He had evidently used every art to soften a woman's heart. And Mrs. Tangye? Remembering that tendency of hers to gild the past at the expense of the present, Pointer could see how she could have been beguiled by this apparently repentant man, who after all, would hold a place in her heart that no other man could ever fill. And who is not touched by the thought of fidelity? If Hart had told her of unhappy years of regret and remorse, of vain longings to have the past over again...
Pointer walked his hotel room back and forwards. Every one of Mrs. Tangye's actions was explained by this completed story. Her agitation when she saw Hart. Her slipping away from Miss Eden to talk to him, her silence on the way to the station and the train up to town. Her prostration on her arrival at the house which she had considered hitherto her home. Her letter to Miss Eden showing that she had decided on at least the outlines of her flight even then. Though still, Pointer was by no means sure that Mrs. Tangye had decided to go with Hart.
On Monday came her preparations for the secret meeting in the early afternoon before Tangye should return, a meeting arranged at Tunbridge. During that talk, the man who was certainly planning her murder even as he sat looking about him, thinking of this, rejecting that, had won her trust completely.
He and she had mapped out exactly what each was to do, so at least Mrs. Tangye would imagine, little dreaming of just what terrible decision was being worked out in the heart of the man who seemed so touchingly anxious to start life afresh with her.
Then came the return of Tangye, the forced quarrel to ensure his going up to town, and to give her a pretext for leaving him, ostensibly an outraged wife. Apart from any quarrel, it was easy to understand that Mrs. Tangye would refuse the loan of money to Tangye from funds in which she believed that she, and therefore far less he, had no real rights. As to what would have come afterwards, Pointer could only guess, nor did it matter. On the whole he believed that Mrs. Tangye would have gone abroad. At any rate this Monday, she had written for her old will restoring Branscombe's money to Cecil Branscombe's heir.
That will! If Hart were Vardon, it, and the gift of the fifteen hundred pounds took on another light. In that case, it was a bad blunder.
Inevitable, perhaps, under the pressure of lack of funds. Pointer followed that thought all through its ramifications. If Hart were Vardon, then all his story of the gift of the money in his rooms, of the talk there was false. Nothing bore out his statement. But neither did any known facts contradict it.
But how about the will if Hart were not Vardon?
In that case it would be enormously to his interest not to have Mrs. Tangye die intestate, with always the possibility of her first marriage, her only legal marriage, cropping out.
Pointer imagined that Hart would have very much pressed the point about the will. It would create an atmosphere of disinterestedness on his side—supposing he were not Vardon. In the latter case it would have taken careful handling. But then the whole affair had been handled carefully.
At any rate, because of Hart's pressure, Mrs. Tangye had hurried out at once after his visit on Monday, bought the will form, and made her will. Pointer thought that looked as though she expected to be very busy, perhaps to be away on a journey, and was afraid of it slipping her memory. As to the notice of withdrawal of funds from Tangye's firm; Mrs. Tanyge might have been going to use it, or some of it, for herself. She could have justified the keeping back, at least temporarily, for her own use of a part of Clive Branscombe's money, by the certainty that if the dead man had known the facts, he would not have wished her to stand penniless in the world.
The rest of her actions on Monday, the Chief Inspector thought, was Mrs. Tangye's own doing.
On Tuesday she had dealt with her private papers, and requested Miss Saunders to be ready to leave Riverview that evening. Not in anger, nor from jealousy had this last been done, but merely as part of her plan.
But who was Hart? Hart, the murderer. Hart, who had been in such a hurry to wipe out the existence of the woman whose one crime was that she had listened to him that summer morning in Wales?
Pointer could find no portrait of the man; though he brought all his ingenuity to bear on the task of unearthing one. But he got the promise of the choirmaster who had trained Hart's voice that he would come to town immediately he should be summoned, to "take a look at some faces," among which Pointer intended to take care that Vardon's should be present. That young man was expected to return from Sweden to-morrow, and to be held up for two days in town before his boat sailed for South America. One thing was certain, Hart was not Tangye. Apart from crass improbability, Hart was fairish, Tangye was very dark. Fifteen years ago, Tangye was at Oxford and had just won his Blue. But was there some collusion? In detective work things are so rarely what they seem. True, by the discovery of a still living first husband, Tangye lost all claim to any money left by Branscombe, but, according to Hyam's latest confidential note, Tangye was to-day a very wealthy man. His gamble in cotton had turned out a magnificent success. He could well afford—now—to lose his late wife's capital.
There was always that key-ring, linking Tangye, and Miss Saunders, and Vardon.
And there was the belief expressed by Wilmot that supposing there were a crime here, then Tangye would be found in some way implicated. Pointer thought of the great crime-specialist's words more than once as he took the train back to town, every nerve tingling, as it would with him, when the end of a hard case was in sight.
CHAPTER 15
WILMOT and Haviland met Pointer at the London Terminus. The Chief Inspector took them on with him to New Scotland Yard, where he told the tale to them and the Assistant Commissioner at the same time. Captain Pelham punctuated the telling with a few shrewd questions. When it was over he glanced at Wilmot.
"You and I will find it difficult to keep our feet, Wilmot, against this."
Wilmot refused to consider that all was lost.
"Though I grant you, Pointer, that your theory's wonderfully improved from the puny shade it was when you showed it last. But, as I see it, it immeasurably strengthens the idea of suicide. Immeasurably. Suppose every fact to be right, except the end. Have Mrs. Tangye hate—as she would, depend on it—the very thought of Hart! Just imagine her situation, her truly terrible situation. She's not married to Tangye. She never was married to Branscombe. She loathes her real husband. If she tells the world the truth, she places herself in a most pitiful position.
"Even if she takes Tangye into her confidence, she knows him well enough to feel sure that he won't be able to keep it to himself. He will be free to marry Mrs. Bligh, or possibly Miss Eden. Poor Mrs. Tangye! A wife and yet not a wife! Rather than face a life in hiding, a life of perpetual humiliation, of never-dying gossip, she picks up that revolver...No wonder she fired it with the left hand! I don't see any need for a Hart in the final scene. I only see a broken heart. An agonised, tormented soul!"
Wilmot's voice had a ring of deep feeling in it for once. "And I see Vardon," murmured Haviland, "though I see what you mean too, Mr. Wilmot. As a matter of fact, for the poor lady, it was just as well it all ended when it did."
"I still see no certain crime here," Wilmot spoke with a touch of reluctance that marked something approaching conversion in his attitude, "not yet. Though