“I should be very glad if you would,” she said earnestly. “Poor, dear uncle! I didn’t think I could ever enter the house again.”
“I can relieve your mind about that,” he said. “The will is not to be read in the house. Mr. Minute’s lawyers have arranged for the reading at their offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I have the address here somewhere.”
He fumbled in his pocket and took out a card.
“Power, Commons and Co.,” he read, “194 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I will meet you there at three o’clock.”
He rumpled his untidy hair with an embarrassed laugh.
“I seem to have drifted into the position of guardian to you, young lady,” he said. “I can’t say that it is an unpleasant task, although it is a great responsibility.”
“You have been splendid, Mr. Mann,” she said warmly, “and I shall never forget all you have done for me. Somehow I feel that Frank will get off; and I hope—I pray that it will not be at Jasper’s expense.”
He looked at her in surprise and disappointment.
“I thought—” he stopped.
“You thought I was engaged to Frank, and so I am,” she said, with heightened color. “But Jasper is—I hardly know how to put it.”
“I see,” said Mr. Mann, though, if the truth be told, he saw nothing which enlightened him.
Punctually at three o’clock the next afternoon, they walked up the steps of the lawyers’ office together. Jasper Cole was already there, and to Mr. Mann’s surprise so also was Inspector Nash, who explained his presence in a few words.
“There may be something in the will which will open a new viewpoint,” he said.
Mr. Power, the solicitor, an elderly man, inclined to rotundity, was introduced, and, taking his position before the fireplace, opened the proceedings with an expression of regret as to the circumstances which had brought them together.
“The will of my late client,” he said, “was not drawn up by me. It is written in Mr. Minute’s handwriting, and revokes the only other will, one which was prepared some four years ago and which made provisions rather different to those in the present instrument. This will”—he took a single sheet of paper out of an envelope—“was made last year and was witnessed by Thomas Wellington Crawley”—he adjusted his pince-nez and examined the signature—“late trooper of the Matabeleland mounted police, and by George Warrell, who was Mr. Minute’s butler at the time. Warrell died in the Eastbourne hospital in the spring of this year.”
There was a deep silence. Saul Arthur Mann’s face was eagerly thrust forward, his head turned slightly to one side. Inspector Nash showed an unusual amount of interest. Both men had the same thought—a new will, witnessed by two people, one of whom was dead, and the other a fugitive from justice; what did this will contain?
It was the briefest of documents. To his ward he left the sum of two hundred thousand pounds, “a provision which was also made in the previous will, I might add,” said the lawyer, and to this he added all his shares in the Gwelo Deep.
“To his nephew, Francis Merrill, he left twenty thousand pounds.”
The lawyer paused and looked round the little circle, and then continued:
“The residue of my property, movable and immovable, all my furniture, leases, shares, cash at bankers, and all interests whatsoever, I bequeath to Jasper Cole, so-called, who is at present my secretary and confidential agent.”
The detective and Saul Arthur Mann exchanged glances, and Nash’s lips moved.
“How is that for a ‘motive’?” he whispered.
XII
The Trial of Frank Merrill
The trial of Frank Merrill on the charge that he “did on the twenty-eighth day of June in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred—wilfully and wickedly kill and slay by a pistol shot John Minute” was the sensation of a season which was unusually prolific in murder trials. The trial took place at the Lewes Assizes in a crowded courtroom, and lasted, as we know, for sixteen days, five days of which were given to the examination in chief and the cross-examination of the accountants who had gone into the books of the bank.
The prosecution endeavored to establish the fact that no other person but Frank Merrill could have access to the books, and that therefore no other person could have falsified them or manipulated the transfer of moneys. It cannot be said that the prosecution had wholly succeeded; for when Brandon, the bank manager, was put into the witness box he was compelled to admit that not only Frank, but he himself and Jasper Cole, were in a position to reach the books.
The opening speech for the crown had been a masterly one. But that there were many weak points in the evidence and in the assumptions which the prosecution drew was evident to the merest tyro.
Sir George Murphy Jackson, the attorney general, who prosecuted, attempted to dispose summarily of certain conflictions, and it had to be confessed that his explanations were very plausible.
“The defense will tell us,” he said, in that shrill, clarion tone of his which has made to quake the hearts of so many hostile witnesses, “that we have not accounted for the fourth man who drove up in his car ten minutes after Merrill had entered the house, and disappeared, but I am going to tell you my theory of that incident.
“Merrill had an accomplice who is not in custody, and that accomplice is Rex Holland. Merrill had planned and prepared this murder, because from some statement which his uncle had made he believed that not only was his whole future dependent upon destroying his benefactor and silencing forever the one man who knew the extent of his villainy, but he had in his cold, shrewd way accurately foreseen the
