Afterwards Part 35

CHAPTER III

Before he went to bed on the night of Carey's visit to him Anstice wrote a letter to the expert recommended by his friend, inquiring whether an appointment could be made for the following Friday afternoon; and on Thursday night a laconic telegram arrived fixing three o'clock on Friday for the suggested interview.

It had seemed to Anstice that a personal interview with the expert would be far more satisfactory than a prolonged correspondence; and he hurried through his work on Friday morning and caught the noon express to London with a minute to spare.

He had the carriage to himself; and during the quick journey to town he pored over the two specimens of handwriting which he was taking up for examination until he was more than ever convinced that both were written by the same hand.

Mr. Clive, the noted handwriting expert, had a flat in Lincoln's Inn; and thither Anstice hastened in a taxi, arriving just as the clocks of London were striking three; a feat in punctuality which possibly accounted for the pleasant smile with which Mr. Clive greeted his visitor.

The expert was a tall and thin person, with deep-set and brilliant eyes hidden more or less by a pair of rimless eyegla.s.ses; and Anstice was suddenly and humorously reminded of the popular idea of a detective as exemplified in Sherlock Holmes and his accomplished brethren.

When he smiled Mr. Clive lost his somewhat austere expression; and as Anstice obeyed his invitation to enter his sitting-room the latter felt that he had come to the right person with whom to discuss the problem of these annoying letters.

"Now, Dr. Anstice." Clive pushed forward a chair for his visitor and sank into another one himself, leaning back and joining his finger-tips in a manner which again reminded Anstice involuntarily of the super-detective. "I expect your time is as valuable as mine--probably more so--and we won't waste it in preliminaries. I gather you have some specimens of handwriting to submit to me?"

"Yes. I have two letters to show you." He drew them carefully from his notebook. "What I want to know is, whether they were both written by the same hand or not."

Mr. Clive unlaced his finger-tips and took the papers carefully from his visitor; after which, rather to Anstice's amus.e.m.e.nt, he removed his eyegla.s.ses and proceeded to study the letters without their aid.

For several minutes he pored over them in silence, the letters spread out on the table before him; and Anstice, watching, could make nothing of the inscrutable expression on his face. Presently he rose, went to a little cabinet at the end of the room, and took from it a small magnifying gla.s.s, with whose aid he made a further study of the two doc.u.ments; after which he resumed his eyegla.s.ses and turned to Anstice with a smile.

"Your little problem is quite simple, Dr. Anstice," he said amiably. "As soon as I looked at these letters I guessed them to be the work of one hand. With the help of my gla.s.s I know my guess to be correct."

For a moment Anstice could not tell whether he were relieved or disappointed by this confirmation of his own suspicions; but the expert did not wait for his comments.

"If you will look through the gla.s.s you will see that the similarities in many of the letters are so striking that there is really no possible question as to their being written by one hand." He pushed the papers and gla.s.s across to Anstice, who obediently bent over the table and studied the letters as they lay before him. "For instance"--Clive moved to Anstice's side and, leaning over his shoulder, pointed with a slim finger--"that 'I' in India is identical with the one with which this letter opens; and that 's' with its curly tail could not possibly have been traced by any hand save that which wrote this one. There are other points of resemblance--the s.p.a.ces between the words, for instance--which prove conclusively, to my mind at least, that the letters are the work of one person; but I expect you have already formed an opinion of your own on the subject."

"Yes," said Anstice. "To be frank, I have. I was quite sure in my own mind that they were written by one person; but I wanted an expert opinion. And now the only thing to be discovered is--who is that person?"

Clive smiled.

"That is a different problem--and a more difficult one," he said quietly. "These anonymous letters are very often exceedingly hard nuts to crack. But probably you have someone in your mind's eye already."

"No," said Anstice quickly, moved by a sudden desire to enlist this man's sympathy and possible help. "I'm completely in the dark. But I intend to find out who wrote these things. I suppose"--for a second he hesitated--"I suppose it isn't in your province to give me any possible clue as to the ident.i.ty of the writer?"

The other laughed rather dryly.

"I'm not a clairvoyant," he said, "and I can't tell from handling a letter who wrote it, as the psychometrists profess to be able to do. But I will tell you one or two points I have noted in connection with these things." He flicked them rather disdainfully with his finger. "They are written by a woman--and I should not wonder if that woman were a foreigner."

"A foreigner?" Anstice was genuinely surprised. "I say, what makes you think that? The writing is not foreign."

"No. You are right there inasmuch as the regulation writing of a foreigner, French, Italian, Spanish, is fine and pointed in character, while this is more round, more sprawling and clumsy. But"--he frowned thoughtfully, and Anstice thought he looked more like Sherlock Holmes than ever--"there is one point in connection with this last letter which has evidently not struck you. Suppose you read it through carefully once more, and see if you can discover something in it which appears a trifle un-English, so to speak."

