Hilditch’s fingers strayed along his shirt-front until he found a certain spot. Then he leaned the dagger against it, his forefinger and second finger pressed against the hilt. His eyes were fixed upon his guest’s. He seemed genuinely interested. Francis, glancing away for a moment, was suddenly conscious of a new horror. The woman had leaned a little forward in her easy-chair until she had attained almost a crouching position. Her eyes seemed to be measuring the distance from where she sat to that quivering thread of steel.
“You see, Ledsam,” his host went on, “that point driven now at that angle would go clean through the vital part of my heart. And it needs no force, either—just the slow pressure of these two fingers. What did you say, Margaret?” he enquired, breaking off abruptly.
The woman was seated upon the very edge of her chair, her eyes rivetted upon the dagger. There was no change in her face, not a tremor in her tone.
“I said nothing,” she replied. “I did not speak at all. I was just watching.”
Hilditch turned back to his guest.
“These two fingers,” he repeated, “and a flick of the wrist—very little more than would be necessary for a thirty yard putt right across the green.”
Francis had recovered himself, had found his bearings to a certain extent.
“I am sorry that you have told me this, Mr. Hilditch,” he said, a little stiffly.
“Why?” was the puzzled reply. “I thought you would be interested.”
“I am interested to this extent,” Francis declared, “I shall accept no more cases such as yours unless I am convinced of my client’s innocence. I look upon your confession to me as being in the worst possible taste, and I regret very much my efforts on your behalf.”
The woman was listening intently. Hilditch’s expression was one of cynical wonder. Francis rose to his feet and moved across to his hostess.
“Mrs. Hilditch,” he said, “will you allow me to make my apologies? Your husband and I have arrived at an understanding—or perhaps I should say a misunderstanding—which renders the acceptance of any further hospitality on my part impossible.”
She held out the tips of her fingers.
“I had no idea,” she observed, with gentle sarcasm, “that you barristers were such purists morally. I thought you were rather proud of being the last hope of the criminal classes.”
“Madam,” Francis replied, “I am not proud of having saved the life of a self-confessed murderer, even though that man may be your husband.”
Hilditch was laughing softly to himself as he escorted his departing guest to the door.
“You have a quaint sense of humour,” Francis remarked.
“Forgive me,” Oliver Hilditch begged, “but your last few words rather appealed to me. You must be a person of very scanty perceptions if you could spend the evening here and not understand that my death is the one thing in the world which would make my wife happy.”
Francis walked home with these last words ringing in his ears. They seemed with him even in that brief period of troubled sleep which came to him when he had regained his rooms and turned in. They were there in the middle of the night when he was awakened, shivering, by the shrill summons of his telephone bell. He stood quaking before the instrument in his pajamas. It was the voice which, by reason of some ghastly premonition, he had dreaded to hear—level, composed, emotionless.
“Mr. Ledsam?” she enquired.
“I am Francis Ledsam,” he assented. “Who wants me?”
“It is Margaret Hilditch speaking,” she announced. “I felt that I must ring up and tell you of a very strange thing which happened after you left this evening.”
“Go on,” he begged hoarsely.
“After you left,” she went on, “my husband persisted in playing with that curious dagger. He laid it against his heart, and seated himself in the chair which Mr. Jordan had occupied, in the same attitude. It was what he called a reconstruction. While he was holding it there, I think that he must have had a fit, or it may have been remorse, we shall never know. He called out and I hurried across the room to him. I tried to snatch the dagger away—I did so, in fact—but I must have been too late. He had already applied that slight movement of the fingers which was necessary. The doctor has just left. He says that death must have been instantaneous.”
“But this is horrible!” Francis cried out into the well of darkness.
“A person is on the way from Scotland Yard,” the voice continued, without change or tremor. “When he has satisfied himself, I am going to bed. He is here now. Good-night!”
Francis tried to speak again but his words beat against a wall of silence. He sat upon the edge of the bed, shivering. In that moment of agony he seemed to hear again the echo of Oliver Hilditch’s mocking words:
“My death is the one thing in the world which would make my wife happy!”
CHAPTER VII
There was a good deal of speculation at the Sheridan Club, of which he was a popular and much envied member, as to the cause for the complete disappearance from their midst of Francis Ledsam since the culmination of the Hilditch tragedy.
“Sent back four topping briefs, to my knowledge, last week,” one of the legal luminaries of the place announced to a little group of friends and fellow-members over a before-dinner cocktail.
“Griggs offered him the defence of William Bull, the Chippenham murderer, and he refused it,” another remarked. “Griggs wrote him personally, and the reply came from the Brancaster Golf Club! It isn’t like Ledsam to be taking golfing holidays in the middle of the session.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Ledsam,” declared a gruff voice from the corner. “And don’t gossip, you fellows, at the top of your voices like a lot of old women. He’ll be calling here for me in a moment or two.”
They all looked around. Andrew Wilmore rose slowly to his feet and emerged from behind the sheets of an evening paper. He laid his hand upon the shoulder of a friend, and glanced towards the door.
“Ledsam’s had a touch of nerves,” he confided. “There’s been nothing else the matter with him. We’ve been down at the Dormy House at Brancaster and he’s as right as a trivet now. That Hilditch affair did him in completely.”
“I don’t see why,” one of the bystanders observed. “He got Hilditch off all right. One of the finest addresses to a jury I ever heard.”
“That’s just the point,” Wilmore explained “You see, Ledsam had no idea that Hilditch was really guilty, and for two hours that afternoon he literally fought for his life, and in the end wrested a verdict from the jury, against the judge’s summing up, by sheer magnetism or eloquence or whatever you fellows like to call it. The very night after, Hilditch confesses his guilt and commits suicide.”
“I still don’t see where Ledsam’s worry comes in,” the legal luminary remarked. “The fact that the man was guilty is rather a feather in the cap of his counsel. Shows how jolly good his pleading must have been.”
“Just so,” Wilmore agreed, “but Ledsam, as you know, is a very conscientious sort of fellow, and very sensitive, too. The whole thing was a shock to him.”
“It must have been a queer experience,” a novelist remarked from the outskirts of the group, “to dine with a man whose life you have juggled away from the law, and then have him explain his crime