“You went and killed him?” said Ned.
“That’s for you and your glass eye to find out!” snapped the prisoner.
“Take his pipe away,” said Carrington quietly.
“Damn it!” cried Rattar, “I’ll tell you, only I’m fed up with that man’s bullying! I put it in a stocking” (he nodded towards the match box) “just as you guessed and I went out to Keldale that night. My God, what a walk that was in the dark! I’d half forgotten the way down to the house and I thought every other tree was a man watching me. I don’t know yet how I got to that library window. I remembered his ways and I thought he’d be sitting up there alone; but it was just a chance, and I’d no idea I’d have the luck to pick a night when he was sleeping in his dressing room. Give me another drink!”
Carrington promptly brought one and again it vanished almost in a gulp.
“Well, I saw him through a gap in the curtains and I risked a tap on the glass. My God, how surprised he was to see me standing there! I grinned at him and he let me in, and then—” He broke off and fell forward in his chair with his face in his hands. “This whisky has gone to my head!” he muttered. “You’ve mixed it too damned strong!”
Ned Cromarty sprang up, his face working. Carrington caught him by the arm.
“Let’s come away,” he said quietly. “We’ve heard everything necessary. You can’t touch him now.”
Cromarty let him keep his arm through his as they went to the door.
“I’ll send a cab up for you in a few minutes,” Carrington added to the superintendent.
They left the prisoner still sitting muttering into his hands.
XL
The Last Chapter
On their way down to the hotel Ned Cromarty only spoke once, and that was to exclaim:
“If I’d only known when I had him alone! Why didn’t you tell me more before I went in?”
“For your own sake,” said Carrington gently. “The law is so devilish undiscriminating. Also, I wasn’t absolutely certain then myself.”
They said nothing more till they were seated in Carrington’s sitting room and his employer had got a cigar between his teeth and pushed away an empty tumbler.
“I’m beginning to feel a bit better,” said he. “Fire away now and tell me how you managed this trick. I’d like to see just how derned stupid I’ve been!”
“My dear fellow, I assure you you haven’t! I’m a professional at this game, and I tell you honestly it was at least as much good luck as good guidance that put me on to the truth at last.”
“I wonder what you call luck,” said Ned. “Seems to me you were up against it all the time! You’ve told me how you caught Rattar lying at the start. Well, that was pretty smart of you to begin with. Then, what next? How did things come?”
“Well,” said Carrington, “I picked up a little something on my first visit to Keldale. From Bisset’s description I gathered that the body must have been dragged along the floor and left near the door. Why? Obviously as a blind. Adding that fact to the unfastened window, the broken table, the mud on the floor, and the hearth brush, the odds seemed heavy on entry by the window. I also found that the middle blind had been out of order that night and that it might have been quite possible for anyone outside to have seen Sir Reginald sitting in the room and known he was alone there. Again, it seemed long odds on his having recognised the man outside and opened the window himself, which, again, pointed to the man being someone he knew quite well and never suspected mischief from.”
“Those were always my own ideas, except that I felt bamboozled where you felt clear—which shows the difference between our brains!”
Carrington laughed and shook his head.
“I wish I could think so! No, no, it’s merely a case of every man to his own trade. And as a matter of fact I was left just as bamboozled as you were. For who could this mysterious man be? Of the people inside the house, I had struck out Miss Farmond, Bisset, Lady Cromarty, and all the female servants. Only Sir Malcolm was left. I wired for him to come up and was able to score him out too. I also visited you and scored you out. So there I was—with no conceivable criminal!”
“But you’d already begun to suspect Rattar, hadn’t you?”
“I knew he had lied about engaging me; I discovered from Lady Cromarty that he had told her of Sir Malcolm’s engagement to Miss Farmond—and I suspected he had started her suspicions of them; and I saw that he was set on that theory, in spite of the fact that it was palpably improbable if one actually knew the people. Of course if one didn’t, it was plausible enough. When I first came down here it seemed to me a very likely theory and I was prepared to find a guilty couple, but when I met Miss Farmond and told her suddenly that Sir Malcolm was arrested, and she gazed blankly at me and asked ‘What for?’ well, I simply ran my pencil, so to speak, through her name and there was an end of her! The same with Sir Malcolm when I met him. And yet here was the family lawyer, who knew them both perfectly, so convinced of their guilt that he was obviously stifling investigation in any other direction.
