The enterprising reporter made the best of his material, but it did not amount to much. The caretaker knew nothing about the dead man, he was armed at all points with his alibi. As regards the house itself, invested with so much tragedy, the present tenant was a Mr. Washington, a man of considerable means, now abroad. Mr. Washington was prepared to let it furnished. The furniture was very valuable.
To a public greedily anxious for the smallest details, the astute journalist served up a nice little article, describing the expensive furniture, and adding a short life-history of Mr. Washington, as supplied by the reminiscent Miles. The public swallowed this article eagerly and awaited further developments.
These came with the inquest, and there was a somewhat tame ending to what had promised to be a very sensational case.
Some three months previously, a certain man named Reginald Davis had been suspected of committing a murder while driving a motor-car in Cornwall. The evidence, although circumstantial, had been very convincing. The police had been on his track, but not quickly enough. The man had eluded their vigilance, and rim to earth somewhere.
On the body of the dead man in Cathcart Square, the two constables had found three letters addressed to Reginald Davis. Also a letter, signed Reginald Davis, addressed to the Coroner in which he avowed his intention of committing suicide at the earliest opportunity.
It was fairly evident from this that the wretched man, hunted by the police, and recognising that capture was imminent in the course of a few days, had resolved upon the fatal step, had effected his entrance into the lonely house in Cathcart Square, had found it even more deserted than he imagined, and in that little dressing-room cheated the law.
But, in addition to this overpowering evidence, there was added the fact of identification.
A tall, handsome young woman, giving the name of Caroline Masters, had been to the mortuary, and identified the body as that of her brother, Reginald Davis.
She gave her evidence before the Coroner with commendable composure, broken now and again with a little natural grief. Her disclosures were briefly as follows.
Reginald had always been the black sheep of the family, not naturally vicious, but impetuous, fiery-tempered and ungovernable. If he was guilty of the murder in Cornwall, it had been due to no natural criminal instinct, but to a fit of unbridled passion. Her theory was that remorse had weighed upon him for this unpremeditated crime, and that, through remorse and the fear of justice overtaking him, he had crept into this lonely house and passed sentence on himself.
She made a very great impression on the Court by the calm and dignified way in which she gave her evidence. The Coroner put to her a few questions. She was quite certain that the body was that of her brother, Reginald Davis? Were there any other members of the family who could support her in her identification?
No, there were no other members of the family alive. There was another brother dead, and a sister of whose whereabouts she knew nothing. Her father had been a strange man, he had quarrelled with all the members of his family, and she had never known one of them. Her mother had died some years ago. Her voice broke a little as she related these touching circumstances of her domestic life, more especially when she added she was a widow, her husband having been killed in the Great War.
There seemed but one possible verdict. The dead man, it was clearly established, was Reginald Davis, first by the letters found upon him, secondly by his sister’s identification.
It was also clear that Reginald Davis, hunted by the police, and knowing that it was only a question of days or weeks before he would be rim to earth, had considered the two alternatives of self-destruction or the extreme penalty of the law—and that he had chosen the former.
The verdict was recorded. Mrs. Masters was complimented on the way in which she had given her evidence. The Coroner assured her that the sympathy of the Court was with her. The tears welled into her eyes as she listened to the Coroner’s well-chosen phrases. She bowed her grateful thanks.
Constable Brown was waiting in the corridor as she came out. Beside him stood the younger policeman who had assisted him on that very well-remembered night in Cathcart Square.
Brown touched his helmet. “A very trying time for you, ma’am,” he said, “a very trying time. You went through it bravely.”
She smiled wanly. “My poor brother! He had so many good points. But it is better as it is. I shudder to think of what might have been, if he had not done this dreadful thing.”
“Much the best way, ma’am, much the best way,” corroborated Brown.
She went out, a graceful figure, and Brown turned to his younger colleague.
“A remarkable case, old chap. As we said all along, suicide.”
The younger man paused a little before he replied. It may be mentioned that a few months later he was promoted to the detective force in consequence of some rather clever work connected with a gang of coiners in an obscure corner of the West End.
“It looks like it, but I’m not quite as sure as you are,” he said laconically.
Brown stared, but made no comment. A verdict was a verdict. His young colleague had the inexperience and the vanity of youth, and thought he was more clever than other people, perhaps!
But on one thing the young constable had made up his mind, and that was that Miles, the bibulous caretaker, had not told the truth when in the witness-box. He came to this conclusion from his demeanour. Miles swore that he had no knowledge of the dead man, but the constable believed this to be a lie.
And with the tame ending of the Coroner’s inquest, the mystery of Number 10 Cathcart Square ceased to hold the public interest. Plenty of other things came on to attract their attention.
Chapter One.
In the year before the Great War, when to all appearance there was not a cloud upon the horizon, when only a few statesmen felt “profoundly uneasy,” the secret of that uneasiness being carefully locked away in their own breasts, and hidden from the general public—in that year of 1913, in the month of March, the Twenty-fifth Lancers were quartered at the town of Blankfield, in Yorkshire.
The Twenty-fifth was a crack regiment. Most of the officers were members of the aristocracy, a few of the plutocracy, that portion of the plutocracy which on account of its wealth had been adopted into a superior world by marriage with its aristocratic daughters.
They were a fine set of clean-minded, healthy living, sporting young fellows. They rode to hounds, they played polo when there was any going, they shot over the coverts of their friends, they made love to all the pretty girls they came across in a gallant and desultory fashion, loving and riding away.
It cannot be said that they took their professional duties in too serious a fashion. But they were brave as lions, and when the time came to prove their mettle, none of their relatives had cause to blush for their record. The memories of most of them were enshrined deeply in the hearts of wailing mothers and weeping sweethearts, when the great holocaust came.
Foremost amongst this band of gay spirits and resolute sportsmen was a certain Captain Murchison, “Hughie,” as he was always called by his intimates.
“Hughie” was not a pure aristocrat. His father, a man of fabulous wealth, was the head of the great brewing firm of Murchison, Delaroyd and Co., the fourth in succession, for the big brewery had been founded over a hundred years ago.
It is supposed, in the case of self-made men, that it requires three generations to make a gentleman. Anyway, the present Sir Hugh had won his spurs by the fact of belonging to the fourth. And he had further firmly established his position by marrying Lady Gertrude Marchmont, a daughter