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"I cannot say that I have any particular suspicions," the young man replied. "I do not know what to think, but I should like to have this terrible mystery cleared up. I have not seen Nepcote since the day of the murder to ask him about the revolver. He said good-bye to me before he left, and I understood that he had received a wire from the War Office recalling him to the front.
That doesn't matter very much either, because the evidence against her is so strong that she is bound to be convicted. Can you tell me anything about the revolver, Mr. Heredith? Do you recognize it?" Phil was turning the revolver over in his hands, examining it closely. "Yes," he said. "I recognize it. It belongs to Captain Nepcote." "Captain Nepcote? Who is he?"
"Why did Hazel Rath keep silence?" he asked. "Women have made greater sacrifices for love," Colwyn gently replied. "Hazel Rath loved him, and kept silence to shield him. She would not have spoken at all if suspicion had not fastened on Nepcote, and even when she did speak she kept something back. We may now learn later what actually passed between Hazel and Mrs. Heredith in the bedroom that night.
Nepcote has plenty of time to take advantage of Merrington's blunder, if there is any occasion for him to do so. No matter what his explanation is, the fact remains that he was in England, and not in France, on the night the murder was committed, and I propose to find out how he spent the time.
But Colwyn silenced him with an imperative glance. "At the time you came to see me, you believed that Captain Nepcote had murdered your wife?" he said, facing Phil. "I did." "Do you mind telling me now on what ground you based that belief?" "I fail to recognize your right to cross-question me," replied the young man haughtily, "but I will answer your question.
The point to which I want to draw your attention is the extreme slightness and smallness of the revolver with which Mrs. Heredith was killed. As Captain Nepcote told Merrington yesterday, it is little more than a toy." "That struck me as soon as I saw it," said Caldew. "But I do not see what bearing the fact has on the case, one way or another."
It seemed to Colwyn that not only had Merrington's ruffled dignity led his judgment astray in an attempt to fit the discovery of the missing necklace into his own theory of the case, but it had caused him to commit a grave mistake in putting Nepcote on his guard at a moment when the utmost circumspection of investigation was necessary.
With a belated but unconscious recognition of an intelligence which far surpassed his own, Merrington felt that it would be worth while to have another talk with Colwyn, in the hope of finding some way out of the perplexities in which he had plunged himself by permitting Nepcote to escape.
As Colwyn lifted the telephone receiver to summon a doctor, the thought occurred to him that, if the immediate problem of the disposal of Nepcote had been settled by his illness, his inability to answer questions necessitated his own return to the moat-house without delay. In any case, that course was inevitable after what he had just heard.
"Yes, but you do not know that the detectives have not been able to establish the ownership of the weapon until to-day. They were under the impression that it belonged to the moat-house, but neither my father nor aunt was able to settle the point. Detective Caldew visited the moat-house to-day to see if I could identify it. I immediately recognized it as the property of Captain Nepcote."