Trent’s Last Case

Mr Cupples paused and drank some tea. Trent smoked and stared out at the hot June landscape.

‘I would not go to White Gables,’ Mr Cupples resumed. ‘You know my views, I think, upon the economic constitution of society, and the proper relationship of the capitalist to the employee, and you know, no doubt, what use that person made of his vast industrial power upon several very notorious occasions. I refer especially to the trouble in the Pennsylvania coal-fields, three years ago. I regarded him, apart from all personal dislike, in the light of a criminal and a disgrace to society. I came to this hotel, and I saw my niece here. She told me what I have more briefly told you. She said that the worry and the humiliation of it, and the strain of trying to keep up appearances before the world, were telling upon her, and she asked for my advice. I said I thought she should face him and demand an explanation of his way of treating her. But she would not do that. She had always taken the line of affecting not to notice the change in his demeanour, and nothing, I knew, would persuade her to admit to him that she was injured, once pride had led her into that course. Life is quite full, my dear Trent,’ said Mr Cupples with a sigh, ‘of these obstinate silences and cultivated misunderstandings.’

‘Did she love him?’ Trent enquired abruptly. Mr Cupples did not reply at once. ‘Had she any love left for him?’ Trent amended.

Mr Cupples played with his teaspoon. ‘I am bound to say,’ he answered slowly, ‘that I think not. But you must not misunderstand the woman, Trent. No power on earth would have persuaded her to admit that to anyone—even to herself, perhaps—so long as she considered herself bound to him. And I gather that, apart from this mysterious sulking of late, he had always been considerate and generous.’

‘You were saying that she refused to have it out with him.’

‘She did,’ replied Mr Cupples. ‘And I knew by experience that it was quite useless to attempt to move a Domecq where the sense of dignity was involved. So I thought it over carefully, and next day I watched my opportunity and met Manderson as he passed by this hotel. I asked him to favour me with a few minutes’ conversation, and he stepped inside the gate down there. We had held no communication of any kind since my niece’s marriage, but he remembered me, of course. I put the matter to him at once and quite definitely. I told him what Mabel had confided to me. I said that I would neither approve nor condemn her action in bringing me into the business, but that she was suffering, and I considered it my right to ask how he could justify himself in placing her in such a position.’

‘And how did he take that?’ said Trent, smiling secretly at the landscape. The picture of this mildest of men calling the formidable Manderson to account pleased him.

‘Not very well,’ Mr Cupples replied sadly. ‘In fact, far from well. I can tell you almost exactly what he said—it wasn’t much. He said, “See here, Cupples, you don’t want to butt in. My wife can look after herself. I’ve found that out, along with other things.” He was perfectly quiet—you know he was said never to lose control of himself—though there was a light in his eyes that would have frightened a man who was in the wrong, I dare say. But I had been thoroughly roused by his last remark, and the tone of it, which I cannot reproduce. You see,’ said Mr Cupples simply, ‘I love my niece. She is the only child that there has been in our—in my house. Moreover, my wife brought her up as a girl, and any reflection on Mabel I could not help feeling, in the heat of the moment, as an indirect reflection upon one who is gone.’

‘You turned upon him,’ suggested Trent in a low tone. ‘You asked him to explain his words.’

‘That is precisely what I did,’ said Mr Cupples. ‘For a moment he only stared at me, and I could see a vein on his forehead swelling—an unpleasant sight. Then he said quite quietly, “This thing has gone far enough, I guess,” and turned to go.’

‘Did he mean your interview?’ Trent asked thoughtfully.

‘From the words alone you would think so,’ Mr Cupples answered. ‘But the way in which he uttered them gave me a strange and very apprehensive feeling. I received the impression that the man had formed some sinister resolve. But I regret to say I had lost the power of dispassionate thought. I fell into a great rage’—Mr Cupples’s tone was mildly apologetic—‘and said a number of foolish things. I reminded him that the law allowed a measure of freedom to wives who received intolerable treatment. I made some utterly irrelevant references to his public record, and expressed the view that such men as he were unfit to live. I said these things, and others as ill-considered, under the eyes, and very possibly within earshot, of half a dozen persons sitting on this veranda. I noticed them, in spite of my agitation, looking at me as I walked up to the hotel again after relieving my mind for it undoubtedly did relieve it,’ sighed Mr Cupples, lying back in his chair.

