Part 33 (2/2)

”You mean you were frightened to keep them in your possession after the judge was killed?”

”Yes. What place had I to keep them safe from prying eyes? So, monsieur, I burnt them all--one by one--and the charred fragments I kept and took into the Park next day, where I scattered them un.o.bserved.”

”And what became of the letter you wrote to Sir Horace Fewbanks at Craigleith Hall, asking him to come to London and save you from your husband's persecutions?”

She looked at him earnestly in the endeavour to ascertain if he had laid a trap for her.

”Sir Horace destroyed it in Scotland, I suppose, if the police did not find it.”

”Strange that he should have kept all your other letters so carefully and destroyed that one. Perhaps it was in his pocket-book that was stolen.”

”I do not know. What does it matter? It has gone.” She shrugged her shoulders lightly and indifferently.

”Do you know who stole the pocket-book?”

”No, monsieur. I thought it was stolen in the train.”

”That is the police theory,” replied Crewe. ”But let that go. Have you, since the night of the murder, seen anything of Pierre?”

”Monsieur, I have not. It is as though the earth has him swallowed. He keeps silent with the silence of the grave.”

”He is wise to do so,” responded Crewe. ”Now, mademoiselle, I have no more questions to ask you. Your confidence is safe; you need be under no apprehensions on that score.”

”I care not for myself, Monsieur Crewe, so long as Madame Holymead is freed from the persecutions of the police agents,” replied Gabrielle, rising from her seat as she spoke. ”If, after hearing my story, you could but give me the a.s.surance--”

”I think I can safely promise you that Mrs. Holymead will not be troubled with any further police attentions,” said Crewe, after a moment's pause.

Gabrielle broke into profuse expressions of grat.i.tude as she turned to go.

”For the rest then, I care not what happens. I am--how do you say it--I am overjoyed. _Je vous remercie_, monsieur, I beg you not, I can find my way out unattended.”

But Crewe showed her to the stairs, where again he had to listen to her profuse thanks before she finally departed. He watched her graceful figure till it was lost to sight in the winding staircase, and then he turned back to his office. In the outer office he stopped to speak to Joe, who, perched on an office-footstool, was tapping quickly on the office-table with his pen-knife, swaying backwards and forwards dangerously on his perch in the intensity of his emotions as he played the hero's part in the drama of saving the runaway engine from das.h.i.+ng into the 4.40 express by calling up the Red Gulch station on the wire.

”Joe,” said Crewe, ”I'll see n.o.body for an hour at least--n.o.body. You understand?”

Joe came out of the cinema world long enough to nod his head in emphatic understanding of the instructions. In his own room Crewe pulled out his notebook and once more gave himself up to the study of the baffling Riversbrook mystery, in the new light of Gabrielle's confession.

Part of her story, he reflected, must be true. She had produced Sir Horace's revolver, and, still more important, a handkerchief which he had clutched in his dying struggles. It was obvious that she or some other woman had been at Riversbrook the night of the murder, and in the room with the murdered man before he died. That tallied with Birchill's statement to Hill that he had seen a woman close the front door and walk along the garden path while he was hiding in the garden. Crewe, recalling Gabrielle's description of the room, came to the conclusion that it was probably she who had been with the judge in his dying moments. No one but a person who had actually seen it could have described the room with such minuteness.

She had been in the room, then. For what object? For the reasons stated in her confession? Crewe shook his head doubtfully.

”She evaded the trap about the pocket-book, but she made one bad mistake,” he mused. ”The letters in the secret drawer were taken away, and I have no doubt were burnt as she says. But were they her letters?

Was Sir Horace her lover? At any rate, she did not get hold of them in the way she said. They were not taken away on the night Sir Horace was murdered, for the simple reason that they were not in the secret drawer at the time.”

CHAPTER XXIV

<script>