CHAPTER XVII.

THE STRANGE HOUSE AT SCALBY

To pretend that Paul Renishaw and the sham detective, Josiah Sawdry, were not tremendously excited by the prospect of their visit to Scalby would be both useless and foolish. Naturally enough, the two men looked forward to this interview with poor demented Rebecca Charlton with the greatest anxiety and eagerness, though no doubt each was urged forward by a totally different reason.

Thus, the journalist, for example, only cared that the innocence of his friend, Arthur Hudson, should be proved and set above the suspicion of the censorious. If that act implicated Ventris Blake--good. The man was a rogue, and it was only right that the mask of a respectable life should be torn from his features, and that he should stand revealed to the whole world as the impudent satyr he undoubtedly was. If, on the contrary, the millionaire escaped his just deserts, and some other figure loomed forward as the murderer of Aimée Blake, the venture would answer equally well. Arthur would be released. His marriage with Winifred Pontifex would be hurried forward. The girl, too, would be saved.

On the other hand, Josiah Sawdry’s thoughts were all for himself. He had mixed much too deeply in the shady throng that flit goblin-like through the dirty bye-paths of city life to care seriously whether one more innocent man was hanged, or a true love hopelessly ruined and broken. To his mind, indeed, the one factor in that expedition was his own cleverness. Had he not been the one to see that the criminal could be no other than this wild, weird creature freshly released from Brentwood Asylum? And on the principle of “to the vulture, the carcase,” or, perhaps, more politely still, “to the victor, the spoils,” was he not entitled to claim his own payment out of it? In this case, commercial and social rehabilitation and a life appointment in the snug and comfortable offices of “Palamountains Limited” that meant ease and a certain five pound a week? Consequently, his feelings were not very far different to those he had experienced in his early days in the city, when he had, to use the vernacular of the Stock Exchange, tried to “pull a good thing off.” This alliance with Paul was “a good thing,” he was certain. By hook or by crook, it must be cemented by success.

So that strangely assorted pair, the optimist and the opportunist, stepped forward briskly in the crisp January air. Maybe, neither of them was quite right in his mental outlook--maybe, the absolutely unselfish man is as foolish as the man who cannot see anything except that precise gap where he “comes in,” but from the point of view of accomplishing what they had set themselves to do, the alliance was a good one enough, and few of us to-day have any doubt as to the one person with whom we would have exchanged places had we been proffered the chance.

Very soon, too, they reached the house they sought--a picturesque but deserted looking farm residence, built about the time of Queen Elizabeth and set back some fifty yards from the road on a raised lawn which was dominated by a huge Crimean cannon. The first plot of land reached, on passing through the familiar white gate, was also grass laid, with trees running along the side, fringed by a deep, dank, stagnant pool. To this succeeded another gate, and a drive, and then the house itself, over which a strange silence and melancholy seemed to brood. The place, in point of fact, was too remote from the road for any sounds of passing traffic to penetrate, and as the farm buildings were deserted, and no fowls wandered about the yards or the orchard, there was over all a sense of infinite mystery and desolation.

“What a dreadful place for a born Londoner like Rebecca Charlton to take refuge in,” whispered Sawdry. “If she wasn’t mad when she came here, the gloom and oppressive atmosphere of this ancient pile are quite enough to wear out every nerve and sound thought she could ever have, away from her dear murky Thames and the ceaseless roll and boom of the traffic up and down Queen Victoria Street.”

“I am only afraid this may have so preyed on her mind that she will be too far gone to be of any practical use to us,” added Paul. “After all, we want something coherent out of her, remember. We shan’t be able to produce her as the real criminal unless we can more or less prove her guilt in open court.”

Sawdry took the old rust-eaten, weather-beaten knocker in his hand, and gave a knock that seemed to go reverberating through empty galleries and dozens of deserted furnitureless rooms. There followed some scuffling, scratching sounds, almost immediately afterwards. “Rats, only rats,” explained Paul, whose hearing was more acute than his companion’s, and he drew back a step and gazed up at the windows in front of the house. All were closed and shuttered, the glass being stained mud colour with storm and dust and rain.

Not a sign, indeed, showed that the place was inhabited. Not a shutter moved. The chimneys remained smokeless. Sawdry bent down and applied both ear and eye to the keyhole. Everything appeared as still and as desolate as a tomb.

