the remand prison

Mr. Tertius broke the significant silence which followed. He shook his head sadly, and sighed deeply.

“Ah, those buts!” he said. “As you remarked just now, Cox-Raythwaite, there is always a but. Now, this particular one—what is it?”

“Let me finish my sentence,” responded the Professor. “I say, I do not believe Barthorpe to be guilty of murder, though guilty enough of a particularly mean, dirty, and sneaking conspiracy to defraud his cousin. Yes, innocent of murder—but it will be a stiff job to prove his innocence. As things stand, he’ll be hanged safe enough! You know what our juries are, Tertius—evidence such as that which has been put before the coroner and the magistrate will be quite sufficient to damn him at the Old Bailey. Ample!”

“What do you suggest, then?” asked Mr. Tertius.

“Suggestion,” answered the Professor, “is a difficult matter. But there are two things—perhaps more, but certainly two—on which I want light. The first is—nobody has succeeded in unearthing the man who went to the House of Commons to see Jacob on the night of the murder. In spite of everything, advertisements and all the rest of it, he’s never come forward. If you remember, Halfpenny had a theory that the letter and the object which Mountain saw Jacob hand to that man were a note to the Safe Deposit people and the key of the safe. Now we know that’s not so, because no one ever brought any letter to the Safe Deposit people and nobody’s ever opened the safe. Halfpenny, too, believed, during the period of the police officials’ masterly silence, that that man had put himself in communication with them. Now we know that the police have never heard anything whatever of him, have never traced him. I’m convinced that if we could unearth that man we should learn something. But how to do it, I don’t know.”

“And the other point?” asked Selwood, after a pause during which everybody seemed to be ruminating deeply. “You mentioned two.”

“The other point,” replied the Professor, “is one on which I am going to make a practical suggestion. It’s this—I believe that Barthorpe told the truth in that statement of his which I’ve just read to you, but I should like to know if he told all the truth—all! He may have omitted some slight thing, some infinitesimal circumstance——”

“Do you mean about himself or—what?” asked Selwood.

“I mean some very—or seemingly very—slight thing, during his two visits to the estate office that night, which, however slight it may seem, would form a clue to the real murderer,” answered the Professor. “He may have seen something, noticed something, and forgotten it, or not attached great importance to it. And, in short,” he continued, with added emphasis, “in short, my friends, Barthorpe must be visited, interviewed, questioned—not merely by his legal advisers, but by some friend, and the very person to do it”—here he turned and laid his great hand on Peggie’s shoulder—“is—you, my dear!”

“I!” exclaimed Peggie.

“You, certainly! Nobody better. He will tell you what he would tell no one else,” said the Professor. “You’re the person. Am I not right, Tertius?”

“I think you are right,” assented Mr. Tertius. “Yes, I think so.”

“But—he’s in prison!” said Peggie. “Will they let me?”

“Oh, that’s all right,” answered the Professor. “Halfpenny will arrange that like winking. You must go at once—and Selwood there will go with you. Far better for you two young people to go than for either Halfpenny, or Tertius, or myself. Youth invites confidence.”

Peggie turned and looked at Selwood.

“You’ll go?” she asked.

Selwood felt his cheeks flush and rose to conceal his sudden show of feeling. “I’ll go anywhere and do anything!” he answered quietly. “I don’t know whether my opinion’s worth having, but I think exactly as Professor Cox-Raythwaite does about this affair. But—who’s the guilty man? Is it—can it be Burchill? If what Barthorpe Herapath says about that will affair is true, Burchill is cunning and subtle enough for——”

“Burchill, my dear lad, is at present out of our ken,” interrupted Cox-Raythwaite. “Barthorpe, however, is very much within it, and Halfpenny must arrange for you two to see him without delay. And once closeted with him, you must talk to him for his soul’s good—get him to search his memory, to think of every detail he can rake up—above everything, if there’s anything he’s keeping back, beg him, on your knees if necessary, to make a clean breast of it. Otherwise——”

Two days later Peggie, sick at heart, and Selwood, nervous and fidgety, sat in a room which gave both of them a feeling as of partial suffocation. It was not that it was not big enough for two people, or for six people, or for a dozen people to sit in—there was space for twenty. What oppressed them was the horrible sense of formality, the absence of life, colour, of anything but sure and solid security, the intrusive spick-and-spanness, the blatant cleanliness, the conscious odour of some sort of soap, used presumably for washing floors and walls, the whole crying atmosphere of incarceration. The barred window, the pictureless walls, the official look of the utterly plain chairs and tables, the grilles of iron bars which cut the place in half—these things oppressed the girl so profoundly that she felt as if a sharp scream was the only thing that would relieve her pent-up feelings. And as she sat there with thumping heart, dreading the appearance of her cousin behind those bars, yet wishing intensely that he would come, Peggie had a sudden fearful realization of what it really meant to fall into the hands of justice. There, somewhere close by, no doubt, Barthorpe was able to move hands and feet, legs and arms, body and head—but within limits. He could pace a cell, he could tramp round an exercise yard, he could eat and drink, he could use his tongue when allowed, he could do many things—but always within limits. He was held—held by an unseen power which could materialize, could make itself very much seen, at a second’s notice. There he would stop until he was carried off to his trial; he would come and go during that trial, the unseen power always holding him. And one day he would either go out of the power’s clutches—free, or he would be carried off, not to this remand prison but a certain cell in another place in which he would sit, or lounge, or lie, with nothing to do, until a bustling, businesslike man came in one morning with a little group of officials and in his hand a bundle of leather straps. Held!—by the strong, never-relaxing clutch of the law. That——

“Buck up!” whispered Selwood, in the blunt language of irreverent, yet good-natured, youth. “He’s coming!”

