CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The handsome young woman addressed the detective with the charm of manner that had no doubt beguiled so many men, notably Hugh Craig and the susceptible Léon Calliard.

“I take it from what you told my husband, Bertram Edwards, that you are acquainted with me--at any rate, my appearance. I suppose, Mr. Grewgus, you must have been in Paris at the same time I was there.”

“That is quite true,” was the answer. Grewgus had certainly formed the opinion at one time that the young woman’s sudden departure had been occasioned by her discovery of the fact that she was being watched. But her next words settled this point once and for all.

“And I suppose you followed me about from place to place. It is rather strange that I did not spot you; as I flatter myself that I am rather a keen observer. From what you know of my career, you may be sure I have had to cultivate the quality of alertness. You must be very clever at your business. I should have said it would be impossible for anybody to shadow me continuously for even a day without my being aware of it.”

Grewgus smiled. “I think I may say, without undue vanity, I am rather clever at it. In your case, I took somewhat elaborate precautions, as I felt I was dealing with a very resourceful woman. I shadowed you under perhaps a dozen different disguises. Well, Mrs. Edwards, I need hardly say I am very astonished to see you in my office. I suppose you will tell me in good time the object of your visit.”

A very hard look came over the handsome face. “I need not keep you waiting a moment longer. My object is revenge.”

“Against your former associates in general, or some particular person?” suggested the detective quietly.

“Against my former associates, with one exception, I have no rancour. They did their best to make my life pleasant, so far as such a life can be made pleasant. I was one of those unfortunate creatures whose mode of existence is determined for them at a very early age by others, from whose domination it is impossible to escape. My father was a crook; my mother, so long as she retained her good looks, followed the same calling. And I was trained to follow in her footsteps. You can say it was easy to break away, to separate from these evil counsellors, and earn my living in some honest way. Mr. Grewgus, it was not easy. More than once I have tried and I had to go back.”

Grewgus looked at her curiously. She had spoken very calmly up to the last few sentences, and then her manner had suddenly changed. Her voice had in it a vibrating ring; her attempt to break away, and the futility of it, had aroused in her very bitter memories.

“They would not allow me to sever my bonds,” she continued, speaking in the same intense tones. “Once I thought I had succeeded, and hidden myself away from them, I had taken a situation as a shop assistant. Somehow, they tracked me down. One of the gang went to the proprietor, and representing himself as a police official, warned him that he had a thief in his service, a girl who had lately come out of gaol. It was a lie. I have deserved prison many times, but luck has kept me out of it; but it was a lie that served its purpose. I was dismissed there and then, turned out into the street with the few miserable francs I had saved out of my poor wages. My mother was waiting near by to take me back. I think in a way she pitied me, but she told me it was useless struggling against them; they would never let me go. I was too useful to them.”

“Your natural advantages proved, no doubt, a great asset to them,” remarked the detective. “Your appearance made you an ideal decoy.”

“Yes, good looks are not invariably a blessing,” said the beautiful young woman with a melancholy smile. “Had I been an ordinary-looking girl, they would have allowed me to remain in that humble shop, and troubled their heads no further about me. They were the cause of my being devoted to a life of evil by which I enriched others more than myself. But the greatest curse of all which they brought upon me was my association with the man you lately called upon, my husband, Bertram Edwards.”

Her voice, as she spoke the name, was full of passion and hatred. Grewgus guessed now why she had called upon him.

“You know something about him, a great deal too much for his comfort, but you cannot know the utter callousness of his brutal nature. Stormont was hard and ruthless in a way, where he encountered opposition, but he had his good points, he was genial, he was generous. If you knew how to handle him, you could get on well with him. The same might be said of John Whitehouse, who for a long time has passed as my uncle, although there is not the most remote relationship between us. But after the first few months of glamour were over, I could never find a single redeeming quality in Edwards. I think the man had all the vices it was possible to amalgamate in a single temperament.”

“You were in love with this man, then, when you married him?”

“Passionately,” was the reply. “Nobody could have been more successful than he in masking a vile nature under a prepossessing exterior. But even in the early days of our honeymoon he showed the cloven hoof. During the whole of our married existence my life has been one long experience of infamy, insult, brutality and outrage. And the love I bore him has turned to a hatred so intense that I would risk anything to procure him the punishment he deserves.”

So, when she had shown Wraysbury the bruise on her arm, and told him her husband was a brute and a bully, she had been speaking the truth, thought Grewgus.

“Have you come to me with the idea of getting him punished?” asked the detective. He would have dearly loved to aid her in such a laudable object but for the express wishes of Lydon to let sleeping dogs lie.

“That is my sole reason. I can give you so much evidence about him and put you in the way of corroborating it without having to appear myself. But, of course, a wife is not allowed to give evidence against her husband in a criminal charge.”

“That is the worst of it,” said the artful detective, who wanted to get all he could out of her, to turn her hatred to his own advantage. “But let me know some of the details, and I will see if anything can be done. Let us start with the murder of Calliard. Was Edwards the murderer?”

