"Wilchester!" he answered. "Thirty years ago. He--knows!"

Mallalieu dropped into the nearest chair: dropped as if he had been shot. His face, full of colour from the keen air outside, became as pale as his partner's; his jaw fell, his mouth opened; a strained look came into his small eyes.

"Gad!" he muttered hoa.r.s.ely. "You--you don't say so!"

"It's a fact," answered Cotherstone. "He knows everything. He's an ex-detective. He was there--that day."

"Tracked us down?" asked Mallalieu. "That it?"

"No," said Cotherstone. "Sheer chance--pure accident. Recognized us--after he came here. Aye--after all these years! Thirty years!"

Mallalieu's eyes, roving about the room, fell on the decanter. He pulled himself out of his chair, found a clean gla.s.s, and took a stiff drink.

And his partner, watching him, saw that his hands, too, were shaking.

"That's a facer!" said Mallalieu. His voice had grown stronger, and the colour came back to his cheeks. "A real facer! As you say--after thirty years! It's hard--it's blessed hard! And--what does he want? What's he going to do?"

"Wants to blackmail us, of course," replied Cotherstone, with a mirthless laugh. "What else should he do? What could he do? Why, he could tell all Highmarket who we are, and----"

"Aye, aye!--but the thing is here," interrupted Mallalieu.

"Supposing we do square him?--is there any reliance to be placed on him then? It 'ud only be the old game--he'd only want more."

"He said an annuity," remarked Cotherstone, thoughtfully. "And he added significantly, that he was getting an old man."

"How old?" demanded Mallalieu.

"Between sixty and seventy," said Cotherstone. "I'm under the impression that he could be squared, could be satisfied. He'll have to be! We can't let it get out--I can't, any way. There's my daughter to think of."

"D'ye think I'd let it get out?" asked Mallalieu. "No!--all I'm thinking of is if we really can silence him. I've heard of cases where a man's paid blackmail for years and years, and been no better for it in the end."

"Well--he's coming here tomorrow afternoon some time," said Cotherstone.

"We'd better see him--together. After all, a hundred a year--a couple of hundred a year--'ud be better than--exposure."

Mallalieu drank off his whisky and pushed the gla.s.s aside.

"I'll consider it," he remarked. "What's certain sure is that he'll have to be quietened. I must go--I've an appointment. Are you coming out?"

"Not yet," replied Cotherstone. "I've all these papers to go through.

Well, think it well over. He's a man to be feared."

Mallalieu made no answer. He, like Kitely, went off without a word of farewell, and Cotherstone was once more left alone.

CHAPTER III

MURDER

When Mallalieu had gone, Cotherstone gathered up the papers which his clerk had brought in, and sitting down at his desk tried to give his attention to them. The effort was not altogether a success. He had hoped that the sharing of the bad news with his partner would bring some relief to him, but his anxieties were still there. He was always seeing that queer, sinister look in Kitely's knowing eyes: it suggested that as long as Kitely lived there would be no safety. Even if Kitely kept his word, kept any compact made with him, he would always have the two partners under his thumb. And for thirty years Cotherstone had been under no man's thumb, and the fear of having a master was hateful to him. He heartily wished that Kitely was dead--dead and buried, and his secret with him; he wished that it had been anywise possible to have crushed the life out of him where he sat in that easy chair as soon as he had shown himself the reptile that he was. A man might kill any poisonous insect, any noxious reptile at pleasure--why not a human blood-sucker like that?

He sat there a long time, striving to give his attention to his papers, and making a poor show of it. The figures danced about before him; he could make neither head nor tail of the technicalities in the specifications and estimates; every now and then fits of abstraction came over him, and he sat drumming the tips of his fingers on his blotting-pad, staring vacantly at the shadows in the far depths of the room, and always thinking--thinking of the terrible danger of revelation. And always, as an under-current, he was saying that for himself he cared naught--Kitely could do what he liked, or would have done what he liked, had there only been himself to think for.

But--Lettie! All his life was now centred in her, and in her happiness, and Lettie's happiness, he knew, was centred in the man she was going to marry. And Cotherstone, though he believed that he knew men pretty well, was not sure that he knew Windle Bent sufficiently to feel sure that he would endure a stiff test. Bent was ambitious--he was resolved on a career. Was he the sort of man to stand the knowledge which Kitely might give him? For there was always the risk that whatever he and Mallalieu might do, Kitely, while there was breath in him, might split.

A sudden ringing at the bell of the telephone in the outer office made Cotherstone jump in his chair as if the arresting hand of justice had suddenly been laid on him. In spite of himself he rose trembling, and there were beads of perspiration on his forehead as he walked across the room.

"Nerves!" he muttered to himself. "I must be in a queer way to be taken like that. It won't do!--especially at this turn. What is it?" he demanded, going to the telephone. "Who is that?"

His daughter's voice, surprised and admonitory, came to him along the wire.

"Is that you, father?" she exclaimed. "What are you doing? Don't you remember you asked Windle, and his friend Mr. Brereton, to supper at eight o'clock. It's a quarter to eight now. Do come home!"

Cotherstone let out an exclamation which signified annoyance. The event of the late afternoon had completely driven it out of his recollection that Windle Bent had an old school-friend, a young barrister from London, staying with him, and that both had been asked to supper that evening at Cotherstone's house. But Cotherstone's annoyance was not because of his own forgetfulness, but because his present abstraction made him dislike the notion of company.