Peggie looked up to see Barthorpe staring at her through the iron bars. He was not over good to look at. He had a two days’ beard on his face; his linen was not fresh; his clothes were put on untidily; he stood with his hands in his pockets lumpishly—the change wrought by incarceration, even of that comparative sort, was great. He looked both sulky and sheepish; he gave Selwood no more than a curt nod; his first response to his cousin was of the nature of a growl.

“Hanged if I know what you’ve come for!” he said. “What’s the good of it? You may mean well, but——”

“Oh, Barthorpe, how can you!” exclaimed Peggie. “Of course we’ve come! Do you think it possible we shouldn’t come? You know very well we all believe you innocent.”

“Who’s all?” demanded Barthorpe, half-sneeringly. “Yourself, perhaps, and the parlour-maid!”

“All of us,” said Selwood, thinking it was time a man spoke. “Cox-Raythwaite, Mr. Tertius, myself. That’s a fact, anyhow, so you’d better grasp it.”

Barthorpe straightened himself and looked keenly at Selwood. Then he spoke naturally and simply.

“I’m much obliged to you, Selwood,” he said. “I’d shake hands with you if I could. I’m obliged to the others, too—especially to old Tertius—I’ve wronged him, no doubt. But”—here his face grew dark and savage—“if you only knew how I was tricked by that devil! Is he caught?—that’s what I want to know.”

“No!” answered Selwood. “But never mind him—we’ve come here to see what we can do for you. That’s the important thing.”

“What can anybody do?” said Barthorpe, with a mirthless laugh. “You know all the evidence. It’s enough—they’ll hang me on it!”

“Barthorpe, you mustn’t!” expostulated Peggie. “That’s not the way to treat things. Tell him,” she went on, turning to Selwood, “tell him all that Professor Cox-Raythwaite said the other night.”

Selwood repeated the gist of the Professor’s arguments and suggestions, and Barthorpe began to show some interest. But at the end he shook his head.

“I don’t know that there’s anything more that I can tell,” he said. “Whatever anybody may think, I told the entire truth about myself and this affair in that statement before the magistrate. Of course, you know they didn’t want me to say a word—my legal advisers, I mean. They were dead against it. But you see, I was resolved on it—I wanted it to get in the papers. I told everything in that. I tried to put it as plainly as I could. No—I’ve told the main facts.”

“But aren’t there any little facts, Barthorpe?” asked Peggie. “Can’t you think of any small thing—was there nothing that would give—I don’t know how to put it.”

“Anything that you can think of that would give a clue?” suggested Selwood. “Was there nothing you noticed—was there anything——”

Barthorpe appeared to be thinking; then to be hesitating—finally, he looked at Selwood a little shamefacedly.

“Well, there were one or two things that I didn’t tell,” he said. “I—the fact is, I didn’t think they were of importance. One of them was about that key to the Safe Deposit. You know you and I couldn’t find it when we searched the office that morning. Well, I had found it. Or rather, I took it off the bunch of keys. I wanted to search the safe at the Safe Deposit myself. But I never did. I don’t know whether the detectives have found it or not—I threw it into a drawer at my office in which there are a lot of other keys. But, you know, there’s nothing in that—nothing at all.”

“You said one or two other things just now,” remarked Selwood. “That’s one—what’s the other?”

Barthorpe hesitated. The three were not the only occupants of that gloomy room, and though the official ears might have been graven out of stone, he felt their presence.

“Don’t keep anything back, Barthorpe,” pleaded Peggie.

“Oh, well!” responded Barthorpe. “I’ll tell you, though I don’t know what good it will do. I didn’t tell this, because—well, of course, it’s not exactly a thing a man likes to tell. When I looked over Uncle Jacob’s desk, just after I found him dead, you know, I found a hundred-pound note lying there. I put it in my pocket. Hundred-pound notes weren’t plentiful, you know,” he went on with a grim smile. “Of course, it was a shabby thing to do, sort of robbing the dead, you know, but——”

“Do you see any way in which that can help?” asked Selwood, whose mind was not disposed to dwell on nice questions of morality or conduct. “Does anything suggest itself?”

“Why, this,” answered Barthorpe, rubbing his chin. “It was a brand-new note. That’s puzzled me—that it should be lying there amongst papers. You might go to Uncle Jacob’s bank and find out when he drew it—or rather, if he’d been drawing money that day. He used, as you and I know, to draw considerable amounts in notes. And—it’s only a notion—if he’d drawn anything big that day, and he had it on him that night, why, there’s a motive there. Somebody may have known he’d a considerable amount on him and have followed him in there. Don’t forget that I found both doors open when I went there! That’s a point that mustn’t be overlooked.”

“There’s absolutely nothing else you can think of?” asked Selwood.

Barthorpe shook his head. No—there was nothing—he was sure of that. And then he turned eagerly to the question of finding Burchill. Burchill, he was certain, knew more than he had given him credit for, knew something, perhaps, about the actual murder. He was a deep, crafty dog, Burchill—only let the police find him!——

Time was up, then, and Peggie and Selwood had to go—their last impression that of Barthorpe thrusting his hands in his pockets and lounging away to his enforced idleness. It made the girl sick at heart, and it showed Selwood what deprivation of liberty means to a man who has hitherto been active and vigorous.

“Have we done any good?” asked Peggie, drawing a deep breath of free air as soon as they were outside the gates. “Any bit of good?”

“There’s the affair of the bank-note,” answered Selwood. “That may be of some moment. I’ll go and report progress on that, anyway.”

He put Peggie into her car to go home, and himself hailed a taxi-cab and drove straight to Mr. Halfpenny’s office, where Professor Cox-Raythwaite and Mr. Tertius had arranged to meet him.

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