MRS3 The Velvet Hand (28 page)

She stayed in the drawing room while I went up to wash, and brush my hair. When I returned supper was on the table: a simple meal of bread and butter, cold meat, cheese, and beer. And in spite of the secret tenseness of the atmosphere we did it justice. The door between drawing room and dining room stood open, and from where I sat I could watch the flower pot. Since I had been upstairs a subtle change had taken place in Bristed's manner. Some of the haggard lines were smoothed out of his face, and a bit of colour had returned to it. He still talked extravagantly, but I was aware of an increased ease and assurance in his manner. It made me vaguely uneasy.

When we had finished eating we began to talk of bed. We passed into the drawing room, and I picked up my flower pot to carry it upstairs. There was nothing in it! With a cry I put it down and flung off the cape. Underneath there was a jardinière somewhat of the same size and shape as the flower pot but perfectly empty.

"It's gone!" I cried.

They crowded around the table. "Good God!" cried Bristed with an admirable assumption of astonishment. "It must have been substituted somewhere en route!"

"Substituted nothing!" I cried angrily. "Do you think I wouldn't know the difference between a full pot and an empty one? I brought it into this house!"

He never changed a hair. "Heavens!" he cried instantly. "Then some interested party must be hanging around the house, peeping in at the windows. What a terrible thought!" And he had the effrontery to look around him as if in terror.

"Nothing of the sort!" I said. "He changed it himself! He changed it while I was upstairs. I could see the difference in his manner when I came down."

"Bella, Bella," said my mistress rebukingly, "you must not make charges that you can't substantiate. It's quite true that while you were upstairs I left the room to help Mrs. Bristed lay the table. But I'm sure Mr. Bristed never touched the thing."

This capped the climax for me. I burst into tears. Mme Storey ignored me. She was playing for a big stake, and a few tears from me could not be allowed to sway her. Bristed was greatly heartened by her seeming rebuke to me.

"I wouldn't have had this happen in my house for a thousand pounds!" he cried fervently.

"It's too bad!" cried my mistress bitterly. "Our whole night's work gone for nothing! The murderer will escape scot free because of this! We must have been spied upon throughout!"

And so on. She was really giving a very good imitation of the chagrin and disappointment she might have been supposed to feel; but I who knew her so well was not deceived by it. If she had been really put about by the loss of the pot of pansies she would have set her teeth and said nothing. So I cheered up again. I had not the least idea of what her game was.

"But we must find it!" cried Bristed. His self-confidence was increasing every minute. "As you may remember, I was out of the house while you were helping Mrs. Bristed. I went out to the laboratory to see if all was right there. He must have slipped in then!"

We gravely went through the comedy of making an exhaustive search. We found that the front door could not be opened from the outside; but there was a window in the hall which had been thrown up on our entrance as the house seemed to be close.

"That was where he came in!" cried Bristed.

We searched the yard surrounding the cottage, and the laboratory. Afterward, at Bristed's insistence, we went over the cottage from ground floor to garret. English houses have no cellars. During this part of the search, I noticed that Mme Storey's eyes were busy, and I guessed that she was looking for more than the pot of pansies.

It must have been close on three o'clock when we had finished. We returned to the drawing room.

Bristed was still voicing his regret in extravagant terms when we heard a motor car approaching through that silent quarter. It came to a stop in front of the cottage. I saw Bristed and his wife slowly stiffen. A moment later the doorbell rang.

"That will be Inspector Battram," said Mme Storey carelessly. "He has motored down from London."

Bristed did not immediately move to open the door. "But how—how did he know you were here?" he stammered.

"Oh, I told Straiker to wait for him at the hotel and fetch him along," she said.

Bristed's new-found confidence slowly wilted. However, he went to open the door with a good face. The handsome inspector came in smiling, with Richard Straiker at his heels. Two more men followed—detectives, by the look of them—who closed the door and stood in front of it. The sight of these two grim figures and the significant action seemed to affect Bristed more than the arrival of the inspector. He gazed at them with a whitening face.

