THE FOURTH MAN

Taranaki Daily News, 26 November 1935, Page 15

THE FOURTH MAN

(By

R. A. J. Walling)

CHAPTER FIVE (continued). The horrible revealing ray of the torch flashed about as he spoke. There was blood on the grass where Selwyn had lain. “The poor gentleman knew nothing about it. He must have been killed instantly, the doctor thinks. And Olver must have made a smart get-away, for he was out of the house at twenty-five past ten. You saw him go, didn’t you?” “Yes,” 1 said. ‘He came out just as Miss Petigrew and I were leaving for Action station, and he walked off in the other direction towards Ealing, as he always did, quite in the usual way.” “Nothing strange in his manner, Mr. Quilter?” “Not that I saw. I was in a hurry. We had only just time to catch the train.’’

“And you knew nothing about anything? You were with the young ladies all the time?”

“Yes, all the time. We came down from the drawing-room and said ‘Goodbye’ to Miss Akaster in the hall.” We got back to the house. They had laid out Mr. Selwyn’s body in the library, the inspector said. Would I care to see him?

I did not care to see him a little bit. I loathed the idea 'of looking on the corpse of the man whose guest I had been a few hours before. But for some vague reason I thought I would like to see the library at that time, and we went in. The inspector switched on the lights.

Mr. Selwyn lay, covered with a sheet, upon a long leather settee against the wall behind the door and facing the windows. His big desk in the middle of the room was open, and his chair half turned away from it, as though he had pushed it aside when he rose. Another chair close by had probably been occupied by Olver in that last interview. I walked away from the settee and stood beside the desk. The inspector, as one accustomed to such things, raised the sheet to reveal the face. I lowered my eyes. I did not want to see that face. The inspector was saying something. I hardly heard him. I glued my eyes co the desk, where a Law Book lay open. I repeated the title at the head of the open page mechanically and rapidly to myself: “24 and 25 Viet. Cap. 96.” The inspector went on talking. I fluttered the pages of “24 and 25 Viet.,” and in order to keep the inspector’s words and actions out of my mind I began to calculate what that date was, and why Law Books could not be dated by the Christian Era and give less trouble in calculation. And as I fluttered the pages a sheet of writing met my eye, and two initials at the bottom of it. And with a glance towards the settee, where the inspector was re-covering the face of Mr. Selwyn with the sheet, I crammed the writing into my pocket. The initials I had seen were “8.0.,” and I did not intend that the inspector or anybody else should see them. CHAPTER SIX. When we returned to the diningroom tire kindly old inspector almost apologised to me for giving me so much trouble, and I thought I was going to be quit of him at once. But his apology was only the prelude to a much stiffer examination. Alt his questions were now bent to One end—the discovery of anything I knew that would throw any light for him updii tire character and habits of Bernard Olver, and especially on a possible motive for the murder and on the possible whereabouts of Bernard Olver at the present moment. With that paper in my pocket, and with my knowledge of the cause of quarrel between Olver and Mr. Selwyn, I had a. thoroughly uncomfortable quarter of an hour.

The inspector impressed upon me the need for. candour, the importance of ignoring friendship in the presence of the law seeking to elucidate a crime, and the dreadful consequences to myself if I should conceal anything that I knew. I talked as little as I could, and used as many words as I could conjure up to convey less than nothing when I did talk. I probably gave the inspector the impression that my intelligence was on a par with that of a mentally defective child of ten. But I could not help that. I was possessed by an insatiable desire to have done with him and to get back to King’s Road and read what was written over those initials. So far, it appeared, there was no trace of Olver. The last persons who had seen him were Joan and myself. But the police felt sure of getting him. A young man in tennis whites could not wander about West London or the outskirts very long, with every policeman on the look-out for him, without being caught. Which, indeed, seemed quite likely. I got away at last about three o’clock. The police had kept the taxi waiting for me. The driver was asleep on his seat. As I was about to get in I heard somebody say: “Excuse me a moment, constable,” and then my name called: “Mr. Quilter!” I turned to see Marple standing there. “I have been waiting for you, Mr. Quilter,” said he. “If you care for it, I’ve kept a cup of hot soup for you. You can keep the cab another two minutes. You must be famished.” I was a little surprised. Marple had paid me no particular attention before, j The inspector, who had accompanied me to the door, came down the little drive, apparently attracted by the sound of conversation. “Ah, Mr. Lomax,” said Marple, “I thought our young friend had been through a rather trying time, so 1 kept some soup for him. He’s going to step in for a minute and drink it up.” “Ah! very kind of you, Mr. Marple,” said the inspector. “Good idea! I’m afraid I’ve been rather putting him through it.” Marple took me by the arm and led.

me to the gate of Milton House. And I had not said a word from beginning to end. . . ..