"I'd forgotten--for the moment," he called. "I've been very busy. All right, Lettie--I'm coming on at once. Shan't be long."

But when he had left the telephone he made no haste. He lingered by his desk; he was slow in turning out the gas; slow in quitting and locking up his office; he went slowly away through the town. Nothing could have been further from his wishes than a desire to entertain company that night--and especially a stranger. His footsteps dragged as he pa.s.sed through the market-place and turned into the outskirts beyond.

Some years previously to this, when they had both married and made money, the two partners had built new houses for themselves. Outside Highmarket, on its western boundary, rose a long, low hill called Highmarket Shawl; the slope which overhung the town was thickly covered with fir and pine, amidst which great ma.s.ses of limestone crag jutted out here and there. At the foot of this hill, certain plots of building land had been sold, and Mallalieu had bought one and Cotherstone another, and on these they had erected two solid stone houses, fitted up with all the latest improvements known to the building trade. Each was proud of his house; each delighted in welcoming friends and acquaintances there--this was the first night Cotherstone could remember on which it was hateful to him to cross his own threshold. The lighted windows, the smell of good things cooked for supper, brought him no sense of satisfaction; he had to make a distinct effort to enter and to present a face of welcome to his two guests, who were already there, awaiting him.

"Couldn't get in earlier," he said, replying to Lettie's half-anxious, half-playful scoldings. "There was some awkward business turned up this evening--and as it is, I shall have to run away for an hour after supper--can't be helped. How do you do, sir?" he went on, giving his hand to the stranger. "Glad to see you in these parts--you'll find this a cold climate after London, I'm afraid."

He took a careful look at Bent's friend as they all sat down to supper--out of sheer habit of inspecting any man who was new to him. And after a glance or two he said to himself that this young limb of the law was a sharp chap--a keen-eyed, alert, noticeable fellow, whose every action and tone denoted great mental activity. He was sharper than Bent, said Cotherstone, and in his opinion, that was saying a good deal.

Bent's ability was on the surface; he was an excellent specimen of the business man of action, who had ideas out of the common but was not so much given to deep and quiet thinking as to prompt doing of things quickly decided on. He glanced from one to the other, mentally comparing them. Bent was a tall, handsome man, blonde, blue-eyed, ready of word and laugh; Brereton, a medium-sized, compact fellow, dark of hair and eye, with an olive complexion that almost suggested foreign origin: the sort, decided Cotherstone, that thought a lot and said little. And forcing himself to talk he tried to draw the stranger out, watching him, too, to see if he admired Lettie. For it was one of Cotherstone's greatest joys in life to bring folk to his house and watch the effect which his pretty daughter had on them, and he was rewarded now in seeing that the young man from London evidently applauded his friend's choice and paid polite tribute to Lettie's charm.

"And what might you have been doing with Mr. Brereton since he got down yesterday?" asked Cotherstone. "Showing him round, of course?"

"I've been tormenting him chiefly with family history," answered Bent, with a laughing glance at his sweetheart. "You didn't know I was raking up everything I could get hold of about my forbears, did you? Oh, I've been busy at that innocent amus.e.m.e.nt for a month past--old Kitely put me up to it."

Cotherstone could barely repress an inclination to start in his chair; he himself was not sure that he did not show undue surprise.

"What!" he exclaimed. "Kitely? My tenant? What does he know about your family? A stranger!"

"Much more than I do," replied Bent. "The old chap's nothing to do, you know, and since he took up his abode here he's been spending all his time digging up local records--he's a good bit of an antiquary, and that sort of thing. The Town Clerk tells me Kitely's been through nearly all the old town doc.u.ments--chests full of them! And Kitely told me one day that if I liked he'd trace our pedigree back to I don't know when, and as he seemed keen, I told him to go ahead. He's found out a lot of interesting things in the borough records that I never heard of."

Cotherstone had kept his eyes on his plate while Bent was talking; he spoke now without looking up.

"Oh?" he said, trying to speak unconcernedly. "Ah!--then you'll have been seeing a good deal of Kitely lately?"

"Not so much," replied Bent. "He's brought me the result of his work now and then--things he's copied out of old registers, and so on."

"And what good might it all amount to?" asked Cotherstone, more for the sake of talking than for any interest he felt. "Will it come to aught?"

"Bent wants to trace his family history back to the Conquest," observed Brereton, slyly. "He thinks the original Bent came over with the Conqueror. But his old man hasn't got beyond the Tudor period yet."

"Never mind!" said Bent. "There were Bents in Highmarket in Henry the Seventh's time, anyhow. And if one has a pedigree, why not have it properly searched out? He's a keen old hand at that sort of thing, Kitely. The Town Clerk says he can read some of our borough charters of six hundred years ago as if they were newspaper articles."

Cotherstone made no remark on that. He was thinking. So Kitely was in close communication with Bent, was he?--constantly seeing him, being employed by him? Well, that cut two ways. It showed that up to now he had taken no advantage of his secret knowledge and might therefore be considered as likely to play straight if he were squared by the two partners. But it also proved that Bent would probably believe anything that Kitely might tell him. Certainly Kitely must be dealt with at once.