“Bolted. We haven’t a trace of him. Which is just as well, for there’s no evidence. Jerdan left no papers. George could have laughed at us if he had the nerve.”
Reggie Fortune chuckled. “I never liked George. I rang him up that night: ‘Mr. George Coppett? The Ferns speaking. It’s all out’ and I rang off. I thought George would quit. George will be worrying quite a lot. So that’s that.”
“Yes, you have your uses, Fortune,” said Lomas. “I’ve noticed it before.”
Reggie Fortune fumbled in his pocket and drew out the magic stone. “Tetherdown said he would like me to have it. Cut him to the heart to give it up, poor old boy. Told me it saved his life.” He smiled. “I don’t care for its methods, myself. Better put it back in a glass case, Lomas.”
“Melitta is rather a dear,” said Mr. Fortune.
A TELEGRAM was brought to Mr. Fortune. It announced that the woman whom his ingenuity convicted of the Winstanton murder had confessed it in prison just after the Home Secretary decided not to hang her. Mr. Fortune sighed satisfaction and took his hostess in to dinner.
He was staying in a Devonshire country house for mental repairs. This is not much like him, for save on visits of duty country houses seldom receive him. The conversation of the county, he complains, is too great a strain upon his intellect. Also, he has no interest in killing creatures, except professionally. But the output of crime had been large that winter and the task of keeping Scotland Yard straight, laborious; and he sought relief with Colonel Beach at Cranston Regis. For Tom Beach, once in the first flight of hunting men, having married a young wife, put central heat and electric light into a remote Tudor manor house, and retired there to grow iris and poultry. Neither poultry nor young wives allured Reggie Fortune, but gardens he loves, and his own iris were not satisfying him.
So he sat by Alice Beach at her table, and while her talk flowed on like the brook in the poem, while he wondered why men marry, since their bachelor dinners are better eating, surveyed with mild eyes her and her guests. Tom Beach had probably been unable to help marrying her, she was so pink and white and round, her eyes so shy and innocent. She was one of those women who make it instantly clear to men that they exist to be married, and Tom Beach has always done his duty. “But she’s not such a fool as she looks,” Reggie had pronounced.