Reluctantly, as it seemed, she had to admit he was not. In the course of her confessions on the subject, she confirmed what Stormont had insisted on to his brother, that murder had never been intended. Edwards had not been on in the final act of the tragedy. As at first resolved upon, it had been a case of simple robbery. She had not even sought the jeweller’s society with the object of blackmailing him, but solely to ascertain his movements.

After she had left Paris, two members of the gang had been dispatched to Brussels to wait for the unfortunate man and entrap him. In rendering him senseless, one of the miscreants had given him too strong a dose of chloroform, and it proved fatal. To cover up their crime, they had thrown his body in the river. She had learned these details afterwards from Whitehouse, but she did not know the names of either of the men. Stormont, who was the leading spirit of the gang, and had originally marked down Calliard for a victim, was alone acquainted with their identity. It was always his policy to keep the subordinate members of the association as far apart as possible. They worked in little coteries, and, in the majority of cases, one coterie knew nothing of the other.

But dearly as she would have loved to implicate Edwards in the tragedy, she had to confess she could not do so. As a matter of fact he was in Spain on other business when it happened.

“Our married life would have been intolerable, but for the fact that we did not spend a great deal of it together; when we did, I suffered physically and mentally,” she explained at this point. “His vile temper vented itself upon me on the slightest provocation, in spite of the fact that both Stormont and Whitehouse frequently intervened on my behalf, and remonstrated with him. When the plot against Wraysbury was hatched, it was a necessary part of it that we should live together. That was a time of terrible torture to me. When it failed, thanks to your intervention, he wreaked his disappointment on me. On the day he left England, frightened by your knowledge, he beat me almost into a state of insensibility.”

Was she exaggerating, or was Edwards such a monster as she made out? But Grewgus, a shrewd judge of demeanour, guessed by her emotion, her fervent accents, that she was telling the truth, that this man had terrorized and ill-treated her, that but for his devilish power over her she would have broken away. She remarked incidentally that she and her mother had a fair amount of money put by, their share of the proceeds from the various schemes in which they had taken part under the leadership of Stormont and Whitehouse.

She gave him a great deal of information about Edwards. This rascal had specialized chiefly in blackmail, using her in most cases as a decoy, and his activities in this direction had almost exclusively been practised abroad. The affair with Lord Wraysbury was the only serious _coup_ he had attempted in his own country. This unscrupulous scoundrel was intensely proud of his birth and social connections, and that perhaps was the reason he did so little in England.

“But, from what he said to Whitehouse, on the day after you had so thoroughly frightened him, I don’t think he will ever return. You see, he is not sure how much you know. He guesses your inquiries were made on behalf of a private person, but he also remembers you threatened him with Scotland Yard,” said the young woman when she had concluded this portion of her story.

Grewgus explained to her that he could not very clearly see his way to assist her in her schemes of vengeance on her brutal husband, as he had appeared to confine himself almost exclusively to acts of blackmail abroad. “In all these cases,” he told her, “there is no chance of securing the co-operation of the victims. If we could have connected him with the kidnapping of Calliard, which resulted in unintentional murder, you yourself could assist the Belgian police, who have abandoned the case. But you emphatically say he was somewhere else at the time. All he did, I suppose, when in Paris was to convey the instructions set out by Stormont, and meet you from day to day to learn what progress you were making. When you both left that city, I presume others were engaged in the affair.”

Mrs. Edwards admitted that this was so. In spite of the prejudice engendered against her by his knowledge of her evil past, Grewgus had to admit that the woman had extraordinary powers of fascination. They influenced him so far that he found himself pitying her profoundly for being tied to such a brutal husband, so much so that he voluntarily offered his services to her if Edwards should again seek to intrude himself into her life.

She thanked him very sweetly. “I have a notion I shall never see him again,” she said. “But one never knows. He has made a good deal of money, but he is a very greedy man. He is very frightened just now, but his fear may pass away, and he will want to further enrich himself by the same old means. In that case, he would seek me out with the object of compelling me to help him. In that case, I should be glad to come to you in the hope that you could terrify him again.”

“What are your intentions as regards the future?” asked the detective presently. “It would hardly be safe for you to go abroad, would it? You would be pretty certain to run across him some day.”

“Yes, I would prefer living on the Continent, but I dare not run the risk of falling in with him again. After the design upon Lord Wraysbury miscarried, thanks to your intervention, and both Whitehouse and Edwards judged it prudent to clear out, I telegraphed to my mother to come over from Rouen, where she was living quietly. We talked over matters very thoroughly, and we made up our minds that we would hide ourselves in some corner of England under an assumed name.”

Grewgus could not help smiling at this last remark. This fascinating young woman had gone under so many different names, that the adoption of another alias would come very naturally to her.

“I understand, then, that you propose for the future to go straight.”

“Most certainly,” was the reply given in a tone that showed absolute sincerity. “Through you, the particular coterie to which I belonged has been practically dispersed. Howard Stormont, for whom I had something like a feeling of affection for his kindness to me, took his own way out of it; he was a thriftless, improvident man and he saw ruin staring him in the face. Whitehouse was altogether different. He was careful, not to say parsimonious. By now he must have saved a great deal of money, and I know it was his intention to give up the life as soon as he had amassed enough to live on. I think he was only waiting for the Wraysbury _coup_ to come off to execute that intention. Its failure has made him forestall it.”

