His first glance at Cressida showed him that the strain of the last day or two had told heavily upon her. Her darkened eyes and the weariness of her whole attitude spoke for themselves of the long hours of tension and anxiety; and on her face he could read clearly the apprehension which she was vainly striving to conceal. What puzzled him most was an impression of conscious guilt which he sensed in some mysterious way without being able to analyse it clearly.
Stanley Fleetwood, lying on a couch with his leg in splints, seemed to present almost as difficult a problem. On his face also the strain had left its traces; and his whole expression inevitably suggested the bearing of an accomplice who, seeing that all is lost, still determines to brazen things out in the hope that some turn of the wheel may yet bring him into a safer position.
The third occupant of the room was the lawyer, a pleasant, keen-faced man, who was seated at a table with some papers before him. His face betrayed nothing whatever as to his views on the case.
“Mr. Wendover has no locus standi here, of course,” Sir Clinton explained when the lawyer had been introduced to them, “but I think it might be advantageous to have a witness at this interview who is not officially concerned in the case. Have you any objection, Mr. Calder?”
The lawyer mutely consulted Cressida and her husband, and then gave his consent without ado. Stanley Fleetwood nodded his assent.
“I’ve consulted Mr. Calder,” he said, when this matter had been settled, “and we’ve come to the conclusion that frankness is the best policy. We’ve nothing to conceal. Now, what is it that you want to know?”
Wendover’s glance, travelling from one to the other, reached Cressida’s face; and he could see plainly that she was in dread of the coming ordeal. It seemed as though she had made up her mind for the worst, and could see no hope of coming safely through the inquisition.
“Perhaps Mrs. Fleetwood could tell us what she knows about this affair?” Sir Clinton suggested. “Then, after we’ve had her account, Mr. Fleetwood could amplify her story wherever he came into the matter directly.”
Cressida nerved herself for the task, but she seemed to find difficulty in controlling her voice. At last she pulled herself together with an obvious effort and began.
“If I’m to make the thing clear to you,” she said, looking distrustfully from one to another in the group, “I’ll need to go back a bit, so that you can understand the state of affairs properly. You know, of course, that I married Nicholas Staveley in 1917, when he was convalescing after a wound he got. It’s common property that my marriage was a complete failure. It couldn’t have been worse. In less than a month he’d shattered almost every ideal I had; and I loathed him more than I’d thought it possible for one person to loathe another. And he terrified me, too.
“He went back to the Front again; and the next we heard was that he’d been reported killed in action. It sounds dreadful to say it, I know, but I can’t pretend I was anything but glad when I heard the news. He was a horrible creature, horrible in every way. Life with him, even for that short time, had been a waking nightmare; and it was an infinite relief to find myself free of him. Then, in 1926, I married Mr. Fleetwood.”
She paused and glanced at the lawyer, as though to draw some encouragement from him. Evidently the sequence of her narrative had been concerted between them beforehand. Wendover’s glance passed from her to Stanley Fleetwood; and he could see from the expression on Fleetwood’s face how much he must have hated the dead man on Cressida’s account.
“Last week,” Cressida continued, in a slightly more controlled tone, “I got a letter signed ‘Nicholas Staveley.’ It was a dreadful shock to see that handwriting again. It seems that the report of his death had been a mistake; but he had let it pass for purposes of his own. It had suited him to disappear then. Now it suited him to reappear—so far as I was concerned. You can guess what that meant to me. It invalidated my second marriage; and it threw me into the hands of that brute. Or, at least, if it didn’t actually put me into his hands, it gave him a weapon against me which he could use for his own ends. He was a selfish beast, and vindictive, too; and I saw that he meant to stir up all the trouble he could. His letter hinted quite plainly that blackmail was his object in reappearing at this moment. He knew I’d married again, and he saw his chance.”
The lawyer produced a paper and handed it across to Sir Clinton.
“This is the letter,” he explained.
Sir Clinton glanced through it and then put it down on the table.
“That’s a pretty production,” he commented. “I can understand your feelings, Mrs. Fleetwood. Please go on.”
Cressida glanced across at the couch.
“Naturally I consulted Mr. Fleetwood,” she continued. “We decided that the best thing to do was to arrange a meeting with the man and try to get him to let us put matters on some bearable kind of footing.”
“What we wanted,” Stanley Fleetwood interrupted, “was to persuade him to allow a divorce to go through quietly. Then we could have regularised matters with as little fuss as possible. From what I’d heard of him, he didn’t seem the sort who would refuse a bribe, if it was big enough—”
He caught the lawyer’s
