that the news editor was regarding him with curiosity: ‘I’m sorry, old man; you mustn’t ask me to handle the story. You’d better put Blackwood on it. It should be a good yarn, but I’m rather mixed up in it. I may be called as a witness.’
Few things are calculated to startle the news editor of a great morning newspaper, but this time Silvervale had certainly succeeded. To tell the truth, the young man was astonished at his own scruples. He made haste to escape before he could be questioned.
Out in Fleet Street he hailed a taxi and was driven straight to the Palatial Hotel. A couple of men were in the big hall, smilingly parrying the questions of half a dozen journalists. One of them shook his head as Silvervale pushed his way to the front.
‘Good Lord! Here’s another vulture. It’s no good, Mr Silvervale. We’ve just been telling your friends here that we don’t know anything. The doctors have not finished their examination yet.’
‘But it looks like suicide, Mr Forrester,’ interposed one of the crowd. ‘You’ve found a pistol.’
A knowing smile extended on Detective-Inspector Forrester’s genial countenance. ‘That won’t work, boys,’ he remonstrated with a reproving shake of his head. ‘You don’t draw me.’
Silvervale managed to get the detective aside. ‘You must give me five minutes,’ he whispered hastily. ‘I know who killed her. I came over in the same boat.’
Forrester thrust his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets. His brow puckered a little, and he studied the journalist’s face thoughtfully. For all his casual unworried air, his instinct rather than anything definite in the preliminary investigations had warned him that the case was likely to prove a difficult one. A detective—the real detective—is quite as willing to take short cuts in his work as any other business man.
‘The deuce you do,’ he said. ‘Come, let’s get out of this. Half a moment, Roker.’
His assistant disengaged himself from the other newspaper men, and Forrester led the way to the lift. At the third floor they emerged. Very quietly the door of the lift closed behind them, and half-unconsciously Silvervale found himself tiptoeing along the corridor, although in any event the soft carpet would have deadened all sound. A man standing stiffly against a white door flung it open as they approached. Within, a couple of men were bending over something on a couch, and two more were busy near the window overlooking the river. No one looked up. Forrester passed straight through to another and smaller room, and fitted his burly form to a basket arm-chair. He waved Silvervale to another one.
‘And now fire away, sonny,’ he said.
Concisely, in quick, succinct sentences, Silvervale told his story. As he concluded, Forrester drew a worn briar pipe from his pocket and packed it with a meditative forefinger.
‘Are you writing anything about this?’
‘Not a word. I know I may be wanted as a witness.’
‘That’s true.’ The inspector puffed contemplatively for a moment. ‘Then there’s this, I don’t mind telling you: That chap downstairs was right. There was a pistol—a five-chambered revolver—found clutched in that woman’s hand. But de Reszke is missing. He never came with her to the hotel.’
‘Then you think it is suicide after all?’
The detective leaned forward and levelled a heavy forefinger at his questioner. ‘You’ve earned a right to know something of this business, Mr Silvervale. It’s no suicide. The body was discovered by the maid just after five o’clock. No one had heard a shot, but that’s nothing—these walls are pretty well sound-proof. The dead woman was lying on a couch with the revolver in her hand—so the girl’s story runs. She thought her mistress was asleep, and it was only when she touched her and the weapon fell to the floor that she discovered she was dead. She was shot through the left eye.’
‘I see. You mean a woman wouldn’t kill herself that way. She’d poison or drown herself—some bloodless death.’
‘There is something in that, but it proves little by itself. But there are not many people who’d shoot themselves deliberately in the eye. It’s curious, but there—But to my mind the conclusive thing is the pistol. Any student of medical jurisprudence will tell you that usually it needs considerable force to relax the grip of a corpse from anything it is clutching at the moment of death. No, Mr Silvervale, this is a carefully calculated murder, if ever there was one. And I think your information will help us to fix the man. Roker’—he addressed his companion—‘you might get hold of the maid again. Get a full description of de Reszke, and there’s bound to be a photograph somewhere. Take ’em along to the Yard and have ’em circulated. We merely want to question him, mind. Now, Mr Silvervale, we’ll see what the doctors say.’
The two doctors, the police divisional surgeon and the medical man who had been first called on the discovery of the murder, had finished their examination as Forrester passed into the next room. He spoke a few words in an undertone to the surgeon, who nodded assentingly.
The two men by the window were still busy. Now Silvervale had an opportunity to see what occupied them. They were busy with scale plans of the room whereon were shown the relative positions of everything in the room, marked out even to inches. Photographs, he surmised, must already have been taken.
Forrester seemed to have forgotten Silvervale’s existence. As soon as the doctors had gone, the inspector had extracted a small bottle of black powder from his pocket and sprinkled it delicately over the open pages of a book resting on a table a couple of yards from the couch. Presently he blew the stuff away. The finger-prints had developed in relief on the white margin.
‘There’s a blotting-pad over there on the writing-table, Mr Silvervale,’ he said; ‘would you mind helping me for a moment?’
Forrester was cool and business-like, yet it was very gently that he lifted the dead white hands and impressed the finger-tips on a sheet of paper on top of the pad. Silently he compared the impressions with those on the book.
‘I’m only an amateur at this finger-print game,’ he said at last. ‘Grant ought to have been here. See if you make these prints agree, Mr Silvervale.’
Silvervale carried the book to the window and bent his brows over it. He found it slow work, but at last he raised his head. ‘These are her thumb-prints on the outer margin,’ he said. ‘The one at the bottom of the book is not hers.’
‘That’s how I make it. Now we can get a fair theory of how the thing was done: Mrs de Reszke was on the couch reading. The murderer entered softly from the corridor, closing the door behind him. She looked up and placed the book beside her. He must have fired point-blank. Then to work out his idea of suicide he placed the pistol in her hand, and, picking up the book, put it on the table. Here’s where we start from—a piece of indisputable proof when we catch the murderer.’
A little contempt at the apparent deliberation of the detective—at the finesse wasted on what seemed an obvious case—had come to Silvervale’s mind. He hazarded a suggestion; Forrester grinned.
‘I’ll bet a dollar I know what you’re thinking. I’m wasting my time meddling with details while the murderer’s escaping. Do you know I had five men here besides these’—he nodded towards the draughtsmen—‘questioning every one who might know anything about the case? Mrs de Reszke has received no one; no one resembling her husband has been seen in the hotel. Do you know that there is not one railway station in London, not one hotel that is not even now being searched for a trace of de Reszke? We are not so slow as our critics think. If de Reszke did this murder he won’t get away, you can take it from me. There’s plenty of people trying to catch him—I’ve seen to that.’
He checked himself suddenly as if he realised that he had for a while lost his wonted imperturbability. ‘I thought you knew better than to run away with the delusion that all we’ve got to do is to arrest a man we’ve fixed our suspicions on. In point of fact it is often more difficult to get material evidence of a moral certainty than to start without any