Detective and mystery stories; England -- Fiction; Murder -- Investigation -- Fiction
She rambled on, but the flood of her reminiscences rolled over Fayre’s
head unheeded. He sat smoking, his thoughtful eyes fixed on the
glowing fire, his mind full of Mrs. Benson’s last revelation.
“Christina Mary Draycott.” The name had been given in full at the
inquest. And Miss Allen had spoken of her sister as “Tina.” The
vicar’s wife had alluded to her divorce from her first husband, but
had not mentioned his name. Tina Allen, then Tina Baxter, and finally
Tina Draycott! The whole thing fitted in with the precision of the
pieces in a jigsaw-puzzle. Not only was her connection with Gregg
explained at last, but his obvious venom was more than accounted for.
And there was nothing surprising now in her curiosity concerning him,
followed by her odd reluctance to meet him. Supposing they _had_ come
together at the farm that night! He could imagine what that meeting
would be like and what it might lead to, given a man of Gregg’s
temperament. He collected his scattered thoughts with an effort and
turned to Mrs. Benson, who had paused for a moment for sheer want of
breath.
“Would it be giving you too much trouble if I asked for a look at that
photograph you spoke of?” he asked. “I’d like to see one of Baxter
again.”
Mrs. Benson beat even her own record as a purveyor of information.
“I’ve got it here!” she announced triumphantly. “When I heard that you
were an old friend of Baxter’s I said to myself: ‘I expect that
photograph will amuse him.’ It was lying on my table where I put it
yesterday, so I just picked it up and brought it with me.”
She fumbled in her bag and produced a photograph which she handed to
Fayre. He looked at it eagerly and was at once confronted with an
unforeseen difficulty. Gregg he spotted at once, younger and a trifle
leaner, but unmistakable. He was sitting in the front row of a group
of about fifteen men. Any one of the other fourteen might have been
Baxter, for all Fayre knew. But which? And he did not dare ask!
It was Henderson who came to the rescue. He had risen and was leaning
over the back of Fayre’s chair, studying the photograph, and he
grasped the situation almost immediately. Out of sheer devilry he
allowed Fayre to sit for some minutes helpless, glowering at Gregg’s
not very pleasing features, racking his brains for a way out of the
difficulty, before he placed a finger on the portrait of a dark,
rather haggard-looking man at the end of the front row and remarked
lazily:
“Baxter looks as if he’d been making a night of it! It’s very like
him, though.”
“He was always a queer, nervous creature. But he was clever enough. I
know they thought a lot of him at St. Swithin’s,” rattled on the
unsuspecting Mrs. Benson.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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