The Home Secretary opened the bundle marked “I.” He read through first the notes which Inspector Orpington had made during his first interview with Ivy Lexton—that interview during which she had gone out of her way to volunteer the fact that Roger Gretorex entertained for her a hopeless, unrequited passion.
Sir Edward next read most carefully again Mrs. Lexton’s two letters to Gretorex, as well as the letter which had reached him anonymously only yesterday.
“This Mrs. Lexton appears to be, in any case, a most hypocritical and abandoned woman,” he observed tartly.
Sir Joseph Molloy laughed a merry, hearty, boyish laugh, and Mr. Justice Mayhew looked round at him with an expression of shocked disgust on his stern face.
But “divil a bit,” as he said to himself, did Sir Joseph care for that.
“Do you agree,” said Sir Edward Law, looking at the Judge, “that these various documents provide sufficient reason for further inquiries?”
Mr. Justice Mayhew waited for what seemed a very long time, both to Sir Joseph and to Alfred Finch. Then reluctantly he answered:
“Yes, I think we have certainly cause here for the execution to be postponed, and for further inquiries to be made.”
“Now that we are on what I may term the right track,” exclaimed Sir Joseph, “I trust that my unhappy friend Roger Gretorex will not be allowed to languish in the cell of a condemned felon a moment longer than is absolutely necessary?”
The great advocate felt that he had now done all he could, and he was well aware that he had only been admitted to this conference by favour. And so, after a word of thanks to his old friend, and a sly look of triumph at the Judge, he went away, taking Alfred Finch with him, and leaving the Home Secretary and Mr. Justice Mayhew alone together.
Inspector Orpington looked not only serious but also very grim, as, early that afternoon, and accompanied by the same colleague as had been with him here before, he rang the bell of Mrs. Lexton’s flat.
He felt extremely incensed for, turn the facts round in his mind as he might, there was no doubt that the childishly simple-looking, lovely little woman had completely taken him in. She had certainly, as he put it to himself, bamboozled him to the top of her bent.
Yet, even now, he found it almost impossible to believe that Ivy Lexton had poisoned her husband. Even so, he had been very much startled and impressed, not so much by Mrs. Huntley’s new statement, for he knew her to be a liar. No, what had astounded him had been Ivy’s letters to Roger Gretorex. Though these two letters had been written at a time when the writer was passionately in love with her correspondent, they revealed quite a different type of woman from what everyone connected with the case had taken her to be.
Inspector Orpington had also been unwillingly impressed by the letter written by Gretorex to Ivy in evident answer to one in which she had begged him to leave off coming to see her. The date, that of November the 6th, inscribed on Gretorex’s letter, proved that she had written the note to which it had been the answer after she had started her cruel work of poisoning her husband, if indeed she had poisoned her husband. The inspector realised that the letter was what might have been called a bull point in the writer’s favour. It breathed sincerity in every line.
It seemed a long time, to the two men standing there, before the door of the flat was opened by the cook. She looked surprised when she saw the inspector standing there, and then she smiled amiably.
“Want to see Mrs. Lexton?” she inquired. And, as he nodded, “Then want will be your master! She’s away in the country, and not coming back yet awhile.”
Orpington had already walked through into the hall.
“All alone in the flat?” he asked casually.
“I am this minute. There don’t seem any reason for keeping a young girl here all day just to do nothing,” said the woman tolerantly. “She works pretty hard when Mrs. Lexton is at home, that I will say.”
“Where is Mrs. Lexton staying?”
“I’ve got it down on a bit of paper. It’s near Brighton. A place belonging to the Lady Flora something or other. I’ll go and get it.”
“Wait a sec. We’ve come on what isn’t a very pleasant job, cook. We’ve got to search this place of yours.”
“Search this place?” Cook looked taken aback. “Whatever for?”
As no answer was vouchsafed to that question, “I’ll just go and tidy my room then,” she exclaimed. “I’ve been taking things easy since Mrs. Lexton went away. Where will you begin? How about the dining-room just here?”
“All right. We’ll begin with the dining-room, and work down towards the kitchen.”
He added in a perfunctory tone, “No need to tell you to hide nothing, eh, cook?”
“There’s nothing to hide!” she exclaimed with some heat. “Everything’s always left open. Mrs. Lexton isn’t a lady to lock up her jewellery, like some do. She trusts us, and we are worthy of the trust, same as everyone is who is trusted.”
“If that’s so ’twill make our job easy. Then there’s no lock-up at all?” and he looked at her rather hard.
“I keeps my box locked up, but you’re welcome to the key!”
“Don’t you be afraid. We’ll let your box alone. I meant, is there no lock-up this end of the flat?”
She waited a moment. “There’s half the big hanging cupboard in Mrs. Lexton’s bedroom always kept locked, just because there’s nothing in it. She keeps all her fine clothes—my, and she has got a lot, fit to stock a shop with!—in a little room that no one uses, next door to the bathroom.”
“Have you got the key of that part of the hanging cupboard?”
“I’ve never even seen it. But I expect it’s about somewhere. Maybe in the dressing-table drawer.”
It takes a long time to search a room thoroughly, and by the time the two men had done with the dining-room and the drawing-room, they felt tired.
“Perhaps we’d better do Mrs. Lexton’s room next? Not that I expect to find anything there. The room in which that poor chap died was searched, and thoroughly too, though not till after the post-mortem.”
Cook brought the bit of paper on which Ivy had written down her country address. Then she went off again into her kitchen.
The two men walked, in a rather gingerly way, into Ivy Lexton’s charming bedroom.
There the searchers had an easy task, for everything was unlocked, as the cook had said it would be.
But suddenly Orpington exclaimed, “Why, this must be the room where, according to that good old soul, there’s a lock-up? I’d forgotten that! It’s the half of this big cupboard. Seen any keys about?”
The other shook his head.
Orpington, stepping back, looked dubiously at the big handsome inlaid piece of furniture. It was a fine bit of early Victorian cabinet work, and had belonged to the mother of the Miss Rushworth whose room this was. Though