The de Bercy Affair

"All right," she said quietly. "You may come to me for help yet" – and turned to the pile of letters on the desk.

"Anyway, Rosalind is not a relative, to your knowledge?" he persisted.

"No."

She stuffed the letters into a drawer, bowed, and was gone, leaving him sorry for her, for he saw a lump working in her throat.

Some minutes after her disappearance, a plump little woman came in – Mrs. Hester Bates, housekeeper in the Osborne ménage. Her hair lay in smooth curves on her brow as on the upturned bulge of a china bowl. There was an apprehensive look in her upward-looking eyes, so Furneaux spoke comfortingly to her, after seating her near the window.

"Don't be afraid to speak," he said reassuringly. "What you have to say is not necessarily against Mr. Osborne's interests. Just state the facts simply – you did see him here on the murder night, didn't you?"

She muttered something, as a tear dropped on the ample bosom of her black dress.

"Just a little louder," Furneaux said.

"Yes," she sobbed, "I saw his back."

"You were – where?"

"Coming up the kitchen stairs to talk to Mr. Jenkins."

"Don't cry. And when you reached the top of the kitchen stairs you saw his back on the house stairs – at the bottom? at the top?"

"He was nearer the top. I only saw him a minute."

"A moment, you mean, I think. And in that one moment you became quite sure that it was Mr. Osborne? Though it was only his back you saw?"

"Yes, sir…"

"No, don't cry. It's nothing. Only are you certain sure – that's the point?"

"Yes, I am sure enough, but – "

"But what?"

"I thought he was the worse for drink, which was a mad thing."

"Oh, you thought that. Why so?"

"His feet seemed to reel from side to side – almost from under him."

"His feet – I see. From side to side… Ever saw him the worse for drink before?"

"Never in all my life! I was amazed. Afterwards I had a feeling that it wasn't Mr. Osborne himself, but his spirit that I had seen. And it may have been his spirit! For my Aunt Pruie saw the spirit of her boy one Sunday afternoon when he was alive and well in his ship on the sea."

"But a spirit the worse for drink?" murmured Furneaux; "a spirit whose feet seemed to reel?"

She dropped her eyes, and presently wept a theory.

"A spirit walks lighter-like than a Christian, sir."

"Did you, though," asked Furneaux, making shorthand signs in his notebook, "did you have the impression that it might be a spirit at the time, or was it only afterwards?"

"It was only afterwards when I thought matters over," said Mrs. Bates. "Even at the time it crossed my mind that there was something in it I didn't rightly understand."

"Now, what sort of something? – can't you say?"

"No, sir. I don't know."

"And when you saw Mr. Jenkins immediately afterwards, did you mention to him that you had seen Mr. Osborne?"

"No, I didn't say anything to him, nor him to me."

"Pity… But the hour. You have said, I hear, that it was five minutes to eight. Now, the murder was committed between 7.30 and 7.45; and at five to eight Mr. Osborne is said by more than one person to have been at the Ritz Hotel. If he was there, he couldn't have been here. If he was here, he couldn't have been there. Are you sure of the hour – five to eight?"

As to that Mrs. Bates was positive. She had reason to remember, having looked at the clock à propos of the servants' supper. And Furneaux went away from her with eyes in which sparkled a light that some might have called wicked, and all would have called cruel, as when the cat hears a stirring, and crouches at the hole's rim with her soul crowded into an unblinking stare of expectation.

He looked at his watch, took a cab to Waterloo, and while in the vehicle again studied that scrawled "Rosalind" on Osborne's letter to Janoc.

"A trip to Tormouth should throw some light on it," he thought. "If it can be shown that he is actually in love – again – already – " and as he so thought, the cab ran out of St. James's Street into Pall Mall.

"Look! quick! There – in that cab!" hissed a man at that moment to a girl with whom he was lurking in a doorway deep under the shadow of an awning near the corner. "Look!"

"That's him!"

"Sure? Look well!"

"The very man!"

"Well, of all the fatalities!"

The cab dashed out of sight, and the man – Chief Inspector Winter – clapped his hand to his forehead in a spasm of sheer distraction and dismay. The woman with him was the murdered actress's cook, Bertha Seward, the same whom Inspector Clarke had one morning seen in earnest talk with Janoc under the pawnbroker's sign in St. Martin's Lane.

Winter walked away from her, looking on the ground, seeking his lost wits there. Then suddenly he turned and overtook her again.

"And you swear to me, Miss Seward," he said gravely, "that that very man was with your mistress in her flat on the evening of the murder?"

"I would know him anywhere," answered the slight girl, looking up into his face with her oblique Chinese eyes that were always half shut as if shy of light. "I thought to myself at the time what a queer, perky person he was, and what working eyes the little man had, and I wondered who he could be. That's the very man in that cab, I'm positive."

"And when you and Pauline went out to the Exhibition you left him with your mistress, you say?"

"Yes, sir. They were in the drawing-room together; and quarreling, too, for her voice was raised, and she laughed twice in an angry way."

"Quarreling – in French? You didn't catch – ?"

"No, it was in French."

Inspector Winter leant his shoulder against the house-wall, and his head slowly sank, and then all at once dropped down with an air of utter abandonment, for Furneaux was his friend – he had looked on Furneaux as a brother.