The Agony Column Part 9

The woman looked piteously about at us.

"I was desperate," she pleaded. "I had given up all that life held for me--given it up for a man who now looked at me coldly and spoke of marrying another. Can you wonder that I went in the evening to his rooms--went to plead with him--to beg, almost on my knees? It was no use. He was done with me--he said that over and over. Overwhelmed with blind rage and despair, I s.n.a.t.c.hed up that knife from the table and plunged it into his heart. At once I was filled with remorse. I--"

"One moment," broke in Hughes. "You may keep the details of your subsequent actions until later. I should like to compliment you, Countess. You tell it better each time."

He came over and faced Bray. I thought there was a distinct note of hostility in his voice.

"Checkmate, Inspector!" he said. Bray made no reply. He sat there staring up at the colonel, his face turned to stone.

"The scarab pin," went on Hughes, "is not yet forthcoming. We are tied for honors, my friend. You have your confession, but I have one to match it."

"All this is beyond me," snapped Bray.

"A bit beyond me, too," the colonel answered. "Here are two people who wish us to believe that on the evening of Thursday last, at half after six of the clock, each sought out Captain Fraser-Freer in his rooms and murdered him."

He walked to the window and then wheeled dramatically.

"The strangest part of it all is," he added, "that at six-thirty o'clock last Thursday evening, at an obscure restaurant in Soho--Frigacci's--these two people were having tea together!"

I must admit that, as the colonel calmly offered this information, I suddenly went limp all over at a realization of the endless maze of mystery in which we were involved. The woman gave a little cry and Lieutenant Fraser-Freer leaped to his feet.

"How the devil do you know that?" he cried.

"I know it," said Colonel Hughes, "because one of my men happened to be having tea at a table near by. He happened to be having tea there for the reason that ever since the arrival of this lady in London, at the request of--er--friends in India, I have been keeping track of her every move; just as I kept watch over your late brother, the captain."

Without a word Lieutenant Fraser-Freer dropped into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

"I'm sorry, my son," said Hughes. "Really, I am. You made a heroic effort to keep the facts from coming out--a man's-size effort it was.

But the War Office knew long before you did that your brother had succ.u.mbed to this woman's lure--that he was serving her and Berlin, and not his own country, England."

Fraser-Freer raised his head. When he spoke there was in his voice an emotion vastly more sincere than that which had moved him when he made his absurd confession.

"The game's up," he said. "I have done all I could. This will kill my father, I am afraid. Ours has been an honorable name, Colonel; you know that--a long line of military men whose loyalty to their country has never before been in question. I thought my confession would and the whole nasty business, that the investigations would stop, and that I might be able to keep forever unknown this horrible thing about him--about my brother."

Colonel Hughes laid his hand on the boy's shoulder, and the latter went on: "They reached me--those frightful insinuations about Stephen--in a round about way; and when he came home from India I resolved to watch him. I saw him go often to the house of this woman. I satisfied myself that she was the same one involved in the stories coming from Rangoon; then, under another name, I managed to meet her. I hinted to her that I myself was none too loyal; not completely, but to a limited extent, I won her confidence. Gradually I became convinced that my brother was indeed disloyal to his country, to his name, to us all. It was at that tea time you have mentioned when I finally made up my mind. I had already bought a revolver; and, with it in my pocket, I went to the Savoy for dinner."

He rose and paced the floor.

"I left the Savoy early and went to Stephen's rooms. I was resolved to have it out with him, to put the matter to him bluntly; and if he had no explanation to give me I intended to kill him then and there. So, you see, I was guilty in intention if not in reality. I entered his study.

It was filled with strangers. On his sofa I saw my brother Stephen lying--stabbed above the heart--dead!" There was a moment's silence.

"That is all," said Lieutenant Fraser-Freer.

"I take it," said Hughes kindly, "that we have finished with the lieutenant. Eh, Inspector?"

"Yes," said Bray shortly. "You may go."

"Thank you," the boy answered. As he went out he said brokenly to Hughes: "I must find him--my father."

