“And that’s all you can tell me, is it?” Winter said nothing, and the inspector added, “Very well, that will do. Now I want to ask Morgan a few questions.”
Morgan had little light to throw upon the tragedy. He had been out all the previous evening, after helping his master to dress for dinner, when he had noticed nothing extraordinary. He had come back soon after 11:30, and had gone straight to bed. Where had he been? He had spent the evening with friends at Hammersmith, had come back by the Tube with two friends, who had only left him at the door of the house. There he had met Winter and had gone upstairs with him to bed.
Asked if he knew the walking-stick, he was quite sure that it was not his master’s, and that it had not been in the room on the previous day. About the knife he knew nothing, except that he had never seen it, or one like it, before.
The inspector had just finished his examination of Morgan when he was startled by a shout from the garden. Throwing up the window, he called to a constable who was running towards the house. The man’s answer was to ask him to come as quickly as possible. Calling another constable to keep guard in the study, Inspector Blaikie hastened to the garden, directed by Morgan to a private stairway which led directly to it from the back of the house. This, Morgan informed him, was Mr. Prinsep’s usual way of getting into the garden, and thence, by the private covered way, into the Piccadilly Theatre itself.
But before inspector Blaikie left the study, he did one thing. He phoned through to Scotland Yard, and made arrangements for the immediate arrest of George Brooklyn, who was probably to be found at the Cunningham Hotel.
IV
What Joan Found in the Garden
Joan Cowper usually knew her own mind. And, in her view, knowing your own mind meant knowing when to stop as well as when to go on. She had made her position clear at the dinner, and Sir Vernon could no longer pretend, she said to herself, that her marriage with Prinsep was a foregone conclusion. Sir Vernon, indeed, had said nothing more about the matter when she took him to his room in the evening, and they had separated for the night apparently on the best of terms. But Joan had known that she must prepare for a stormy interview on the morrow; and, as she dressed in the morning, her thoughts were running on what she should say to Sir Vernon, in answer to the reproaches he was sure to address to her.
Just as she was ready for breakfast, her scared maid came to her door, and said that Morgan wished to speak to her for a moment. Joan looked at the girl’s face, and saw at once that something serious was amiss.
“Why, what’s the matter?” she said.
“I don’t know, miss; but there’s something wrong upstairs, and they’re sending for the police.”
Joan hurried to the room where Morgan was waiting for her. With the impeccable manner of the good manservant, and almost without a shade of feeling in his voice, Morgan told her what had happened—how he and Winter had found Prinsep lying on the floor of his study, dead.
“You are sure that he is dead,” she managed to ask. “Have you sent for a doctor?”
Morgan assured her that everything was being attended to, and said that he had come to her because someone would have to break the news to Sir Vernon. Would she do it?
Into Joan’s mind came the thought of the interview she had expected, and of the interview she was after all to have. No question now of her marrying John Prinsep—there was no longer any such person as John Prinsep to marry.
“I suppose I must do it,” she said.
Joan’s composure lasted just long enough for the door to close behind Morgan. Then she flung herself down on a couch, and let her feelings have their way. She sobbed half hysterically—not because, even at this tragic moment, she felt grief for John Prinsep, but simply because the sudden catastrophe was too much for her. Tragedy had swooped down in a moment on the house of Brooklyn, sweeping out of existence the crisis which had seemed so vital to her only a few minutes ago. On her was the sense of calamity, bewilderment, and helplessness in the face of death.
She had felt no call to ask Morgan questions. John Prinsep’s death—his murder—was a fact—a shattering event which must have time to sink into her consciousness before she could begin to inquire about the manner of its coming. She did not even ask herself how it had happened, or who had done this thing. As she lay sobbing, the one thought in her mind was that Prinsep was dead.
But soon that other thought, that call to action which had been presented to her at the very moment when Morgan told her the news, came back into her mind. She had given way; but she must pull herself together. Sir Vernon, old and weak as he was, must be told the news; and she must tell him. She must tell him at once, lest tidings should break on him suddenly from some other quarter. Already the police were probably in the house. With a powerful effort, Joan forced herself to be calm. Drying her eyes, she stood upright, and looked at herself in the glass. She would need all her power to break the news to the old man whom she loved—the old man who had loved John Prinsep far more than he loved her.
John Prinsep had been Sir Vernon’s favourite nephew—the man who was to succeed him—had indeed already succeeded him—in the management of the great enterprise he had built up. He liked George and Joan; but Prinsep had always had the first