“It’s no good,” he said at length rising and facing the journalist. “We can’t stay here all day when such momentous results depend on our action. We must strike at once, or the poor creature may get some other crazy notion in her head and take herself off to sea--to Holland or some God-forsaken country like that, and may never be heard of again, for her thoughts might turn to suicide and she might even plunge into the Scheldt.”

“Well, let us break in then,” returned Paul calmly. “I am no advocate of sitting down and waiting like those poor creatures did in the Bible for an angel to come down and a miracle to happen. After all, you have plenty of excuse for doing so. The woman wrote to her husband and asked him to send you up here to her at once. Well, you’ve come, that’s all.” And the Jew nodded and looked round for some suitable object with which he could smash in the panels of the door.

“Stop! Stop! don’t let us be violent,” said Paul with a shudder as he saw Sawdry’s crude preparations.

“‘Gently go-ee Monkey catch-ee,’

as ‘B.P.’ told his comrades at Mafeking. After all, a loud noise might frighten her so much that she would throw herself from an upstairs window to escape our attentions. Besides, I don’t think it will be necessary to make any real noise over the business. I forgot to tell you that once I had a lesson in housebreaking from one of the cleverest men that ever used a ‘jemmy’,” smiling, as he recalled how his experiences in this line had already proved of service to Arthur when they wished to spy on “The Three Glass Eyes” in the millionaire’s garret, and it was necessary to break into the caretaker’s deserted rooms.

A moment later Renishaw had dropped to his knees, and gently pressed his shoulder against the woodwork. As he had suspected, he now proved from the way in which the door gave in places, that no bolts had been shot in their sockets. All that stood against them indeed, was simply an antiquated lock--but as the key had been conveniently left in it, all that was necessary for any cracksman, amateur or professional, to do was to take a miniature pair of pincers (which he always carried in his revolver pocket) and to fix them on the shaft of the key and turn it, which as a matter of fact, he did with one turn of the wrist.

“Now we can enter,” he cried with a smile of gratification, and springing to his feet again he twisted round the handle of the door, which yielded, and both men stepped swiftly across the threshold.

A damp, musty smell like that of newly turned earth assailed their nostrils immediately they did so. It shewed, at all events, that the door had not been opened very recently, but as the hall was so dark, it was difficult to see very far beyond the doorway; and when the door itself was closed, so that no chance passers by might become suspicious, they found themselves completely enveloped in blackness.

Luckily, Paul carried a box of wax vestas, and lighting one of these they pressed forward to one of the rooms the door of which stood open. As they had surmised, this was bare of all decoration or furniture, but the Jew’s quick eyes caught a glimpse of an empty beer bottle containing a piece of candle in the fireplace--and instantly he pounced on this and lit the candle which was three or four inches in length.

“Now you’ve got your hands free,” he said to Paul. “Just draw your shooting iron, will you? I don’t expect for a moment that you will have to use it--that anybody will dare to molest us--but it is just as well to show even Mrs. Charlton (if she has got any glimmering of reason left) that we are quite prepared if she desires to be nasty, to be nasty too.”

Paul nodded and took out his revolver, altering the trigger to full cock. He had no sentimental objection to the use of a weapon--and he had no intention of offering himself for a target to unseen, unknown enemies without a fair chance of making himself objectionable to an equal degree in return.

A door at the far end of this room led into a passage that communicated with the kitchens, but just as he was about to open it he was certain he heard a sound like a groan come from some space beneath his feet. Instantly he stopped and listened again. Yes, there was no doubt about it. He had heard aright. There was somebody in the cellar, groaning, apparently in great distress.

Sawdry now caught the same sound, and nodding to his companion, enjoining stealth and silence, he crept softly through the doorway into the passage where he came upon a few steps that led downward to another door which evidently communicated with the cellars.

Down these he crept like a shadow, Paul following him closely. Away in the distance now they caught sight of some rays of artificial light curiously like those of their own candle, and, guided by these, they came quickly to an arched-in cellar brilliantly illuminated by candles stuck in certain beer-bottles, hundreds of which had been scattered about and literally covered the floor of the place almost to the depths of their knees.

And in the centre of these, squatted the woman they sought, Rebecca Charlton, who was seated on a truss of straw and fondling a big black rat which she had evidently only recently tamed.