The hall was narrow, and we passed, as a matter of course, into the drawing room. Straiker was carrying something on his arm. A slight thump on the centre table sharply recalled Bristed's attention to it. He beheld, wrapped in an old coat, an object strangely reminiscent of the pot which had rested on the table earlier in the evening.

"What's that?" he gasped.

Straiker, at a glance from Mme Storey, threw off the wrappings, revealing a pot of pansies, the flowers and leaves now a good deal broken and wilted. I myself swallowed a gasp at the sight of it, but, knowing my mistress, I guessed what had happened. Bristed stared at it wildly.

"But—but—but——" he stammered.

"Oh, the one you hid was the pot which Bella obtained from the gardener before dinner," said Mme Storey with the utmost nonchalance. "This is the one we fished out of the Scar River at Bedminster. I didn't want to take any chances, so I changed the pots on the bridge. The station guard put this one in the luggage van for me, and Mr. Straiker claimed it when we got here."

It was a sickening blow to Bristed. It seemed to stupefy him for the moment. A look of hard defiance came into his wife's face. She saw that the game was up.

"The one he hid?" put in the inspector.

"Yes," said Mme Storey calmly. "He buried the other one under the compost heap in the garden of the cottage next door until he should have a chance to destroy it. He was in a hurry, or he would have noticed that it was the wrong one."

"Did you see him do it?" said Battram.

"No. Shreds of vegetable matter were clinging to his trousers when he came back," answered Mme Storey, with her inimitable air of unconcern.

The two of them made believe to ignore Bristed for the time being. Inspector Battram was bending over the pot of flowers. "It appears to be two pots nested together," he remarked.

"I expected something of the sort," said Mme Storey.

With his penknife the inspector succeeded in prying them apart. Out of the big pot came a shallow pot such as pansies are usually planted in. In the space beneath it there was a simple apparatus the nature of which we could all understand at a glance. A little tin tank was fitted in the top with an infinitesimal opening through which water had dripped on a chemical placed in the bottom of the pot. There was also a rubber tube which had been run up through the top pot and had issued among the leaves of the pansies. Through this tube the gas had escaped.

"How simple!" said Inspector Battram.

"And how effective!" added Mme Storey.

Bristed was pulling at his collar and struggling for speech. In that moment he had cracked. "I'm done!" he cried hoarsely.

His wife turned on him like a tigress. The change in her was electrical. Gone were her dullness and lassitude. In that moment she was as beautiful as the angel of evil. One of the detectives, supposing that she was actually about to assault her husband, hastily stepped between them.

"Be quiet!" she cried.

But Bristed continued to wail: "I'm done! I'm done!"

"You fool!" cried the woman. "There is no evidence to connect you with this crime! The woman is just trying to break you down with her stage tricks. That has been her object from the first!"

Bristed, having cracked, was helpless now. "I know it!" he cried hysterically. "And she's done it! I'm done, I tell you; I can stand no more! Oh, God! nobody knows what I have been through to-night! It is more than flesh and blood can bear!"

"Be quiet, you fool! You snivelling coward!" she cried with blazing eyes. "You are hanging yourself!"

"You're all right," he said. "You're not in it. I did it all. I'll protect you!"

"Ah, be quiet!" she said, turning from him with a violent gesture of disgust. "I'm done with you! All night you've been playing the fool. She made you dance to her tune like a marionette on strings! Ah, God! if I was married to a man!"

After that Bristed completely lost control of himself. He howled and beat his fists against his head. It was an ugly sight. Straiker, thinking of his brother, listened to the confession with burning eyes; Mme Storey was as cold as Nemesis. Remembering the hideous brutality of the murder, she felt no pity.

"I did it! I did it! I did it!" screamed Bristed. "Does that satisfy you? I prevented the old man from travelling by daylight. I prepared the scheme to gas him. And it worked, too! When I entered the compartment you were all sleeping like the dead. I took the old man's pocketbook. I got what I wanted out of it, and slipped it into his pocket. He was nothing to me." He pointed at Straiker. In his hysterical state he evidently confused the identity of the brothers. "I stabbed him!" he went on. "It was an old knife which had been among my tools for years. It would never have been missed. I stabbed him! I flung his body out of the door! Now you know it. If you want any more details ask her"—pointing to my mistress—"she's got it all down pat!"

