What Dread Hand? Read Online Free PDF Page B

impatient waiting from then on, for the end of a life whose expectations had been somewhat underestimated. On hers—ah! she had been on the spot to recognise in advance the long years she might yet have to serve with a man who at the least sign of rebellion would pare down her inheritance to the limit the law allowed. Had she really confessed to Cyrus Caxton an earlier marriage? Not likely! ‘You are well named Elizabeth—the virgin queen,’ he had said; and added, ‘I hope!’ Of them all, the one who had had most cause to dread Mr. Caxton’s marriage bed, had been Elizabeth herself.
    The plot then, laid: but in one mind alone. Use the ex-husband, expendable now, as red-herring number one; ensnare with enchantments long proved irresistible, such other poor fools as might serve to confuse the issue. With gentle persistence, no injury pin-pointable, alienate servants too long faithful and now in the way. And, the scene set, sit, sweet and smiling, little hands fluttering, soft eyes mistily blue—and in the back of one’s scheming mind, think and think and plan and plan…
    ‘You can’t know,’ she said, spitting it out at him, as they drove away from the house, the three men left sick and bewildered, utterly confounded, watching her go: sitting between himself and his sergeant in the smooth black police car, ceaselessly, restlessly struggling against their grip on her wrists. ‘You don’t know. It’s all a trick, trying to lead me up the garden path.’
    ‘No,’ said Cockrill. ‘Not any more. We’ve been up enough garden paths: with you leading me.’ His arm gave slackly against the tug and pull of her hand, but his fingers never left their firm hold. ‘How well you did it!—poking the clues under my nose, snatching each of them back when you saw it wasn’t going to work—and all with such a touching air of protecting your poor dear admirers, fallen into this terrible trap, for love of you. But I matched you,’ he said with quiet satisfaction, ‘trick for trick.’
    ‘You can’t know,’ she repeated again.
    ‘I knew from the first moment,’ he said. ‘From the first moment I remembered his asking why he couldn’t have had smoked salmon. You ordered the meal: accuse who you will—whatever you had said about the meal, that would have been decided. So why give him oysters; which would only make him angry? If one thought about it—taking all the other factors into consideration—the answer had to be there.’
    ‘But the tin! You saw it yourself when we came into the dining-room. I never left the dining-room—how could I have hidden it in the vase?’
    ‘You hid it when you went out to “look”; it wouldn’t take half a second and you had your little hankie in your hand, didn’t you?—all ready to muffle your finger-prints.’ And with his free hand he smote his knee. ‘By gum!—you’d thought this thing out, hadn’t you?—right down to the last little shred of a handkerchief.’
    She struggled, sitting there between them, ceaselessly wrenching to ease their grip on her wrists. ‘Let me go, you brutes! You’re hurting me.’
    ‘Cyrus Caxton didn’t have too comfortable a time, a-dying.’
    ‘That old hog!’ she said, viciously. ‘Who cares how such an animal dies?’
    ‘As long as he dies.’
    ‘You’ll never prove that I killed him, Inspector. How, for example,’ she said, triumphantly, subsiding a little in her restless jerking to give her whole mind to it, ‘how could I have taken the poison from the tin?’
    ‘You could have taken it while you were in the house with Theo, on the way to the church. Theo went off to the downstairs cloakroom—’
    ‘For half a minute. How long does a man take, nipping into the loo? To get the stuff out of the tin, do all the rest of it—’
    ‘Ah, but I don’t say you did “do all the rest of it”—not then. “All the rest of it” had been prepared in advance. We’ll find—if we look long enough; and we will—some chemist in