For a few seconds nobody uttered a word. That strange creature remained where she was, seated on a pile of straw, crooning meaninglessly over her pet rat, and rocking herself to and fro with her eyes fixed on a piece of blank white-washed wall in front of her. At a sign from the Jew, Paul Renishaw himself quietly pocketed his revolver, and took a seat too on an upturned empty case beside Josiah Sawdry, who now did nothing but nurse the empty beer bottle bearing a lighted candle. And all about them were strewn the signs of the woman’s wild debauch--of a woman who had gone to the task with all the frenzy and delirium of the born dipsomaniac and had smashed or drunk all that she could lay her hands on.

At that moment, however, it was obvious she was sober enough. There was a steadiness about the swing of her body and the way she used her fingers and her eyes when her pet, alarmed by the presence of strangers, tried to make its escape, that showed her brain was not much out of its normal balance. Just then too she spoke--and her tones were clear and bell-like, and she came in a most unfeminine way straight to the point.

“I am glad to see you, Josiah,” she said, twisting round and facing Sawdry who contented himself with bowing. “Very glad. Somehow though I knew that you would come. It seems to me now the time never was when you were not a true friend of mine. Leastways now I need your assistance.”

“Very good,” said the Jew briskly. “I shall be very glad to give it to you. I may be blunt--but I can be relied on.” And quite unconscious of his own hypocrisy, he put the bottle he was nursing down on the floor and patted himself approvingly on the chest.

“That is so,” the woman returned, but there was no emotion or suggestion of gratitude in her voice. “You always were true where truth paid you. Why, however did you bring a gentleman, a stranger, with you? How did you know that the business I wanted you for was not quite private or confidential?”

“I couldn’t help it,” Sawdry answered quickly. “I wasn’t really equal to finding you alone. Besides, Mr. Renishaw here is a gentleman. Anything he hears now won’t be shouted all over Scarborough.”

“Very well,” replied Rebecca Charlton listlessly. “First of all, I want you to take charge of these Bank of England notes.” She fumbled in an old petticoat she was wearing, and then took therefrom a package exactly similar to the one which the newsboy had found on the Filey road and which it was supposed had been given to the telegraph-operator Drummond by Aimée Blake’s murderer, but it was considerably larger. “Count them,” she added. “In all, they ought to total two thousand. And, perhaps, after all, it is well as that gentleman came with you. He will see nobody robs you--or me!” And she gave a low mirthless laugh.

Sawdry bent down and did as he had been directed. Yes, in all they reached the respectable total of £2,000, and were also obviously genuine. Paul also checked their number and narrowly inspected each one for proof that they were not false. He had to agree they certainly stood for a very solid and positive £2,000.

“The point is, what do you want me to do with them?” said Sawdry finally, placing two very distinctive india-rubber bands around them and thrusting them into his pocket. “Open an account at some good bank for you, and invest the balance in good dividend-earning bank shares? Or would you rather I bought you some gilt-edged securities like consols or colonial inscribed stock, stuff that can’t break or melt and will be always there when you want to lay your hands on the solid?”

“Neither,” said the woman shortly. “If I had, I wouldn’t have sent for you. I’d have gone to the bank or the stockbroker myself. No, I’ll tell you what I want you to do for me. Split that two thousand into two sums of a thousand each. Take the first thousand and buy a Post Office annuity for my husband. He’ll probably drink himself to death just like I shall, but then he’ll die happy if young, and nobody will be the poorer for his loss.”

“And the other thousand?” queried the Jew greedily, moistening his lips unconsciously in the hope that after all some pickings in this unexpected windfall might come in his direction.

“Take it to the best detective that has ever chucked up his job at Scotland Yard in disgust at the wooden way they there treat men with brains. Give it to him and tell him to find the murderer of Aimée Blake.”

“My!” The candle he had taken up again almost dropped from the hands of Josiah Sawdry at the same moment as this expression of absolute stupefaction fell from his lips. There was something indeed almost ludicrous now in his looks of profound amazement. Either this woman was the most finished actress he had ever seen or, what appeared more likely, she had no hand in the doing to death of Ventris Blake’s wife--in which event where would be his promised £5 a week?

For a second his reason quite deserted him. “Oh, talk to her Renishaw,” he gasped. “I can’t. I’m stumped!” And he sprang to his feet and began to pace up and down the cellar. Paul smiled indulgently, but at the bottom he too began to fear that that house of speculation they had built in that arbour off the Filey road after they had found that gold link stamped “K” was perilously near destruction. With an effort, nevertheless, he rallied himself.

