"So he ought!" I conceded cordially. "He's a jolly good sort, and it would have been all up with me in another few hours. Though how on earth he could fix on me as Ca.s.savetti's murderer, I can't imagine. It's a fool business, anyhow."

"H'm--yes, I suppose so," drawled Southbourne, in that exasperatingly deliberate way of his. "But I think you must blame--or thank--me for that!"

CHAPTER XXV

SOUTHBOURNE'S SUSPICIONS

"You! What had you to do with it?" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

"Well, Freeman was hunting on a cold scent; yearning to arrest some one, as they always do in a murder case. He'd thought of you, of course.

Considering that you were on the spot at the time, I wonder he didn't arrest you right off; but he had formed his own theory, as detectives always do, and in nine cases out of ten they're utterly wrong!"

"Do you know what the theory was?" I asked.

"Yes. He believed that the murder was committed by a woman; simply because a woman must have helped to ransack the rooms during Ca.s.savetti's absence."

"How did he know that?"

"How did you know it?" he counter-queried.

"Because he told me at the time that a woman had been in the rooms, but he wouldn't say any more, except that she was red-haired, or fair-haired, and well dressed. I wondered how he knew that, but he wouldn't tell me."

"He has never told me," Southbourne said complacently. "Though I guessed it, all the same, and he couldn't deny it, when I asked him. She dropped hairpins about, or a hairpin rather,--women always do when they're agitated,--an expensive gilt hairpin. That's how he knew she was certainly fair-haired, and probably well dressed."

I remembered how, more than once, I had picked up and restored to Anne a hairpin that had fallen from her glorious hair. Jim and Mary Cayley had often chaffed her about the way she shed her hairpins around.

"What sort of hairpins?" I asked.

"A curved thing. He showed it me when I bowled him out about them. I know the sort. My wife wears them,--patent things, warranted not to fall out, so they always do. They cost half a crown a packet in that quality."

I knew the sort, too, and knew also that my former suspicion was now a certainty. Anne had been to Ca.s.savetti's rooms that night; though nothing would ever induce me to believe she was his murderess.

"Well, I fail to see how that clue could have led him to me," I said, forcing a laugh. I didn't mean to let Southbourne, or any one else, guess that I knew who that hairpin had belonged to.

"It didn't; it led him nowhere; though I believe he spent several days going round the West End hairdressers' shops. There's only one of them, a shop in the Haymarket, keeps that particular kind of hairpin, and they snubbed him; they weren't going to give away their clients' names. And there was nothing in the rooms to give him a clue. All Ca.s.savetti's private papers had been carried off, as you know. Then there was the old Russian you told about at the inquest. He seems to have vanished off the face of the earth; for nothing has been seen or heard of him. So, as I said, Freeman was on a cold scent, and thought of you again. He came to me, ostensibly on other business. I'd just got the wire from Petersburg--Nolan of _The Thunderer_ sent it--saying you'd walked out of your hotel three nights before, and hadn't been seen or heard of since.

It struck me that the quickest way to trace you, if you were still above ground, was to set Freeman on your track straight away. So I told him at once of your disappearance; and he started cross-questioning me, with the result,--well--he went off eventually with the fixed idea that you were more implicated in the murder than had appeared possible at the time, and that your disappearance was in some way connected with it.

Wait a bit,--let me finish! The next I heard was that he was off to St.

Petersburg with an extradition warrant; and, from what he told me just now, he was just in time. Yes, it was the quickest way; they'd never have released you on any other consideration!"

"No, I guess they wouldn't," I responded. "You've certainly done me a good turn, Lord Southbourne,--saved my life, in fact. But what about this murder charge? Is it a farce, or what? You don't believe I murdered the man, do you?"

"I? Good heavens, no! If I had I shouldn't have troubled to set Freeman on you," he answered languidly. I've met some baffling individuals, but never one more baffling than Southbourne.

