Pointer's thoughts turned back to the will itself. The absolute deletion of her husband's name as a beneficiary, and yet the request at the foot about not withdrawing the money from his firm immediately. That little note was stranger than the will itself, Pointer thought. Supposing the latter to be genuine. He could imagine a woman leaving her fortune away from a husband with whom she had cause to be angry, with whom she was about to have a furious quarrel, but in that case, why the apparent unwillingness to inconvenience him unduly? That did not look like blind rage.
A new thought stirred in the great detective's mind. He put it on one side for the moment, and concentrated on Vardon, and Vardon's rooms last Tuesday evening.
What of him and Miss Saunders? Supposing that the evidence Pointer had just gleaned had been accurate, she had been at Fulham about eight last Tuesday evening. In other words, as soon as she could get there after the police had left Riverview. She had apparently not gone upstairs, but some one had run down and driven off with her.
Pointer called in his thoughts, which were racing too far away on a breast-high scent, and turned his car towards the stationer's, where the will form had been possibly bought, where at all events, it appeared to have been witnessed.
CHAPTER 10
POINTER stopped his car at the stationer's in Victoria Road. He produced his official card. Mr. Stone showed him into a little back parlour with outward calm and some inward trepidation.
He was thinking of sundry half-crowns on "certs" that came and went—chiefly went, on most days of the racing year. But Pointer was affability itself. Did Stone remember any one calling at his shop last Monday, and buying a will-form?
Stone heaved a sigh of relief. He remembered the lady perfectly. Mrs. Tangye it was, "as shot herself by accident the day afterwards." She had come in to ask where the nearest agent for Carter Patterson's could be found. He had pointed out the shop further down.
Looking around her, with the patently amiable intention of buying something, she had picked up a will-form from a pile by the door.
"Will-forms!..." The idea had seemed to go home. She had read the printed paper through, and stood a moment, as though thinking. Stone had been called to another part of the shop to help his assistant hold his own in a wordy dispute about some weekly payment, and forgot the lady. The argument was a long one, necessitating much searching of ledgers. When it was over, he saw the lady seated on a chair writing on the bottom of one of the forms. She covered what she had written with a sheet of blotting-paper and asked him and his assistant, now alone in the shop, to witness her signature, saying that what she was signing was her last will and testament. They witnessed for her, and received what Mr. Stone considered a very handsome payment for the trouble. He saw her slip the will into an envelope which she bought from him, and, after a moment's hesitation, address it to the Registrar of Wills, Somerset House, before folding it up unfastened, and putting it into her hand-bag.
His identification of the lady as Mrs. Tangye was fairly satisfactory. He had only seen her in a dusky shop, in her hat, but he remembered her name perfectly. He had remembered it when he read of her death in the paper.
"Some people say it's all nonsense about being bad luck to make your will. I dunno. My brother made his will and died the same year. And look at this case! Still of course if you mess about with loaded firearms—will or no will—you're likely to end up sudden."
Pointer saw that the man was under the honest impression, as was his assistant, that it was this will which had been referred to at the inquest. The Chief Inspector drove on his way again with another little brick added to his pile.
"'Unless Charles Tangye should pre-decease Philip Vardon,'" Wilmot read aloud again. "M-m."
"Just so," Pointer agreed, "not so much look of suicide about that proviso as there might be, eh?"
Wilmot re-fixed his eye-glass.
"Why so? My Company claims that Mrs. Tangye was staging an accident effect. This was part of the pasteboard scenery. To make a will, and then shoot herself, would look a bit obvious. That proviso is merely a stage-direction. Nothing more. And there's another thing," Wilmot went on in a thoughtful tone, "this paper knocks your idea of a romantic visitor on the head. Where's any mention in it of the chap with whom you thought she was about to decamp? Of the 'footsteps that stopped,' in other words?"
"Why, he's the only one mentioned!" Haviland struck in, "Vardon, in fact. He's deluded her into leaving him all her money, and he gets rid of her before she can spoil his plan of marrying Miss Ash."
Wilmot had to allow that this was possible.
"I wonder where Tangye comes into this." Wilmot screwed up his eyes, thinking hard. "If a crime, if, mark you both! mark you both! I have a strong inward feeling that in some way he and that woman—" he broke off and finished his cigarette in silence. "I should think this will may be a blow to him," he began again. "Cheale writes me that Tangye's hard hit by the Irish failure. That there were large commitments left on his hands."
"Tangye—Vardon. Vardon—Tangye," Haviland murmured. "And just a bit of Oliver Headly thrown in. They sort of swing to and fro. And Miss Saunders now with one, now with the other." Haviland had been puffing finger-print powder over the will. He shook it off, and then compared the result with his photographs of prints belonging to the "circle."
"Lot's of men's prints. Vague ones we haven't got. Shop fingers, I take it. Several smallish ones in gloves. Mrs. Tangye's, in fact. But here are Vardon's clear enough. Here at the corners. Though you found the flap of the envelope gummed down, he must have opened it and read it through before he shut it up again."
"Do you still go by finger-prints?" Wilmot spoke as though to a user of bows and arrows, but Haviland refused to be drawn. He knew the most modern suspicion of that form of proof, but he himself swore by it.
"Obviously Vardon knew the contents of the will or he wouldn't have worried about it's possibly being in his bag," Pointer spoke a little dryly. "If Mrs. Tangye had left her money to the hospitals, Vardon would have told us of it, you may be sure."
Pointer's constable-clerk brought in a set of papers, and his two visitors left. They had been talking in his room at the Yard. In the plainly furnished but airy inner den where the Chief Inspector worked alone with his many knee-hole tables. One to every case, in which he was concerned. The reports brought him were from Hyam, and they helped to fill in a few more of the blanks still vacant in the puzzle.
On Wednesday morning, as soon as the banks in Manchester opened, those notes to the value of fifteen hundred pounds which Tangye said were safe, that half the Clerkhill farm price in other words, in which Pointer was most keenly interested—had among others, been handed in by a clerk from William Merchant and Son, Cotton brokers. The men who were most concerned in the great cotton boom now sky-rocketing. Tangye's hosts during at least part of his last week-end.
The notes could obviously not have been posted later than Tuesday night from town to reach Manchester by Wednesday morning. Pointer thought it even possible that Tangye had sent them off by the six-thirty collection.
Certain it was that Haviland had not found any of them in the morning-room, nor in the open safe on his arrival at Riverview ten minutes past the hour. But they might have been reposing in some other room, or even in the pockets of either Tangye or Miss Saunders.
The Chief Inspector had thought for some time that Tangye must have been at his home during the hours of suspicion, or the woman's hold over him could not have been what Pointer believed it was, a strangle-hold. He felt sure that she had seen the stockbroker there between the death of Mrs. Tangye and the arrival of the police.
Had she caught him red-handed, and helped him to erase any traces he might have left? Or had the companion