CHAPTER XLV.

THREE CIGARETTES

Two months later, Dr. Judd sat on the edge of a very small bed and smoked three cigarettes, one after the other. It was a rainy morning, and the square of glass which gave light to the cell seemed to collect all the grayness and drabness of the day and transmute the faded light of heaven into a lead.

The doctor smoked luxuriously, for he had not tasted a cigarette for the greater part of two months. Presently the door of the cell opened, and Larry came in. Judd jumped up to his feet and greeted the visitor with a smile.

“It’s awfully good of you to come, Holt,” he said. “I intended saying nothing, but in the circumstances it seems to me only fair to a man of your position, who has put in such a large amount of earnest and excellent work, that you should know the truth.”

He was altogether sincere: Larry knew that.

“My brother David and I--and this you will understand--were on the most affectionate terms from our early childhood. David was my care and my responsibility, and he was also my joy. We had both been left by our mother at a very early age, and our father was an eccentric gentleman who had very little use for children. So we grew up and went to the same public school and to the University together, and I think I am right in saying that we were wholly sufficient for one another. I had an admiration and a love for David beyond anything that is human,” said the doctor, lowering his voice and looking down.

Larry nodded. He had recognized this quality in the two men.

“I hope you will not think that I owe you a grudge because you killed David,” he said. “Far from it. I recognize the inevitability, and in my heart I know that nothing could have saved David. He died as he would have wished; and in some respects I am very glad for all that has happened. At the trial I made every effort to prove to the judge and the jury that I was perfectly sane, and your evidence helped to secure the conviction which I knew was inevitable. I thank you for it. As I say----” he went back to the story of his early life, and told stories of the childhood of himself and his brother.

“When my father died,” he went on, “he left us the Greenwich Insurance Company, a small impoverished concern which was then on the verge of bankruptcy. I can safely and honestly say that I have never respected the sanctity of human life. To me a human being is like any other animal--a kind of dumb Lew,” he explained easily, and Larry could hardly restrain a shudder at the light-hearted way he referred to this human wreck.

“I tell you that before I go any further, lest you expect anything in the shape of an apologetic attitude on my part. If you do, you will be disappointed. The business to which my brother and I succeeded was bankrupt, and I think we got our first idea for the subsequent operations when we had to pay out a risk which had been taken by my eccentric father and a risk which he should never have undertaken.

“The idea of the scheme was partly mine and partly David’s. We began our experiments three months later, when we drowned a man, whose name I need not tell you, since it would serve no useful purpose and no person is under suspicion for his death. We had insured him in our own office--a very simple process--without his being any the wiser. I myself had signed the medical report, and David, who was a clever draughtsman, in addition to being a brilliant engineer--the career for which he was trained--signed all the necessary forms in his name. We chose the man carefully. He was one who had no friends and was regarded as being something of a recluse. The policy was made payable in favour of a fictitious name which my brother had taken in Scotland, where he had furnished a small house and where he lived for the purposes of collection.

“We made a large sum of money by this death, for we had reinsured the life and there was little to do but to collect from the underwriters. My brother was always something of a poet, and when he was at Oxford he wrote two or three plays, which the managers of the London theatres rejected. I need hardly tell you,” he said with the utmost gravity, “that they were wonderful plays, though not, of course, as good as those I produced later at the Macready Theatre.”

“The Macready was your property, was it not?” said Larry, and the doctor inclined his head.

“I bought it some time ago for the purpose of producing dear David’s dramas,” he said. “It was the one thing for which I lived: to establish David’s name. He had very early on taken the name of Dearborn, and it is curious that you had not compared the name that appeared on the playbills six years ago with the Rev. John Dearborn.”

“They were compared,” said Larry, “and our conclusions were drawn, but not until a late stage in the investigations.”

