Chapter SEVENTEEN: A Diamond Cluster

It was a novel experience for Andrew Macleod to find himself standing up in a court of law committing wilful perjury. He could hardly believe that it was he who was speaking so calmly.

“Yes,” he said, “I saw the door of Merrivan’s house open, and a little while after I saw a woman coming across the green.”

“At what time was this?”

“Eleven o’clock. The fact is, the clock of Beverley Church was striking eleven as she passed.”

“You could not distinguish her features?”

“No, your honour; the moon was obscured that night.”

That concluded the evidence, and the jury retired. They returned in half an hour with a verdict of wilful murder against Abraham Selim. They had been practically directed to that verdict by the coroner.

Downer had not come to court. Andy had looked round in search of him, but he was neither at the reporters’ table nor in the body of the little hall where the inquest was held.

He stopped to chat a moment with Mr. Boyd Salter and a representative of the Public Prosecutor’s department, and then he walked back to the village, having very much the same state of mind towards Mr. Downer as Stella had had towards him on the first day they had met.

He walked so slowly that Merrivan’s lawyer was able to overtake him.

“The story about Mr. Merrivan being in the clutches of a moneylender is nonsense,” said that gentleman, whose name was Vetch. “Mr. Merrivan was a rich man.”

“Did he leave a will? You did not mention that in your evidence,” said Andy.

“None has been discovered,” said the other, shaking his head. “The estate will go to Mr. Wilmot unless a nearer relative turns up.”

Andy wondered how much truth there was in the story that Merrivan was married. A search had been made of the marriage registers, but no trace of such a marriage had been unearthed.

“You described Merrivan as a merchant. What does that mean exactly? In what particular branch of merchandise did he trade?”

Mr. Vetch shook his head.

“I haven’t the slightest idea. He was very reticent about his business affairs and did not come to us until he had retired. I have an idea he was in the tea trade.”

“What makes you think that?” asked Andy quickly.

“He was rather fastidious about tea. I think it was the only commodity in his household in which he took the slightest interest. Often when I have been up at his house and the tea has been brought in, he has asked me what I thought of it, very much as a man who is a connoisseur of wines would ask you to pass an opinion on some old port.”

They had turned into Beverley Green road when they came in sight of a man who was strolling in the same direction.

“Isn’t that a reporter, a man named Downer? I saw him this morning. A very intelligent fellow,” said Vetch. “We discussed that new judgment in the High Court on the liability of agents. He seems very well read in law.”

“In everything,” said Andy grimly. “I suppose he didn’t ask you anything about Merrivan’s private affairs?”

“If he had I shouldn’t have told him,” said the lawyer. “I am too old a bird to be caught discussing my clients’ affairs. The only subject we did discuss was quite innocuous—the cost of living!”

“In what respect?” asked Andy curiously.

“He was suggesting that it must have cost Merrivan a lot of money to run that house. It hadn’t occurred to me to check his expenditure, but I did then. Of course, I didn’t show him the bills.”

“If you had the bills on the table you showed them to him,” said Andy. “That fellow can read upside down. Was there any especial bill—any exceptionally heavy bill amongst them?”

“One for £130,” said the lawyer. “It wasn’t exactly a bill, but a memorandum written in Mr. Merrivan’s hand—‘Stelling Bros., £130.’ What it was for I do not know. Who are Stellings?”

Andy did not enlighten him.

Stellings were the biggest jewellers in town, and that memorandum which the methodical Mr. Merrivan had jotted down, probably after he had destroyed the bill, was the price of the diamond cluster he had purchased in anticipation of his easy conquest.

By this time they were within earshot of Downer, and Andy discreetly changed the subject.

“No, I didn’t come to the inquest,” said Downer. “I had one or two calls to make, and inquests bore me anyway. Nothing came out, I suppose?”

“Nothing that would enlighten us and which is not already published,” said Andy.

At this point the lawyer left them. He had to settle accounts with Merrivan’s household.

“Has anything come out about a diamond cluster Merrivan bought four or five days before his death?” asked Downer, slashing at the grass with his walking-stick, and apparently interested in nothing more than the decapitation of a daisy. “I think it must have been the ring that the inspector found on the green,” he went on. “Queer thing, old Merrivan buying a diamond cluster and then chucking it away. It looks almost as if he bought it for somebody who hated him so much that as soon as she got out of the house—say at about eleven o’clock at night—she pulled it off her finger and threw it as far away from her as she could.”

“That idea occurred to me also,” said Andy. “The woman who passed under my window may have done almost anything between the time she walked out of Merrivan’s house and the time she came into view.”

There was a silence, and then:

“There was a policeman on duty at this end of Beverley High Street,” said Downer. “He was waiting outside a house. A servant had brought him out some coffee, and he was chatting to her from eleven to half-past. Nobody passed from eleven until twenty minutes after.”

He was still engaged in decapitating wild flowers and did not once look at Andy.

“She may have gone another way. There are two ends to the road,” said Andy.

Another silence, and then Downer went on monotonously:

“A cyclist policeman started out at ten minutes to eleven from Hylton Cross Roads—that’s the other end of the road—and pedalled into Beverley. He saw nobody until he came up to the policeman who was talking to the servant. He had a bright acetylene lamp in the front of his machine, and the road is fairly narrow. She couldn’t even have hidden in the shadow of a hedge, could she?”

