“It’s in a parcel up in my room. I thought I’d wait till you had finished your port.”
“Is it something you can bring into a dining-room?” her father asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“Then Burt will fetch it.”
“Oh, no!” she cried, arresting her father’s hand on the bell. “I’ll get it. I shan’t be a minute.”
She came back carrying a large brown-paper parcel, which her father said looked like a Salvation Army gift day. She unwrapped it and produced a man’s coat, of a greyish black.
“That is the coat you wanted,” she said. “But it has all its buttons.”
Grant took the coat automatically, and examined it.
“Where in Heaven’s name did you get that, Erica?” her father asked, astonished.
“I bought it for ten shillings from a stone-breaker at Paddock Wood. He gave a tramp five shillings for it, and thought it such a bargain that he didn’t want to part with it. I had to have cold tea with him, and listen to what the Border Regiment did on the first of July, and see the bullet scar on his shin, before he would give up the coat. I was afraid to go away and leave him with it in case he sold it to someone else, or I couldn’t find him again.”
“What makes you think this is Tisdall’s coat?” Grant asked.
“This,” she said, and showed the cigarette burn. “He told me to look for that.”
“Who did?”
“Mr. Tisdall!”
“Who?” said all three men at once.
“I met him by accident on Wednesday. And since then I’ve been searching for the coat. But it was great luck coming across it.”
“You met him! Where?”
“In a lane near Mallingford.”
“And you didn’t report it?” Grant’s voice was stern.
“No.” Hers quavered just a little, and then went on equably. “You see, I didn’t believe he had done it. And I really do like you a lot. I thought it would be better for you if he could be proved innocent before he was really arrested. Then you wouldn’t have to set him free again. The papers would be awful about that.”
There was a stunned silence for a moment.
Then Grant said, “And on Wednesday Tisdall told you to look for this.” He held forward the burned piece, while the others crowded from their places to inspect.
“No sign of a replaced button,” Meir observed. “Do you think it’s the coat?”
“It may be. We can’t try it on Tisdall, but perhaps Mrs. Pitts may be able to identify it.”
“But—but,” stammered the Colonel—“if it is the coat do you realise what it means?”
“Completely. It means beginning all over again.”
His tired eyes, cold with disappointment, met Erica’s kind grey ones, but he refused their sympathy. It was too early to think of Erica as his possible saviour. At the moment she was just someone who had thrown a wrench into the machinery.
“I shall have to get back,” he said. “May I use your telephone?”
15
Mrs. Pitts identified the coat. She had dried it at the kitchen fire one day when a thermos bottle of hot water had leaked on it. She had noticed the cigarette burn then.
Sergeant Williams, interviewing the farmer who had identified Tisdall’s car, found that he was colour blind.
The truth stuck out with painful clarity. Tisdall had really lost his coat from the car on Tuesday. He had really driven away from the beach. He had not murdered Christine Clay.
By eleven that Friday evening Grant was faced with the fact that they were just where they were a week previously, when he had cancelled a theatre seat and come down to Westover. Worse still, they had hounded a man into flight and hiding, and they had wasted seven days on a dud investigation while the man they wanted made his escape.
Grant’s mind was a welter of broken ends and unrelated facts.
Harmer. He came into the picture now, didn’t he? They had checked his story as far as it went. He really had made enquiries from the owner of the cherry orchard, and from the post office at Liddlestone at the times he said. But after that, what? After that no one knew anything about his movements until he walked into the cottage at Medley, some time after eight the next morning.
There was—incredibly!—Edward Champneis, who had brought back topazes for his wife, but who, for some reason, was unwilling that his movements on that Wednesday night should be investigated. There could be no other reason for his desire to make Grant believe that he had arrived in England on Thursday morning. He had not come to England secretly. If you want to arrive secretly in a country, arriving in a populous harbour by yacht is not the way to do it. Harbour-master and customs’ officials are a constitutionally inquisitive race. Therefore it was not the fact of his arrival that he wanted to hide, but the way in which he had occupied his time since. The more Grant thought about it, the queerer it became. Champneis was at Dover on Wednesday night. At six on Thursday morning his well-loved wife had met her death. And Champneis did not want his movements investigated. Very queer!
There was, too, the “shilling for candles.” That, which had first caught his interest and had been put aside in favour of more obvious lines of enquiry, that would have to be looked into.
On Saturday morning the newspapers, beginning to be bored with a four-day-old man hunt, carried the glad news that the hunted man was innocent. “New information having come to police.” It was confidently expected that Tisdall would present himself before nightfall, and in that hope reporters and photographers lingered round the County police station in Westover; with more optimism than logic, it would seem, since Tisdall was just as likely to present himself at a station miles away.
But Tisdall presented himself nowhere.
This caused a slight stirring of surprise in Grant’s busy mind when he had a moment to remember Tisdall; but that was not often. He wondered why Tisdall hadn’t enough sense to come in out of the wet. It had rained again on Friday night and it had been blowing a north-easter and raining all Saturday. One would have thought he would have been glad to see a police station. He was not being sheltered by any of his old friends, that was certain. They had all been shadowed very efficiently during the four days that he was “wanted.” Grant concluded that Tisdall had not yet seen a newspaper, and dismissed the thing from his mind.
He had set the official machinery moving to discover the whereabouts of Christine Clay’s brother; he had started a train of enquiries which had the object of proving that Jason Harmer had once had a dark coat which he had lately discarded and which had a missing button. And he himself took on the investigation of Lord Edward Champneis. He noticed with his usual self-awareness that he had no intention of going to Champneis and asking for an account of his movements on Wednesday night. It would be highly embarrassing, for one thing, if Champneis proved that he had slept peacefully in his bunk all night. Or at the Lord Warden. Or otherwise had a perfect alibi. For another—oh, well, there was not getting away from the fact; one didn’t demand information from the son of a ducal house as one demanded it from a coster. A rotten world, no doubt, but one must conform.
Grant learned that the Petronel had gone round to Cowes, where her owner, Giles Champneis, would live in her for Cowes’ week. On Sunday morning, therefore, Grant flew down to Gosport, and got a boat across the glittering Spithead to the island. What had been a white flurry of rain-whipped water yesterday