Bray sat in his chair, staring hard ahead, his jaw thrust out angrily.

Suddenly he turned on Hughes.

"You don't play fair," he said. "I wasn't told anything of the status of the captain at the War Office. This is all news to me."

"Very well," smiled Hughes. "The bet is off if you like."

"No, by heaven!" Bray cried. "It's still on, and I'll win it yet. A fine morning's work I suppose you think you've done. But are we any nearer to finding the murderer? Tell me that."

"Only a bit nearer, at any rate," replied Hughes suavely. "This lady, of course, remains in custody."

"Yes, yes," answered the inspector. "Take her away!" he ordered.

A constable came forward for the countess and Colonel Hughes gallantly held open the door.

"You will have an opportunity, Sophie," he said, "to think up another story. You are clever--it will not be hard."

She gave him a black look and went out. Bray got up from his desk. He and Colonel Hughes stood facing each other across a table, and to me there was something in the manner of each that suggested eternal conflict.

"Well?" sneered Bray.

"There is one possibility we have overlooked," Hughes answered. He turned toward me and I was startled by the coldness in his eyes. "Do you know, Inspector," he went on, "that this American came to London with a letter of introduction to the captain--a letter from the captain's cousin, one Archibald Enwright? And do you know that Fraser-Freer had no cousin of that name?"

"No!" said Bray.

"It happens to be the truth," said Hughes. "The American has confessed as much to me."

"Then," said Bray to me, and his little blinking eyes were on me with a narrow calculating glance that sent the s.h.i.+vers up and down my spine, "you are under arrest. I have exempted you so far because of your friend at the United States Consulate. That exemption ends now."

I was thunderstruck. I turned to the colonel, the man who had suggested that I seek him out if I needed a friend--the man I had looked to to save me from just such a contingency as this. But his eyes were quite fishy and unsympathetic.

"Quite correct, Inspector," he said. "Lock him up!" And as I began to protest he pa.s.sed very close to me and spoke in a low voice: "Say nothing. Wait!"

I pleaded to be allowed to go back to my rooms, to communicate with my friends, and pay a visit to our consulate and to the Emba.s.sy; and at the colonel's suggestion Bray agreed to this somewhat irregular course. So this afternoon I have been abroad with a constable, and while I wrote this long letter to you he has been fidgeting in my easy chair. Now he informs me that his patience is exhausted and that I must go at once. So there is no time to wonder; no time to speculate as to the future, as to the colonel's sudden turn against me or the promise of his whisper in my ear. I shall, no doubt, spend the night behind those hideous, forbidding walls that your guide has pointed out to you as New Scotland Yard. And when I shall write again, when I shall end this series of letters so filled with--

The constable will not wait. He is as impatient as a child. Surely he is lying when he says I have kept him here an hour.

Wherever I am, dear lady, whatever be the end of this amazing tangle, you may be sure the thought of you--Confound the man!

YOURS, IN DURANCE VILE.

This fifth letter from the young man of the Agony Column arrived at the Carlton Hotel, as the reader may recall, on Monday morning, August the third. And it represented to the girl from Texas the climax of the excitement she had experienced in the matter of the murder in Adelphi Terrace. The news that her pleasant young friend--whom she did not know--had been arrested as a suspect in the case, inevitable as it had seemed for days, came none the less as an unhappy shock. She wondered whether there was anything she could do to help. She even considered going to Scotland Yard and, on the ground that her father was a Congressman from Texas, demanding the immediate release of her strawberry man. Sensibly, however, she decided that Congressmen from Texas meant little in the life of the London police. Besides, she night have difficulty in explaining to that same Congressman how she happened to know all about a crime that was as yet unmentioned in the newspapers.

So she reread the latter portion of the fifth letter, which pictured her hero marched off ingloriously to Scotland Yard and with a worried little sigh, went below to join her father.

CHAPTER VII

In the course of the morning she made several mysterious inquiries of her parent regarding nice points of international law as it concerned murder, and it is probable that he would have been struck by the odd nature of these questions had he not been unduly excited about another matter.