“It is a curious case altogether,” agreed Andy. “The woman may have retraced her footsteps after I went away from the window. I went to bed a little later.”

“You mean, she may have gone back to Merrivan’s?” Downer raised his eyes. “Gone back after she had thrown away her ring?”

“She may have lost it, that is an explanation,” said Andy, “and, discovering her loss, may have gone back to look for it.”

“The ring was found near the road,” persisted the indefatigable Downer. “She either threw it away or else she didn’t come straight across the green, as you said. The centre of the green is about eighty-five yards from the place where the ring was found.”

“Eighty-six,” said Andy gravely, and Downer laughed.

“I agree with you that there is not much in the woman incident,” he said. “These elderly men have queer friends. She was probably some slut from the village.”

He fixed the detective with his eyes, but Andy did not flinch. This man knew. How he knew—whether it was clever deduction or information received—he did not bother to speculate upon.

“I don’t think we ought to take away Merrivan’s character,” he said. “The man lived a very wholesome life, so far as we know.”

“She didn’t commit the murder,” said Downer with conviction, “but she ought to be cleared up. Scottie busy?” he asked abruptly, and Andy laughed.

“Very. He is temporarily a reformed character. I believe he is posing for Mr. Nelson, an artist who lives in these parts. But I needn’t tell you anything about him, Downer. A sleuth like you will have his biography at his finger-tips.”

“He has gone in for a course of reformation himself, hasn’t he?” said Downer. “Yes, I’ve made enquiries in the ordinary way of business. A very charming girl, Miss Nelson.”

“Very,” agreed Andy, “a very charming girl.”

Downer nodded.

“I suppose she is very upset about the murder. She was a friend of Mr. Merrivan’s, wasn’t she? He lent her £300 about nine months ago. Of course,” he added apologetically, “that is no business of mine or yours. And it is not a very terrible thing for a lady to borrow money from a man old enough to be her father.”

This was indeed news to Andy, but he knew that Downer was not speaking at random.

“How did you get to know that?” he asked.

“I forget who told me,” said Downer with a yawn. “So long. I’ll see you later.”

One of his own men had come down to help him prepare a report on the crime, and to him Andy gave an urgent commission.

“Go into the town and find out whether Downer was here last night and whom he saw. He probably stayed at the Beverley Hotel.”

Andy’s surmise was not far from the mark. Mr. Downer had arrived on the evening train, and he had as a guest to dinner a clerk of the Micham Farmers Bank.

“He is some sort of relation of Downer’s,” reported the detective on the telephone. “The clerk hasn’t been in Beverley very long.”

“And he won’t be much longer,” said Andy grimly.

That was obviously the source of Downer’s information. The fact that his relative would certainly be fired if he had betrayed the secrets of the bank meant no more to Mr. Downer than if a similar misfortune had overtaken his worst enemy.

Money was under discussion in the Nelson household that afternoon. Mr. Nelson came in from his study wearing his long white coat, and the girl had expected him. He had been very quiet all the morning, hardly spoke at lunch, and she was a little apprehensive, because these signs of an unquiet spirit usually had only one consequence.

He shut the door leading into the passage which connected with the studio and then went back to make sure that it was shut.

“Stella,” he said, “I woke rather early this morning and I did a lot of thinking. Do you remember that money we borrowed from poor Merrivan, or, rather, that you borrowed?”

She nodded.

“Did we ever pay it back?”

She nodded again.

“Where did you get the money to pay it back? I remember that I was in a tremendous hole when I sent you to get it.”

She did not reply.

“It was £300, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, father,” she said quietly.

“Where the dickens did we get £300 to pay him back? You are sure we did pay him?”

“Oh, yes, father,” she said. “I have the receipt.”

He sat down and for a long time examined his nails, his forehead knit.

“I’ve only the vaguest idea about it,” he said. “It comes to me like scraps of a dream. But was the repayment made during that”—he hesitated—“that horrible week I gave you?”

He had not over-described those seven days of mental torture, during which he had never once appeared in the house wholly sober.

“I got hold of a lot of money just about then, didn’t I? Where did I get it from?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He started drumming his fingers on the table nervously, irritatingly.

“It is strange,” he said. “I invariably associate that time with some unpleasant happening—something that makes my blood run cold—and I don’t know what it is. Of course, it may be just a realisation of my beastliness, but I can’t think it was that. I did not do anything particularly outrageous, did I?”

“No, father,” she said. The consequence of his outrageous deed had been wiped out with its charred evidence.

“You know of nothing?” he insisted, watching her narrowly. “I used to have my maudlin moments of contrition even in that period, didn’t I? And if I had done anything wrong I should have told you. Where on earth did the money come from?”

She did not help him to discover. The burden of his sin she had borne at its heaviest. She would not share the memory of that crushing load.

At dusk Stella was watering a flower-bed under the shadow of the hedge which separated the front garden from the road. Two men were walking past, and she caught a scrap of their conversation. It was rather one-sided, for the speaker gave his companion very little opportunity of getting a word in.

“I thought when I saw you at first, Mr. Wilmot, that you were going to be difficult. You quiet, deep men are always the most baffling to a reporter——”

Mr. Downer was discussing a subject very dear to Mr. Arthur Wilmot, namely, Mr. Arthur Wilmot.