“Have you brought me any news?” she drawled.
It was not like Lady Raytham to drawl.
“I telephoned to you about an hour ago, but unfortunately I could not catch you; on the whole, I think I prefer that a woman officer should deal with this case.”
“Has he stolen anything?” asked Leslie bluntly, and to her amazement Lady Raytham shook her head.
“No, I’ve missed nothing; I shouldn’t imagine he would steal. He may have done, of course; but I shall be able to tell you more about that tomorrow. He was grossly insulting, and left me at a second’s notice.”
“Have you been out?”
“Yes; I went to a dinner with Princess Anita Bellini. We intended going on to the theatre, but I had a headache and decided to return.”
“What time did you come back?” asked Leslie.
Lady Raytham raised her eyes to the ceiling.
“It may have been half-past nine—probably a little earlier,” she said. “We dined at a little restaurant which the Princess knows—”
“And then you came back and had another dinner,” said Leslie steadily. “The table is still on the landing—set for two, so far as I could see.”
For a second the woman was staggered out of self-control. Her hand went up to her lips.
“Oh, that?” she said awkwardly. “My friend, Mrs. Gurden, came later, and—and we gave her some supper.”
Leslie shook her head.
“I wish you would be frank with me, Lady Raytham,” she said. “The truth is, you didn’t go out to dinner at all, did you?”
For a second the woman made no reply.
“I don’t know what I did,” she said.
Between despair and suppressed anger her voice was a wail.
“He drove everything out of my mind—oh, if I had known! If I had known!”
She covered her eyes with her hands, and Leslie heard the sobs she could not stifle.
“What did he say to you before he went?” she asked inexorably.
Lady Raytham shook her head.
“I can’t tell you—he was dreadful, dreadful!”
Leslie had waited this opportunity to fire her shot.
“He is in our hands,” she said. “Shall we bring him here?”
The woman uncovered her eyes and stepped back with a little scream.
“Here? Here?” she said huskily. “My God, not here! He must go to the mort—”
She stopped herself, but too late.
“How did you know he was dead?” asked Leslie sternly.
Under the rouge the woman’s face was grey.
VII
“How did you know he was dead?” asked Leslie again. “Who told you?”
“I—I heard.” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.
“Who told you? Nobody knows but the inspector and I, and I have come straight away from the place where he was found. I left him three minutes ago.”
“Three minutes? I don’t understand.” And then, as she saw that she had been trapped for the second time, the colour came and went in Jane Raytham’s face.
“I don’t wonder that you are surprised, Lady Raytham. You know that Barnes Common is a little more than three minutes away, don’t you?”
The woman looked round like some hunted animal seeking an avenue of escape.
“I know he is dead,” she said desperately.
And then she faced the girl with a new resolution and a courage which Leslie could only admire.
“I know he’s dead,” she breathed. “I know he’s dead. God knows who killed him, but I found him there. I saw him as my car was passing—on the sidewalk. I somehow knew it was he and got out. That is how I know. I should have told the police, I suppose, but—I was frightened, terribly frightened. I thought I should faint.”
“Where were you going when you found his body?”
Leslie’s grave eyes were fixed on the woman.
“To—to the Princess Bellini. She has a house in Wimbledon.”
“But you couldn’t have parted with her for very long when you decided to follow her.”
Jane Raytham licked her dry lips.
“She left something behind—the night was rather pleasant—I wanted the air, so I drove—”
“Won’t you sit down, Lady Raytham?” said the girl gently.
The woman looked ready to drop. With a little nod she sank down—to say that she collapsed would be a more descriptive word—into an easy-chair that was near at hand.
Humanity was at the back of Leslie Maughan’s suggestion, but there was something else. She had learnt at Scotland Yard never to interrogate either a prisoner or a possible witness whilst you are on the same level with them. It was a piece of information that had been conveyed to her by the greatest criminal counsel of the Bar. “Put a witness on a lower level,” he said, “and he’ll tell you the truth.”
Now she looked down at the broken woman who was nervously fingering the arm of the chair, and a wave of pity swept over Leslie Maughan such as she had never experienced before.
“You were not going to Princess Bellini’s, Lady Raytham,” she said gently. “You were looking for Druze—he had taken something of yours.”
Lady Raytham gazed at her without answering.
“You thought he had gone to the Princess Bellini’s. Is that the way, across Barnes Common?”
“It is—a way—yes.”
“Then you saw the body and recognized it? Saw it in the light of your headlamps, as we did? You weren’t on your way to Wimbledon at all; you were coming back. I saw the rear lights of your car.”
Lady Raytham was breathing quickly.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t have seen the body otherwise. It lay on the left-hand footpath as you came towards London, on the farther path as you came from London. What kind of a car have you?”
Jane told her.
“So you had been to Princess
