“I understand,” Sir Clinton interposed smoothly. “You wished to come to some agreement with him. We needn’t discuss the terms. Will you go on, please, Mrs. Fleetwood?”
“I wrote him a letter,” Cressida pursued, with rather more courage in her tone as she saw that Sir Clinton was obviously not directly hostile, like the inspector. “Mr. Fleetwood took it across to Flatt’s cottage that afternoon—Friday afternoon—and dropped it into the letter-box. You’ll understand in a moment that I didn’t wish Mr. Fleetwood to meet this man face to face.”
The inspector looked up from the notebook in which he was making a shorthand report of the interview.
“You might identify the letter we found on the body,” he suggested.
Sir Clinton produced the letter, and Cressida examined it.
“Yes, that’s it. I arranged to meet him at Neptune’s Seat late in the evening, when no one was likely to be on the beach. I didn’t want to have him coming about the hotel, naturally.”
She halted for a moment or two, as though she felt she was coming to the difficult point in her tale.
“Perhaps you won’t understand what I’ve got to say next. If I could let you know what sort of man he was, you’d understand better. There are some things one can’t tell. But I want you to know that I was really in physical fear of him. I’m not easily frightened; but during the month or so that I lived with him he stamped fear into me—real physical fear, downright terror of personal violence, I mean. He drank; and when he had been drinking he seemed to grow almost inhuman. He terrified me so much that I left him, even before he went back to the Front.”
Her face showed even more clearly than her words what it had meant to her. She halted for a space, unintentionally letting her effect sink home on her audience.
“When it came to meeting him,” she went on, “Mr. Fleetwood insisted on going with me.”
“Naturally,” Stanley Fleetwood broke in. “I wanted to go alone to meet the fellow; but she wouldn’t let me go either alone or along with her.”
Cressida nodded.
“If they had met, nothing could have prevented a quarrel; and that man would stick at nothing. I was afraid of what he might do. Anything was better than letting them meet. But I was horribly afraid of meeting him alone, without any protection. I’d had enough experience of him already. So I borrowed a pistol from Mr. Fleetwood and took it with me to Neptune’s Seat. I thought it would serve to frighten that man if he showed any signs of going over the score.”
“What sort of pistol was it?” Armadale interjected, looking across at Stanley Fleetwood.
“A Colt .38. I have the number of it somewhere.”
“I’ll get you to identify it later on,” Armadale said; and with a gesture he invited Cressida to continue.
“Mr. Fleetwood gave in about going with me to meet the man,” Cressida went on, “but he insisted on taking me down to the shore in our car. I let him do that. I was glad to know that he’d be at hand. But I made him promise not to interfere in any way. He was to stay with the car while I went down alone to Neptune’s Seat.”
“I think the inspector would like to know exactly what you did before you left the hotel,” Sir Clinton intervened.
“Mr. Fleetwood went round to the garage to get out the car. Meanwhile I went down to the ladies’ dressing-room, where I keep my golfing things. I changed my slippers for my golfing-shoes—I was in an evening frock—and I slipped on my golfing-blazer. Then I went out through the side-entrance and joined Mr. Fleetwood in the car. He drove me down to the point on the road nearest Neptune’s Seat. I left him there, got out of the car, and went across the sands to the rock.
“The man was there, waiting for me; and at the first glance I could see he’d been drinking. He wasn’t drunk, you understand, but he wasn’t normal. When I saw that, I was terrified. I can’t explain these things, but he—Oh, I used to shiver at times even at the very thought of what he’d been like in that state; and when I met him down there, face to face, I was really in terror of him. I pulled the pistol out of my pocket and held it in my hand, without letting him see it.
“Then I spoke to him and tried to persuade him to come to some arrangement with me. It was no use—none whatever. You’ve no idea of the kind of man he was. He wanted money to keep his mouth shut. He wouldn’t hear of any divorce, because that would loosen his hold on me if it went through, he said, and he meant to keep me in his grip. And then he said—oh, I’m not going to repeat what he said about Mr. Fleetwood and myself—horrible things, meant to hurt me and degrade me in my own eyes. And the worse he got in that way, the angrier he grew. You know what a drunken man’s like? I know it only too well.”
She made an involuntary gesture which betrayed even more than her words.
“At last he went beyond all bounds. I was trembling all over, partly from fear and partly from pure rage at the things he said. It was quite clear that I could do nothing with him in that state; so I turned to go. Then he muttered something—I’m not going to repeat it; you can imagine it for yourselves—and he pounced forward and gripped me when I wasn’t expecting it.
“I lost my head completely. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was almost beside myself with terror of him. Somehow the pistol went off in my hand, and down he fell at my feet and lay there without a movement. It was too dark to see anything
