"Too many," said Mr. Quin quietly.
"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Satterthwaite, slightly startled.
"Too many for Martin Wylde. There has been a tendency from the beginning to regard this as just one more of a series of the same type of crime--a man seeking to free himself from one woman in order to marry another."
"Well," said Mr. Satterthwaite, doubtfully. "On the evidence--"
"Ah!" said Mr. Quin quickly, "I am afraid I have not followed all the evidence."
Mr. Satterthwaite's self-confidence came back to him with a rush. He felt a sudden sense of power. He was tempted to be consciously dramatic.
"Let me try and show it to you. I have met the Barnabys, you understand. I know the peculiar circumstances. With me you will come behind the scenes--you will see the thing from inside."
Mr. Quin leaned forward with his quick encouraging smile. "If anyone can show me that, it will be Mr. Satterthwaite," he murmured.
Mr. Satterthwaite gripped the table with both hands. He was uplifted, carried out of himself. For the moment he was an artist pure and simple--an artist whose medium was words.
Swiftly, with a dozen broad strokes, he etched in the picture of life at Deering Hill. Sir George Barnaby, elderly, obese, purse-proud. A man perpetually fussing over the little things of life. A man who wound up his clocks every Friday afternoon, and who paid his own housekeeping books every Tuesday morning, and who always saw to the locking of his own front door every night. A careful man.
And from Sir George he went on to Lady Barnaby. Here his touch was gentler, but none the less sure. He had seen her but once, but his impression of her was definite and lasting. A vivid, defiant creature--pitifully young. A trapped child, that was how he described her.
"She hated him, you understand? She had married him before she knew what she was doing. And now--"
She was desperate--that was how he put it. Turning this way and that. She had no money of her own; she was entirely dependent on this elderly husband. But all the same she was a creature at bay--still unsure of her own powers, with a beauty that was as yet more promise than actuality. And she was greedy. Mr. Satterthwaite affirmed that definitely. Side by side with defiance there ran a greedy streak--a clasping and a clutching at life.
"I never met Martin Wylde," continued Mr. Satterthwaite. "But I heard of him. He lived less than a mile away. Farming, that was his line. And she took an interest in farming--or pretended to. If you ask me, it was pretending. I think that she saw in him her only way of escape--and she grabbed at him, greedily, like a child might have done. Well, there could only be one end to that. We know what that end was, because the letters were read out in court. He kept her letters--she didn't keep his, but from the text of hers one can see that he was cooling off. He admits as much. There was the other girl. She also lived in the village of Deering Vale. Her father was the doctor there. You saw her in court, perhaps? No, I remember, you were not there, you said. I shall have to describe her to you. A fair girl--very fair. Gentle. Perhaps--yes, perhaps a tiny bit stupid. But very restful, you know. And loyal. Above all, loyal."
He looked at Mr. Quin for encouragement, and Mr. Quin gave it him by a slow, appreciative smile. Mr. Satterthwaite went on.
"You heard that last letter read--you must have seen it, in the papers, I mean. The one written on the morning of Friday, September 13th. It was full of desperate reproaches and vague threats, and it ended by begging Martin Wylde to come to Deering Hill that same evening at six o'clock. '_I will leave the side door open for you, so that no one need know you have been here. I shall be in the music room._' It was sent by hand."
Mr. Satterthwaite paused for a minute or two.
"When he was first arrested, you remember, Martin Wylde denied that he had been to the house at all that evening. His statement was that he had taken his gun and gone out shooting in the woods. But when the police brought forward their evidence, that statement broke down. They had found his fingerprints, you remember, both on the wood of the side door and on one of the two cocktail glasses on the table in the music room. He admitted then that he had come to see Lady Barnaby, that they had had a stormy interview, but that it had ended in his having managed to soothe her down. He swore that he left his gun outside leaning against the wall near the door, and that he left Lady Barnaby alive and well, the time being then a minute or two after a quarter-past six. He went straight home, he says, but evidence was called to show that he did not reach his farm until a quarter to seven, and, as I have just mentioned, it is barely a mile away. It would not take half an hour to get there. He forgot all about his gun, he declares. Not a very likely statement--and yet--"
"And yet?" queried Mr. Quin.
