CHAPTER XI

A Chain of Confusion

Without delaying a moment Evelyn took the paper pattern of the footprint she had discovered from her drawer and went along the corridor to Philip’s room. The door was standing ajar; she pushed it open, entered and closed it after her. Now that she had come to the climax of her investigations her mind for all its deadly horror was free of the tortures of uncertainty; intimacy, free and absolute, had been regained between her and Celia, and she had had the joy of taking from Celia the crushing belief in her brother’s guilt.

But the criminal remained in all his blackness, and her heart knew no pity there: she stooped and, fighting down a sense of nausea, took up the pair of evening shoes on which Humblethorne had pounced with avidity on his entrance the day before. Their smooth, undarkened soles came as a sudden shock to her; she had been so certain that she would have no need to look further. Then the same thought occurred to her as previously to Humblethorne—these were worn and left conspicuously about just because he had a second pair. She understood completely now what Humblethorne had meant. But she had something which would be decisive even without the discovery of that pair: with a trembling hand she took up her paper pattern and laid it on the left shoe of the two in her hand. It was several sizes too large!

To say that she was taken aback would be hopelessly to understate the turmoil in her brain; she stared at the misfit, so incomprehensible, so utterly unexpected, as if she were seeing a ghost. Her breath went and came; her colour left her; it was against all reason, past all understanding. It could not be true.

Then after a few moments of absolute blank disbelief, when it was obvious that unless she had taken leave of her senses she could not by any alteration of the placing of the pattern make it coincide with the shoe, her mind began to work feverishly again. She could not be entirely wrong, it was the shoe which was wrong, it must be. She knew that at any rate this was not the shoe which had left the stain; perhaps the subtle mind of the man she was tracking had foreseen this, and had deliberately left these small shoes about to be found by any one who came so far along the path of his crime. She snatched up one after the other the left feet of the three other pairs of shoes and boots in the room: the result was identically the same.

“I’m going out of my mind,” she thought; “there’s something wrong somewhere!” It could not now be the shoe; it was absurd to suppose that all the footgear was a blind. It must be the pattern, she decided; she was agitated when she cut it out and had made it too big. Yes, that must be it: she seized the left evening shoe again, hurried out of the room down the passage until she stood half-breathless once more before the little dancing girl. She waited a moment to steady herself and then bent down and, taking the utmost pains to ensure accuracy, placed the shoe over the stain. She could no longer doubt her eyes: the stain was too big.

When at last she became convinced that this was so, she experienced an overpowering revulsion of feeling. For an hour or more her whole soul had been sickened with the contemplation of a dastardly crime and the callous effrontery of the criminal. Now she was forced to believe that she had done him a great wrong; it was certain now that he had not replaced the statuette, it was probable he had never laid hands on it at all. She was hurled in this terrible see-saw of doubt back on the story she had just heard from Celia. John and his father had been left facing each other in the hall in deepest anger. Had John after all done this? Her mind, leaping to the question, instantly conceived how it might have been—she pictured Sir Roger suddenly altering his mind about Celia’s departure, John on an impulse running upstairs to fetch her back, then the thought of the strange weapon at his elbow and the fierce flinging of it down. And then, perhaps, Philip had found him in remorse beside his father’s body, had decided to shield him and had let him out after John had replaced the weapon. And she had just told Celia John was guiltless and she could prove it—that to her was the most poignant tragedy of this surprise. She felt estranged from Philip for ever, whatever part he had played, and, if it had to lie between him and John, she longed only to be able to say it was not John.

In acute agony she returned to Philip’s room, not greatly caring now whether she ran into him or not, replaced the shoe and almost automatically took up the pattern which in her bewilderment she had left lying on his dressing table. She turned out of the room with a strange feeling of apathy, saw she held the pattern in her hand, and, with an unreasoning resentment, tore it to pieces. She had hardly done so before she regretted the action: at least she might make as certain of John as she had tried to do of Philip. She went into John’s room and, seeing an odd boot at the end of the row, took it up. It was a left one and she was puzzled to know what could have become of its fellow. It had been there, she was sure, when she had looked in and found Humblethorne the day before. However, that mattered little beside the purpose for which she had come.