Anstice took the second letter as desired, and read it through carefully, while Clive watched him with an interest which was not feigned. Although Anstice had no suspicion of the fact, Clive, who had travelled in India, had in the light of that letter identified his visitor directly with the central figure in that bygone tragedy in Alostan; and although, owing to his absence from England, Clive had not been one of the experts consulted in the Carstairs case, it was not hard for him to place the first letter as belonging to that notorious series of anonymous scrawls which had roused so much interest in the Press a couple of years before this date.

Just where the connection between the two cases came Clive could not discover, but he had always felt a curiously strong sympathy with the unknown man who had carried out a woman's wish just ten minutes too soon, and he would willingly have helped Anstice to solve this problem if he could have seen his way to find the solution.

Presently Anstice looked up rather apologetically.

"I'm awfully stupid, but I don't see what you mean about a foreigner...."

Clive smiled.

"Don't you? Well, I'll explain. And after all I may be wrong, you know.

However, here goes." He bent down again and pointed to the word India, which for some reason was set in inverted commas. "Don't you notice any peculiarities about these commas? Think of the usual manner in which an English writer uses them--and note the difference here."

Anstice studied the word with suddenly keen attention, and instantly noted the peculiarity of which Clive had spoken.

"The first double comma, so to speak, is set below the line, and the other one above. But English writers and printers use both above the line. Isn't that so?"

"Yes. Whereas in the majority of French or Italian printing the commas are set as they are here--a trick which, to my mind, points to the strong probability, at least, of the writer of this letter being a foreigner of sorts."

"Italian! Why----" Suddenly a vision of the woman with the Italian name, Tochatti, Mrs. Carstairs' personal attendant, flashed into Anstice's mind, and Clive's eyes grew still keener in expression as he noted the eager tone in his visitor's voice.

"Well?" As Anstice paused the expert spoke quickly. "Does the suggestion convey anything to your mind?"

"Yes," said Anstice. "It does. But the only Italian--or half-Italian--person I know, a woman, by the way, is absolutely the last one I could suspect in the matter."

"Really?" As he spoke Clive removed his eyegla.s.ses once more and stared with his brilliant eyes at the other man's face. "Don't forget that in cases like these it is generally the last person to be suspected who turns out to be the one responsible. Of course I don't know the facts of the case, and my suggestions are therefore of little practical value. At the same time the very fact that you are able at once to identify an Italian in the case----"

"She is not altogether Italian," said Anstice slowly. "She's a half-breed, so to speak--and I really can't in fairness suspect her, devoted as she is to Mrs. Carstairs----"

He broke off abruptly, annoyed with himself for having betrayed so much; but Clive's manner suddenly became more animated.

"See here, Dr. Anstice." He sat down again, and handed his cigarette case to his visitor. "May I be frank with you?"

"Certainly." He accepted a cigarette and Clive resumed immediately.

"I think I am correct in a.s.suming that the first letter is one of those supposed--by some people--to have been written by Mrs. Carstairs, wife of Major Carstairs of the Indian Army?"

"Yes." It would have been folly to deny the correctness of the a.s.sumption.

"Well, I was not professionally interested in the case, but all along I have had very grave doubts as to the course of justice in that unhappy affair. And I have always thought the sentence was unjustifiably severe."

Anstice's face cleared, and his manner lost its first stiffness.

"I am glad to hear you say so," he said heartily. "For my own part I am perfectly convinced Mrs. Carstairs was absolutely innocent in the matter. You see, I have the privilege of her acquaintance, and it would be quite impossible for her to stoop to so low and degrading an action."

"Just so." For a second the expert wondered whether Dr. Anstice's interest in Mrs. Carstairs arose from a purely personal dislike to see an innocent woman unjustly accused or from some warmer feeling; but after all it was no concern of his, and he dismissed that aspect of the case from his mind for the present. "But I should like to ask you to explain one thing to me. Would it have been possible for this Italian woman of whom you speak to have written those former letters? I gather that it is not altogether impossible, though I daresay improbable, for her to be connected with this last one; but of course, if she must be acquitted of any hand in the first, the clue drops to the ground at once."

"Well"--for a second Anstice hesitated, then resolved to speak plainly.

"To tell you the truth, it would have been quite possible for her to be mixed up in both affairs--save for one thing. The woman, is a servant in the household of Mrs. Carstairs; but she's not only absolutely devoted to her mistress, but is also unable to write even her name."

"What proof have you of that?" The question shot out so abruptly that Anstice was genuinely startled.