‘And Manderson? Did he say no more?’

‘Not a word. He listened to me with his eyes on my face, as quiet as before. When I stopped he smiled very slightly, and at once turned away and strolled through the gate, making for White Gables.’

‘And this happened—?’

‘On the Sunday morning.’

‘Then I suppose you never saw him alive again?’

‘No,’ said Mr Cupples. ‘Or rather yes—once. It was later in the day, on the golf-course. But I did not speak to him. And next morning he was found dead.’

The two regarded each other in silence for a few moments. A party of guests who had been bathing came up the steps and seated themselves, with much chattering, at a table near them. The waiter approached. Mr Cupples rose, and, taking Trent’s arm, led him to a long tennis-lawn at the side of the hotel.

‘I have a reason for telling you all this,’ began Mr Cupples as they paced slowly up and down.

‘Trust you for that,’ rejoined Trent, carefully filling his pipe again. He lit it, smoked a little, and then said, ‘I’ll try and guess what your reason is, if you like.’

Mr Cupples’s face of solemnity relaxed into a slight smile. He said nothing.

‘You thought it possible,’ said Trent meditatively ‘—may I say you thought it practically certain?—that I should find out for myself that there had been something deeper than a mere conjugal tiff between the Mandersons. You thought that my unwholesome imagination would begin at once to play with the idea of Mrs Manderson having something to do with the crime. Rather than that I should lose myself in barren speculations about this, you decided to tell me exactly how matters stood, and incidentally to impress upon me, who know how excellent your judgement is, your opinion of your niece. Is that about right?’

‘It is perfectly right. Listen to me, my dear fellow,’ said Mr Cupples earnestly, laying his hand on the other’s arm. ‘I am going to be very frank. I am extremely glad that Manderson is dead. I believe him to have done nothing but harm in the world as an economic factor. I know that he was making a desert of the life of one who was like my own child to me. But I am under an intolerable dread of Mabel being involved in suspicion with regard to the murder. It is horrible to me to think of her delicacy and goodness being in contact, if only for a time, with the brutalities of the law. She is not fitted for it. It would mark her deeply. Many young women of twenty-six in these days could face such an ordeal, I suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products of the higher education of women today which would carry them through anything, perhaps.

‘I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the conditions of feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is not like that. She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering misses that used to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains; she is full of character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it is all mixed up’—Mr Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture—‘with ideals of refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is not a child of the age. You never knew my wife, Trent. Mabel is my wife’s child.’

The younger man bowed his head. They paced the length of the lawn before he asked gently, ‘Why did she marry him?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Cupples briefly.

‘Admired him, I suppose,’ suggested Trent.

Mr Cupples shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have been told that a woman will usually be more or less attracted by the most successful man in her circle. Of course we cannot realise how a wilful, dominating personality like his would influence a girl whose affections were not bestowed elsewhere; especially if he laid himself out to win her. It is probably an overwhelming thing to be courted by a man whose name is known all over the world. She had heard of him, of course, as a financial great power, and she had no idea—she had lived mostly among people of artistic or literary propensities—how much soulless inhumanity that might involve. For all I know, she has no adequate idea of it to this day. When I first heard of the affair the mischief was done, and I knew better than to interpose my unsought opinions. She was of age, and there was absolutely nothing against him from the conventional point of view. Then I dare say his immense wealth would cast a spell over almost any woman. Mabel had some hundreds a year of her own; just enough, perhaps, to let her realise what millions really meant. But all this is conjecture. She certainly had not wanted to marry some scores of young fellows who to my knowledge had asked her; and though I don’t believe, and never did believe, that she really loved this man of forty-five, she certainly did want to marry him. But if you ask me why, I can only say I don’t know.’

Trent nodded, and after a few more paces looked at his watch. ‘You’ve interested me so much,’ he said, ‘that I had quite forgotten my main business. I mustn’t waste my morning. I am going down the road to White Gables at once, and I dare say I shall be poking about there until midday. If you can meet me then, Cupples, I should like to talk over anything I find out with you, unless something detains me.’