“You wish them to find the murderer of Aimée Blake!” he said turning and looking keenly at Rebecca Charlton. “But there is no need to spend any more money on that quest. They have found the criminal. It was the work of a wretch named Arthur Hudson, who is now safe enough in Scarborough police station.”

“Don’t you believe it,” retorted the woman, with a cunning shake of the head. “I know better than that. Arthur Hudson is no more guilty of the crime than I am.”

Paul’s heart gave a great leap! After all, then, his theory that Ventris Blake had really killed his wife to be free to win Winifred Pontifex might not be so far out as Sawdry had contended. He would move with caution. He seemed on the brink of great far-reaching, startling discoveries.

“But how can you be so sure of it?” he questioned. “There are plenty of witnesses against Hudson. The matter doesn’t seem to me to admit of any doubt he did it, and fled at once back to London.”

“None the less, you are wrong,” persisted the woman; and then, catching sight of Sawdry’s look of incredulity, which he had purposely made as irritating as he could, she added: “And you, Josiah, needn’t twist up your face in scorn like that. I haven’t forgotten what I said to you in our old rooms in Queen Victoria Street. I did hate Aimée Blake. I would willingly have given half my life to see her stretched dead in front of me. Only I didn’t kill her.”

“What are you doing here in Scarborough then?”

The words came from Paul--and behind them seemed a clash of steel.

“I am hiding myself as I promised a certain party.”

“Who was that party?”

“Why the real murderer of Aimée Blake of course.”

Paul and Sawdry exchanged glances. By this time they had come to have very grave doubts of the speaker’s sanity. Her replies were prompt enough and clear enough, it was true--but they led to nothing and to nowhere. Everything indeed that she said seemed to make the confusion more confounded.

The Jew now took up the conversation.

“Look here, Rebecca,” he said sharply, taking up a position straight in front of her; “put that wretched rodent you are hugging down for a moment and talk quite plainly to me. What the deuce have you been up to since you did that moonlight flit from your home? And where in this bleak, desolate, deserted hole of a house did you raise a big sum like this two thousand pounds.”

The woman gave a hoarse chuckle. “Money as ever, Josiah,” she replied tauntingly. “Always money with you gentlemen of the crooked noses--and consciences. That twist was placed on you Jews’ phizzes by your Maker to shew plainly to everyone that clapped eyes on you, that you had a twist in your mind as well. The mere sight of money sends you all demented or frantic or consumed with covetousness!”

“Well, answer my questions that’s all,” said Sawdry sullenly. “Don’t beat any more about the bush. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

“All right,” said the woman changing her tone. “I won’t chaff you any further. As a matter of fact, you annoyed me by your denseness. I will, however, be patient and explain to you more fully so that there can be no excuse for you not understanding me this time. Well, as you ought to have guessed, I did come to Scarborough to kill Aimée Blake. I bought a knife in Gray’s Inn Road for that precise purpose, and also a return tourist ticket for a sovereign at the office at King’s Cross, feeling sure that I should be able to drop on her when she took her walks abroad, and to plunge it in her and to slip off before anybody dared lift a finger to detain me.

“When I got to Scarborough I made a point of enquiring at all the principal hotels, and I soon spotted the one she was at. For some hours I hung about outside, but at length I was rewarded for she came out when it was dark and late! and quite unattended, she set off at a brisk walk along the Filey road. I followed her. My plan of action was perfected. ‘When you turn to come home again I will spring out of the shadow and bury this steel in your foul and treacherous heart,’ I told myself, ‘I will not do it a moment sooner. I will not fail a moment later.’

“For several miles she walked on. Apparently she was very excited and very determined. I too had made up my mind, and so although I got some fine chances to slip up behind her and to finish her off, I wouldn’t do it. ‘A bargain’s a bargain even to yourself;’ said I. ‘Keep it, and you will be all right.’ Only as it happened I wasn’t. The man she had gone to meet was before me, and just as she reached a lonely spot he sprang out from behind a hedge and dashed out her brains with a hedge stick.”

“A man?” queried both her hearers dumbfounded. “What man?”

“A man you ought both of you to know very well. He’s a big public character in London although this time he was made up to resemble Arthur Hudson exactly.”

