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'Are you telling me the truth?' she asked. 'Is it really true that you came down here - by accident? Or did you come because - because' - her voice quavered in spite of herself 'you suspected my husband?' Bobby and Frankie looked at each other. Then Bobby said: 'I give you my word of honour that we'd never even heard of your husband till we came down here.' 'Oh, I see.' She turned to Frankie. 'I'm sorry. Lady Frances, but, you see, I remembered that evening when we came to dinner. Jasper went on and on at you - asking you things about your accident. I couldn't think why. But I think now that perhaps he suspected it wasn't genuine.' 'Well, if you really want to know, it wasn't,' said Frankie.
'Whoof - now I feel better! It was all camouflaged very carefully. But it was nothing to do with your husband. The whole thing was staged because we wanted to - to - what does one call it? - get a line on Roger Bassingtonffrench.' 'Roger?' Moira frowned and smiled perplexedly.
'It seems absurd,' she said frankly.
'All the same facts are facts,' said Bobby.
'Roger - oh, no.' She shook her head. 'He might be weak or wild. He might get into debt, or get mixed up in a scandal but pushing someone over a cliff - no, I simply can't imagine it.' 'Do you know,' said Frankie, 'I can't very well imagine it either.' 'But he must have taken that photograph,' said Bobby stubbornly. 'Listen, Mrs Nicholson, while I go over the facts.' He did so slowly and carefully. When he had finished, she nodded her head comprehendingly.
'I see what you mean. It seems very queer.' She paused a minute and then said unexpectedly: 'Why don't you ask him?'
CHAPTER 20 Council of Two
For a moment, the bold simplicity of the question quite took their breath away. Both Frankie and Bobby started to speak at once: 'That's impossible -' began Bobby, just as Frankie said: 'That would never do.' Then they both stopped dead as the possibilities of the idea sank in.
'You see,' said Moira eagerly, 'I do see what you mean. It does seem as though Roger must have taken that photograph, but I don't believe for one moment that he pushed Alan over.
Why should he? He didn't even know him. They'd only met once - at lunch down here. They'd never come across each other in any way. There's no motive.' 'Then who did push him over?' asked Frankie bluntly.
A shadow crossed Moira's face.
'I don't know,' she said constrainedly.
'Look here,' said Bobby. 'Do you mind if I tell Frankie what you told me. About what you're afraid of.' Moira turned her head away.
'If you like. But it sounds so melodramatic and hysterical. I can't believe it myself this minute.' And indeed the bald statement, made unemotionally in the open air of the quiet English countryside, did seem curiously lacking in reality.
Moira got up abruptly.
'I really feel I've been terribly silly,' she said, her lip trembling. 'Please don't pay any attention to what I said, Mr Jones. It was just - nerves. Anyway, I must be going now.
Goodbye.' She moved rapidly away. Bobby sprang up to follow her, but Frankie pushed him firmly back.
'Stay there, idiot, leave this to me.' She went rapidly off after Moira. She returned a few minutes later.
'Well?' queried Bobby anxiously.
"That's all right. I calmed her down. It was a bit hard on her having her private fears blurted out in front of her to a third person. I made her promise we'd have a meeting - all three of us - again soon. Now that you're not hampered by her being there, tell us all about it.' Bobby did so. Frankie listened attentively. Then she said: 'It fits in with two things. First of all, I came back just now to find Nicholson holding both Sylvia Bassingtonffrench's hands - and didn't he look daggers at me! If looks could kill I feel sure he'd have made me a corpse then and there.' 'What's the second thing?' asked Bobby.
'Oh, just an incident. Sylvia described how Moira's photograph had made a great impression on some stranger who had come to the house. Depend upon it, that was Carstairs. He recognized the photograph, Mrs Bassington-ffrench tells him that it is a portrait of a Mrs Nicholson, and that explains how he came to find out where she was. But you know, Bobby, I don't see yet where Nicholson comes in. Why should he want to do away with Alan Carstairs?' 'You think it was him and not Bassington-ffrench? Rather a coincidence if he and Bassington-ffrench should both be in Marchbolt on the same day.' 'Well, coincidences do happen. But if it was Nicholson, I don't yet see the motive. Was Carstairs on the track of Nicholson as the head of a dope gang? Or is your new lady friend the motive for the murder?' 'It might be both,' suggested Bobby. 'He may know that Carstairs and his wife had an interview, and he may have believed that his wife gave him away somehow.' 'Now, that is a possibility,' said Frankie. 'But the first thing is to make sure about Roger Bassington-ffrench. The only thing we've got against him is the photograph business. If he can clear that up satisfactorily -' 'You're going to tackle him on the subject? Frankie, is that wise? If he is the villain of the piece, as we decided he must be, it means that we're going to show him our hand.' 'Not quite - not the way I shall do it. After all, in every other way he's been perfectly straightforward and above board.