‘I am going for a walk this morning,’ Mr Cupples replied. ‘I meant to have luncheon at a little inn near the golf-course, The Three Tuns. You had better join me there. It’s further along the road, about a quarter of a mile beyond White Gables. You can just see the roof between those two trees. The food they give one there is very plain, but good.’

‘So long as they have a cask of beer,’ said Trent, ‘they are all right. We will have bread and cheese, and oh, may Heaven our simple lives prevent from luxury’s contagion, weak and vile! Till then, goodbye.’ He strode off to recover his hat from the veranda, waved it to Mr Cupples, and was gone.

The old gentleman, seating himself in a deck-chair on the lawn, clasped his hands behind his head and gazed up into the speckless blue sky. ‘He is a dear fellow,’ he murmured. ‘The best of fellows. And a terribly acute fellow. Dear me! How curious it all is!’

CHAPTER IV (#ulink_ca3cc6e1-9cb7-52d7-9240-fb4cbf4568a4)

HANDCUFFS IN THE AIR (#ulink_ca3cc6e1-9cb7-52d7-9240-fb4cbf4568a4)

A PAINTER and the son of a painter, Philip Trent had while yet in his twenties achieved some reputation within the world of English art. Moreover, his pictures sold. An original, forcible talent and a habit of leisurely but continuous working, broken by fits of strong creative enthusiasm, were at the bottom of it. His father’s name had helped; a patrimony large enough to relieve him of the perilous imputation of being a struggling man had certainly not hindered. But his best aid to success had been an unconscious power of getting himself liked. Good spirits and a lively, humorous fancy will always be popular. Trent joined to these a genuine interest in others that gained him something deeper than popularity. His judgement of persons was penetrating, but its process was internal; no one felt on good behaviour with a man who seemed always to be enjoying himself. Whether he was in a mood for floods of nonsense or applying himself vigorously to a task, his face seldom lost its expression of contained vivacity. Apart from a sound knowledge of his art and its history, his culture was large and loose, dominated by a love of poetry. At thirty-two he had not yet passed the age of laughter and adventure.

His rise to a celebrity a hundred times greater than his proper work had won for him came of a momentary impulse. One day he had taken up a newspaper to find it chiefly concerned with a crime of a sort curiously rare in our country—a murder done in a railway train. The circumstances were puzzling; two persons were under arrest upon suspicion. Trent, to whom an interest in such affairs was a new sensation, heard the thing discussed among his friends, and set himself in a purposeless mood to read up the accounts given in several journals. He became intrigued; his imagination began to work, in a manner strange to him, upon facts; an excitement took hold of him such as he had only known before in his bursts of art-inspiration or of personal adventure. At the end of the day he wrote and dispatched a long letter to the editor of the Record, which he chose only because it had contained the fullest and most intelligent version of the facts.

In this letter he did very much what Poe had done in the case of the murder of Mary Rogers. With nothing but the newspapers to guide him, he drew attention to the significance of certain apparently negligible facts, and ranged the evidence in such a manner as to throw grave suspicion upon a man who had presented himself as a witness. Sir James Molloy had printed this letter in leaded type. The same evening he was able to announce in the Sun the arrest and full confession of the incriminated man.

Sir James, who knew all the worlds of London, had lost no time in making Trent’s acquaintance. The two men got on well, for Trent possessed some secret of native tact which had the effect of almost abolishing differences of age between himself and others. The great rotary presses in the basement of the Record building had filled him with a new enthusiasm. He had painted there, and Sir James had bought at sight, what he called a machinery-scape in the manner of Heinrich Kley.

Then a few months later came the affair known as the Ilkley mystery. Sir James had invited Trent to an emollient dinner, and thereafter offered him what seemed to the young man a fantastically large sum for his temporary services as special representative of the Record at Ilkley.

‘You could do it,’ the editor had urged. ‘You can write good stuff, and you know how to talk to people, and I can teach you all the technicalities of a reporter’s job in half an hour. And you have a head for a mystery; you have imagination and cool judgement along with it. Think how it would feel if you pulled it off!’

Trent had admitted that it would be rather a lark. He had smoked, frowned, and at last convinced himself that the only thing that held him back was fear of an unfamiliar task. To react against fear had become a fixed moral habit with him, and he had accepted Sir James’s offer.

