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‘Is that so!’ exclaimed the Sergeant. ‘That doesn’t look too good, I will say!’
‘It doesn’t, but it doesn’t look too bad either. Steel’s explanation being that Miss White was talking nineteen to the dozen all the time he was trying to have a word with a friend of his, and he didn’t pay much heed to her. I’m bound to say I don’t altogether disbelieve him.’
The Sergeant thought it over. ‘She does talk,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘What was the second thing you discovered, sir?’
‘The second thing, if true, bears out friend Baker’s story that he never had a notion of asking Carter for five hundred pounds. Jones, White, and Carter wanted it for their own nefarious doings. You certainly have to hand it to Carter: regular turn in himself !’
The Sergeant, when the story was told him, said severely that there was too much of that sort of thing going on, but he didn’t see that it had much bearing on the case.
‘Not at first glance,’ agreed Hemingway. ‘But if young Baker wasn’t blackmailing Carter, then we’ve got to consider whether he shot him out of revenge, and if so, how he knew where to lay his hands on that rifle.’
The Sergeant frowned. ‘It’s my belief he’s too much of a wind-bag.’
‘You may be right, and I’m not denying I don’t fancy him much myself. The trouble is I’ve got something on the whole gang of them, and not enough to hang any one of them. You take the Prince: he’s got no alibi; he fakes one, which naturally makes me very suspicious. At the same time, I’m not surprised he wasn’t so keen on coming clean before he was forced to, supposing he didn’t shoot Carter; and I wouldn’t like to say that what he finally told us wasn’t true. It might have been. In fact, it’s quite plausible. Then there’s Steel. He’s in love with the widow, and it’s common knowledge that he hated Carter, and got remarkably hot under the collar at the way he treated the fair Er
myntrude. He’s not the sort of man I take to, and he’s just about as anxious to make me think that the Prince did it as the Prince is to make me think he did it. After him, we have to consider the Glamour-girl.’
‘Miss Fanshawe? Why, she’s only a kid, sir!’
‘Well, if she’s a kid she’s a shocking precocious one, that’s all I have to say!’ replied Hemingway. ‘She was in the shrubbery; she could have got the rifle any time she wanted; and she knew how to handle it.’
‘Pretty heavy gun for a little bit of a thing like her,’ objected the Sergeant.
‘I wouldn’t put it beyond her to fire it, not with that hair-trigger pull. If it had had a five-pound pull, which I’m told is the usual, she might have found it a bit too much for her. However, I don’t fancy her any more than I fancy the other girl. If she did it, it was to do her mother a good turn, which I grant you would seem to me a lot too far-fetched, if she weren’t such a caution. As it is, I wouldn’t like to say what she’d take it into her head to do. But if the other girl did it, she did it for the reason that nine people out of ten would: money. She thought she’d come into Aunt Clara’s fortune; and from what I can make out, it would have been sound sense to see to it that Carter didn’t get the chance to splurge around with it first.’
‘She doesn’t give me the impression of being that kind of a girl,’ said Wake.
‘Nor me either, but that’s not to say I’m right. Finally, we’ve got that young Bolshie, Baker. And I say finally, because he’s the one I fancy least of all. I’m a psychologist.’
‘Are you ruling out the widow, sir? Seems to me she had as much cause to shoot Carter as anyone, and we’ve only got her word for it she was lying down in her room at the time.’
‘You go and take another look at her, my lad,’ recommended the Inspector. ‘If she or either of the girls did it, they had to jump across the stream. Well, if you see her doing that you’ve got more imagination than what I have.’
Upon reflection the Sergeant apologised, and said that he had spoken without thinking. He added: ‘We’ve got to remember that funny business at the shoot on Saturday, haven’t we?’
‘You’re right; we have. By all accounts, the Prince or Steel was responsible for that affair. Everyone seems to be agreed it couldn’t have been the doctor, nor yet young Dering.’
‘Well, that puts it on to one of the other two,’ said the Sergeant. ‘The murder, I mean.’
‘Funny,’ mused Hemingway. ‘I was thinking just the opposite.’
‘Why, sir?’
‘Psychology,’ replied Hemingway. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions, and that’s a very dangerous thing to do. I grant you it wouldn’t be a bad way of getting rid of anyone, to stage an accident at a shoot. But to my way of thinking the man that misses his victim one day and has a second shot at him the next must be plain crazy. And no question of accident about the second shot, either! The more I look at this case, the more I feel I want someone who wasn’t mixed up in Saturday’s little affair.’
‘Yes, I see,’ said Wake slowly. ‘That’s assuming the first affair was an accident. Gave the murderer the idea, so to speak, or at least made him feel it would be a good moment to bump off Carter, because we’d be bound to connect the two shootings.’
‘Yes, you speak for yourself !’ said the Inspector tartly.
The Sergeant pondered a while, a frown creasing his brow. ‘You know, sir, I don’t like it,’ he pronounced at last. ‘When I get to thinking about the people who are mixed up in the case, I can’t but come to the conclusion there isn’t one of them has what you could call a real motive. That Prince said he could have got Mrs Carter to divorce Carter. I don’t say he could, and I’m not forgetting what Miss Cliffe told us, that Mrs Carter didn’t hold with divorce; but the way he talked you could see he thought himself such a one with the ladies he could get them to do anything he wanted. Well, then there’s Mr Steel. Of course I’m not saying he mightn’t have got all worked up to murder Carter, but what I ask myself is, why didn’t he do it any time these last two years?’
‘There’s an answer to that one,’ interposed the Inspector. ‘If Steel did it, it was the Baker-business set him off. We know the widow pitched in a tale to him that made him see red.’
‘That’s so,’ Wake admitted. ‘But would you say, from all we’ve been able to pick up, that it was the first time she’d complained to him about Carter?’
‘I wouldn’t, of course, but have you ever heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back?’
‘All right, sir: have it that it’s Steel we’re after. He’s more likely than either of those two girls, to my mind.’
