“Question them first,” answered the superintendent. “I shan’t let them get out of my sight, anyway, after what you’ve told me, for I expect you’re right in your conclusions. What is it?” he asked, as one of the two men who followed behind called him.
The man pointed down the Market Place to the doors of the police-station.
“Two cars just pulled up there, sir,” he said. “Came round the corner just now from the Norcaster road.”
The superintendent glanced back and saw two staring headlights standing near his own door.
“Oh, well, there’s Smith there,” he said. “And if it’s anybody wanting me, he knows where I’ve gone. Come on—for aught we know these two may have cleared out already.”
But there were thin cracks of light in the living-room window of the lonely cottage on the Shawl, and the superintendent whispered that somebody was certainly there and still up. He halted his companions outside the garden gate and turned to Cotherstone.
“I don’t know if it’ll be advisable for you to be seen,” he said. “I think our best plan’ll be for me to knock at the front door and ask for the woman. You other two go round—quietly—to the back door, and take care that nobody gets out that way to the moors at the back—if anybody once escapes to those moors they’re as good as lost forever on a dark night. Go round—and when you hear me knock at the front, you knock at the back.”
The two men slipped away round the corner of the garden and through the adjacent belt of trees, and the superintendent gently lifted the latch of the garden gate.
“You keep back, Mr. Cotherstone, when I go to the door,” he said. “You never know—hullo, what’s this?”
Men were coming up the wood behind them, quietly but quickly. One of them, ahead of the others, carried a bull’s-eye lamp and in swinging it about revealed himself as one of the superintendent’s own officers. He caught sight of his superior and came forward.
“Mr. Brereton’s here, sir, and some gentlemen from Norcaster,” he said. “They want to see you particularly—something about this place, so I brought them—”
It was at that moment that the sound of the two revolver shots rang out in the silence from the stillness of the cottage. And at that the superintendent dashed forward, with a cry to the others, and began to beat on the front door, and while his men responded with similar knockings at the back he called loudly on Miss Pett to open.
It was Mallalieu who at last flung the door open and confronted the amazed and wondering group clustered thickly without. Every man there shrank back affrighted at the desperation on the cornered man’s face. But Mallalieu did not shrink, and his hand was strangely steady as he singled out his partner and shot him dead—and just as steady as he stepped back and turned the revolver on himself.
A moment later the superintendent snatched the bull’s-eye lamp from his man, and stepped over Mallalieu’s dead body and went into the cottage—to come back on the instant shivering and sick with shock at the sight his startled eyes had met.
XXXI
The Barrister’s Fee
Six months later, on a fine evening which came as the fitting close of a perfect May afternoon, Brereton got out of a London express at Norcaster and entered the little train which made its way by a branch line to the very heart of the hills. He had never been back to these northern regions since the tragedies of which he had been an unwilling witness, and when the little train came to a point in its winding career amongst the fell-sides and valleys from whence Highmarket could be seen, with the tree-crowned Shawl above it, he resolutely turned his face and looked in the opposite direction. He had no wish to see the town again; he would have been glad to cut that chapter out of his book of memories. Nevertheless, being so near to it, he could not avoid the recollections which came crowding on him because of his knowledge that Highmarket’s old gables and red roofs were there, within a mile or two, had he cared to look at them in the glint of the westering sun. No—he would never willingly set foot in that town again!—there was nobody there now that he had any desire to see. Bent, when the worst was over, and the strange and sordid story had come to its end, had sold his business, quietly married Lettie and taken her away for a long residence abroad, before returning to settle down in London. Brereton had seen them for an hour or two as they passed through London on their way to Paris and Italy, and had been more than ever struck by young Mrs. Bent’s philosophical acceptance of facts. Her father, in Lettie’s opinion, had always been a deeply-wronged and much injured man, and it was his fate to have suffered by his lifelong connection with that very wicked person, Mallalieu: he had unfortunately paid the penalty at last—and there was no more to be said about it. It might be well, thought Brereton, that Bent’s wife should be so calm and equable of temperament, for Bent, on his return to England, meant to go in for politics, and Lettie would doubtless make an ideal helpmeet for a public man. She would face situations with a cool head and a well-balanced judgment—and so, in that respect, all was well. All the same, Brereton had a strong notion that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Bent would ever revisit Highmarket.
As for himself, his thoughts went beyond Highmarket—to the place amongst the hills which he had never seen. After Harborough’s due acquittal Brereton, having discharged his task, had gone back to London. But ever since then he had kept up a regular correspondence with Avice, and he knew all the details of the