She took up the boot and went back to the stain; almost listlessly she placed the one over the other. Then she gave a little cry; John’s boot fitted no better than Philip’s shoe! She rose unsteadily, her mind in a whirl; she was utterly crushed, humiliated. On what foolish belief in her own cleverness had she been building these fearful ideas about her friends? She had seen something she did not understand and had immediately set to work to paint disloyal and hideous pictures, refusing in her pride of brain to listen to the true promptings of her heart. And now she had finally and conclusively proved her folly to herself. Philip had not been there, nor John. Her abasement at her own self-deceptions did not prevent her from a feeling of relief so great as almost to choke her, but it kept in the back of her consciousness the question which still remained. She put it from her, kept it ignored, and moved away from the fatal spot in a dazed, unthinking condition, content with what she knew and conscious of a great contempt for her powers of investigation. It was only when she had gone some yards that she saw that she was still holding John’s left boot. Who, she thought, could have taken the other one; what was the point when John was innocent? Then she remembered that Humblethorne did not know he was; of course he must have taken it. She wondered where Humblethorne was, becoming aware she had not seen him the whole morning. The boot in her hand and the thought of Humblethorne brought back the recollection of the meeting outside the drawing-room window; she could afford to smile at it now. She would go and look at the window again; in the light of what she knew it would interest her without tempting her to any further frightful theories. She went down and entered the drawing-room and saw to her surprise that the window was now standing open.

Meanwhile Humblethorne had been spending his time in the straightforward, though difficult, business of following up the stranger of the inn. Inquiry showed that he had left early on the morning after the crime, walked to the railway station and there caught the 8.7 a.m. train. He had taken no ticket, obviously having a return half. Having ascertained so much, first from Timmins and then by a visit to the station, Humblethorne walked back, intending to send off a long official telegram which would start the great machinery of the police force at work in picking up the trail. As he passed the post-office, however, an idea struck him; he sauntered in and over the sale of a picture postcard drifted easily into conversation with the postmaster on the great topic of the crime. A skilful suggestion about the awfulness of having to write such news to the son bore unexpected fruit; Miss Celia, it appeared, had written to him. The postmaster was easily drawn on to talk: the letter had attracted notice by being the first written to Mr. John since he was driven from home, think of that, and he had noticed the street and the suburb, though he couldn’t be certain of the number. The telegram that Humblethorne eventually dispatched in official code would do the rest.

Humblethorne then devoted his energies to an endeavour to procure further identification, either of John Penterton or of Philip Castle from the cigarette box, but, as he had feared, the roughness of the surface, owing to the ornamentation and tooling, made the discovery of any finger-marks hopeless. Evelyn, had she thought of it further, only narrowly escaped falling under suspicion herself by virtue of this accident.

One half of his inquiry, that relating to John, being now finished, Humblethorne next directed his attention to the finding of the evidence against Castle which he was firmly persuaded was still in existence. He walked up to the Towers, and, entering quietly, made his way up the back stairs. With unhurried, unwearied persistence he searched the two large unoccupied rooms, which were at the end of the passage past Castle’s room. He found no trace whatever of what he was looking for, entered John’s room and repeated the process, again without result. Puzzled, he stopped, wondering where he should search next. His glance fell upon the boots and it occurred to him that it would still further strengthen the chain of evidence if he verified his measurements: also he would re-examine the window in the hope that he might find he had overlooked some proof of the identity of the man who had bolted the shutters. He accordingly picked up the nearest boot of the row, went downstairs and crossed the hall into the drawing-room.

Here he subjected the window and shutters to the minutest examination, but shutters will not retain any impression from hands that are clean, and he could still find nothing, except the dirty finger-marks on the lintel: these he resolved to have photographed that afternoon. He threw open the window at last, and looked out. It was pleasant there in the sun and he remained in meditation several minutes; then realizing that he was idling, he went out to fit the boot he had taken to the one clear impression in the soil. He bent down to do so when he realized that he had stupidly brought only one boot and that the wrong one. For another minute he looked the soil over to see if amongst its tramplings he could make out a right foot with sufficient clearness, but saw it was hopeless and exclaimed irritably to himself, “I shall have to get the other, that’s all.”

“Perhaps I can save you the trouble,” he heard a voice say pleasantly, and straightening his back he looked up and saw Evelyn at the window holding the left boot.

