“She writes him a letter making an appointment at an out-of-the-way place—Neptune’s Seat—at a time when it’s sure to be quiet—11 p.m. That was the note we found on the body. Secrecy’s written all over it, as any jury would see.”
He paused for a moment, as though he were not quite sure how to put his next piece of the case.
“She takes an automatic pistol with her; probably her husband had one. I’m not prepared to say that she meant definitely to murder Staveley then and there. Perhaps she only took the pistol as a precaution. Probably her barrister will try to pretend that she took it for self-defence purposes, Staveley being what he was. I don’t think that. Why? Because she took her husband along with her; and he could have looked after Staveley for her.”
Wendover was about to interpose, but the inspector silenced him.
“I’ll give you the evidence immediately, sir. Let me put the case first of all. She puts on her golfing-shoes, because she’s going on to the sand. She takes down her golf-blazer and puts it on over her evening dress. Then she goes out by the side-door and meets the car that her husband has brought round from the garage for her. That must have been close on eleven o’clock. Nobody would miss her in a big place like the hotel.”
With unconscious art, the inspector paused again for a moment. Wendover, glancing at Sir Clinton’s face in the hope of reading his thoughts, was completely baffled. The inspector resumed, still keeping to the historical present in his narrative.
“They reach the point of the road nearest to Neptune’s Seat. Perhaps they turn the car then, perhaps later. In any case, she gets out and walks down towards the rock. Fleetwood, meanwhile, slips in behind the groyne and keeps in the lee of it as he moves parallel with her. That accounts for the kind of prints we saw this morning.
“She gets to the rock and meets Staveley. They talk for a while. Then she loses her temper and shoots him. Then the fat’s in the fire. The Fleetwoods go back to their car and drive off to the hotel again. They don’t take the car to the garage straightway. She gets out, goes round by the entrance leading to place where the guests keep their golfing togs. She takes off her golfing-shoes, strips off her blazer and hangs it up, and slips into the hotel, without being spotted.”
Wendover had listened to this confident recital with an ever-increasing uneasiness. He comforted himself, however, with the hope that the inspector would find it difficult to bring adequate proof of his various points; but he could not deny that Armadale’s reconstruction manifested a higher gift of imagination than he had been expecting. It all sounded so grimly probable.
“Meanwhile,” the inspector resumed, “young Fleetwood leaves the car standing and goes into the hotel. What he was after I can’t fathom—perhaps to establish some sort of alibi. In any case, he comes hurrying down the stairs at 11:35 p.m., catches his foot, takes a header, and lands at the bottom with a compound fracture of his right leg. That’s the end of him for the night. They ring up Rafford, who patches him up and puts him to bed.”
Armadale halted again, and threw a superior smile towards Wendover.
“That’s my case stated. I think there’s enough in it to apply for a warrant against the woman as principal and young Fleetwood as accessory.”
Wendover took up the implied challenge eagerly, now that he knew the worst. This was the part for which he had cast himself, and he was anxious to play it well.
“There’s a flaw at the root of your whole case, inspector,” he asserted. “You make out that it was fear of exposure that acted as the motive. Well, by this murder exposure became inevitable—and under its worst form, too. How do you get round that difficulty?”
Armadale’s air of superiority increased, if anything, as he heard the objection advanced.
“I’m afraid, Mr. Wendover, that you haven’t had much experience of real murder cases. In books, of course, it may be different,” he added, with an evident sneer. “Your real murderer may be stupid and unable to forsee the chain of events that the murder’s going to produce. Or else you may have an excitable clever type that’s carried away by strong feelings on the spur of the moment, so that all the cleverness goes for nothing and the murderer does the work in a frame of mind that doesn’t give much heed to the possible consequences.”
“And, of course, the murderers who are neither stupid nor excitable are the ones who never get caught, eh?” Sir Clinton interjected in an amused tone. “That accounts for us police being at fault now and again.”
Wendover considered Armadale’s thesis with care.
“Then, as Mrs. Fleetwood isn’t stupid,” he said frigidly, “you’re assuming that she lost her head under some strong provocation?”
“It’s quite likely,” Armadale insisted. “No jury would turn down that idea simply because we can’t state what the precise provocation was. They wouldn’t expect a verbatim report of the conversation on the rock, you know.”
Wendover could hardly deny this in his own mind; and his heart sank as he heard the inspector’s confident declaration. He tried a fresh point of attack.
“You said you’d definite evidence to support this notion of yours, didn’t you? Well, how do you propose to prove that Mrs. Fleetwood was there at all last night?”
Armadale’s smile had a tinge of triumph in it. He bent over his bag and drew from it one of the wax casts, which he laid on the table. A second dip brought to light a pair of girl’s golfing-shoes. He selected the proper one and placed it, sole upward, alongside the cast. Wendover, with a sinking heart, compared corresponding parts of the two objects. Even the most
