He let the flood of misses, and catches, and weights and measures flow on for an hour by the great clock above his head. Then he introduced the object of his presence. Some solicitors in town wanted to trace Miss Headly, he said. Question of a bit of money left her on her sister's death.
"As I was coming here for some fishing, I said I would ask around. Miss Headly of hereabouts taught me to fish years ago, before she married. This is a portrait of her sister. Is this at all like the lady you call Mrs. Hart? The two sisters as girls were said to resemble each other closely."
Only two men besides Father William had known Mrs. Hart. They all three thought that the portrait of Mrs. Tangye—taken only a few months ago—might well have passed as a picture of Mrs. Hart, supposing that poor woman to have lived on.
"She was a younger woman then, you see," one of the men said handing back the portrait, "twenty, and a bit. No more. Too young to've come to such an end. But it's the young ones as are the rash ones."
None of the three had known her intimately.
"Mrs. Hart was a hard woman," one of them said.
"Hardly treated, I thought," another corrected; "her husband drank, I heard. She had to sell her catches to keep her body and soul together."
"What was her husband?" Pointer asked.
"Used to swank about an estate of his, but after he was drowned, it came out that he was a little peddling grocer's manager down in Newport."
Pointer could collect no facts from the talk. Even the tragedy was but a vague memory. The broken boat had been found one morning after a sudden storm, on Peterstone Flats, just outside Newport, at the mouth of the Usk.
No trace of either body had ever been found, but the tide, and the rocks, and the storm would account for that.
Pointer let the talk swing round to fishing again. He did not want to arouse curiosity. He had better means of learning the truth now than from idle gossip.
He sent off a telegram to the Yard to look up the marriage records of all H's with even greater care than had been done. Then Pointer caught the train into noisy Newport.
CHAPTER 14
NEXT morning Pointer awoke from a dream in which he had been playing a weird game of golf. He had not been able to hit a ball, let alone drive one! Worn out, he had just clambered over a hazard to find Wilmot on the eighteenth green holing a magnificent putt, and saying affably, "Try my pet club Intuition; it's more flexible than that old-fashioned iron Proof which I see you still use."
The dream haunted Pointer, but half an hour later saw him at the chief police office in Newport, turning over the records of thirteen years ago. He found the tragedy reported in full. The brief description of the couple fitted Mrs. Tangye for the woman, and for the husband might have fitted Vardon, or many another man.
Irving Hart, described as a grocery shop manager, was the same age as his wife: twenty-two.
The boat used by the husband for salt-water fishing was a small yacht of three tons, partially covered, yawl-rigged, which he had himself skilfully fitted up. The kind of little craft a man could be out in all night if need be. A shore loafer came forward to testify that he helped Hart himself launch it rather late in the afternoon. Mrs. Hart came down at the last moment and got in. He, the witness, had warned them that a change of weather was coming, but Hart had only laughed at him.
Within two hours there were wild sea manes tossing as far as the eye could see. By nightfall no boat could have hoped to put in. Many a one went to pieces in that storm. Many a fisherman failed to return.
The loafer in question had long disappeared. His evidence at the time had been believed, partly because it was considered unbiased, partly because none of the Harts' effects were missing from their rooms. A couple of very respectable women, too, bore out that they had seen Mrs. Hart about the time mentioned walking fast to the cove where the boat lay. Creel and rod in hand, oilskin on arm.
As to the shop—the only address entered in the newspaper accounts or on the warrant—the great new docks had engulfed the street where it had stood. A police-sergeant, who remembered the inquest well, had a hazy notion that the Harts had lodged somewhere else, but he was not certain on the matter, far less could he remember any address. The Chief Inspector was unable to find any one who could settle this point. Water rates—gas companies—all had only the shop address.
One thing was curious, Hart seemed to have no background. Pointer could not learn of any parents, any home, from which he had come.
True, this was not unusual, supposing him to be ashamed of all three. He might even have none, in any but the literal sense of the word. He might have been an orphan—a foundling—an unwanted child.
On the other hand, if Hart were Vardon, then the lack was easily, obviously, explained. There was no mystery about Vardon's parentage and home. Vardon's whereabouts could not be traced during that summer nor for the year succeeding, nor for that matter, without the expenditure of a great deal of time and money, for still another couple of years, which he purported to have spent journeying round the world.
Certainly here in Wales, death, or other natural causes seemed to have removed every one with whom he claimed to have come in contact.
A reply telegram came from the Yard in cipher. The Somerset House register showed no sign of yielding any earlier marriage on Mable Headley's part than that to Branscombe.
Pointer looked hard at his boot-tips. Apart from his belief that the woman he had heard called Mrs. Tangye would not have stooped to such a position, the tale he had learnt sounded preposterous unless Mable Headly had been tied to Hart. Why should she, young, with many friends, and certificates that would enable her to teach in any school in the British Isles, have stayed to face such drudgery? Yet if she had been married, how to find the record of it?
In a moment he was on his feet, and at work on what he called routine.
He worked backwards, and forwards, and sideways, and all ways around his new idea of a marriage at sea, and as the result of three days and nights of incessant work, he learnt an interesting little tale which unravelled at least a part of the mystery that so perplexed him, the mystery of Mrs. Tangye's actions just before she was murdered.
The story, duly vouched for step by step, was as follows:
Lady Susan Dawlish had come to Bettws-y-coed one summer fifteen years ago with her great-niece, Mable Headly, then about twenty. They had stayed at the best hotel in that lovely spot. Mable played an uncommonly good game of tennis. So did a Mr. Hart, a visitor at the same hotel. Also he sang in a well-trained tenor, while Mable played charming accompaniments. He gave out that he belonged to a good family in Ireland. Talked of his hunters, and polo ponies, and passed for the younger son of a hard-up landowner. Lady Susan disliked him intensely at first sight, and took the pretext of "doctor's advice" to go to Colwyn Bay. She had complained of the young man's unwanted attentions, mentioning that any such match would be preposterous, as her great-niece would be extremely well off, since she, Lady Susan, intended leaving her all her money. The old lady was wealthy, even by post-war standards.
At Colwyn Bay, Pointer found that Hart had followed the two women, taking up his quarters in another hotel, but one which used the same tennis courts. But after a fortnight Lady Susan received a telegram. Her maid had told the manageress that it was from some relatives who were starting for the Colonies, relatives of the older woman, whom Miss Headly did not even know. Lady Susan went on to Holyhead to see them off, taking her maid with her. They were only to be gone two days.
Miss Headly promptly utilised the first to go out with Hart on a little craft