It was on his own initiative, therefore, that Thomas went to see both Winter and Morgan, and received from them a repetition of what they had told the police. From them he learnt nothing new. But from one of the maidservants he picked up a fact which had escaped Inspector Blaikie’s attention. A few days before the murders the butler, Winter, had quarrelled violently with John Prinsep, and, in the heat of the quarrel, Prinsep had practically given the man notice to leave. The notice had not been quite definite, and the maid had heard Winter confide to Morgan that he intended to hang on and see what happened, and to get the matter cleared up with Prinsep the one way or the other before the month expired. She did not know what the quarrel had been about; and Thomas did not think it politic to push his inquiries further, or to ask either Morgan or Winter himself for an explanation. He, therefore, cautioned the girl against telling anyone at all that there had been a quarrel. “It would only make further trouble,” he said; “and we have trouble enough on our hands already.”
Thomas had thus found the first essential for building up a case on suspicion against Winter—an actual quarrel and therefore a possible motive for murder. But he recognised that the argument was very thin, and that he must, if possible, get something more definite. Inquiries, however, failed to give him anything at all that could be used to defame either Winter’s or Morgan’s character. They appeared to be persons of unblemished respectability, and Winter’s long service in the Brooklyn household seemed never to have been marred before by such an incident as his quarrel with Prinsep. The position did not look promising for Thomas’s client; but he determined to persist.
His persistence was at length rewarded. He discovered what had been the cause of the quarrel between Winter and Prinsep. And it was Morgan who told him, quite unconscious that he was providing a link in the chain which Thomas was attempting to forge. Thomas had turned his attention to a further study of the character and circumstances of the murdered men, and had gone to Morgan for light on the ways of his late master. It was easy to see that Morgan had disliked Prinsep, though he had always behaved to him in life as a perfectly suave and well-drilled servant knows how to behave—with a deadly politeness that conceals all human feeling behind an impenetrable mask. But, now that Prinsep was dead, Morgan no longer concealed his opinion of him. He had neither prospect nor intention of remaining with the Brooklyns, and he did not care whether they liked or disliked what he said. Accordingly, he told Thomas without any hesitation that, shortly before his death, Prinsep had been engaged in a peculiarly unpleasant intrigue with a girl down at Sir Vernon’s country place at Fittleworth, in Sussex—the daughter, in fact, of Sir Vernon’s head gardener there—and what made it worse was that the girl was engaged to be married at the time to a decent fellow who had only found out at the last moment how things were going. He would marry her all the same; but that did not make Prinsep’s part in the affair less dishonourable.
It did not take Thomas long to extract the information that the “decent fellow” whom Prinsep had wronged was actually no other than this very man, Winter, against whom he had been trying to build up a case. Winter was twenty years older than the girl; but he seemed to be very much in love with her, and naturally enraged by Prinsep’s misuse of her. Here at last were all the elements of a crime of passion, and Thomas began to see his way clear to throw upon Winter quite enough suspicion to make it very difficult for a jury to convict Walter Brooklyn. Indeed, might he not even have stumbled accidentally on the truth, or a part of it? Perhaps after all Walter Brooklyn was not the murderer, although he knew all about it. But, on the whole, he was still inclined to believe that his client was guilty, and that nevertheless fortune had presented him with an excellent chance of shifting the suspicion elsewhere. Certainly he would say not a word of his discoveries to anyone until the time came to adopt an actual line of defence at the coming trial.
XIX
The Police Have Their Doubts
While the representatives of the defence—official and unofficial—were pursuing their separate lines of investigation, the police had not been altogether idle. Inspector Blaikie had not been long in finding out that Thomas had been making inquiries among the servants at Liskeard House, or in drawing the conclusion that the defence would make an attempt to shift some part at least of the suspicion to other shoulders with the object of creating enough doubt to make it difficult for a jury to convict their client. He was not surprised at this, and it did not at all alarm him; for, among other things, he regarded it as sure proof that the lawyer held his own case to be weak. The inspector was quite unable to take seriously the idea that Winter was in any way implicated in the murders; and
