Part 33

“You were out of the house, then, at the time Mr. Wells died?”

“I can prove it by as many witnesses as you wish to call.”

“Now, about these letters, Hawkins,” Sperry said. “The letters in the bag. Have you still got them?”

He half rose--we had given him a chair facing the light--and then sat down again. “What letters?”

“Don’t beat about the bush. We know you have the letters. And we want them.”

“I don’t intend to give them up, sir.”

“Will you tell us how you got them?” He hesitated. “If you do not know already, I do not care to say.”

I placed the letter to A 31 before him. “You wrote this, I think?” I said.

He was genuinely startled. More than that, indeed, for his face twitched. “Suppose I did?” he said, “I’m not admitting it.”

“Will you tell us for whom it was meant?”

“You know a great deal already, gentlemen. Why not find that out from where you learned the rest?”

“You know, then, where we learned what we know?”

“That’s easy,” he said bitterly. “She’s told you enough, I daresay. She doesn’t know it all, of course. Any more than I do,” he added.

“Will you give us the letters?”

“I haven’t said I have them. I haven’t admitted I wrote that one on the desk. Suppose I have them, I’ll not give them up except to the District Attorney.”

“By ‘she’ do you refer to Miss Jeremy?” I asked.

He stared at me, and then smiled faintly.

“You know who I mean.”

We tried to assure him that we were not, in a sense, seeking to involve him in the situation, and I even went so far as to state our position, briefly:

“I’d better explain, Hawkins. We are not doing police work. But, owing to a chain of circumstances, we have learned that Mr. Wells did not kill himself. He was murdered, or at least shot, by some one else. It may not have been deliberate. Owing to what we have learned, certain people are under suspicion. We want to clear things up for our own satisfaction.”

“Then why is some one taking down what I say in the next room?”

He could only have guessed it, but he saw that he was right, by our faces. He smiled bitterly. “Go on,” he said. “Take it down. It can’t hurt anybody. I don’t know who did it, and that’s God’s truth.”

And, after long wrangling, that was as far as we got.

He suspected who had done it, but he did not know. He absolutely refused to surrender the letters in his possession, and a sense of delicacy, I think, kept us all from pressing the question of the A 31 matter.

“That’s a personal affair,” he said. “I’ve had a good bit of trouble. I’m thinking now of going back to England.”

And, as I say, we did not insist.

When he had gone, there seemed to be nothing to say. He had left the same impression on all of us, I think--of trouble, but not of crime. Of a man fairly driven; of wretchedness that was almost despair. He still had the letters. He had, after all, as much right to them as we had, which was, actually, no right at all. And, whatever it was, he still had his secret.

Herbert was almost childishly crestfallen. Sperry’s attitude was more philosophical.