“Wait two or three minutes, driver,” Marple called out to the taxi-man. “Mr. Quilter won’t be long.” We entered Milton House, and its owner closed and locked the door. He saw my eyebrows raised at this, “Don’t want any policeman butting in to this,” said he. “Come along!” In his dining-room, similarly situated to that of Selwyn’s house, but smaller, he had an electric heater on the sideboard and a little soup-container simmering. He poured a cupful and handed it to me.

I shook my head. “Sip it,” he said, “and let me do the talking. How’s Miss Akaster? Alarmed, terrified, of course. But not ill? Apparently not. Good! Now, what you’ve got to do is to look after her and keep her spirits up. She’s going to have a terrible time. You musn’t say a word to her to indicate that you know anything. Only, keep her up with the idea that Olver will be all right. And he will be. Take it from me. No, don’t ask any questions. I shan’t tell you anything. Not a thing. Olver is in frightful danger—in a worse mess than even you can imagine. But I think he’ll get out of it. Question of time and chance. We shall have to wait and see what the police discover when they get their real boss men from Scotland Yard on the job. This is all preliminary. But they mean business. They were so hot on the trail. Do you know what they did to-night?” “Put a double police guard on Mrs. Olver’s house at Ealing in case he should try to sneak home for clothes! But never mind. It only shows you. Now, Mr. Quilter, get away before they begin to smell a rat. Keep up your courage, and Miss Akaster’s too. I’m on the telephone. But remember that the telephone has ears. I daresay we shall see more of each other within the next few days.” I was out of Marple’s house in three minutes, and had not said a word to this remarkable and loquacious person. But as I was whirled back to King’s Road I thought over his advice and found it quite sound. At half-past three I was in my own room, threw off hat and coat, and sat down, spreading out on my table the crumpled paper that was signed witli the initials, “B.O.” CHAPTER SEVEN. i Sunday was dreadful. After a few hours spent in the sleep of exhaustion I went round to the Boltons and passed most of the day with Joan and Evelyn. The affair at Waller House had happened so late at night that the papers that day contained little or nothing about it, and we were spared the worrying of attending to the inquiries of the Press. They had not found us out. Evelyn tried hard to keep her courage up, and I, as I had promised Marple, did my best to assure her that Bernard would be all right, and that the trouble would quickly pass away. Joan comforted her more, as only a girl can do. But it was all deeply melancholy. Mrs. Pettigrew was a brick. She had been rather fond of Olver and his lively ways, and utterly refused to believe either that he had done anything wicked or that any harm would come to him. That was, indeed, our gospel. At the back of all our minds were things which we would not discuss. The facts were too ugly to face. We whistled, so to speak, to keep up our courage. But we could not get rid of the vision of Olver as a fugitive who might at any moment be taken.

Towards the evening Evelyn suddenly said she would like to go to Ealing to see Mrs. Olver. Bernard had taken her to his house several times, and she liked his widowed mother. Though I was not at all convinced that such a visit would do Evelyn any good, and the idea of seeing two women in distress was anything but pleasant. I offered to escort her, and we went. This was my first visit to Giver’s place, a modest little house in a terrace facing some tennis grounds, and also my first sight of Olver’s mother. The interview proved surprisingly unlike my expectations. In the first place, Mrs. Olver was not alone. In the next, instead of the agitated mother I had thought to find, wrought up to a pitch of tragedy by the misfortune of her son, I spoke to a cool and self-possessed lady whose attitude allayed the anxiety of Evelyn far better than all my assurances and consolations. The most surprising thing was that we were shown into a little drawingroom where Mrs. Olver sat talking to Marple. He shook hands with Evelyn in an affectionate manner ,and then came to talk to me while the old lady and the young one met. “See ’em?” was his first observation. I looked my puzzlement. “The cops, I mean. Two of ’em still there—in the doorways opposite. Stand behnid the curtains and have a peep.” And, surely enough, there were the two men in doorways, one at each end of the tennis grounds, motionless. “S’pose,” said Marple, in his curious clipped syntax, “old Lpmax thinks Bernard’s bound to try to get home to change his clothes. Well, let him.” In all his talk there were assumptions so quick that I could hardly follow him. He seemed to have assumed that I knew enough about everything to make explanation unnecessary, that we were all engaged as a matter of course in defeating the ends of “old Lomax,” and that it was a kind of jolly game. I could not possibly question him there. So I nodded, and said: “I did not know you were a friend of Mrs. Olver.” "Oh, yes. Been friends since the Flood. Came down to comfort her about Olver. But she’s a woman in a thousand. Sense—common-sense.” “No news of any sort?” I asked. (To be continued).