He led Viner down a corridor, through one or two locked doors, and motioning him to tread softly, drew back a sliding panel in the door of a cell and silently pointed. Viner, with a worse sickness than before, stole up and looked through the barred opening. One glance at the man sitting inside the cell, white-faced, staring at the drab, bare wall, was enough; he turned to Drillford and nodded. Drillford nodded too, and led him back to the office.
“That’s the man I saw,” said Viner.
“Of course!” assented Drillford. “I’d no doubt of it. Well, it’s been a far simpler thing than I’d dared to hope. I’ll tell you how we got him. This morning, about ten o’clock, this chap, who won’t give his name, went into the pawnbroker’s shop in Edgware Road, and asked for a loan on a diamond ring which he produced. Now, Pelver, who happened to attend to him himself, is a good deal of an expert in diamonds—he’s a jeweller as well as a pawnbroker, and he saw at once that the diamond in this ring was well worth all of a thousand pounds—a gem of the first water! He was therefore considerably astonished when his customer asked for a loan of ten pounds on it—still more so when the fellow suggested that Pelver should buy it outright for twenty-five. Pelver asked him some questions as to his property in the ring—he made some excuses about its having been in his family for some time, and that he would be glad to realize on it. Under pretence of examining it, Pelver took the ring to another part of his shop and quietly sent for a policeman. And the end was, this officer brought the man here, and Pelver with him, and the ring. Here it is!”
He opened a safe and produced a diamond ring at which Viner stared with feelings for which he could scarcely account.
“How do you know that’s one of Mr. Ashton’s rings?” he asked.
“Oh, I soon solved that!” laughed Drillford. “I hurried round to Markendale Square with it at once. Both the ladies recognized it—Mr. Ashton had often shown it to them, and told them its value, and there’s a private mark of his inside it. And so we arrested him, and there he is! Clear case!”
“What did he say?” asked Viner.
“He’s a curious customer,” replied Drillford. “I should say that whatever he is now, he has been a gentleman. He was extremely nervous and so on while we were questioning him about the ring, but when it came to the crucial point, and I charged him and warned him, he turned strangely cool. I’ll tell you what he said, in his exact words. ‘I’m absolutely innocent of that!’ he said. ‘But I can see that I’ve placed myself in a very strange position.’ And after that he would say no more—he hasn’t even asked to see a solicitor.”
“What will be done next?” asked Viner.
“He’ll be brought before the magistrate in an hour or two,” said Drillford. “Formal proceedings—for a remand, you know. I shall want you there, Mr. Viner; it won’t take long. I wish the fellow would tell us who he is.”
“And I wish I could remember where and when I have seen him before!” exclaimed Viner.
“Ah, that’s still your impression?” remarked Drillford. “You’re still convinced of it?”
“More than ever—since seeing him just now,” affirmed Viner. “I know his face, but that’s all I can say. I suppose,” he continued, looking diffidently at the inspector, as if he half-expected to be laughed at for the suggestion he was about to make, “I suppose you don’t believe that this unfortunate fellow may have some explanation of his possession of Mr. Ashton’s ring?”
Drillford, who had been replacing the ring in a safe, locked the door upon it with a snap, and turned on his questioner with a look which became more and more businesslike and official with each succeeding word.
“Now, Mr. Viner,” he said, “you look at it from our point of view. An elderly gentleman is murdered and robbed. A certain man is seen—by you, as it happens—running away as fast as he can from the scene of the murder. Next morning that very man is found trying to get rid of a ring which, without doubt, was taken from the murdered man’s finger. What do you think? Or—another question—what could we, police officials, do?”
“Nothing but what you’re doing, I suppose,” said Viner. “Still—there may be a good deal that’s—what shall I say?—behind all this.”
“It’s for him to speak,” observed Drillford, nodding in the direction of the cells. “He’s got a bell within reach of his fingers; he’s only got to ring it and to ask for me or any solicitor he likes to name. But—we shall see!”
Nothing had been seen or heard, in the way hinted at by Drillford, when, an hour later, Viner, waiting in the neighbouring police-court, was aware that the humdrum, sordid routine was about to be interrupted by something unusual. The news of an arrest in connection with the Lonsdale Passage murder had somehow leaked out, and the court was packed to the doors—Viner himself had gradually been forced into a corner near the witness-box in which he was to make an unwilling appearance. And from that corner he looked with renewed interest at the man who was presently placed in the dock, and for the hundredth time asked himself what it was in his face that woke some chord of memory in him.
There was nothing of the criminal in the accused man’s appearance. Apparently about thirty years of age, spare of figure, clean-shaven, of a decidedly intellectual type of countenance, he looked like an actor. His much-worn suit of tweed was well cut and had evidently been carefully kept, in spite of its undoubtedly threadbare condition. It, and the worn and haggard look of the man’s face, denoted poverty, if not recent actual privation, and the thought was
