“He did not wish to drag his wife’s name into the case.”
“He must have known that the Crown would take up the case. Then, again, how is it no one saw him in the company of the swarthy foreigner he described?”
“Two witnesses did see Mr. Morton in company with Skinner,” argued Polly.
“Yes, at 9:20 in West Street; that would give Edward Skinner time to catch the 9:45 at the station, and to entrust Mr. Morton with the latchkey of Russell House,” remarked the man in the corner dryly.
“What nonsense!” Polly ejaculated.
“Nonsense, is it?” he said, tugging wildly at his bit of string; “is it nonsense to affirm that if a man wants to make sure that his victim shall not escape, he does not usually wind rope ‘loosely’ round his figure, nor does he throw a wool shawl lightly round his mouth. The police were idiotic beyond words; they themselves discovered that Morton was so ‘loosely’ fastened to his chair that very little movement would have disentangled him, and yet it never struck them that nothing was easier for that particular type of scoundrel to sit down in an armchair and wind a few yards of rope round himself, then, having wrapped a wool shawl round his throat, to slip his two arms inside the ropes.”
“But what object would a man in Mr. Morton’s position have for playing such extraordinary pranks?”
“Ah, the motive! There you are! What do I always tell you? Seek the motive! Now, what was Mr. Morton’s position? He was the husband of a lady who owned a quarter of a million of money, not one penny of which he could touch without her consent, as it was settled on herself, and who, after the terrible way in which she had been plundered and then abandoned in her early youth, no doubt kept a very tight hold upon the purse-strings. Mr. Morton’s subsequent life has proved that he had certain expensive, not altogether avowable, tastes. One day he discovers the old love letters of the ‘Comte Armand de la Tremouille.’
“Then he lays his plans. He typewrites a letter, forges the signature of the erstwhile Count, and awaits events. The fish does rise to the bait. He gets sundry bits of money, and his success makes him daring. He looks round him for an accomplice—clever, unscrupulous, greedy—and selects Mr. Edward Skinner, probably some former pal of his wild oats days.
“The plan was very neat, you must confess. Mr. Skinner takes the room in Russell House, and studies all the manners and customs of his landlady and her servant. He then draws the full attention of the police upon himself. He meets Morton in West Street, then disappears ostensibly after the ‘assault.’ In the meanwhile Morton goes to Russell House. He walks upstairs, talks loudly in the room, then makes elaborate preparations for his comedy.”
“Why! he nearly died of starvation!”
“That, I dare say, was not a part of his reckoning. He thought, no doubt, that Mrs. Chapman or the servant would discover and rescue him pretty soon. He meant to appear just a little faint, and endured quietly the first twenty-four hours of inanition. But the excitement and want of food told on him more than he expected. After twenty-four hours he turned very giddy and sick, and, falling from one fainting fit into another, was unable to give the alarm.
“However, he is all right again now, and concludes his part of a downright blackguard to perfection. Under the plea that his conscience does not allow him to live with a lady whose first husband is still alive, he has taken a bachelor flat in London, and only pays afternoon calls on his wife in Brighton. But presently he will tire of his bachelor life, and will return to his wife. And I’ll guarantee that the Comte de la Tremouille will never be heard of again.”
And that afternoon the man in the corner left Miss Polly Burton alone with a couple of photos of two uninteresting, stodgy, quiet-looking men—Morton and Skinner—who, if the old scarecrow was right in his theories, were a pair of the finest blackguards unhung.
XXVIII
The Regent’s Park Murder
By this time Miss Polly Burton had become quite accustomed to her extraordinary vis-á-vis in the corner.
He was always there, when she arrived, in the selfsame corner, dressed in one of his remarkable check tweed suits; he seldom said good morning, and invariably when she appeared he began to fidget with increased nervousness, with some tattered and knotty piece of string.
“Were you ever interested in the Regent’s Park murder?” he asked her one day.
Polly replied that she had forgotten most of the particulars connected with that curious murder, but that she fully remembered the stir and flutter it had caused in a certain section of London Society.
“The racing and gambling set, particularly, you mean,” he said. “All the persons implicated in the murder, directly or indirectly, were of the type commonly called ‘Society men,’ or ‘men about town,’ whilst the Harewood Club in Hanover Square, round which centred all the scandal in connection with the murder, was one of the smartest clubs in London.
“Probably the doings of the Harewood Club, which was essentially a gambling club, would forever have remained ‘officially’ absent from the knowledge of the police authorities but for the murder in the Regent’s Park and the revelations which came to light in connection with it.
“I dare say you know the quiet square which lies between Portland Place and the Regent’s Park and is called Park Crescent at its south end, and subsequently Park Square East and West. The Marylebone Road, with all its heavy traffic, cuts straight across the large square and its pretty gardens, but the latter are connected together by a tunnel under
