Chapter XIX

“Colonel Lockwood,” said Wilson after lunch, “has just telephoned in a state of considerable agitation. It appears that his men have rounded up Mr. Jerry Machin, and he wants me to come and hear what the young man’s got to say. Care to come along too?”

“Will Brandreth be there, I wonder?” Michael mused.

“Oh, probably,” said Wilson in a resigned tone. “Yes, I think you’re correct, and it was Lockwood that passed on that bit of information about the green frock--possibly without knowing that he’d done so. There ought to be a major crime in every county at least once in five years--to keep the police up to elementary standards of caution.”

“And Brandreth told Mrs. Meston to run away.”

“She certainly ran away,” Wilson admitted. “That Brandreth put her up to it I’m not so sure. However, we may be wiser when we’ve got Machin’s story.”

They betook themselves to Lockwood’s house, where, in a room guarded by a stolid police-sergeant, they found a terribly agitated Lockwood and a calm tramp, who appeared quite unmoved by the Colonel’s perturbation.

“This is Jerry Machin,” the Colonel began abruptly. “Tell these gentlemen what you were telling me just now.”

“Well,” said Jerry Machin, spreading himself completely at his ease and speaking in an unusually educated voice, “it was like this. I’ve been taking a shakedown lately, back of Sir Felix Lewis’s boathouse--I needn’t tell _you_ whereabouts, sir,” he added to Wilson, “because I seem to recollect it was you along with Jim Collins that smoked me out yesterday afternoon. Well, anyway, there I was----”

“Trespassing,” interrupted the Colonel sourly. Jerry Machin smiled at him.

“Wonderful how good comes out of evil, Colonel, isn’t it?” he said. “If I hadn’t been setting the law at defiance, in a manner of speaking, I’d not have been able to tell you what you want to know--if you _do_ want to know it.” And, indeed, the Colonel did not look as though the information had been welcome. “Well, as I was saying, I had a shakedown----”

“Inside or outside the boathouse?” Wilson asked.

“Outside, sir. The weather’s good, and I’ve no love for a roof over my head at the best of times. Anyway, there I was, and--it was the night Mr. Meston left Sam Wason’s place--I’d had a nap, and I woke up sudden, and, being hot, I thought I’d take a stroll by the river. I’d only just got to the tow-path when I heard a car coming up the road to the old bridge. I was just wondering who it was, for there isn’t much traffic on that road late at night, when the car stopped----”

“Where?” Wilson interrupted.

“Close by the bridge, on the far side of the road.” Wilson nodded, as if satisfied. “I saw the headlights. Then whoever the car belonged to turned them out and began walking up and down the road. It was a still night, and I could hear him plain as plain.”

“But you couldn’t see him, I suppose?”

“No. ’Twas too dark. Leastways, he was in the trees, and I didn’t catch a sight of him for some time. But after a bit--quarter of an hour, it may have been--he came to the bridge and walked right out into the middle of it, and I could see his shape plain as plain against the bend of the river. Then I said to myself, I know that walk; and when he turned to go back I was quite certain.”

“And it was----?”

“Mr. John, sir.”

“John Loring,” the Colonel supplemented unhappily. Michael could not suppress a gasp.

“But I thought Mr. John Loring was in China,” Wilson said.

“So did I, sir; and if I hadn’t known him so well I couldn’t have believed my eyes. But I’ve known Lorings, father and sons, these twenty years; and I’ll take my oath it was Mr. John. Besides, I saw him after, closer to, as I’ve been telling the Colonel, and I’ve no doubt in my own mind it was Mr. John.”

“Very well. Go on. What did you do then?”

“Just waited, sir, to see what was going to happen. It wasn’t above five minutes after I’d seen Mr. John, sir, there was the sound of another car along the road, the other side of the bridge, and Mr. John went along to meet it. It crossed the bridge, and stopped on my side of the road--the other side from Mr. John’s--and Mr. John helped a lady to get out of it. I didn’t particularly want to be seen, so I moved off behind the old boathouse, and then I heard them go into it and shut the door. Well, I mooched a bit round, to see if they were coming out. They didn’t come, and I felt more than a bit curious to see who it was Mr. John was meeting so private at that time of night.”

“What time was it?” Wilson asked.

“Round about midnight, sir,” Machin said. “I couldn’t speak to the minutes, not carrying a timepiece, but it was there or thereabouts. Well, after I’d listened awhile, I remembered seeing a knot-hole in the back of the house, and I thought I might get a peep in that way. So I crept up very quietly, and put my face to it--but I didn’t see so much as a glimpse. It was all dark inside there, barring Mr. John’s cigarette, and I couldn’t see who it was with him.”

“Couldn’t you hear?”

“I could hear, right enough; but there wasn’t anything much _to_ hear. Except that it was Mr. John’s young lady, and he’d brought her out there to tell her so, I couldn’t hear a word. And after I’d been looking for a bit, my foot slipped and I caught on a nail, and made a bit of a noise. So I skipped off into the woods as quiet as a mouse.”

“Why?”

“Ask the Colonel, sir.” Jerry Machin grinned. “You’ve known the Lorings pretty near as long as I have, Colonel. I put it to you, if one of them found you’d been listening to his sweethearting, would you stay around to hear what he thought about it?”

“And is that all you saw?”

“No, sir. I came back again, maybe an hour and a half later.”

“What had you been doing meanwhile?”

