Pointer laughed.
"No, sir, I'm not interested in Patagonia—so far. What I mean is that he'll be practically under observation all the time. I shall tell him that we have no objection to his leaving, and ask the captain of whatever ship he chooses to keep an eye on him. If I may, I'll telephone the good news to him at once."
"So Oliver Headly, the cousin, is out of it. Well, as a matter of fact, he never was really in it," came from Haviland, as he and Wilmot lunched with Pointer.
"I'm not concerned with Oliver. He's beyond our powers to investigate or locate," Pointer agreed. "At any rate, Tangye doesn't fulfil the necessary conditions. Even without Miss Saunders' support of his latest alibi. I think he's merely a frightened man, though frightened for very good reasons."
"All the facts we've been able to discover, I still consider only accidental, not incidental—from the point of view of a crime," Wilmot mused, "but had there been a crime here, I should have thought Tangye—"
"Vardon, Mr. Wilmot!" Haviland struck in, "Vardon's in the very middle of things. The keys in his luggage. That will—"
"Ah, that will!" the newspaper man frowned thoughtfully, "that will!"
"That will suggests a new thought to me," Pointer said, after a moment's pause.
"A quarrel with her husband?" Wilmot finished.
"I don't call it the will of an angry woman," Pointer continued. "No, I think—I think—there's but one explanation that fits that will. Easily. And that is that Mrs. Tangye felt that Tangye had no right to the money."
"Forfeited it, in fact, by his treatment of her?" Haviland looked a little doubtful. Wilmot only waited.
"Suppose Mrs. Tangye had been married before she met Branscombe? Married secretly. Thought her husband dead. Say he was some one—possibly a criminal—of whom she was bitterly ashamed as soon as she had married him. There are three years of her life of which we have no record, you remember. Suppose she saw down at Tunbridge last Sunday, not Tangye and anybody, but this first husband, this only legal husband whom she had thought long dead and buried—I think, that would explain everything. And that alone.
"Tangye is away Sunday. She sees to it that he's away Monday as well. He may have been speaking the truth when he tells us that that quarrel had a forced, theatrical air. She may have snatched at the pretext afforded her by his having been down at the show, just as she would have jumped at any other excuse. Her one thought, if my idea is correct, would be to get the man out of the house who isn't her husband, who never was her husband, and have a reasonable motive in the eyes of her circle, for leaving him. By the same argument, Branscombe's money reverts to his heir. She halves the sale of the farm, her only loose money, and calls in the sum invested in Tangye's firm which I think she intended to halve too."
There was a silence as he finished.
"You think that Vardon was really her husband!" Haviland ejaculated under his breath.
"Where does this lead to—?" Wilmot asked slowly, "I don't see—?"
"Vardon. That's where it leads to, Mr. Wilmot, and that's a fact."
"Vardon?" Pointer spoke meditatively—. "Maybe, but at any rate it leads, apparently, directly away from Tangye. At any rate I shall work from along a different line, and we shall see where we fetch up. Of course, it's a mere guess. But it's a guess that might account for Mrs. Tangye's wish not to have her visitor come to the front door. She would naturally be nervous about any one seeing the man who was really her husband—and, if I'm right, her only husband. It was a position which would make any woman get rattled."
"But why should he kill her?" asked Wilmot, perplexity in his voice, "this is all very interesting, very exciting even, but where does it lead to? Why the deuce should he kill her? She, him—yes. But there's no sense in his doing away with her!"
"Suppose he were a convicted felon? A sentence still hanging over him? Or, married? Has a family? Or on the eve of another marriage? He, too, may have believed her dead. Since he seems to've made no effort to come across her before. There might be reasons, many reasons, which would fit in here."
"Vardon fits in, right enough in fact," Haviland murmured. "He's in love with that pretty Miss Ash."
"Would fit! Might be reasons!" Wilmot shook his head. "Pointer, your suspicion is like the sun which only circles, but never sets."
"Still, it would fit the facts," Haviland said with enthusiasm, "and—"
"You mean it fits Vardon," Wilmot retorted tartly. "I think we're only getting more and more at sea. You're going too far and too fast, Pointer, when you take to inventing a third husband for that poor lady, or rather only one."
Pointer merely nodded a pleasant good-bye as he hurried off. Three years of Mrs. Tangye's life were unexplored. The years from twenty to twenty-three. Her father was dead by that time. She had gone away with a relative of her mother's, a highly respectable lady, who had died two years before Miss Headly reappeared to teach in a high school in town. She had always been a poor correspondent. Her friends had believed that she had meanwhile been somewhere in the north of England. The Headmistress of the school in London thought that she had gone as governess to some family connection, but as she knew Mable Headly of old, she had not looked the matter up.
It was quite possible that those three years would not explain the mystery, but Pointer could see no other chance of clearing it up. But how to get on the track of them? He had been trying in vain all this week to get into touch with any one who could supply him with a clue, a jumping-off board. None had been found. Possibly there was no mystery. If so, this last effort, too, would end in vague ripples. If the guilty man were Vardon, the investigations would come back to the artist. Slowly possibly, but surely. Those footsteps that stopped in the garden last Tuesday...
They still were on the wrong side of the circle which, as he reminded Wilmot, had two sides. Would they resist his efforts much longer to trace the person to whom they belonged?
It was barely possible, of course, that Mable Headly had got actively entangled with criminals, not merely by a hypothetical marriage to one. She might have dipped down into the underworld herself. But a criminal for three years, and before, and after, those years never to fall below the line of highest respectability? Pointer had never come across such a case, for Mrs. Tangye had not struck any one as a two-sided woman. All that Pointer could learn of her was of a piece.
What did fit his theory, was what he had heard about her throwing a halo over the past. Over what she had lost.
Pointer thought this explained her actions when, or if, she had met a first husband whom she had supposed dead, last Sunday. Suppose that husband in need of money? Suppose he had ingratiated himself with her? Suppose he had talked of starting life again together? Mrs. Tangye had shown herself a woman very easily affected by men. Mrs. Tangye collects her papers bearing on her money affairs, gives away her clothes which would only remind her of what must shock her deeply—life with a man to whom she finds she is not married. That letter to Miss Eden becomes intelligible under this light. After receiving this rediscovered husband on Monday, they arrange that on Tuesday she shall leave Riverview, either with him, or more likely far, after him. Pointer thought that she was obviously planning her escape from her old life to look like a separation from Tangye because of Tangye's flirtations. Pointer could imagine more than one reason why Mrs. Tangye to give her the name she bore, but which he had begun to think might not have been hers legally—should decide not to reveal the truth till later, if ever.
Seeing her husband's infatuation with Mrs. Bligh, Pointer thought that she was the type to have never told the real truth, to have never set free the man and woman she thought had deceived her. She had looked a very jealous woman to Pointer. He recalled Miss Eden's words about her being capable under provocation, of acting very unjustly.
Pointer's men had not been able to trace any marriage earlier than that to Branscombe. But she might have married abroad. Or even under another name. But the point was, how to get into touch with her past?
He went for