"Well," said Mr. Satterthwaite slowly, "it's a possible one, isn't it? Counsel ridiculed the supposition, of course, but I think he was wrong. You see, I've known a good many young men, and these emotional scenes upset them very much--especially the dark nervous type like Martin Wylde. Women, now, can go through a scene like that and feel positively better for it afterward, with all their wits about them. It acts like a safety valve for them, steadies their nerves down and all that. But I can see Martin Wylde going away with his head in a whirl, sick and miserable, and without a thought of the gun he had left leaning up against the wall."
He was silent for some minutes before he went on:
"Not that it matters. For the next part is only too clear, unfortunately. It was exactly twenty minutes past six when the shot was heard. All the servants heard it, the cook, the kitchen-maid, the butler, the housemaid, and Lady Barnaby's own maid. They came rushing to the music room. She was lying huddled over the arm of her chair. The gun had been discharged close to the back of her head, so that the shot hadn't a chance to scatter. At least two of them penetrated the brain."
He paused again and Mr. Quin asked casually, "The servants gave evidence, I suppose?"
Mr. Satterthwaite nodded. "Yes. The butler got there a second or two before the others, but their evidence was practically a repetition of each other's."
"So they _all_ gave evidence," said Mr. Quin musingly. "There were no exceptions?"
"Now I remember it," said Mr. Satterthwaite, "the housemaid was only called at the inquest. She's gone to Canada since, I believe."
"I see," said Mr. Quin.
There was a silence, and somehow the air of the little restaurant seemed to be charged with an uneasy feeling. Mr. Satterthwaite felt suddenly as though he were on the defensive.
"Why shouldn't she?" he said abruptly.
"Why should she?" said Mr. Quin with a very slight shrug of the shoulders.
Somehow the question annoyed Mr. Satterthwaite. He wanted to shy away from it--to get back on familiar ground.
"There couldn't be much doubt who fired the shot. As a matter of fact, the servants seemed to have lost their heads a bit. There was no one in the house to take charge. It was some minutes before anyone thought of ringing up the police, and when they did so, they found that the telephone was out of order."
"Oh," said Mr. Quin. "The telephone was out of order."
"It was," said Mr. Satterthwaite--and was struck suddenly by the feeling that he had said something tremendously important. "It might, of course, have been done on purpose," he said slowly. "But there seems no point in that. Death was practically instantaneous."
Mr. Quin said nothing, and Mr. Satterthwaite felt that his explanation was unsatisfactory.
"There was absolutely no one to suspect but young Wylde," he went on. "By his own account, even, he was only out of the house three minutes before the shot was fired. And who else could have fired it? Sir George was at a bridge party a few houses away. He left there at half-past six and was met just outside the gate by a servant bringing him the news. The last rubber finished at half-past six exactly--no doubt about that. Then there was Sir George's secretary, Henry Thompson. He was in London that day, and actually at a business meeting at the moment the shot was fired. Finally there is Sylvia Dale, who, after all, had a perfectly good motive, impossible as it seems that she should have had anything to do with such a crime. She was at the station of Deering Vale seeing a friend off by the 6:28 train. That lets her out. Then the servants. What earthly motive could any one of them have? Besides, they all arrived on the spot practically simultaneously. No, it must have been Martin Wylde."
But he said it in a dissatisfied kind of voice.
They went on with their lunch. Mr. Quin was not in a talkative mood, and Mr. Satterthwaite had said all he had to say. But the silence was not a barren one. It was filled with the growing dissatisfaction of Mr. Satterthwaite, heightened and fostered in some strange way by the mere quiescence of the other man.