“Just about in the woods, sir. I’d a bit of business to attend to,” said Jerry, with an expression which left no doubt what the “bit of business” was. “Then I came back to see if the coast was clear, and just as I got near the bridge I heard a car starting, and just got there in time to see the second car--the lady’s--going away through the trees. I wondered whether Mr. John had gone too, and in case he hadn’t, I came up quietly. And it was my salvation I did so, sir; because as soon as I got close I could see Mr. John down by the waterside lighting a cigarette. The match-flame showed him up clear--I wasn’t more than a dozen feet away--and if I ever saw hell it was in Mr. John’s face then. It was just black with rage, and he’d got his teeth set--you know the way he has, Colonel--and if I’d got in his way then it wouldn’t have been long before I’d ’a’ been in the river with a cracked skull. So I dropped into the grass and lay low; and Mr. John, he paced up and down for a bit, muttering to himself. But then he suddenly got into his car and made off--the same way he’d come--without his lights, too, for all it was so black as my hat. And that’s the last I saw of him.”

“That is to say,” Wilson said, “you saw Mr. Loring first at about midnight. The lady came twenty minutes or so afterwards, and went away--when?”

“Some time after one, I should guess. Near as much as the half.”

“And Mr. Loring went away--how soon after her?”

“Five to ten minutes. Not more.”

“You didn’t see any one else there all the time?”

“Not a soul. And there wasn’t any one after Mr. John left. I looked all round before I went to bed again.”

“Could any one have been there while you were watching? Could you tell?”

“Not within a hundred yards, sir,” Machin replied positively. “I should have heard--and probably farther.”

“And you don’t know who the lady was?”

“Not if you say _know_, sir. Of course,” with a leer, “if you say _guess_, I could maybe put a name to her--and so could the Colonel for that matter. But I didn’t see her to swear to.”

“Nor hear her voice?”

“Not above a whisper, sir.”

“I see. Well, I think that’s all I want out of him, Colonel. I suppose you’ll keep him somewhere where he can be got at?”

“Bullock will see to that,” the Colonel replied, with unnecessary viciousness.

“Good! Wait a minute, though. I want a thread from your coat, Machin.” Wilson drew a small pair of tweezers from his pocket, and with a firm pull extracted from the tramp’s ragged coat a bit of grey tweed. Then he indicated dismissal, and Jerry Machin, with an impenitent smile to the world at large, disappeared in the firm charge of the police-sergeant.

“Well?” said Wilson to the Colonel.

“This is a frightful thing,” the latter groaned.

“Is that man reliable, should you say?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“We can test him on one point, at all events.” From an envelope in his pocket Wilson drew the grey thread he had taken from the old boathouse, laid it on the table beside Jerry Machin’s specimen, and compared the two through a lens. “That’s that,” he said. “They’re the same piece of stuff. That means that our friend did look through the knot-hole of the boathouse, and did see Mrs. Meston trysting with her lover from China. I gather, Colonel, from miscellaneous gossip, that that affair, while it was on, was pretty serious?”

The Colonel nodded unhappily. “Sylvia has never had one anything like so serious. And John Loring was very hard hit.”

“So that, if he suddenly returned from China, there might have been an--explosive situation?”

“There might.”

“And what would you expect Mr. John Loring to do under the circumstances?”

The Colonel gulped. “Not--hang a man. I can’t believe that!”

“But you could believe anything else. Thank you, Colonel.”

“Whoever they were, they were left alone in that boathouse for an hour or more,” Michael put in, “while the poacher was away. And Loring was in a raging passion afterwards.”

“Yes. Of course, you know, that fact strikes me as a little out of keeping with the rest of what you seem to suggest. What need to rage because one has just killed one’s rival?”

“In such a way as to destroy one’s own chances?”

“Yes--yes. There may be something in that, of course.”

“I can’t believe it,” the Colonel repeated.

“My dear Colonel,” said Wilson a little impatiently, “you won’t have to believe it unless some more evidence is forthcoming. We still don’t _know_ that Meston was there. I suppose”--to Michael--“your suggestion is that while Machin was away he walked up the tow-path, surprised the lovers, and got killed?” Michael nodded. “Getting out of the inn late at night, and coming for a chance walk? I hardly think that will do, you know. He must have had some sort of intimation or warning. Now, how did he get it? Who knew that John Loring was in the place?”

“_I_ don’t know,” said the Colonel. “I didn’t. I suppose Sylvia did.”

“Mrs. Meston,” said Wilson, “has very prudently departed, leaving no address. We had better get on her tracks quickly, but for the answer to my question we must, I’m afraid, try elsewhere. There’s just one possibility that occurs to me. Will you send for Strake, the private inquiry agent who has been messing around here, and let me question him? He seemed to me to have some information up his sleeve.”

The Colonel, looking rather bemused, gave the necessary orders. “And then,” Wilson continued, when he returned, “Mr. John Loring also must certainly be found and asked to explain. Have you any idea where he is likely to have made for?”

“Oh, I know where he is,” said the Colonel. “Godfrey Loring told me last night, when he was on the ’phone to me. He had a motoring smash a few days ago, on his way up to London, and is now lying ill at a friend’s house in St. John’s Wood. But he’s getting much better, Godfrey says.”

“And will soon be about again, I suppose,” Wilson supplemented. “Hadn’t you better make quite sure, that he comes here when he is, Colonel?”

“It won’t be easy,” the Colonel said, “if he went off in a rage.”

“There is such a thing as a warrant,” Wilson cruelly reminded him.

There was a gloomy silence, which was broken by the return of the policeman sent to fetch Strake.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, with a broad grin, “but Strake can’t come.”

“Can’t come?”

“He’s in the Cottage Hospital, sir, with a broken nose and contusions. The gentleman from Africa--Mr. Mackenzie--heard him in the King’s Arms last night making allegations against Mrs. Meston, and pretty near killed him. It took six of them to pull him off, and the Hospital say he won’t be fit to move till to-morrow.”

“You live in a violent neighbourhood, Colonel,” Wilson commented. “However, I think we might as well hear what the ill-advised man did say. Shall we try the Cottage Hospital?”