“Our next experiment was on a man named--well, I need not give this name, either,” he said. “We had to wait a reasonable time before we bled the underwriters. And here occurred an unfortunate thing. One of our clerks discovered that the person to whom the money was paid was my brother. He found it out by the veriest accident, and began to blackmail David, and finally, fearing the consequence of this line of action, he stole a considerable sum of money from the office and went to France. David followed him and shot him in Montpellier. You know that part of the story very well, Mr. Holt,” he said with a good-humoured smile. “Flash Fred saw the act committed, and lived on me for years, but only because he never accepted an invitation to dinner in my house,” he added with a little smile.

“And now I come to the Stuart case. David, who did a great deal of investigating of his own, had, as you know, disappeared as the result of Flash Fred’s recognition. We gave him a very handsome funeral, and----” He hesitated.

“And the body was the brother of Lew,” said Larry quietly.

“Quite right,” agreed the doctor. “He was an awkward man, and he--had to go! The whole thing had been simplified by now,” he explained. “My brother had built our beautiful house, and the death chamber with its water, its pump, and its ventilator, had been created by his genius. It was my idea that we should buy up Todd’s Home, and curiously enough I had completed the sale before it became necessary for dear David to disappear. Mr. Grogan has not told you, in all probability, that we sought by every means in our power to induce him to come to the Macready Theatre to see a representation of one of my brother’s dramas. He saved himself, not by any superhuman cleverness, but because he had the low cunning of the rat which walks around the cage of a trap, knowing that the trap is there, yet unable to realize just how it works.

“I will return to Stuart,” he said. “We had laid our plans when Stuart came into the box, and our plans did not include any injury to him whilst he was in the theatre, because we thought it would be a simple matter to persuade him to pass through the fire door into the car which was waiting in the private road which is the property and stands upon the grounds of the theatre.

“Stuart came. My brother, of course, was not there, though he was near enough at hand if I wanted him. Boxes A, B, and C were never let to the public, by the way. To our surprise he came in the most exalted mood, and told us that he had discovered a daughter. And then, for the first time, we knew that he was not an obscure stranger, but a very rich man. We took him back to the house and he went willingly, and there we had a discussion, dear David and I, as to what should be done. We came to the conclusion that there was nothing definite to be secured from this man if we let him live, and it was very necessary, indeed vitally necessary, that money should come in at once. I had spent a great deal of money, some hundred thousand pounds,” he said airily as he lit his second cigarette, “on art treasures, and another hundred thousand upon the theatre, and we were being pressed very hard. We decided that Stuart should go.”

He puffed at his cigarette and blew a ring to the ceiling.

“He showed fight,” he said briefly. “By the way, I have reason to believe that one of the cuff-links which were torn off my shirt in that struggle was retrieved by you, Mr. Holt. Where did you find it?”

“In the dead man’s hand,” said Larry, and Dr. Judd nodded.

“I was afraid I had not been very thorough,” he said, “but I am relieved, because I thought that David was to blame--David was careless in some matters.

“He had told us, had Stuart, all about his charwoman, had given us her address; and there and then we decided to find this Clarissa and marry her to someone.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It did not matter whom, so long as we could first of all prove her birth and then control her money. The next day my brother went to confirm the man’s story, but he found difficulty. The woman in charge of the nursing home--it was a converted farm, if you remember, where Mrs. Stuart died--had disappeared. And even the offer of a reward did not produce any results. We had no difficulty in finding and capturing the charwoman. Blind Jake, who was a faithful servant of ours--and nobody regrets his death more than myself, but I also realize that it was necessary, or had the appearance of necessity--Blind Jake, I say, hurried her away, and from the information she was able to supply us with, I could trace Clarissa Stuart as Diana Ward. I might add, for your information,” he said, addressing Holt, “that the inquiries did not take more than half a day.”

“There is one question I should like to ask you, doctor,” said Larry quietly. “The lift accident was arranged by whom?”