“His name, his name,” cried both hearers, distracted.

“Why, the Rev. Duncan Kilroy, of course, the man at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. He it was who gave me the two thousand to shut my mouth and to come here to lie low until all the hue and cry was over.”

At first Paul could scarcely restrain a strong inclination to laugh aloud. Rebecca Charlton’s assertion appeared so preposterous. Then he chanced to turn and look at his companion. Instead of Josiah Sawdry’s face expressing incredulity and amazement, another and totally different feeling seemed struggling for expression--as though the Jew had been recalled suddenly, by a chance phrase or name, to a series of events which he had long since forgotten, and was now searching helplessly in and out amongst them--intent only on piecing them together to construct a new, a certain, and an absolutely reliable clue.

“Surely,” the journalist began irritably, “you don’t credit this amazing statement! Why, it knocks the bottom out of your own theory completely. It starts a totally new chain of surmise--the end of which might even land us in a bishop’s palace before we had finished with it!” And again he shrugged his shoulders and laughed scornfully.

“I am not so sure that I have not been in the wrong,” replied Sawdry, passing his hand nervously across his forehead. “After all, Mrs. Charlton’s words are not such a surprise as they ought to be in the circumstances. They have recalled to me a lot of things about Ventris Blake’s past which I had dismissed as absolutely irrelevant.”

“But what about your own clue?” cried Paul triumphantly, “the gold link?”

“Yes,” said the Jew, slowly, “what about that gold cuff link you lost, Mrs. Charlton? Have you any idea where you dropped it?”

“Of course I have--I let it fall in that garden off the Filey road, where the murderer of Aimée Blake washed the blood-stains off his hands. I went into the exact greenhouse he took refuge in, and, in poking about, the sleeve of my blouse caught on a rusty nail, and snapped the gold band in half. I looked everywhere for it, but I could not see it. Have you got it?” And she stretched out her fingers for it with the most natural air in the world.

Paul hesitated--but only for a second. Then he resolved to play an entirely different role with her--to appear to believe every word that she uttered; and he gave her the tiny piece of gold marked “K” without any demur. “I wish you would tell us in your own words,” he said kindly, “all that you know about the Reverend Duncan Kilroy’s association with the Blakes and my friend Arthur Hudson. At present we don’t doubt what you assert--but without more particulars, we find it very hard to understand why this well-known London clergyman should be mixed up at all in a squalid crime such as this?”

“Then you need not be,” answered Rebecca Charlton. “First and foremost, you must get fixed in your mind this fact--Duncan Kilroy and his twin-brother, who used to be employed in the same office as Mr. Hudson, namely ‘Palamountains Limited,’ and Ventris Blake have been intimate friends for a number of years. Naturally, Duncan Kilroy resented Mr. Hudson’s triumph over his twin-brother, for he had expected that his brother would not only feather his nest out of old Allen Palamountain, and would succeed to that fine business in Cheapside as a matter of course, and become one of the richest house agents in the City of London, but also that he would get the old man to leave him a nice snug fortune by which he might buy his way to very high preferment in the Church.

“As a consequence, when his twin-brother came to him, broken, despairing and hopeless, a confirmed dipsomaniac, his hatred grew beyond all bounds. Just as the brother sank lower and lower, passing through the Triple Chambers of the Drunkard’s Doom--beer, whiskey, brandy--so his determination to be revenged on Hudson grew from the plain desire to the burning wish, and then on to positive mania.

“Finally, the brother died a raving drink-maniac in a top-room of St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. By his deathbed Duncan swore to pay Arthur Hudson one even if it cost him his position in the Church. Now, in matters like this, the form which the revenge takes turns very much on the nature of the man who pants to be avenged. For instance, some cannot rest by day or by night until they have set about their task and either demolished their opponent utterly, or been propelled themselves to their own destruction. Others can wait--wait one year, two years, aye, even twenty years if necessary--and these are the most dangerous, for they go on adding blow to blow, trap to trap, torture to torture, and never, never let themselves be beaten.

“As it happened, however, chance favoured Duncan in a very curious fashion in his desire to ruin Mr. Hudson. As no doubt you have gathered by this time, this clergyman is a bad lot in every sense--and particularly where it turns upon questions of women. In the course of his nocturnal wanderings about this time, he came upon Aimée Burgoyne--in point of fact, during a visit he had paid to a fellow vicar in Peterborough. His desire to make love to her overcame every other impulse, good and bad. He hastened back to London, to my little cottage in Blackfriars Road, and, on some petty pretexts, he got some well-known costumier and wig-maker to come there and make him up so that he resembled Arthur Hudson exactly.