We've taken that to be super-cunning - but suppose it just happens to be innocence? //he can explain the photograph and I shall be watching him when he does explain - and if there's the least sign of hesitation of guilt I shall see it - as I say, if he can explain the photograph - then he may be a very valuable ally.' 'How do you mean, Frankie?' 'My dear, your little friend may be an emotional scaremonger who likes to exaggerate, but supposing she isn't - that all she says is gospel truth - that her husband wants to get rid of her and marry Sylvia. Don't you realize that, in that case, Henry Bassington-ffrench is in mortal danger too. At all costs we've got to prevent him being sent to the Grange. And at present Roger Bassington-ffrench is on Nicholson's side.' 'Good for you, Frankie,' said Bobby quietly. 'Go ahead with your plan.' Frankie got up to go, but before departing she paused for a moment.
'Isn't it odd?' she said. 'We seem, somehow, to have got in between the covers of a book. We're in the middle of someone else's story. It's a frightfully queer feeling.' 'I know what you mean,' said Bobby. 'There is something rather uncanny about it. I should call it a play rather than a book. It's as though we'd walked on to the stage in the middle of the second act and we haven't really got parts in the play at all, but we have to pretend, and what makes it so frightfully hard is that we haven't the faintest idea what the first act was about.' Frankie nodded eagerly.
'I'm not even so sure it's the second act - I think it's more like the third. Bobby, I'm sure we've got to go back a long way... And we've got to be quick because I fancy the play is frightfully near the final curtain.' 'With corpses strewn everywhere,' said Bobby. 'And what brought us into the show was a regular cue - five words - quite meaningless as far as we are concerned.' "'Why didn't they ask Evans?" Isn't it odd, Bobby, that though we've found out a good deal and more and more characters come into the thing, we never get any nearer to the mysterious Evans?' 'I've got an idea about Evans. I've a feeling that Evans doesn't really matter at all - that although he's been the starting point as it were, yet in himself he's probably quite inessential.
It will be like that story of Wells where a prince built a marvellous palace or temple round the tomb of his beloved.
And when it was finished there was just one little thing that jarred. So he said: "Take it away." And the thing was actually the tomb itself.' 'Sometimes,' said Frankie, 'I don't believe there is an Evans.' Saying which, she nodded to Bobby and retraced her steps towards the house.
Frankie stared at him. Suddenly she remembered that in Bobby's first account of the tragedy he had mentioned putting a handkerchief over the face of the dead man.
'You never thought of looking?' went on Frankie.
'No. Why should I?' 'Of course,' thought Frankie, 'if/y found a photograph of somebody I knew in a dead person's pocket, I should simply have had to look at the person's face. How beautifully incurious men are!' 'Poor little thing,' she said. 'I'm so terribly sorry for her.' 'Who do you mean - Moira Nicholson? Why are you so sorry for her?' 'Because she's frightened,' said Frankie slowly.
'She always looks half scared to death. What is she frightened of?' 'Her husband.' 'I don't know that I'd care to be up against Jasper Nicholson myself,' admitted Roger.
'She's sure he's trying to murder her,' said Frankie abruptly.
'Oh, my dear!' He looked at her incredulously.
'Sit down,' said Frankie. 'I'm going to tell you a lot of things.
I've got to prove to you that Dr Nicholson is a dangerous criminal.' 'A criminal?' Roger's tone was frankly incredulous.
'Wait till you've heard the whole story.' She gave him a clear and careful narrative of all that had occurred since the day Bobby and Dr Thomas had found the body. She only kept back the fact that her accident had not been genuine, but she let it appear that she had lingered at Merroway Court through her intense desire to get to the bottom of the mystery.
She could complain of no lack of interest on the part of her listener. Roger seemed quite fascinated by the story.
'Is this really true?' he demanded. 'All this about the fellow Jones being poisoned and all that?' 'Absolute gospel truth, my dear.' 'Sorry for my incredulity - but the facts do take a bit of swallowing, don't they?' He was silent a minute, frowning.
