“Of course, Parker,” said my companion. “It stood out a mile. Where Miss Brentwood saw only compassion and thoughtfulness, I saw the man revealed for the debased monster he is. No wonder the wretch sat on the bench there and looked at the rose-garden by the hour. He was terrified that someone would dig it up and reveal his ghastly crime and so he had to mount guard on it, summer and winter. He haunted the dining-room which overlooks it. as Miss Brentwood has since told me.”
“So the burial of the dog…?”
“Merely provided a convenient excuse for his compassion. Now we come to the more recent events. The girl’s uncle, worried at her approaching majority, and for other reasons, decided to invite Fawkes to the house in the guise of the lawyer, to prepare the ground. Not surprisingly, the girl found him changed from her recollection, though, as Roseacre hoped, her suspicions were not aroused. As Miss Brentwood has already told us, the two men quarrelled that night over the will.
“I do not yet know the exact reason for the quarrel but we shall have it from this creature before the night is out.”
Roseacre ground his teeth. It was an astonishing sound in the sombre atmosphere of that gaslit room.
“Do not depend on it, Pons.” he snarled.
Solar Pons regarded him coolly and having made sure that my revolver was sighted in our prisoner’s bulky form, he turned back to me.
“Quarrel they did. Perhaps over the fake Marcus’ role with Miss Brentwood’s legacy imminent. How was he to explain where most of the money had gone? Perhaps they quarrelled over the money still remaining. Fawkes being unconscious of its true extent? Or did Fawkes want the remaining sum in consideration of his silence?”
Another gritting of teeth on the part of our silent prisoner.
“The latter, Mr Pons.”
Pons inclined his head.
“Thank you. You have spoken the truth about something at last. The quarrel passed but the matter was still unresolved. Late at night Roseacre crept to Fawkes’ room and tried to strangle his sleeping partner with a cord. Fawkes woke up and a struggle ensued. Roseacre had already secured the rope to the end of the bed. The wretched man tried to escape, even to the extent of throwing himself through the window.
“He went through, breaking the glass, as we have already seen. Parker. He screamed, which woke up Miss Brentwood in the room below who was naturally horrified to see his dying figure arrive in front of her window. Fortunately for Roseacre she fainted with the shock. He was able to haul up the body and tidy the room. Mrs Bevan was hard of hearing and in any case slept some way away and would have heard nothing. His niece was another matter.
“He descended to her room and found her lying concussed. This gave him time to remove the body to an outhouse and. I submit, to the boot of his car, where it remained throughout the doctor’s visit.”
“How do you know all this, Pons?”
“The sequence of events in the unfortunate Fawkes’ bedroom was perfectly clear. Parker. I immediately noted the indentations of the rope in the soft wood of the bedhead and there were marks on the floor where the bed had been dragged by the weight of the dying man’s body.
This was, of course, the squeaking noise heard by Miss Brentwood. You saw me examine the brickwork outside her room, Parker. There were clear traces where the man’s feet had scraped across the wall. Roseacre would, of course, have cleared the broken glass from the garden.
“Naturally, Roseacre had then to draw the shutters across the window to avoid the broken panes being seen outside and to make some excuse to Mrs Bevan for clearing up the room itself. It was obvious to me immediately that Miss Brentwood had suffered no dream or hallucination, though her uncle himself acted skilfully enough partly to convince her that she had.
“Now, Parker, hear this. Roseacre does not dare repeat his experiment in the rose- garden. So he drove to London in the dark hours of the night, leaving his niece in care of Mrs Bevan, the body of his victim in the boot of the car. He went straight to Fawkes’ house at Chapel Court, using the dead man’s own key. Here he had some hours undisturbed.
“He was able to stage quite a convincing if somewhat grim piece-de-theatre. After he had hanged Fawkes’ body from a beam in his bedroom, he burned a great many of his papers and documents on the grate, including some photographs of the dead man which might have proved incriminating. Fortunately, like most criminals, he overdid it. He undoubtedly threw the police suspicions in the right direction. He left enough material in the deed-boxes to make it plain that the fake Marcus had swindled his clients of money from their estates, including that of Miss Brentwood. He certainly removed any material that might have incriminated himself.”
“How did he overdo it, Pons?”
“Because, Parker, no man committing suicide, in my experience at least, would bother to burn his own photographs. Incriminating papers, old love-letters, certainly. That is understandable and natural. But self-love dies hardest of all and though a suicide for love might destroy a beloved’s photograph, I have never yet met a case where the victim of such a tragedy destroyed his own. However, this was not the only detail which guided me to the truth.
“I had already gone to the mortuary because, of course, I needed police cooperation to gain access to the premises at Chapel Court. I found Jamison already viewing the body.”
“Extraordinary, Pons.”
My companion nodded, ignoring the bowed figure in the easy chair by the fireplace.
“None other, Parker. He is nothing if not dogged. The scratches made by the broken window on the body of the corpse had worried the police surgeon and now it puzzled him. We were able to pool our ideas to mutual advantage. The finger-prints of the corpse were taken and it was soon established that Marcus was Fawkes, who had a police record, remember. On our visit to Chapel Court Jamison showed me a scrap of one of the photographs. It bore a few fragments of lettering and I was able to identify it as the cipher of Leibnitz, the portrait photographer in the Strand. Jamison went there and their records clinched the matter.”
“You certainly had a busy day, Pons!” I exclaimed in admiration.
“Did I not, Parker,” said Solar Pons, his eyes grim as he looked at Roseacre, who seemed somewhat to have recovered his spirits. Now he drew himself up and passed a hand across his haggard face.
“You are going to find this rigmarole rather difficult to prove, Mr Pons. Most of it is supposition and entirely unsupported. And as for your preposterous story about the rose-garden…”
“You were extremely clever,” Solar Pons interrupted. “You went to the police today — as you would have to give evidence at the inquest — and you bluffed it out magnificently there.”
He went to stand in front of the dining-room door as he spoke.
“But Jamison already had his suspicions. He had been to the bank and found the disordered state of affairs in the estates of Marcus’ clients. Fortunately for your niece she still has £13,000 of the £100,000 remaining and the sale of the house and contents will raise a considerable further sum so she should not be too badly off.”
Roseacre had recovered himself completely now. He drew himself up, his eyes blazing.
“You are mad, Pons!”
Solar Pons shook his head.
“We will see who is mad.”
Roseacre gave us a sneering smile.
“There is nothing in the rose-garden!”
He moved so quickly that I was taken unawares: his iron hand was on the revolver which exploded harmlessly at the ceiling. I went backwards in the big easy chair all of a tumble and as I staggered up Roseacre rushed toward the kitchen door, his only escape route.
“After him, Parker!”
I was at Pons’ heels as Roseacre kicked open the door to reveal the gas-lit interior and the ghastly cry he gave rings in my cars yet. He sagged against the door panel, his face drained of all colour. Beyond him, on the bare-scrubbed kitchen table was the remains of the rotted thing in the tarpaulin, all eaten and burned with lime, that we had excavated from the garden earlier that evening.