Mr. Pyke sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Then I’m afraid I’m not very observant,” he said at last. “I can’t remember any such peculiarity in poor Stanley’s case.”
“Nothing in the shape of the finger nails,” French prompted. “No birthmark, no local roughness or discoloration of the skin?”
“By Jove!” Mr. Pyke exclaimed with a sudden gesture. “There is something. My cousin had a birthmark, a small red mark on his left arm, here. I remembered it directly you mentioned the word.”
“Then you have been fairly intimate with your cousin? Have you often seen this mark?”
“Seen it? Scores of times. We were boys together and I have noticed it again and again. Why, now I come to think of it, I saw it on these last holidays I spent with Stanley. We went to the south of France and shared a cabin in the steamer to Marseilles.”
“Could you describe it?”
“No, but I could sketch it.” He seized a piece of paper and drew a rough triangle.
French laid his photograph beside the sketch. There could be no doubt that they represented the same object. Pyke seized the photograph.
“That’s it. I could swear to it anywhere. You’ve found Stanley’s body right enough. Good Heavens! Inspector, it’s incredible! I could have sworn he hadn’t an enemy in the world. Have you any clue to the murderer?”
Natural caution and official training made French hedge.
“Not as yet,” he answered, assuring himself that his ideas about Berlyn were hypothetical. “I was hoping that you could give me a lead.”
“I?” Jefferson Pyke shook his head. “Far from it. Even now I can scarcely credit the affair.”
“Well, I should like you to run over his associates and see if you can’t think of any who might have hated him. Now to start with the senior partner: What about Colonel Domlio?”
Mr. Pyke had never met him and knew nothing about him, though he had heard his cousin mention his name. French went on through the list he had made at Ashburton till in the natural sequence he came to Berlyn.
“Now Mr. Berlyn. Could he have had a down on your cousin?”
“But he was lost, too,” Pyke rejoined, then stopped and looked keenly at French. “By Jove! Inspector, I get your idea! You think Berlyn may have murdered him and cleared out?” He shook his head. “No, no. You are wrong. It is impossible. Berlyn wasn’t that sort. I knew him slightly and I confess I didn’t care for him, but he was not a murderer.”
“Why did you not like him, Mr. Pyke?”
Pyke shrugged.
“Hard to say. Not my style, perhaps. A good man, you know, and efficient and all that, but—too efficient, shall I say? He expected too much from others; didn’t make allowances for human errors and frailties. Poor Mrs. Berlyn had rather a time with him.”
“How so?”
“Well, an example will explain what I mean. On this last holiday after Stanley and I got back to London we met Berlyn and his wife, who were in town. The four of us dined together and went to a theatre. We were to meet at the restaurant at . Well, Mrs. Berlyn had been off somewhere on her own and she was . What was that for a woman? But Berlyn was so ratty about it that I felt quite embarrassed. You see, he wouldn’t have been late himself. If he had said , he would have been there—on the tick. He couldn’t see that other people were not made the same way.”
“I follow you. You say that Mrs. Berlyn had rather a time with him. Did they not get on?”
“Oh, they got on—as well as fifty percent of the married people get on. Berlyn did his duty to her strictly, even lavishly, but he expected the same in return. I don’t know that you could blame him. Strictly speaking, of course he was right. It was his instinct for scrupulously fair play.”
“Your late cousin and Mrs. Berlyn were very good friends, were they not?”
“We were both good friends with Mrs. Berlyn. Stanley and I knew her as children. In fact, it was through Stanley that Berlyn met her. I was in the Argentine at the time, but he told me about it. Berlyn was going for a holiday—one of those cruises round the western Mediterranean. Stanley happened to have met Phyllis Considine, as she was then, in London, and she had mentioned she was going on the same trip. So he gave Berlyn an introduction. Berlyn, it appears, fell in love with her and was accepted before the cruise was over.”
“Do you think Berlyn could have been jealous of your cousin?”
“I’m sure he could not, Inspector. Don’t get that bee into your bonnet. Stanley certainly went often to the house, but Berlyn was always friendly to him. I don’t for a moment believe there was anything to be jealous about.”
“There was enough intimacy for them to be talked about.”
“In Ashburton!” Pyke retorted, scornfully. “In a little one-horse place like that they’d talk no matter what you did.”
“It was believed that there was something between them until about four months before the tragedy, then for some unknown reason the affair stopped.”
“That so?” Pyke retorted. “Well, if it stopped four months before the tragedy it couldn’t have caused it.”
“Do you know where Mrs. Berlyn is now?”
“Yes, in London; at 70b Park Walk, Chelsea, to be exact.”
French continued his questions, but without learning anything further of interest, and after cautioning Pyke to keep his own counsel, he took his leave.
So he had reached certainty at last! The body was Stanley Pyke’s. He had admittedly made four ghastly blunders in his test points and these he must now try to retrieve. There was also a reasonable suspicion that Charles Berlyn was the murderer. Splendid! He was getting on. As he went down to the Yard he felt he had some good work behind him to report.
X
London’s Further Contribution
Now
