The butler being out that afternoon it was Harris who let her mistress in, and as the latter asked no questions, the girl did not volunteer the information that her master had a visitor. She went back to the servants’ hall, but five minutes later the smoking-room bell rang, and she had to run up again. The foreign lady was then in the hall alone, and obviously waiting to be shown out. This Harris did, after which Mr Culledon came out of his room, and, in the girl’s own graphic words, ‘he went on dreadful’.
‘I didn’t know I ’ad done anything so very wrong,’ she explained, ‘but the master seemed quite furious, and said I wasn’t a proper parlour-maid, or I’d have known that visitors must not be shown in straight away like that. I ought to have said that I didn’t know if Mr Culledon was in; that I would go and see. Oh, he did go on at me!’ continued Katherine Harris, volubly. ‘And I suppose he complained to the mistress, for she give me notice the next day.’
‘And you have never seen the foreign lady since?’ concluded Lady Molly.
‘No; she never come while I was there.’
‘By the way, how did you know she was foreign? Did she speak like a foreigner?’
‘Oh, no,’ replied the girl. ‘She did not say much – only asked for Mr Culledon – but she looked French like.’
This unanswerable bit of logic concluded Katherine’s statement. She was very anxious to know whether, if the foreign lady was hanged for murder, she herself would get the £250.
On Lady Molly’s assurance that she certainly would, she departed in apparent content.
3
‘Well! we are no nearer than we were before,’ said the chief, with an impatient sigh, when the door had closed behind Katherine Harris.
‘Don’t you think so?’ rejoined Lady Molly, blandly.
‘Do you consider that what we have heard just now has helped us to discover who was the woman in the big hat?’ retorted the chief, somewhat testily.
‘Perhaps not,’ replied my dear lady, with her sweet smile; ‘but it may help us to discover who murdered Mr Culledon.’
With which enigmatical statement she effectually silenced the chief, and finally walked out of his office, followed by her faithful Mary.
Following Katherine Harris’s indications, a description of the lady who was wanted in connection with the murder of Mr Culledon was very widely circulated, and within two days of the interview with the ex-parlour-maid another very momentous one took place in the same office.
Lady Molly was at work with the chief over some reports, whilst I was taking shorthand notes at a side desk, when a card was brought in by one of the men, and the next moment, without waiting either for permission to enter or to be more formally announced, a magnificent apparition literally sailed into the dust-covered little back office, filling it with an atmosphere of Parma violets and Russia leather.
I don’t think that I had ever seen a more beautiful woman in my life. Tall, with a splendid figure and perfect carriage, she vaguely reminded me of the portraits one sees of the late Empress of Austria. This lady was, moreover, dressed to perfection, and wore a large hat adorned with a quantity of plumes.
The chief had instinctively risen to greet her, whilst Lady Molly, still and placid, was eyeing her with a quizzical smile.
‘You know who I am, sir,’ began the visitor as soon as she had sunk gracefully into a chair; ‘my name is on that card. My appearance, I understand, tallies exactly with that of a woman who is supposed to have murdered Mark Culledon.’
She said this so calmly, with such perfect self-possession, that I literally gasped. The chief, too, seemed to have been metaphorically lifted off his feet. He tried to mutter a reply.
‘Oh, don’t trouble yourself, sir!’ she interrupted him, with a smile. ‘My landlady, my servant, my friends have all read the description of the woman who murdered Mr Culledon. For the past twenty-four hours I have been watched by your police, therefore I have come to you of my own accord, before they came to arrest me in my flat. I am not too soon, am I?’ she asked, with that same cool indifference which was so startling, considering the subject of her conversation.
She spoke English with a scarcely perceptible foreign accent, but I quite understood what Katherine Harris had meant when she said that the lady looked ‘French like’. She certainly did not look English, and when I caught sight of her name on the card, which the chief had handed to Lady Molly, I put her down at once as Viennese. Miss Elizabeth Löwenthal had all the charm, the grace, the elegance, which one associates with Austrian women more than with those of any other nation.
No wonder the chief found it difficult to tell her that, as a matter of fact, the police were about to apply for a warrant that very morning for her arrest on a charge of wilful murder .
‘I know – I know,’ she said, seeming to divine his thoughts; ‘but let me tell you at once, sir, that I did not murder Mark Culledon. He treated me shamefully, and I would willingly have made a scandal just to spite him; he had become so respectable and strait-laced. But between scandal and murder there is a wide gulf. Don’t you think so, madam?’ she added, turning for the first time towards Lady Molly.
‘Undoubtedly,’ replied my dear lady, with the same quizzical smile.
‘A wide gulf which, no doubt, Miss Elizabeth Löwenthal will best be able to demonstrate to the magistrate tomorrow,’ rejoined the chief, with official sternness of manner.
I thought that, for the space of a few seconds, the lady lost her self-assurance at this obvious suggestion – the bloom on her cheeks seemed to vanish, and two hard lines appeared between her fine eyes. But, frightened