He had pulled it off. For the second time he had given the authorities a start and a beating, and his name was on all tongues. He withdrew and painted pictures. He felt no leaning towards journalism, and Sir James, who knew a good deal about art, honourably refrained—as other editors did not—from tempting him with a good salary. But in the course of a few years he had applied to him perhaps thirty times for his services in the unravelling of similar problems at home and abroad. Sometimes Trent, busy with work that held him, had refused; sometimes he had been forestalled in the discovery of the truth. But the result of his irregular connection with the Record had been to make his name one of the best known in England. It was characteristic of him that his name was almost the only detail of his personality known to the public. He had imposed absolute silence about himself upon the Molloy papers; and the others were not going to advertise one of Sir James’s men.

The Manderson case, he told himself as he walked rapidly up the sloping road to White Gables, might turn out to be terribly simple. Cupples was a wise old boy, but it was probably impossible for him to have an impartial opinion about his niece. But it was true that the manager of the hotel, who had spoken of her beauty in terms that aroused his attention, had spoken even more emphatically of her goodness. Not an artist in words, the manager had yet conveyed a very definite idea to Trent’s mind. ‘There isn’t a child about here that don’t brighten up at the sound of her voice,’ he had said, ‘nor yet a grown-up, for the matter of that. Everybody used to look forward to her coming over in the summer. I don’t mean that she’s one of those women that are all kind heart and nothing else. There’s backbone with it, if you know what I mean—pluck—any amount of go. There’s nobody in Marlstone that isn’t sorry for the lady in her trouble—not but what some of us may think she’s lucky at the last of it.’ Trent wanted very much to meet Mrs Manderson.

He could see now, beyond a spacious lawn and shrubbery, the front of the two-storied house of dull-red brick, with the pair of great gables from which it had its name. He had had but a glimpse of it from the car that morning. A modern house, he saw; perhaps ten years old. The place was beautifully kept, with that air of opulent peace that clothes even the smallest houses of the well-to-do in an English countryside. Before it, beyond the road, the rich meadow-land ran down to the edge of the cliffs; behind it a woody landscape stretched away across a broad vale to the moors. That such a place could be the scene of a crime of violence seemed fantastic; it lay so quiet and well ordered, so eloquent of disciplined service and gentle living. Yet there beyond the house, and near the hedge that rose between the garden and the hot, white road, stood the gardener’s toolshed, by which the body had been found, lying tumbled against the wooden wall.

Trent walked past the gate of the drive and along the road until he was opposite this shed. Some forty yards further along the road turned sharply away from the house, to run between thick plantations; and just before the turn the grounds of the house ended, with a small white gate at the angle of the boundary hedge. He approached the gate, which was plainly for the use of gardeners and the service of the establishment. It swung easily on its hinges, and he passed slowly up a path that led towards the back of the house, between the outer hedge and a tall wall of rhododendrons. Through a gap in this wall a track led him to the little neatly built erection of wood, which stood among trees that faced a corner of the front. The body had lain on the side away from the house; a servant, he thought, looking out of the nearer windows in the earlier hours of the day before, might have glanced unseeing at the hut, as she wondered what it could be like to be as rich as the master.

He examined the place carefully and ransacked the hut within, but he could note no more than the trodden appearance of the uncut grass where the body had lain. Crouching low, with keen eyes and feeling fingers, he searched the ground minutely over a wide area; but the search was fruitless.

It was interrupted by the sound—the first he had heard from the house—of the closing of the front door. Trent unbent his long legs and stepped to the edge of the drive. A man was walking quickly away from the house in the direction of the great gate.

At the noise of a footstep on the gravel, the man wheeled with nervous swiftness and looked earnestly at Trent. The sudden sight of his face was almost terrible, so white and worn it was. Yet it was a young man’s face. There was not a wrinkle about the haggard blue eyes, for all their tale of strain and desperate fatigue. As the two approached each other, Trent noted with admiration the man’s breadth of shoulder and lithe, strong figure. In his carriage, inelastic as weariness had made it; in his handsome, regular features; in his short, smooth, yellow hair; and in his voice as he addressed Trent, the influence of a special sort of training was confessed. ‘Oxford was your playground, I think, my young friend,’ said Trent to himself.

‘If you are Mr Trent,’ said the young man pleasantly, ‘you are expected. Mr Cupples telephoned from the hotel. My name is Marlowe.’