“You know where he is at the present moment, of course?” asked Grewgus.

“No, I do not,” was the emphatic answer, and the detective believed that it was a truthful one. “When we talked the matter over, we both agreed that it was best we should know nothing of each other’s movements. I suppose we had both lived in such an atmosphere of suspicion and secrecy, that he did not care to trust me; I was equally disinclined to trust him.”

“Why did he carry on that solicitor’s business? He had no genuine business, had he?”

Mrs. Edwards smiled. “Although I did not particularly like the man, I had no grudge against him, and we always got on comfortably together, and I should not care to do him a bad turn. But I think now I can answer that question without doing him any harm. He had practically no legal business, but he acted for the organization in cases where they wanted advice. He was actually a money-lender, and having got his articles when a young man, before he took to a life of crime, set up as a solicitor in order to present a more respectable appearance. I believe he made a great deal of money that way.”

“And I suppose you know how he and Stormont became first acquainted?”

Mrs. Edwards was perfectly frank about the matter. “Whitehouse and he met originally in Australia. Whitehouse had been affiliated to a rather high-class gang for some time, and I suppose he recognized in Stormont a very promising recruit. They engaged in some enterprises there, and Stormont got into trouble. When he came out of prison he returned to England and hunted up his old friend. In due course, Stormont became a leading member of the organization. I was one of his assistants, and I am sure he had several others. But he was a very cautious man, in spite of his bluff and genial manners, and he never allowed us to know much of each other. He and Whitehouse directed affairs in their own particular branch.”

Grewgus was feeling very well satisfied with the result of the interview. The candour of the fascinating young woman had led her actually to confirm his different discoveries and suspicions. There was one other matter, however, on which he wished to obtain further enlightenment.

“The affair with Hugh Craig at Nice, was Stormont at the back of that?”

Mrs. Edwards did not appear to answer quite as readily as before.

“Yes, it was he who first set me upon it. He knew that Craig, although not a wealthy man, had some money.”

“And you were married to Edwards at the time, of course?” was the detective’s next question.

“Not at the time I first met Craig. Our marriage came later. But, as I told you, we lived only occasionally together. The exigencies of our calling rendered it necessary for us to be apart the best part of our married life.”

“And I know that you relieved poor Craig of a good deal of his money.”

“I had to obey orders in this case as in the others,” was the young woman’s answer; and Grewgus could perceive that she was speaking with considerable emotion. “It was the most painful episode in my career, for the poor young fellow was desperately in love with me. When a foolish blunder on my part roused his suspicions, I think his mind became unhinged. He would never have tried to kill me if he had been in full possession of his senses. I can guess you know all the details of the ghastly story from his great friend, Lydon.”

Grewgus nodded, and Mrs. Edwards, conquering her emotion, went on in a calmer voice:

“I always felt a premonition that Stormont made the greatest mistake of his life when he cultivated Lydon’s acquaintance with the view of providing a good match for his niece. He should have steered clear of anybody who had a knowledge at first hand of that tragedy. I told him so when I first heard of it. I told him again when I met Lydon that day at Effington. He laughed at my fears, said that we had never met, and that if I kept my mother out of the way, all would be well. Dozens of girls had a similar blemish. How was he likely to connect me with Elise Makris? Lydon, I must say, acted very well. I did not suspect for a moment that he recognized me. I cannot guess to this day how he did.”

“I think I can enlighten you on that point,” said Grewgus, who felt, after her attitude to him, that he could afford to show a little candour. He touched the sapphire pendant which she was wearing, and told her what Lydon had learned about it on the day he saw it lying on the table in a room of the Villa des Cyclamens.

“If it had been the blemish only, Mrs. Edwards, he might not have identified you,” Grewgus concluded. “But it was _that_ which gave him the clue--your mascot which your mother said you always wore, and which she had taken from you that day in the hospital.”

“Ah, now I understand. The incident must have passed completely from my mother’s mind, for although we have often talked together of young Lydon, and the necessity of keeping her out of his way, she never spoke of it. Strange, very strange,” she added in a musing voice, “that this little mascot in which I so firmly believed should be the cause of all that has happened, should have set you, through Lydon, on the track of myself, Stormont and the others.”

Grewgus presently brought the conversation round again to Hugh Craig directly, and artfully cross-examined her as to the manner in which she had blackmailed him. But to his questions he did not get very distinct replies. He gathered that, in his infatuation for the beautiful girl, the young man had parted with large sums, ostensibly to defray debts incurred by herself and her mother, sums which were divided in certain proportions between the confederates in the schemes. But he failed to get any precise details. She sheltered her reticence under the plea that it gave her inexpressible pain to dwell upon those miserable days.

She left him shortly, with renewed thanks for his promise to help her in case Edwards should return and endeavour to force his society upon her. And after she had left, he sat for a long time meditating on herself, her strange charm, and all she had told him.

Had she been only playing a part in order to excite his sympathy, or had she always hated the life which had been thrust upon her by her environment, and was only too thankful to embrace this opportunity of quitting it?