'These,' he continued, 'are early eighteenth century. This,' he touched the earring, ' I suspect of being modem and spurious. But this,' he touched the collar, 'this is what tradition describes as a gift to George Converse, in the year fifteen seventy-six, from Gloriana herself.'
And Lord Ashe raised his eyes to the portrait above the fireplace, that black portrait through which only a shadow-image could be discerned.
There was a long silence.
Outside, in the walled garden, stood a solitary plum-tree. As in a dream Dick saw the sunlight filling that garden, pouring through the tall narrow windows on the blaze of these coloured fires. He saw the dingy room with its rows of brown books round the walls. He saw the portrait, breathing of English soil at a time when such finery as these gauds decorated arm and throat and ear as a matter of everyday wear.
But most of all he saw the face of Lord Ashe - that combination of the scholar and the outdoor man, with evasive-looking eyes - as Lord Ashe's hand hovered over the jewels. And Dick at last broke the silence.
'Yours, sir?'
The other shook his head.
'I wish I could say they were,' he answered regretfully. He looked up and smiled. 'They belong, now, to Miss Lesley Grant.'
'But that's impossible! Lesley doesn't own any jewellery!' ' I beg your pardon,' said Lord Ashe.' She hates
