Barbara recounted the story with which they were all so familiar by now. She had nothing new to add to the scene in the morning-room.
"Did you see the revolver?"
She nodded. "Underneath her left hand. The next thing I remember was hearing a man's voice saying, outside the room, 'I don't think I can do much harm if you and the maid have both been in.' And I thought I should only be in the doctor's way. I took it for granted it was a doctor. I thought a caller was certainly not wanted in the house at such a moment. There were plenty of women to help. I crossed the hall into what used to be the housekeeper's room in the old days. It's evidently a smoking-room now. A moment later I heard people in the hall, and the same voice, it was the reporter's I learnt at the inquest, asking if that was the room. I let myself out by the tradesmen's door."
"And why did you say nothing at your home of having been to Riverview?" Pointer asked.
"I'm not by way of visiting Mrs. Tangye. Every one knows that. I should have had to explain why I suddenly called at Riverview after having refused to go with mother times out of number."
"The coroner remarked on your absence at the inquest."
"Yes. But he said my evidence could not have made any difference as I had not seen Mrs. Tangye alive. I should have come forward in spite of everything, if he hadn't added that. But you see, I hoped to keep it from my own people—and from strangers—that I was going to ask Mrs. Tangye to help Philip Vardon. It's only now—"
"Now that dear Philip is involved," Pointer finished to himself, rather grimly.
"Now that I am bringing a sort of accusation against Mr. Tangye, that I see I must tell everything against myself as well. I owe the truth, all of it, to Mr. Tangye and to you." Barbara's eyes would have softened a Chinese executioner.
"Did you notice her keys lying on her desk?" Pointer asked.
"Yes. I instinctively looked around for a glass of water, and they were lying beside a glass. I almost touched them before I noticed that hole just over poor Mrs. Tangye's heart."
"And can you swear that you had not been to Riverview before your arrival at six last Tuesday?"
She looked surprised.
"Certainly, I can. We discussed the time when I left the Palace at five, after having been there from before four. And at the garage both the girl who was there to take telephone orders, and I kept our eyes on the clock till a mechanic finally arrived just before six."
When she had left they looked at one another.
"To think I dropped in to tell you two that Tangye has sent in a formal renunciation of his wife's insurance money. Alas! I know full well what wild hopes this last little bit of tittle-tattle will rouse in any policeman's bosom." Wilmot groaned. "I don't say that my own is quite unperturbed."
"Well, I dunno..." Haviland lit a cigar. "Her story may seem to let Vardon out, but the fact of her having been at Riverview at all last Tuesday, just at that hour too, lets him in deeper than ever to my thinking. And even if she's telling us the truth—we can easily verify it—it goes to show how much he needed that leg-up. The fact is that both he and Tangye were evidently desperate for funds just at that time." Haviland glanced questioningly, however, at the Chief Inspector.
"Her story sounded truthful," was the brief reply.
"So it did. But the fact is, all tales told us police sound that," Haviland commented shrewdly, "when, like Miss Ash, they take time to think them over. A gal and her young man! I dunno!"
"We always knew Miss Saunders was putting the screw on Tangye. The only screw that would make him knuckle under, something connected with Mrs. Tangye's death." Wilmot had been thinking over Barbara's story. He, too, thought it had a truthful ring.
"That part of it's just what the Chief Inspector and me have maintained from the first," the unblushing Haviland said with quite a patronising smile.
"What you, or any one else, maintains from the first, doesn't count," Wilmot retorted, "it's only what you maintain at the end, that does. I confess—I confess—" He sat obviously considering the new light thrown by the girl on the case.
"It certainly is very disturbing for my Company," he finally decided aloud. But further than that he would not go.
CHAPTER 12
POINTER got through to the stockbroker over the telephone. He told the answering clerk that he—Mr. Wright, the name had been agreed on with Tangye, wanted to speak to Tangye at once. Tangye promptly suggested that Wright should come on to see him in about two hours' time. Until then, every minute was already engaged.
Pointer agreed, and put in some hours, hard work at his own rooms in the Yard, wading through the papers waiting for him. Among them were reports on the purchasers of Lux cameras. In all England, only three of them had been sold from any known photographic dealers during the last six months. And all to men. One had been in the Haymarket to a man identified from his portrait at once by manager and salesman as Tangye. That had been close on a fortnight before his wife's death. One had been in Exmouth, and had been bought by a deeply bronzed, very big, youngish man, who looked as though he had lived an uncommonly hard life. One had been sold in Folkestone, only last Monday morning as soon as the shop opened. In this case the buyer had, by chance, been recognized by the salesman as Professor Orison, guest of honour of the local P.S.A. the evening before.
Like the other two, Professor Orison had carried the camera away with him.
So it was a Lux that Tangye had bought. What had become of it? Pointer had already sent a man down with careful instructions to Norfolk, to the house where Tangye had week-ended. He had learnt that the stockbroker had only been absent from the shooting-party from early on Sunday till the evening.
He knew too, that Tangye had arrived at North Walsingham with a camera, because the railway porter had identified his portrait as that of one of Mr. Riddell's guests who had brought one with him on his arrival on Saturday, and refused to let him, the porter, carry it even as far as the car. When the same man left for town, Monday noon, he had no camera with him. A footman at the house, too, was quite sure that Mr. Tangye had left on Sunday morning with his camera in the car beside him, and had not brought it back on his return in the late afternoon. He said that Tangye had spoken as though he intended making a present of it to a lady, and was only testing it first, he supposed that the stockbroker had done so on the Sunday.
Detective Inspector Watts represented himself as sent from the photographic dealers to whom Tangye had complained of a faulty lens. They maintained that the camera must have had a bad fall after it left their hands, and he, Watts, wanted to trace the camera's movements very carefully. Pointer sat a moment gazing across the river running beneath his windows.
That youngish, sunburnt-looking man at Exmouth—Vaguely the description would have passed for Oliver Headly—supposing Oliver to be alive. He took up his pen. It seemed a hopeless quest, but instructions were sent to the Exmouth constabulary to do their best. They were furnished with portraits of the man as he had been twenty years ago. The photographs from Fez were no good here, for that man had undoubtedly been stood against a wall by a firing-party. Then came the last of the three purchasers—Professor Orison.
Pointer had heard of him as one of the smart lads of the moment. A lecturer in duchesses' drawing-rooms on the Power of the Mind. For all that his erudition, like his degree, was laughed at by scholars.
Pointer had seen him a couple of times. At a royal garden party. At a ducal wedding. Orison was a striking figure. Thin, elderly, bent, with a face like a wrinkled glove in which burned two dark, keen eyes beneath tufted white brows. He claimed to be of noble Polish descent on his mother's side, and wore a long drooping Polish moustache, and a Paderewski-like mop of fine silvery hair. He even spoke with a Polish accent.
Pointer