Orpington came forward quickly. He peered into the mahogany-lined cavity. It was empty, save for a shabby-looking red-leather despatch-box, on which, so faded as to be practically indecipherable, were embossed three gilt letters.
“That’s a rummy looking thing! One wouldn’t expect Mrs. Lexton would have such an object as this about,” and he lifted the despatch-box out of the cupboard.
It was surprisingly light.
“I wonder if she kept Gretorex’s love-letters in there,” said the other with a laugh. “If so, we may find something useful, eh?”
Orpington shook the box. Though it was so light he could feel that there was something in it which rolled about.
“You won’t find it as easy to open this box as you did that cupboard,” he observed, “but it has to be done.”
“The only way we could open this,” said the sergeant, decidedly, “would be with a kitchen knife, unless they’ve got a chisel.”
“You go and get what you can from the old woman.”
A minute or two later the man came back. “She’s in her room tidying up,” he said with a grin, “so I just took this without saying ‘by your leave.’ ” And he held up a short stout kitchen knife.
“You just lock that door,” said Orpington quickly.
And then, the two men, by exerting a great deal of strength, managed to prize open the hinges of the old despatch-box which had belonged to Ivy’s father. The lock stayed fast.
The inspector felt a pang of disappointment, for there only lay on the rubbed green velvet lining a lady’s fancy handbag.
And then Orpington suddenly remembered Mrs. Huntley’s sworn statement. In that statement was actually a description of the bag Ivy had had with her when the old woman had found her alone in the surgery with the jar of arsenic on the table before her. A bolster bag that “looked like mother-of-pearl.” This was the same one without doubt.
He took the odd little bag out of the despatch-box and pressed the jewelled knob—to find nothing in it but a cable from South Africa. The signature, “Rushworth,” meant nothing to him, though of course he knew of the famous Rushworth Line.
Then he opened the little white leather-lined, inner pocket of the bag. It, too, was empty. A faint scent, that of a popular face powder, rose from it.
And then, suddenly, he noticed, with a queer quickening of his pulse, that a few grains of what looked like kitchen salt clung to the white leather sides.
Moistening his finger, he put it against the leather, and a few grains stuck on to his wet finger. Face powder? No, not face powder. He touched his finger with his tongue, and then the colour rushed up all over his face.
“I’d like Sir Bernard to have a squint at that!” he exclaimed, holding up the open bag.
“D’you mean you’ve found something?” the other cried excitedly.
“Hush!”
Carefully Orpington put the rather absurd-looking mother-of-pearl bolster into a big black bag which he had brought with him. Then he put the empty despatch-box back into the cupboard.
“Let’s get out of this,” he murmured, “before the old woman sees us. Can you manage to shut the cupboard as cleverly as you opened it?”
“I think I can,” said the other. And sure enough he did shut it, though it took him longer to lock up the half of the great early-Victorian cupboard than it had done to unlock it.
Orpington took a card out of his notebook. He wrote on it: “We’ve seen everything we wanted. Shan’t be troubling you any more,” and left it in a prominent place on the hall table.
Then he shut the front door rather loudly behind him, and, together, the two men went down the stairs by the side of the lift.
When they were safely out of the Duke of Kent Mansion, the inspector stayed his steps.
“I’ve got her!” he said exultingly. “Little Ivy will live to be sorry she bamboozled ‘yours truly,’ my boy!”
XXI
With a sudden cry of fear Ivy Lexton sat up in the Jacobean four-post bed, where she had spent a broken night.
She was still plunged in sleep, but anyone standing, say, by the large half-moon window of the delightful old-world country bedroom would have thought her awake, for her violet-blue eyes were wide open and dilated, as if with terror.
How lovely she looked; how childlike was the pure, delicate contour of her face, and the droop of her little red mouth. Her dimpled shoulders rose from what she called a “nightie” of flesh-coloured crêpe de Chine. The sleeveless bodice was edged with a deep band of real lace, and, to the eyes of the old-fashioned maid who waited on her in this, her friend’s, Lady Flora Desmond’s, country cottage, it looked more like a ball-dress than a nightgown.
There were tens of thousands of human beings who, had they been privileged to see Ivy as she was now, this morning, would have felt their hearts contract with intense pity for the woman they regarded as having been the innocent victim of an extraordinary set of ironic circumstances. There were also tens of thousands of other human beings who, though they had had strong doubts as to the part she had played in the singular story, would have told themselves that their suspicions had been cruelly unjust, could they have looked into that flower-like face, and heard the words now escaping from her half-opened mouth.
Those words were uttered in an appealing, broken tone, “Don’t hurt him! Please don’t hurt him!” And then: “Oh, Roger, I am so sorry for you!”
Ivy’s soul was not here in this delightful country bedroom. It had travelled a long long way, to a prison situated on the outskirts of London.
She seemed to be gazing through the door of a small, bare room, which she knew to be now occupied by one on whom judgment of death was to be executed that morning.
There stood by the