"What did you take out of the pocketbook?" asked the inspector.

"The formula for making the gas," said Bristed. "He was going to place it in the archives of the Royal Society."

"But if you knew how to make the gas, what good was the formula to you?"

"It was my discovery!" cried Bristed. "And he wouldn't give me credit for it!"

"That is no doubt a lie," said Mme Storey coldly.

Bristed whirled on her. "That woman is a she-devil!" he screamed. "She's not human! She kept at me and at me till I near went mad! She ought to have been in the Spanish Inquisition, she should! What's she doing over here, anyway, plying her trade? Aren't there enough murders in America? She wasn't content with arresting me and letting me stand my chance at my trial. Wanted to torture me for her pleasure. Made me go back over everything on the pretext that she thought it was somebody else and I was helping her catch him. Step by step over everything! God! it was like being dissected alive, nerve by nerve!"

"No advantage in listening to this sort of thing," said Inspector Battram, low-voiced, to my mistress.

He nodded to one of his men, who thereupon stepped up to Bristed and snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. The act had the effect of shutting off the man's wild cries. He fell into a helpless, shaken weeping, while his wife's lip curled. The second detective approached Mrs. Bristed with a pair of steel bracelets. She proudly drew herself up.

"Keep your hands off me!" she said.

The man hesitated. Inspector Battram looked at Mme Storey, who said coldly:

"I recommend you to take her too. In my opinion she got the whole scheme up. It would never have been conceived in the man's muddled brain. In any case, it must have been she who handed the pot of pansies to Mr. Hendrie. There was not time for Bristed to have disguised himself after doing so and still have caught the train."

So Mrs. Bristed's graceful wrists had to submit to the steel. She became apathetic again. One could feel sorry for her. Under that dull exterior slumbered a fiery spirit. The man was merely contemptible.

"Take them to the local police and make the necessary affidavits," said Inspector Battram. "Then come back here for us."

Bristed and his wife left their little cottage, never to return to it. Neither gave it a backward look.

When they were taken away we had a chance to relax. It had been a strenuous twelve hours. Mme Storey and the inspector lighted cigarettes.

"A fine piece of work!" the inspector said with generous enthusiasm. "If it was anybody else I would feel sore thus to have my own trade taught me. But from Madame Storey I can learn with humility!"

"Nonsense!" said my mistress, affecting to scorn his flattery, but not at all ill pleased by the same. "I just blundered into this case by accident. You would have solved it if I had never appeared on the scene."

"I hope so," he said modestly. "And I hope this will not be the end of our association," he added wistfully. It was the man, not the inspector, who spoke then.

"Come to America and see how we do things there," said Mme Storey, smiling.

"I will," he said meaningly.

We fell to discussing different aspects of the case. Said the inspector:

"The man was certainly lying when he claimed to be the discoverer of the gas. They all do that. What did he expect to get out of the murder, anyway?"

"After a year or two they would have come forward as the discoverers of the gas," said Mme Storey. "Sims Hendrie was so secretive about his work that no one knew what he was doing."

"And is it then so valuable?" said Battram.

"Ah, consider all its possible uses! A new and better anaesthetic, perhaps, without the dangerous qualities of ether; a cure for insomnia, one of the scourges of mankind. And this is not to speak of its advantages in warfare. Put your enemy to sleep and he would be yours!"

"Tell us something about how the case shaped itself in your mind," said the inspector persuasively.

"In the first place," said Mme Storey, "I suspected that Bella and I had been drugged in the railway carriage, and the question was, how could the murderer have drugged us without coming into the carriage with us; and how, if he had been in the carriage, could he have drugged us without drugging himself at the same time? A fascinating problem. As soon as I learned that the pot of pansies had disappeared, I suspected that that had been the medium.

"Secondly, something in the quality of young Straiker's voice assured me that he was not guilty of murder. But intuitions are not sufficient in our business—that is, they're not sufficient to convince judges and juries. So I had to go to work.