MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES - British Murder Mysteries Collection: 17 Books in One Edition. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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said the inspector quickly. “I cannot allow you to do that, Dr. Gretorex. I’m sorry, but from now on you are my prisoner.”
“May I make a statement to you now? I suppose there is no objection to my telling you that I’m absolutely innocent?”
The older man hesitated.
“I should advise you,” he said, not unkindly, “to make no statement. You are, of course, aware that anything you say may be used against you in evidence. I need hardly tell you that every facility will be given you to procure legal advice.”
“And what is going to happen to me now?”
“You will go with me to Lynchester, and you will be kept there in a police cell till you are conveyed to London tomorrow. Once there, as you probably are aware, Dr. Gretorex, you will be taken to the police station of the district where the alleged murder was committed, and in due course you will be charged.”
Meanwhile the inspector was watching his prisoner closely. He was remembering that during the brief telephone conversation with Scotland Yard, which had led to his presence here, he had been reminded how near Anchorford was to the sea, and he had been warned that he might find his bird flown.
What a fool he would look if, after having actually arrested him, this man effected even a temporary escape!
“May I shake hands with my mother and—and with my friends?”
“I will take it on myself to allow you to do that, Dr. Gretorex,” was the cold reply. “Then, I’m afraid, we must be getting on.”
“Won’t you allow my son to have some supper before you take him away?” asked Mrs. Gretorex. For the first time her voice was not quite steady. “Won’t you both have supper here? It’s quite ready.”
“No, ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t do that. But I promise you your son shall have something to eat, as good as I can get him at this time of night, when we reach Lynchester.”
The inspector’s voice had become kindly, even respectful, to his prisoner’s mother. He felt very sorry for her.
But for Roger Gretorex he was not at all sorry. He had been given to understand, quite unofficially of course, that there was a married woman in the case, and that she provided a strong enough motive to hang a dozen times over the fine young fellow now standing by his side.
“What I would advise you to do, ma’am—advising you as a private person, I mean—would be to go up to London tomorrow morning, and get in touch with a good solicitor. Dr. Gretorex will be allowed to see his lawyer alone as much as he can reasonably require. At least that is the usual procedure.”
Roger Gretorex held out his hand. Something seemed to warn him that it would be wiser for him to remain standing exactly where he was standing now. He felt that the inspector was watching him intently.
Mrs. Gretorex took a step forward. She shook hands quietly, unemotionally, with her son.
And then something very unexpected happened—unexpected, that is, by every one of the four people there.
Enid Dent approached Roger a little timidly. Had he not, a few moments ago, called her his friend? When she was close to him, she looked up into his face, for he was far taller than she. And then, all at once, he bent forward and, putting his arms round her, he kissed her good-bye.
Chapter Twelve
As Ivy stepped down out of the telephone box, after her conversation with Roger Gretorex, she felt, though partially relieved, yet at the same time agitated and still terribly frightened. She was, indeed, so much affected that she did not even notice the admiring glance thrown at her by a man in the next box.
Her interview that morning with Inspector Orpington and his subordinate—for he had brought with him a sergeant—had made her feel sick with fear. True that, after she had answered with apparent frankness the first probing questions put to her, she had felt, as she almost always did feel with any man with whom life brought her into temporary contact, that the inspector was beginning to like her and to sympathise with her. But, even so, she had experienced this morning what she had never experienced before—not only a sensation of abject fear, but also as if she were becoming entangled in a horrible, close-meshed net.
During a brief visit to Paris, in the old days when she and Jervis still had plenty of money to burn, she had gone with a gay party to the Grand Guignol. There she had seen acted a terrifying little play which showed the walls of a room closing in on a man. That was exactly how she had felt during the long examination and cross-examination she had endured this morning.
One of the things that had made her feel so dreadfully frightened was that the two men from Scotland Yard had not begun their investigations by seeing her, the widow of the dead man. They had first interviewed Nurse Bradfield, and then the cook.
While this had been going on, Ivy had waited in the drawing-room, sick with terror and suspense, wondering what the two women were saying about her. At long last, the strangers had come into the drawing-room, looking very grave indeed.
And now, as she walked back to Duke of Kent Mansion, choosing instinctively a roundabout way, Ivy kept living over again that strange, even she had realised momentous, interview.
The inspector had gone straight to the point. When had she, Mrs. Jervis Lexton herself, last been in the company of her husband before his unexpected death? After an imperceptible pause, during which she was wondering fearfully if Nurse Bradfield had remembered all that had happened on that sinister last afternoon, she had answered the question truthfully. She said that she had been with Jervis after luncheon, while the nurse had gone out for a short time.
When Ivy had made this admission, there had come a look of alert questioning on the inspector’s face, for Nurse Bradfield had not mentioned that fact, which indeed she had forgotten. And then it was, on seeing the sudden change of countenance on the part of her inquisitor, that Mrs. Jervis Lexton had gently volunteered the statement that, after she herself had gone out, the sick man had had another visitor that afternoon, a friend of her own and her husband’s, a young man named Roger Gretorex, who was a doctor.
She had allowed, and consciously allowed, herself to look embarrassed, as she made what sounded like an admission. As she had intended should be the case, the inspector had at once run after that hare. But she had not bargained for what had followed immediately—insistent questioning as to her own and her husband’s relations with the man who had been, with the exception of the cook and the nurse, the last person to see Jervis Lexton alive.
How long had they known Dr. Gretorex? Did they see much of him? What had been her own relations with him? When, for instance, had she herself last seen him before the death of Jervis Lexton?
At last, when she was beginning to feel as if the meshes of the net were becoming smaller and smaller, he had “got out of her,” so Ivy put it to herself, that Roger Gretorex cared for her far more than a bachelor ought to care for the wife of a friend.
Nevertheless, everything would now have been “quite all right” from Ivy’s point of view if it had stopped there. But to her dismay and surprise, Inspector Orpington suddenly began on quite another tack.
In spite of the fact, which he assured her he accepted as true, that she had rejected with indignation Dr. Gretorex’s advances, he suggested that it was odd that her own and her husband’s friendship with the young man had gone on. He “presumed” that Lexton had known nothing of Gretorex’s unwelcome attentions to Mrs. Lexton? Ivy had reluctantly admitted that that was so. And, as he pressed her, with one quick, probing question after another, she saw, with a clear, affrighted, inward vision, that what she had intended should be a molehill was growing into a mountain.
At last had come the most alarming query of all—had she ever been to see Dr. Gretorex at 6 Ferry Place?
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