“Well, I’m hanged!” he exclaimed.

“You will probably wish to fit it yourself,” she said, leaning out; relief at her failures was making her spirits rise above the humiliation of her late thoughts and she spoke almost gaily. “It does fit; I know, because I tried it yesterday.”

He was so taken aback by her sudden appearance and her manner that she could not help smiling.

“This is the window I always come to first, isn’t it?” she said. “Don’t grudge it me.”

“I don’t understand,” he replied slowly. “Do you know whose boots these are?”

“Ten years ago they belonged to Mr. John Penterton,” she answered coolly.

“And feet don’t change their size much after people grow up,” he added rather slowly.

“From which the conclusion is to be drawn——?” she asked.

“That two nights ago Mr. Penterton was let in through this window.”

“Well? We know that. What of it?”

It was obvious that she puzzled him: he remembered too well the way she had been suddenly stricken dumb before this same window the day before, and now she leant out of it, inconsequent, almost gay. He was more than puzzled; he felt a vague misgiving, but he did not care to confess it.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me,” he said with an assumption of the official manner, “why, if you fitted that boot here yesterday, you come here with it again to-day?”

“I was making sure,” she answered slowly.

“I see; well, perhaps you would let me do the same.”

She handed him the boot without a word and watched him fit it carefully to the impression. He raised himself after having done so with an air of subdued triumph in his eyes and felt a renewal of misgiving as he noticed that in hers was only a fairly obvious amusement.

“Don’t lean out of that window, please,” he said rather stiffly. “You are very nearly touching the lintel and I have still to take a copy of those finger-marks.”

She drew back obediently at once and asked with interest—

“How do you manage to do that? It must be very difficult there.”

“I shall photograph those,” he answered.

“The whole system of taking finger-marks is extraordinarily fascinating,” she said; “I don’t see how you do it.”

“Oh, it’s not difficult when once you know how.”

“Like so many things, I suppose,” she remarked, “but it must require great dexterity and special training.”

“I don’t know,” he answered: insensibly his tone had become that of the expert, good-humouredly answering the questions of a layman; and he was not altogether sorry to have an opportunity to show this clever amateur the science that lay beneath his methods. “Of course,” he went on, “I have taken prints for years, and practice makes perfect, they say; but I don’t know that it is specially difficult.”

“How do you set about it in the ordinary way?” she asked.

“Well, it depends of course what they are on,” he replied rather sententiously. “And you can do it in several ways.”

“Yes, but ordinarily.”

“Oh, well, if they were on paper, for example, and you were to sprinkle a little lamp-black over the place, you would see all there was: if on something dark, well, there are several things one can use; fine flour does as well as anything.”

“And it shows up the marks?”

“If there are any; but you have to dust it off very lightly. It’s the grease on the hand, you see, miss, that makes the mark and you want something light that will stick on the place when the rest is brushed off. Of course you can touch plenty of things and not leave a mark, anything rough for instance; in moments of great agitation, however, the human hand becomes moist, which facilitates the work of discovery.”

“I see; it’s very interesting. Well, thank you. I hope I haven’t wasted your time. Oh,” a little smile played round her lips, “I know I haven’t done that.”

He was slightly nettled. “And how do you know?” he asked.

“Because—well, it sounds rude but I don’t mean it to be—because you are wasting it for yourself out there. The man who made those marks is not the man who killed Sir Roger.”

She nodded pleasantly and left him to stare after her with open mouth and profoundly puzzled eyes, as she went slowly upstairs to luncheon.

“Celia let him in; who let him out? What really happened?” she was thinking. “How, when and why did I begin to build up my castle of falsehood?” She stopped dead half way up the stairs; it was the little window, she remembered, which had first convinced her it was Philip just because she was sure Celia could not have done that. In her revulsion of feeling she now absolved Philip afresh; who broke the window then? Suddenly without seeking for it she remembered every word of her conversation with Birts about that window. How blind she had been to its real significance! The breakage had not been discovered till two o’clock on the day after the murder. It might, then, have been done any time between after dinner on the night of the murder and two o’clock next day; it might have been done, the thought came insistently, on the morning after the murder. It might, yes, but why should it have been? No answer suggested itself, but it was with quickened interest in the sudden opening up of a new avenue of thought that she continued her way slowly upstairs.