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I drove to Sherryman Street, got the necklace, and returned to Victoria just in time to catch the six o'clock express. I left the train at Weydene, and walked across the fields to the moat-house. It was quite dark when I reached there. I crossed the back bridge over the moat and went to the door in the left wing, as we had arranged. To my surprise it was locked.
The baronet greeted Colwyn with his gentle unfailing courtesy, and Musard shook hands with him heartily. The fact that Phil had brought him to the moat-house was in itself sufficient to ensure a gracious reception from Miss Heredith, but as soon as she saw Colwyn she felt impelled to like him on his own account.
He welcomed the opportunity of working unquestioned, because he was not prepared to disclose the statements of Nepcote and Hazel Rath to any of the inmates of the moat-house until he had tested the feasibility of both stories in the setting of the crime. "It has all turned out very fortunately, so far," was the thought which arose in his mind. "And now to work." He glanced at his watch.
Religion, hypocrisy, smugness, plausibility; these were the commonest counterfeit qualities of criminals; not dignity, worth, and pride. There was, of course, the possibility that Miss Heredith, grown imperious with her long unquestioned sway at the moat-house, had quarrelled with the young wife, and committed the murder in a sudden gust of passion.
The recollection of the incidents of his visit to the moat-house came thronging into Merrington's mind at this reply. "Did you see your mother when you got downstairs on the night of the murder?" he asked. "Not at first. She came in afterwards." "How long afterwards?" The girl, struck by a new note in his voice, looked at him with horror in her widened eyes.
"But what was her motive for committing such an atrocious crime?" asked Captain Stanhill in bewilderment. "Jealousy," responded Merrington promptly. "I saw the possibility of that motive as soon as I heard Milly Saker's story, and learnt that Hazel Rath had lived for some years in the moat-house.
Heredith to produce it on the following day, and it was arranged between them that when he reached the moat-house that night he was to enter the unused door in the left wing, which was to be previously unlocked for him, and was to wait on the staircase until Mrs. Heredith was able to steal down to him and obtain the jewels.
Sergeant Lumbe's brain such as it was was in too much of a whirl to permit him to talk coherently; Tufnell, habitually a taciturn individual, had been rendered more so than usual by the events of the night; and Caldew was plunged into such a reverie of pleasurable expectation, regarding the outcome of his investigations of the moat-house murder, that the stages of his promotion through the grades of detective, sub-superintendent, and superintendent, flashed through his mind as rapidly as telegraph poles flit past a traveller in a railway carriage.
Whether that fact squares with your own theory or not, it is too important to be disregarded or overlooked. That is why I left the moat-house immediately I discovered it. I felt that you had been ignorantly misled, and that it was only right you should be told without delay." Merrington was conscious of that evanescent feeling which men call gratitude.
He was a sound judge of cattle and horses, but of human nature he knew nothing whatever, and his first act, on being informed of the murder at the moat-house, was to ring up Scotland Yard and request it to send down one of its most trusted officials to investigate the circumstances.
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