“By David,” said the doctor with a little smile, as though he were amused at something. “David was on the floor above, and it was David who dropped things on your head. They didn’t reach your head, of course, which was unfortunate. Then he had an easy exit along the roof to the next building, and I never admired you so much as when you refrained from going up those steps left so invitingly under the open trap-door. You would have come down very quickly,” he added significantly. “And that, gentlemen, really concludes my story.” And he took up the third cigarette, for the second had been smoked very vigorously.

“Why did you spare Lew?” asked Larry. “He was one of your helpers and knew your secrets.”

“I was prepared to spare almost anybody unless my life was endangered,” said Dr. Judd. “Certainly I did not want to find all my good plans tumbling to the ground through the death of some wretched beggar who was quite harmless. I only killed when it was necessary or profitable,” he said. “Blind Jake had his own vendettas, and his attempt upon Fanny Weldon was a purely private affair in which we were not interested.”

A man came in through the door of the cell, a short, stocky man who was bareheaded, and Dr. Judd took one long whiff of his cigarette, dropped it on the floor of the cell and put his foot upon it.

“The executioner, I presume?” he said pleasantly, and turned round, putting his hands behind him.

The stocky man strapped him tight, and the white-robed clergyman, whose ministrations he had refused and who was waiting outside the cell door, came in and walked slowly by the doctor’s side.

And so he went out of sight of Larry, who waited behind. He saw the broad shoulders for the last time as they passed through the narrow door leading from the prison hall to the exercise yard, and he waited, feeling inexpressibly and unaccountably sad.

A minute passed, and then there was a crash that came like thunder to his ears and made him start. It was the crash of the falling death-trap. Dr. Judd had met his brother.

[The End]

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The Ward, Lock & Co. (1924) edition was consulted for many of the changes listed below.

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ boarding-house/boarding house, cigar-case/cigar case, flash-lamp/flash lamp, etc.) have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

Punctuation: a few missing/invisible periods and commas, and some quotation mark pairings.

[Chapter II]

Change “it is awfully good of you to forgo _you_ holiday” to _your_.

“_Reguarly_ as the clock he’d return after two hours’ absence” to _Regularly_.

[Chapter III]

“He looked around for some receptacle, and saw, a cupboard in the wall” delete the second comma.

[Chapter VIII]

“He frowned. It was an _absnrd_ idea” to _absurd_.

[Chapter XII]

“She turned round with, an exclamation of fright.” delete the comma.

(“Your men know all about him, Mr. Holt.” Fanny hesitated. “He’s) change the first period to a comma.

[Chapter XX]

“disreputable scoundrel. Have you _see_ him lately?” to _seen_.

“He laughed, and he had a very hearty and _pleasnat_ laugh” to _pleasant_

[Chapter XXI]

(“Did this lady give any address”) add question mark.

[Chapter XXVI]

“he said, and she _queezed_ his arm affectionately” to _squeezed_.

[Chapter XXVII]

“So that he shall not read _Braile_ or write Braille” to _Braille_.

[Chapter XXVIII]

“There were two _peple_ whom he desired greatly to meet.” to _people_.

[Chapter XXIX]

“though _fortuately_ I hadn’t a gun in my possession” to _fortunately_.

[Chapter XXXII]

“and spends a _lots_ of money in charity” to _lot_.

[Chapter XXXIV]

“The joy of accomplishment set his _heat_ beating faster” to _heart_.

[CHAPTER XXXVI]

(“I wondered what door _his_ tumbler lock was on,”) to _this_.

[Chapter XXXVIII]

“He looked down at the bag and the writing-case. and there was regret” change the period to a comma.

[Chapter XXXIX]

(“They must have had this scheme in mind for some time, for a month before David’s death. Dr. Judd had completed the purchase of Todd’s Home.) delete the period after _death_.

[Chapter XLIV]

(“David! It frightens, me. Tell him not to!”) delete the comma.

[Chapter XLV]

“I was prepared to spare almost anybody _unlesss_ my life” to _unless_.

[End of text]