“A third man?” Andrew repeated in blank amazement. “How on earth could there have been a third man in Félice’s room?”
“There may have been a third man after the jewels,” Sir Richard suggested tonelessly. Glenlitten took his hands out of his pockets.
“Dick,” he said, “for a clever chap, it seems to me that you are talking like an ass. How could a third man have been hidden in the room? How could he have got there? What evidence is there concerning him? Why, Félice undressed there. Where was he hiding?”
“Quite so,” Sir Richard agreed. “There are many problems to be faced, of course, but since the present position has arisen, Andrew, I am going to tell you that I noticed several things about the room that night which for the moment I am going to keep to myself.”
Andrew Glenlitten was very quiet now, but it was the quietude of suppressed passion. Sir Richard Cotton was his oldest friend, but if he had obeyed the furious instinct which had surged into his heart, he would have leaned over and struck him across the mouth. His voice, when he spoke, was curiously unlike himself. It seemed to come from a long way off, unrecognisable to his own listening ears.
“And what do you deduce from these—observations of yours?”
“Please bear with me, Andrew,” his friend begged gently. “Mind, I am not suggesting for a single moment that your wife knew of any other person being in the room. It was quite possible for any one, knowing that she was in the habit of leaving a thirty-thousand-pound necklace on the dressing table to hide there without her knowledge, and yet—I am bound to tell you this—I think that your wife knows a little more than she has told us, and under those circumstances—the circumstances being that very soon a man will be upon his trial for murder—it becomes necessary that she should be quite frank at any cost, that she should tell us everything she knows, anything she may suspect.”
Andrew finished his port, stretched out his hand, lit a cigarette and pushed the box across. With the handkerchief which he drew almost surreptitiously from his coat pocket, he wiped the beads of moisture from his forehead.
“For a clever man, Dick,” he declared, with an attempt at lightness, “I never heard such tosh in my life as you’ve been talking.”
“But is it tosh?” was the swift protest. “I’m a criminal lawyer, mind, Andrew, and I see these things from the legal point of view. Why did your wife, who passionately adores dancing and who had been in the highest spirits all day, desert her guests under pretext of a headache? Why was her own main door into the corridor, and the door communicating with your apartment locked, and the more important door into her boudoir left open, as it must have been for De Besset to have rushed in that way. Was it only a coincidence that she chose that one particular evening—the evening she had a headache and might have needed attention—to send her maid away and refuse to allow her to perform the usual offices? No one respects and admires Lady Glenlitten more than I do. She is your wife, to start with, which makes her dear to me, and no one could meet her day by day without beginning to feel affection for her; but in this case I am the law, and the life of a burglar is the same thing to me as the life of a prince. When he is brought up for his trial, there must be no question of shielding anybody else. You must make her understand that. What she suspects, she must confide to us.”
Andrew rose to his feet a little unsteadily, although with a great effort to appear at his ease.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “I entirely agree with you, except that I am perfectly certain Félice neither knows nor suspects any more than she has told us. However, we must respect the attitude of the law, though it all sounds a little crude and quaint, coming from the lips of a pal. We’ll have it out with Félice.”
The two men strolled together across the hall, loitered for a moment to warm their hands at the great log fire in the open hearth, and tried their best to behave naturally as host and guest. Parkins came respectfully across towards them.
“Her ladyship is in the smaller library, my lord,” he announced. “I am sending coffee there.”
Glenlitten nodded and piloted his guest across the smoothly polished floor to a very comfortable apartment with old-fashioned oak furniture, upholstered in faded but magnificent red damask. Félice was curled up upon an immense divan, drawn close to the fire. She threw down her book at their entrance and leaned eagerly forward.
“You have been a very long time,” she complained. “I should like to know at once all that you and Sir Richard have been talking about.”
There was something a little breathless about the question. Sir Richard waved it on one side.
“Like all old fogeys who enjoy their glass of port,” he said, “I love my coffee and cigarette afterwards, and behold!”
Parkins and a footman were arranging the coffee and liqueurs upon a round table in the middle of the room.
“You’ll take just a sniff at the old brandy, Dick,” his host urged. “I’m afraid we won’t have many more chances. The worst of having a long minority and a Bishop for a guardian is that your cellars get neglected. No one had better guardians,” he continued, as he crossed the room with his own coffee and took a seat by his wife’s side, “than I had, from a financial point of view, but they hadn’t the faintest idea of laying down wines.”
Sir Richard established himself comfortably in a high-backed chair close at hand. The servants left the room.
“And now, please,” Félice begged, “you are both of you—you especially, Andrew—shocking actors. Something has happened. You are both on edge with one another, and you’ve been sitting at the table there for half an hour. Tell me at once what it means.”
“Just this,” her husband replied, carefully lighting his cigar. “Dick was telling me some news. Your burglar has been caught.”
There was a moment’s silence. Sir Richard bent over the cigar box. He never even glanced towards Félice. Andrew turned away to reach for his brandy.
“And the necklace?” she asked.
“There is no news of that for the moment,” Sir Richard admitted, “but the fact that he was arrested at Harwich leads one to suppose that he may have had the diamonds upon him. He was probably on his way over to Amsterdam.”
Félice nodded thoughtfully. She showed very few signs of discomposure. Sir Richard watched the cigar smoke drift upwards towards the ceiling. He was wondering whether she was really the delightfully natural child she seemed, or whether this was the guile of her sex. He tried to remember what he had heard about the Ruse’ temperament.
“It would be a great joy to have my necklace back again,” she murmured. “Will he be very much punished, Sir Richard, for stealing it?”
“Not too heavily,” was the cautious reply. “Burglary without violence is, if anything, scheduled a little too leniently in the statute book. The trouble he will have to face will be more serious though, I am afraid.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“There is the man—poor De Besset—” he reminded her, “who came in to warn you, and who was killed at the foot of your bed, murdered in cold blood.”
She set down her cup with trembling fingers. Little by little, the delicate colour faded from her cheeks.
“But how can they prove that he did that?” she exclaimed. “There was no one who saw him.”
“No one who actually saw him fire the shot, perhaps, but, on the other hand, who else in the room could have done it?”
She sat with her hands clasped and her great eyes fixed. She seemed to be looking through the wall of the room, to be envisaging the horrible memories of that night. Andrew leaned over and took her hand in his, aghast to feel how cold it was.
“You see, Félice dearest,” he said tenderly, “it is very terrible,