CHAPTER XXIV
The day "Cupid" heard that Ian Barr had been trapped in France, he made a "find" in the View Tower.
Although the police had reported at first that nothing was visible there which could afford a clue to the mystery, except in the room on the ground floor, Gaylor had never been satisfied. He wanted, if possible, to have a clear case against Barr, whom he now believed to be the murderer of Lady Hereward; and if he could come across any proof that Barr had been in the habit of using the Tower just before the tragedy, it would be a score. Consequently he searched, with the idea ever before him; and from far down between the seat and back of the battered, couch-like sofa in the upper room, he prized out a hairpin.
This was on the afternoon of the day when the news had come from France; and the best thing about the trophy, from the detective's point of view, was that the hairpin appeared to be a new one.
If it had been old, it might have fallen from some woman s head months or years before, and worked its way down into the sofa; but it was new; and it had a certain individuality of its own. As no woman had entered the Tower since the murder, it was clear that one must have been there, in the upper room, not very long before the day of Lady Hereward's death, if not on the day itself; and the question arose in Gaylor's mind: Was it a woman whom Barr had gone there to meet?
Naturally, he thought of Miss Verney, whose statements at the inquest had been so unsatisfactory. Now, as he had just heard, Barr had been caught with her in France, and it seemed more than ever probable that she and the young man had been together on the afternoon of the murder. It occurred to Gaylor that the girl might even be an accomplice, for Lady Hereward had separated her from her lover, temporarily at least, and caused Barr to forfeit the means of supporting a wife.
The hairpin, Gaylor thought, might very well be hers. She had red-gold hair; and this was not a common, black hairpin, but a golden brown one, wound with fine brown silk, so as to resemble the texture of hair. No woman with dark hair would choose to wear such a thing.
He put it in his pocket; and when he went back to the farmhouse for tea he brought out the hairpin, and showed it to his hostess.
"I suppose this isn't yours, is it, Mrs. Barnard?" he inquired.
"Well! Wherever did you pick that up?" Rose wanted to know, with an eagerness which instantly convinced Gaylor that she had seen such hairpins before, and was surprised to see this one now. He replied, teasingly, that he would tell her where he had found it, when she told him whose it was.
Mrs. Barnard temporized. "Was it in this room?"
"What do you think?" questioned the young man, with his innocent, dimpled smile.
"Well, it would be the strangest thing if it were here, considering never a morning goes by but the whole place is swept."
"Ah, then it's several days since the person has been to see you?"
"You do catch one up quick," said Rose. "Neither of the persons has set foot in this house for weeks, then, since you put it that way."
"Do two ladies of your acquaintance use this sort of silky brown hairpin?" asked Gaylor, not hiding his astonishment.
"One of them's not what you'd call a lady," said Rose, "but the other was."
"Was? She is dead, then? Do you mean Lady Hereward?"
"Yes. She used always to have hairpins like that. She would not let her maid put any other kind in her hair. These just matched it."
Gaylor was as much astonished as it was in his experienced soul to be. He had not once thought of Lady Hereward. Could it be, he asked himself, that she had gone to the upper room of the Tower the day she was murdered? Or had she perhaps been in the habit of going there, unknown to her husband and other members of the household at Friars' Moat? This idea upset his theories, but he could fit it in, in several different ways, doubtless, when he had had time to think the puzzle out. Lady Hereward might have been induced to visit the tower by a letter from Ian Barr, either signed or anonymous. Or it might still be that Miss Verney was the other who used the brown silk hairpins, in spite of the fact that Mrs. Barnard described that person as "not what you'd call a lady."
"Has Miss Verney a fancy for the same sort of pins?" the detective asked, with boyish slyness which was engaging rather than repulsive.
"Dear me, no, they'd be the wrong shade for her hair," replied Rose, scorning his masculine ignorance. "I don't know what sort of hairpins she wears, I'm sure, but she wouldn't choose this sort, anyway."
"How do you know about Lady Hereward? Did you ever notice them in her hair?"
"No, I can't say I did, though she came here fairly often, to leave some little present for Poppet. She was very kind to Poppet, yet the queer thing is, the child never cared for her. Her ladyship seemed to know that, and have a kind of pride in trying to gain the little thing's affection. But she never could."
"Poppet isn 't the type of child whose love could be forced," remarked Gaylor, to Rose's delight. "About this hairpin, though. You might as well tell me who is the 'other person,' if not Miss Verney."
"Why, if you must know, it's Kate Craigie. I hope you haven't got any horrid, secret reason for wanting to find out? You see, it's just not impossible that a hairpin dropped here by Lady Hereward or Kate might have stuck in a rug, in spite of all the sweepings; but Kate was so cross with my little Poppet for letting out things to you that she's never been inside the house since the afternoon her poor ladyship was done away with."
"I didn't say I'd found the hairpin here," Gaylor remarked. "But I'm sure those hairpins don't match Kate Craigie's hair, since you say women are so keen on a match in such things. Hers is almost black. Why should she choose them, if Miss Verney wouldn't?"
That s different," Rose informed him. "Miss Verney's hair is one of her greatest beauties, and she must know that, though she's not a vain young lady. Gilt hairpins are as cheap to buy as dark ones. She'd either be careless, and get black, or else she'd have yellow of the right shade, nothing in between; do you see? But Kate, being about her mistress's room a great deal, if she was wanting a hairpin would stick in one of her ladyship's, or even help herself to a handful if she'd forgotten to buy her own sort. No harm in that. All ladies' maids do it, I expect. It was Kate who told me of Lady Hereward's being so fond of her brown silk kind. One day here Kate was trying a new way of doing her hair, after a picture in a fashion book I had, and Poppet—observing little puss!—noticed those lightish, silk-covered hairpins among the common black sort, on my dressing-table."
"No harm, of course," said the detective, consoling Rose, who looked anxious. But he was disturbed in mind. All his calculations trembled like a card-house built too high, at the thought that Kate Craigie might have been secretly in the habit of visiting the View Tower. What if, after all, the evidence against Ian Barr should come to nothing, and the wind of suspicion should veer back to Edward, the footman, lover of Lady Hereward's maid and enemy of Lady Hereward? At best, the evidence against Barr, black as it looked, remained even now entirely circumstantial.
Gaylor had been working industriously up to the point he had reached, and it was partly due to his advice that Barr had been so successfully trapped in France. The late steward of Friars' Moat would be "extradited" back to England in a day or two, and Gaylor had expected to have an almost impregnable case built up against him. It would be a blow to find, just before the arrival of the prisoner, who owed his arrest largely to Gaylor's discoveries as well as suggestions, that the case was not so strong after all.
This contingency had to be faced, however, and the detective faced it. If there were to be new developments, he wanted to be the one to develop them, and spring them upon Scotland Yard and an eager public, instead of having them sprung upon him.
As he sat thinking, lost for the moment to all consciousness of Mrs. Barnard's presence, a knock sounded at the door. Rose went to open it, Gaylor scarcely hearing. A moment later she came back to him, a telegram in her hand.