The Chief Inspector opened skilfully, but Vardon either was, or professed to be, in ignorance, as to any callers at his flat last Tuesday evening, or of any object which could have attracted them during his absence.
True, Pointer learned that about a fortnight ago Tangye had been met by chance in the street, and had come on up to see a Patagonian iguana, since presented to the Zoo. But he had stayed a bare fifteen minutes, and had not been alone in the room.
"Did any one telephone to you last Tuesday close on eight?"
"Yes," Vardon said, some one had. So, at least, one of the chambermaids had told him, but, on hearing that he was out, the voice, a man's voice, had said that another time would do as well, and had left no message.
That, at any rate, fitted. Tangye, if not an invited guest, would have wanted to know that Vardon was out, before running up stairs. Even if the artist's rooms had been locked, the key, as Pointer himself had found just now, had doubtless hung below his number on the indicator board, and, in that ill-kept house, any stray passer-by could have taken it.
And if those keys were not taken by Philip Vardon, if they really had been left in his rooms unknown to him, then, since Regina Saunders was below, Pointer believed that the only other person worried by any mention of them, Tangye—was connected with their puzzling re-appearance among the artist's effects.
Pointer, after learning the exact date of Tangye's call at the rooms, which told him nothing, passed on immediately to another important point.
"Why did Mrs. Tangye make a will in your favour?" The question came in exactly the same tones as the preceding ones.
Vardon paled. He said nothing. Pointer repeated the question. Vardon fingered the Spanish book which he had been reading when the Chief Inspector had first come to see him. Pointer was wont to say that as a rule, the less mind a man possessed, the greater difficuty he had in knowing it, but the Chief Inspector did not think that that was the trouble here. Vardon, like Tangye when he had heard of the discovery of the keys, was rather weighing alternatives, neither of which he liked.
"I don't know," he said undecidedly.
"Equally unaware of why you didn't mention the fact to us?"
"Naturally I didn't volunteer information which has no bearing on the case. Things look black enough, in all conscience, without my touching 'em up."
"You know," Pointer said after a second, "if you're innocent, I really think you would do best for yourself to tell us everything. Short of an actual confession on your part, I don't see how the case could look worse—"
Vardon went to his telephone, and tried to reach Dorset Steele, but the solicitor was out of town.
He came back, and again his foot gave a sort of queer little jerk as he crossed the carpet.
"Very well," he said finally, "I'll trust to your being honest. And not trying to trap me into some talk that can be twisted afterwards. You asked me why Mrs. Tangye made that will. I told you I don't know, and you've as good as called me a liar. I don't know, but I can guess. She had evidently, patently, had a definite rupture with Tangye. Hence the gift of the money, and the change in her will. She told me, I've forgotten to mention that, to send the properly drawn-up contract to her bank, not to Riverview."
Pointer nodded.
"She handed you the will fastened up, I suppose?"
"Any one would suppose so. But it wasn't even gummed down. Just as she was rushing out of the room she picked it up from the table, where she had laid it on entering, and said, 'Glance this through and then post it for me, please.' With that she was gone. I took it for granted it was to do with the money lent me, until I read it. And that was really why I nearly went in to see her later in the afternoon.
"That, and to ask her if I mightn't speak, to one particular friend, of her backing our venture. But the will was most in my mind. It didn't seem playing the game. There was no reason for her to swing from one extreme to another." Vardon looked as though he would have taken back that last sentence if he could; "That is—er—it seemed unfair to Tangye. At any rate, I decided not to post the will until I had talked the matter over with her, or written about it to her."
Pointer stared at his boots. Then he looked 'up.
"Was there any question of a silence as to something that had happened in the past—implied or not—on your part, in return for the loan, or for the will?"
Vardon ran his finger along some of the Castilian'words as though spelling them out.
"I consider such a question rather an insult," he said finally, in a low voice.
"It isn't meant in that way." Pointer spoke very earnestly. "You surely don't wish Mrs. Tangye's murderer to escape justice?"
"But she wasn't murdered!" Vardon said shortly.
"She was," Pointer was quite frank now. "To the best of my belief, she was. And a peculiarly cruel, dastardly, murder, too. Surely you're not against me in my hunt for the criminal?"
Vardon seemed stirred by the ring in the other's voice.
"You're one of the brass-hats at Scotland Yard, they tell me," he spoke uneasily, "you chaps take crimes rather for granted. Crimes and criminals."
"Not in this case. Unless I miss my guess, we've here as clever a criminal as I've yet encountered. I need every particle of help that can be given me. If I waste my time over innocent people the real culprit may get away. Now I read—well—many things into that will. And I ask you again, was there nothing known to you in her past which Mrs. Tangye wished kept a secret?"
Vardon hesitated.
Pointer went on, "I never met her alive, but if I know anything of faces, the last thing Mrs. Tangye would have wanted would be for her murderer to get off."
"And the last thing I or any one would want. But you must be mistaken for once, Chief Inspector. You must be! Who would murder Mrs. Tangye? Tangye has been here—as you, of course, know. He tells me there's nothing missing. With the fifteen hundred pounds loaned me, every farthing's accounted for. Then why on earth should any one kill her?"
"We have our own ideas on that." At least Pointer was beginning to have the glimmering of one since reading that will. "Then at most, Mrs. Tangye only referred to that draft of a will made by her former husband,—by Branscombe,—in his last night? The draft which she burnt?"
Vardon's look of bewilderment was almost comic.
"How the dickens—how the dickens did you learn of that?"
"Routine work. But, frankly, was that the screw you intended to turn—on Mrs. Tangye?"
Vardon's face flamed.
"Ghastly expression to've used. But—well, it was. You see, my grandmother—Clive Branscombe's grandmother, too—was a Vardon. She used to always say that the land she had brought the Branscombes was to come back to us Vardons ultimately. Sir Richard Ash, Branscombe's partner, nearly got my cousin to make a will to that effect once. But Clive put it off—until he tried to draft it again, too late. As you've learnt in some miraculous way. I thought there was no one alive now who knew of that incident."
"And didn't she ask you on Tuesday not to speak of it?"
"Yes. She asked me to forgive and forget what had happened after Clive's death, and she said something which is rather terrible. In the light of what happened. 'You'll find it'll all come right—and very speedily.'"
That last was one to Wilmot, Pointer thought as he hurried off. His next interview was with Tangye. He wondered how the stockbroker would take the news of a later, altered will.
Tangye almost leaped to his feet when Pointer told him briefly that in the course of some routine work, a will of Mrs. Tangye's had been found, dated last Tuesday, leaving everything of which she should die possessed to Vardon.
"Vardon! Impossible!" he said again, as he had said before,