That brought Garbould down upon her like a ton of bricks. She was there to answer questions, not to make idle remarks and so forth and so on.
Then Greatorex came to the breaking off of the engagement and put it to her that Willoughton had broken it off, had in fact jilted her after compromising her. That she would not have for a moment. She declared that they had had a quarrel and she had broken it off. To that she stuck and there was no shaking her, though Garbould himself took a hearty hand in trying to shake her.
In the middle of it Willoughton, who was looking quite himself again, now that the atmosphere of the Court might be said to be charged almost with violence, said in a very unpleasant, jeering voice: “What she says is perfectly true – what’s the good of bothering her?”
Again Garbould was to the fore, and angrily reprimanded him for speaking, bade him keep silent, and said that he would not have his Court turned into a bear-garden.
“With the bear on the bench,” said Hazeldean to Arbuthnot in a whisper that carried well.
Two or three people laughed. One of them was a juryman. By the time Garbould had finished with him I did not think that that juryman would have convicted Willoughton, if he had actually seen him stab Kelstern.
Willoughton was writing a note which was passed to Hazeldean.
Hazeldean rose to cross-examine Ruth with a wholly confident air. He drew from her the facts that her father had been on excellent terms with Willoughton until the breaking off of the engagement; that in that matter he had taken her part warmly; and that when the maid who had spied upon them had informed him of her relations with Willoughton he had been very little more enraged than he was already.
Then Hazeldean asked: “Is it a fact that since the breaking off of your engagement the prisoner has more than once begged you to forgive him and renew it?”
“Four times,” said Ruth.
“And you refused?”
“Yes,” said Ruth. She looked at Willoughton queerly and added: “He wanted a lesson.”
“Did he then beg you at least to go through the form of marriage with him, and promise to leave you at the church door?”
“Yes.”
“And you refused?”
“Yes,” said Ruth.
Garbould bent forward and said in his most unpleasant tone: “And why did you reject the opportunity of repairing your shameful behaviour?”
“It wasn’t shameful,” Ruth almost snapped; and she scowled at him frankly. Then she added naïvely: “I refused because there was no hurry. He would always marry me if I changed my mind and wanted to.”
There was a pause. To me it seemed clearer than ever that the Crown had bungled badly in raising the question of the relations between her and Willoughton since he had evidently been more than ready to save her from any harm that might come of their indiscretion. But then, with a jury, you can never tell. Then Hazeldean started on a fresh line.
In sympathetic accents he asked: “Is it a fact that your father was suffering from cancer in a painful form?”
“It was beginning to grow very painful,” said Ruth sadly.
“Did he make a will and put all his affairs in order a few days before he died?”
“Three days,” said Ruth.
“Did he ever express an intention of committing suicide?”
“He said that he would stick it out for a little while and then end it all,” said Ruth. She paused and added: “And that is what he did do.”
One might almost say that the Court started. I think that everyone in it moved a little, so that there was a kind of rustling murmur. Garbould threw himself back in his seat with a snort of incredulity and glowered at Ruth.
“Will you tell the Court your reasons for that statement?” said Hazeldean.
Ruth seemed to pull herself together; the flush had faded from her face and she was looking very tired; then she began in a quiet, even voice: “I never believed for a moment that Mr. Willoughton murdered my father. If my father had murdered Mr. Willoughton it would have been a different matter.”
Garbould leaned forward and snarled that it was not her beliefs or fancies that were wanted, but facts.
I did not think that she heard him; she was concentrating on giving her reasons exactly; she went on in the same quiet tone: “Of course, like everybody else I puzzled over the weapon: what it was and where it had got to. I did not believe that it was a pointed piece of a half-inch steel rod. If anybody had come to the Turkish bath meaning to murder my father and hide the weapon, they wouldn’t have used one so big and so difficult to hide, when a hat-pin would have done just as well and could be hidden much more easily. But what puzzled me most was the tea-leaf in the wound. All the other tea-leaves that came out of the flask were lying on the floor. Inspector Brackett told me they were. And I couldn’t believe that one tea-leaf had fallen on to my father at the very place above his heart at which the point of the weapon had penetrated the skin and got driven in by it. It was too much of a coincidence for me to swallow. But I got no nearer understanding it than anyone else.”
Garbould broke in in a tone of some exasperation and told her to come to the facts. Hazeldean rose and protested that the witness should not be interrupted; that she had solved a mystery which had puzzled some of the best brains in England, and she should be allowed to tell her story in her own way.
Again Ruth did not appear to listen to them, and when they stopped she went on in the same quiet voice: “Of course I remembered that Dad had talked to putting an end to it; but no one with a wound like that could get up and hide the weapon. Then, the night before last I dreamt that I went into the laboratory and saw a piece of steel rod, pointed, lying on the table at which my father used to work.”
“Dreams now!” murmured Garbould contemptuously; and he leaned back and folded his hands over his stomach.
“I didn’t think much of the dream, of course,” Ruth went on. “I had been puzzling about it all so hard for so long that it was only natural to dream about it. But after breakfast I had a sudden feeling that the secret was in the laboratory if I could only find it. I did not attach any importance to the feeling; but it went on growing stronger; and after lunch I went to the laboratory and began to hunt.
“I looked through all the drawers and could find nothing. Then I went round the room looking at everything and into everything, instruments and retorts and tubes and so on. Then I went into the middle of the floor and looked slowly round the room pretty hard. Against the wall, near the door, lying ready to be taken away, was a gas cylinder rolled it over to see what gas had been in it and it had no label on it.”
She paused to look round the Court as if claiming its best attention; then she went on: “Now that was very queer because every gas cylinder must have a label on it – so many gases are dangerous. I turned on the cylinder and nothing came out of it. It was quite empty. Then I went to the book in which all the things which come in are entered, and found that ten days before Dad died he had had in a cylinder of CO2 and seven pounds of ice. Also he had had seven pounds of ice every day till the day of his death. It was the ice and the CO2 together that gave me the idea. CO2, carbon dioxide, has a very low freezing-point – eighty degrees centigrade – and as it comes out of the cylinder and mixes with the air it turns into very fine snow; and that snow, if you compress it, makes the hardest and toughest ice possible. It flashed on me that Dad could have collected this snow and forced it into a mould and made a weapon that would not only inflict that wound but would disappear instantly!”
She paused again to look round the Court at about as rapt a lot of faces as any narrator could desire. Then she went on: “I knew that that was what he had done. I knew it for certain. Carbon dioxide ice would make a hard, tough dagger, and it would melt quickly in the hottest room of a Turkish bath and leave no smell because it is scentless. So there wouldn’t be any weapon. And it explained the tea-leaf too. Dad had made a carbon dioxide dagger perhaps a week before he used it, perhaps only a day. And he had put it into the thermos flask as soon as he had made it. The thermos flask keeps out the heat as well as the cold, you know. But to make sure that it couldn’t melt at all he kept the flask in ice till he was ready to use the dagger. It’s the only way you can explain that tea-leaf. It came out of the flask sticking to the point of the dagger and was driven into the wound!”