'Look here,' he said at last. 'Fantastic as the whole thing sounds, I think you must be right in your first deduction. This man, Alex Pritchard, or Alan Carstairs, must have been murdered. If he wasn't there seems no point in the attack upon Jones. Whether the key word to the situation is the phrase "Why didn't they ask Evans?" or not doesn't seem to me to matter much since you've no clue to who Evans is or as to what he was to have been asked. Let's put it that the murderer or murderers assumed that Jones was in possession of some knowledge, whether he knew it himself or not, which was dangerous to them. So, accordingly, they tried to eliminate him, and probably would try again if they got on his track. So far that seems sense - but I don't see by what process of reasoning you fix on Nicholson as the criminal.' 'He's such a sinister man, and he's got a dark-blue Talbot and he was away from here on the day that Bobby was poisoned.' 'That's all pretty thin as evidence.' 'There are all the things Mrs Nicholson told Bobby.' She recited them, and once again they sounded melodramatic and unsubstantial repeated aloud against the background of the peaceful English landscape.
Roger shrugged his shoulders.
'She thinks he supplies Henry with the drug - but that's pure conjecture, she's not a particle of evidence that he does so.
She thinks he wants to get Henry to the Grange as a patient well, that's a very natural wish for a doctor to have. A doctor wants as many patients as he can get. She thinks he's in love with Sylvia. Well, as to that, of course, I can't say.' 'If she thinks so, she's probably right,' interrupted Frankie.
'A woman would know all right about her own husband.' 'Well, granting that that's the case, it doesn't necessarily mean that the man's a dangerous criminal. Lots of respectable citizens fall in love with other people's wives.' 'There's her belief that he wants to murder her,' urged Frankie.
Roger looked at her quizzically.
'You take that seriously?' 'She believes it, anyhow.' Roger nodded and lit a cigarette.
'The question is, how much attention to pay that belief of hers,' he said. 'It's a creepy sort of place, the Grange, full of queer customers. Living there would be inclined to upset a woman's balance, especially if she were of the timid nervous type.' 'Then you don't think it's true?' 'I don't say that. She probably believes quite honestly that he is trying to kill her - but is there any foundation in fact for that belief? There doesn't seem to be.' Frankie remembered with curious clearness Moira saying, 'It's just nerves.' And somehow the mere fact that she had said that seemed to Frankie to point to the fact that it was not nerves, but she found it difficult to know how to explain her point of view to Roger.
Meanwhile the young man was going on: 'Mind you, if you could show that Nicholson had been in Marchbolt on the day of the cliff tragedy that would be very different, or if we could find any definite motive linking him with Carstairs, but it seems to me you're ignoring the real suspects.' 'What real suspects?' 'The - what did you call them - Haymans?' 'Caymans.' 'That's it. Now, they are undoubtedly in it up to the hilt.
First, there's the false identification of the body. Then there's their insistence on the point of whether the poor fellow said anything before he died. And I think it's logical to assume, as you did, that the Buenos Aires offer came from, or was arranged for, by them.' 'It's a bit annoying,' said Frankie, 'to have the most strenuous efforts made to get you out of the way because you know something - and not to know yourself what the something you know is. Bother - what a mess one gets into with words.' 'Yes,' said Roger grimly, 'that was a mistake on their part. A mistake that it's going to take them all their rime to remedy.' 'Oh!' cried Frankie. 'I've just thought of something. Up to now, you see, I've been assuming that the photograph of Mrs Cayman was substituted for the one of Moira Nicholson.' 'I can assure you,' said Roger gravely, 'that I have never treasured the likeness of a Mrs Cayman against my heart. She sounds a most repulsive creature.' 'Well, she was handsome in a way,' admitted Frankie. 'A sort of bold, coarse, vampish way. But the point is this: Carstairs must have had her photograph on him as well as Mrs Nicholson's.' Roger nodded.
'And you think -' he suggested.
'I think one was love and the other was business! Carstairs was carrying about the Cayman's photograph for a reason. He wanted it identified by somebody, perhaps. Now, listen - what happens? Someone, the male Cayman perhaps, is following him and, seeing a good opportunity, steals up behind him in the mist and gives him a shove. Carstairs goes over the cliff with a startled cry. Male Cayman makes off as fast as he can; he doesn't know who may be about. We'll say that he doesn't know that Alan Carstairs is carrying about that photograph.
What happens next? The photograph is published ' 'Consternation in the Cayman menage,' said Roger helpfully.