“Then he went back to Peterborough, and, taking rooms at the Angel Hotel, he soon managed to contrive to call on the woman on a matter of business connected with the painting of a portrait--and that acquaintanceship rapidly ripened into the marriage we have heard so much of lately. I, as you know, was one of the witnesses, and I got fifty pounds for my trouble, but it went very rapidly in drink, alas! Israel Sawdry was the other witness, and, as he stated, he went at the request of the bride, but, growing suspicious, he started later to make mischief; and so, to save his friend from exposure, Ventris Blake gave the man a berth in his office in London, and then, finding him utterly unscrupulous, he quickly promoted him to the confidential position he now occupies.

“Unfortunately, the millionaire’s curiosity was aroused as to the kind of woman for which his friend, Duncan Kilroy, had dared so much. In return for saving him from the machinations of Israel Sawdry, he stipulated that Duncan Kilroy should introduce him to the woman with whom he had contracted this bigamous alliance. Fearful but powerless, Kilroy did so. As the clergyman had dreaded, Aimée Burgoyne was fascinated by Blake, particularly by his wealth. Indeed she loathed the secrecy, the mystery, and the poverty, in which she was kept by Kilroy, and finally the pair of them made Kilroy own his perfidy, and then, to crown all, to marry them, which he did in some out of the way village I can’t remember just now, but which act certainly brought him many large gifts of money, both from the millionaire, and the woman who had thrown him over for a better and a lawful union.

“At the same time it must not be supposed that Kilroy took to this arrangement with any particular grace. As a matter of fact he did not. He was inarticulate with rage over it--but, as I said at first, he was the kind of man who could wait, and he waited, and finally evolved this peculiarly diabolical scheme by which he confounded both his enemies, Blake and Hudson, in one huge cataclysm of crime and ill-starred passion. Of course, his initial difficulty was to get Blake interested in Winifred Pontifex, but so curiously are the lives of all of us mingled together, that he had a certain strand of a connection to work upon in the fact of Russell Langford’s complicity over a thing they call The Three Glass Eyes, and an old association with her father, Colonel Pontifex. As it happened, too, Blake very quickly wearied of his wife, and so he drank in greedily Kilroy’s accounts of Winifred’s beauty and suggestions, how easy it would be for him to terrorise Russell Langford and so get the niece entirely at his mercy.

“When he had sufficiently inflamed Blake’s imagination, Kilroy took the millionaire to a ball at Stamford, with the result you are probably aware of. The girl’s charm but aloofness worked on the wretched man like newly made wine, and, as Kilroy told me after the murder, even Satan seemed at this point, to make a big move for him. Not only was he able to produce that sham marriage certificate that socially ostracised Arthur Hudson, but Aimée Blake herself suddenly determined to get rid of Ventris and to make the clergyman take up with her again. In vain Duncan Kilroy wriggled--procrastinated--promised--protested. She was adamant; all at once the woman seems to have realised what a terrible vampire she was bound to and to have determined to free herself from him by the agency of the very man who had led her into this pit of evil.

“For this precise purpose she went to Scarborough. From this place she despatched telegram after telegram to St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. The burden of each one was the same. ‘Come to me. Go with me. Fail me, and I expose you. But, I beseech you, go with me.’ In his despair, Kilroy went to Blake and told him all about it. He begged him that just as he had helped him over Israel Sawdry, he would assist him over this.

“But, of course, Blake did nothing of the sort. In the first place, he told the wretched man that he never helped any lame dog more than once over any critical stile. In the second, he suggested that it would pay them both to see Mrs. Blake nicely interred in a freshly turfed grave, and as he, Kilroy, was the one who was in danger from the woman it was obviously Kilroy’s duty to take this little job in hand and to remove the woman from their path for ever.

“Frantic and despairing Kilroy made that fatal appointment with Aimée Blake on the Filey Road. As in the early Peterborough days, he had only one idea--to use Arthur’s name and personality, and he did so in this instance, so that when she scornfully rejected his appeal to leave him alone, he fell on her without compunction, and killed her as we have seen--certain that he would never be discovered.”