“She came to tea on one occasion, but not alone, of course. A friend of hers, a widow called Mrs. Arundell, and a man friend of Mrs. Arundell’s, came with her.”
And then Roger Gretorex leant forward:
“I do hope that you will believe me when I tell you that any—well, feeling of attraction, was entirely on my side. When I did, I admit very foolishly, once try to tell her—”
He stopped, and the other interjected, not unkindly, “How much she attracted you?”
Gretorex nodded, and then he gasped out the lying words—“She made me feel at once she was not that kind of woman.”
“I suppose,” said the inspector with a twinkle in his eyes, “that Mrs. Lexton used that very expression.”
Gretorex tried to smile back.
“Well, yes, I believe she did. It happened a long time ago, in fact when I first made the Lextons’ acquaintance.”
Now this observation gave the direct lie to Ivy Lexton’s statement, which Orpington honestly believed had been extracted from her against her will.
“I suppose that you can suggest no reason why this man, Jervis Lexton, should have wished to take his own life?”
“No, none at all. He had just obtained an excellent job.”
“You can throw no light either, I presume, as to how the arsenic which undoubtedly caused his death can have been administered to him?”
“Not only can I throw no light on it, but I find it almost impossible to believe what my reason tells me is true—your assertion that his death was directly due to the administration of arsenic.”
The speaker’s voice was strong, assured. At last he was on firm ground.
“I take it there is a surgery attached to this house, and that you make up your own medicines?”
The inspector asked that vital question in a very quiet tone, but Gretorex realised its purport as he answered, “I do—for the most part.”
“I should like to see the surgery.”
“By all means.”
Roger Gretorex got up. Then he placed his back against the door.
Instantly Inspector Orpington, though he was a brave man, and had been in more than one very tight corner, felt a cold tremor run through him. Was this fine-looking young chap going to whip out a revolver and kill, not only himself, but also the man whose unpleasant duty it had been to show him that the game he had been so mad as to play was up?
But he need not have been afraid.
“Look here! Before I take you into my surgery, where you will find a jar of arsenic as likely as not on an open shelf—for I am a careless chap, and no one has access to the place but myself and my old charwoman—I want to say something to you. I don’t suppose you will believe me, but I wish to tell you, here and now, that I have no more idea of how poor Lexton got at the arsenic which caused his death—if it did cause it—than you have, and that the one thing of which I am quite sure is that it did not come out of my surgery.”
XI
Instead of doing what he ought to have done—that is, to have sought at once the best legal aid in his power—Roger Gretorex made up his mind to go back to Sussex, if only for a few hours.
Ivy’s words of agonised fear now found an echo in his own heart. His mother must hear the very few and simple facts concerning Jervis Lexton’s death from himself.
On his way to the station he saw two newspaper placards, and he felt as if it was at him that they shouted the ominous words:
Kensington
Poisoning
Mystery.
Well-Known
Clubman
Poisoned.
He bought an evening paper in the station, and then, when he unfolded it, he felt a sharp stab of anger and disgust. In the centre of the front page was a charming portrait of Ivy—Ivy looking her sweetest and most seductive self. Above and below the photograph was printed a series of paragraphs dealing with the joyous life the young couple had led in the carefree existence which centres round the idler members of the fashionable nightclubs. It was also stated that, on the very night of Mr. Lexton’s unexpected death, Mrs. Lexton was supping at the Savoy with “a smart theatre-party.”
In the grateful darkness of a late November afternoon, Roger Gretorex walked the two miles which separated the little station from Anchorford, the village which he still felt part of the very warp and woof of his life, though he owned practically no land there. All that his father had been able to keep was the manor house, and the little portion of the park which had surrounded the dwelling-house of the owners of Anchorford from the days of Domesday Book.
Now and again Gretorex, as he hurried through the narrow lanes, would tell himself that the inexplicable mystery attaching to Jervis Lexton’s death by poison was bound to be cleared up, and probably in some quite simple way—a way that he himself was now too excited and too anxious to think out for himself.
Then there would come a sudden sensation of doubt, of despondency. Like Ivy, but with far more cause, Roger Gretorex began to feel as if a net were closing round him.
At last he turned into the long avenue which led to Anchorford House, and his heart leapt when he saw the long Elizabethan front, now bright with twinkling lights.
He rang the front door bell, and then he schooled himself to wait patiently for old Bolton, who, once his father’s head groom, now acted as general factotum and odd-job man.
But when, all at once, the door opened, it was his mother, tall, upright, grey-haired, who stood there, her face full of eager welcome.
“I knew it was you, my dearest! I don’t believe in presentiments, but I have been thinking of you all today, even more than usual.”
His face gave no answering smile. He looked very grave, and yet how young he seemed to her, standing there; how strong, how finely drawn and