"As far as we are concerned it is a farce,--though he doesn't think it one. He imagines he's got a case after his own heart. To s.n.a.t.c.h a man out of the jaws of death, nurse him back to life, and hand him over to be hanged; that's his idea of a neat piece of business. But it will be all right, of course. I doubt if you'll even be sent for trial; but if you are, no jury would convict you. Anyhow, I've sent for Sir George Lucas,--he ought to be here directly,--and I've given him _carte blanche_, at my expense, of course; so if a defence is needed you'd have the best that's to be got."

I began to stammer my thanks and protestations. I should never have dreamed of engaging the famous lawyer, who, if the matter did not prove as insignificant as Southbourne seemed to antic.i.p.ate, and I had to stand my trial, would, in his turn, secure an equally famous K. C.,--a luxury far beyond my own means.

But Southbourne checked me at the outset.

"That's all right," he said in his lazy way. "I can't afford to lose a good man,--when there's a chance of saving him. I hadn't the chance with Carson; he was a good man, too, though he was a fool,--as you are! But, after all, it's the fools who rush in where angels fear to tread; therefore they're a lot more valuable in modern journalism than any angel could be, when they survive their folly, as you have so far! and now I want to know just what you were up to from the time you left your hotel till you were handed over by the Russian authorities; that is, if you feel equal to it. If not, another time will do, of course."

I told him just as much--or as little--as I had already told Freeman. He watched me intently all the time from under his heavy lids, and nodded as I came to the end of my brief recital.

"You'll be able to do a good series; even if you're committed for trial you'll have plenty of time, for the case can't come on till September.

'The Red Terror in Russia' will do for the t.i.tle; we'll publish it in August, and you must pile it on thick about the prison. It's always a bit difficult to rake up sufficient horrors to satisfy the public in the holidays; what gluttons they are! But, look here, didn't I tell you not to meddle with this sort of thing?"

I had been expecting this all along, and was ready for it now.

"You did. But, as you've just said, 'Fools rush in,' etcetera. And I'm quite willing to acknowledge that there's a lot more of fool than angel in me."

"You're not fool enough to disobey orders without some strong motive,"

he retorted. "So now,--why did you go to that meeting?"

I was determined not to tell him. Anne might be dead, or in a Russian prison, which was worse than death; at any rate nearly two thousand miles of sea and land separated us, and I was powerless to aid her,--as powerless as I had been while I lay in the prison of Peter and Paul. But there was one thing I could still do; I could guard her name, her fame.

It would have been a desecration to mention her to this man Southbourne.

True, he had proved himself my good and generous friend; but I knew him for a man of sordid mind, a man devoid of ideals, a man who judged everything by one standard,--the amount of effective "copy" it would produce. He would regard her career, even the little of it that was known to me, as "excellent material" for a sensational serial, which he would commission one of his hacks to write. No, neither he nor any one else should ever learn aught of her from me; her name should never, if I could help it, be touched and smirched by "the world's coa.r.s.e thumb and finger."

So I answered his question with a repet.i.tion of my first statement.

"I got wind of the meeting, and thought I'd see what it was like."

"Although I had expressly warned you not to do anything of the kind?"

"Well, yes; but still you usually give one a free hand."

"I didn't this time. Was the woman at the meeting?"

"What woman?" I asked.

"The woman whose portrait I showed you,--the portrait Von Eckhardt found in Carson's pocket. Why didn't you tell me at the time that you knew her?"

"Simply because I don't know her," I answered, bracing up boldly for the lie.

"And yet she sat next to Ca.s.savetti at the Savage Club dinner, an hour or two before he was murdered; and you talked to her rather confidentially,--under the portico."

I tried bluff once more, though it doesn't come easily to me. I looked him straight in the face and said deliberately:

"I don't quite understand you, Lord Southbourne. That lady at the Hotel Cecil was Miss Anne Pendennis, a friend of my cousin, Mrs. Cayley. Do you know her?"

"Well--no."

"Then who on earth made you think she was the original of that portrait?"

"Cayley the dramatist; he's your cousin's husband, isn't he? I showed the portrait to him, and he recognized it at once."