No Clue Part 42

Hastings swept on. "You have the motive, hatred of this woman here and her daughter--you have the proof of the letter sent to him making the compulsory appointment--you have his own crazy explanation of his homicidal impulse, from which, by the way, he never sought relief, a queer 'impulse' since it gave him time, hours, to plan the crime and manufacture the weapon with which he killed!"

"I said at the start," Wilton put in hoa.r.s.ely, "this man Hastings was only theorizing. If he had anything to connect me with----"

"I have!" Hastings told him, and came to a standstill in front of the sheriff, bending over him, as if to drive each statement into Crown's reluctant mind.

"He got that letter a little after five in the afternoon. He left me here, in this room, with Sloane and Webster, and was gone three-quarters of an hour. That was just before dinner. He had the second floor, on that side of the house, entirely to himself. He took a nail-file from Webster's dressing case, and in Webster's room put a sharper point on it by filing it roughly with the file-blade of his own pen knife.

"That's doubly proved: first, my magnet, with which I went over the floor in Webster's room, picked up small particles of steel. Here they are."

He produced a small packet and, without unwrapping it, handed it to Crown.

"Again: you'll find that the file-blade of his knife retained particles of the steel in the little furrows of its corrugated surface. I know, because last Sunday, as your car came up the driveway, I borrowed his knife, on the pretext of tightening a screw in the blade of mine. And I examined it."

He put up a silencing hand as Wilton forced a jeering laugh.

"But there's more to prove his manufacture and ownership of the weapon that killed the woman. He made the handle from the end of a slat on the bed in the room which I occupied that night. The inference is obvious: he didn't care to risk going outside the house to hunt for the wood he needed; he wouldn't take it from an easily visible place; and, having stolen something from one room, he paid his attention to mine. All this is the supercaution of the so-called 'smart criminal.' It matches the risk he took in returning to the body to hunt for the weapon. That was why he was there when Webster found the body.

"The handle of the dagger matches the wood of the slat I've just mentioned. You won't find that particular slat upstairs now. It was taken out of the house the next day, broken into sections and packed in his bag of golf-sticks. But there is proof in this room of the fact that he and he only made the dagger.

"You'll find in the edge of the large blade of his penknife a nick, triangular in shape, which left an unmistakable groove in the wood every time he cut into it. That little groove shows, to the naked eye, on the end of the shortened slat and on the handle of the dagger. If you doubt it----"

"Thunder!" Crown interrupted, in an awed tone. "You're right!"

He had taken the dagger from his pocket and given it minute scrutiny. He handed it now to Sloane.

Wilton, watching the scene with flaming eyes, sat motionless, his chin thrust down hard upon his collar, his face shining as if it had been polished with a cloth.

Sloane gave the dagger back to Crown before he spoke, in a wheezy, shrill key: "They're there, the marks, the grooves!"

He did not look at Wilton.

Hastings straightened to his full stature, and looked toward Wilton.

"Now, Judge Wilton," he challenged, "you said you preferred to answer the accusation here and now. Do you, still?"

Wilton, slowly raising the heavy lids of his eyes, like a man coming out of a trance, presented to him and to the others a face which, in spite of its flushed and swollen aspect, looked singularly bleak.

"It's not an accusation," he said in his roughened, grating voice. "It's a network of suppositions, of theories, of impossibilities--a crazy structure, all built on the rotten foundation of a previous misfortune."

"Arrest him, Crown!" Hastings commanded sharply.

Wilton tried to laugh, but his heavy lips merely worked in a crazy barrenness of sound. With a vague, clumsy idea of covering up his confusion, he started to light a cigar.

He stopped, hands in mid-air, when Crown, shambling to his feet, said:

"Judge, I've got to act. He's proved his case."

"Proved it!" Wilton made weak protest.

"If he hasn't, let's see your penknife."

Wilton put his hand into his trousers pocket, began the motion that would have drawn out the knife, checked it, and withdrew his hand empty.

He managed a mirthless, dreary laugh, a rattling sound that fell, dead of any feeling, from his grimacing lips.

"No, by G.o.d!" he refused. "I'll give it to neither of you. I don't have to!"

In that moment, he fell to pieces. With his thick shoulders dropping forward, he became an inert ma.s.s bundled against the table edge. The blood went out of his face, so that his cheeks hollowed, and shadows formed under his eyes. He was like the victim of a quick consumption.

Crown's eyes were on Hastings.

"That's enough," the old man said shortly.

"Too much," agreed Crown. "Judge, there's no bail--on a murder charge."

"I'm very glad," Mrs. Brace commented, a terrible satisfaction in her voice. "He pays me--at last."

In the music room Dr. Garnet had just given Lucille and Hastings a favourable report on Berne Webster's condition.

"I should so like to tell him," she said, her glance entreating; "if you'll let me! Wouldn't he get well much faster if he knew it--knew the suspense was all over--that neither he nor father's suspected any more?"

"I think," the doctor gave his opinion with exaggerated deliberation, "it might--in fact, it really will be his best medicine."

She thanked him, stars swimming in her eyes.