In the Mayor's Parlour

Chapter 13

A WOMAN INTERVENES

In the midst of the commotion that followed and while Mrs. Saumarez, attended by the doctors, was being carried out of the Court-room, Tansley, at Brent's elbow, drew in his breath with a sharp sibilant sound that came near being a whistle. Brent turned from the withdrawing figures to look at him questioningly.

"Well?" he said.

"Queer!" muttered Tansley. "Why should she faint? I wonder----"

"What?" demanded Brent as the solicitor paused.

"I'm wondering if she and Wellesley know anything that they're keeping to themselves," said Tansley. "She was obviously nervous and frightened when she was in that box just now."

"She's a nervous, highly-strung woman--so I should say, from what bit I've seen of her," remarked Brent. "Excitable!"

"Well, he's cool enough," said Tansley, nodding towards the witness-box. "Hasn't turned a hair! Meeking'll get nothing out of him!"

The barrister was again addressing himself to Wellesley, who, after one glance at Mrs. Saumarez as she fainted, had continued, erect and defiant, facing the Court.

"You heard Mrs. Saumarez's evidence just now, Dr. Wellesley?" asked Meeking quietly.

"I did!"

"Was it correct?"

"I am not going to discuss it!"

"Nor answer any questions arising out of it?"

"I am not!"

"Perhaps you will answer some questions of mine. Was there any jealousy existing between you and the late John Wallingford, of which Mrs. Saumarez was the cause?"

Wellesley hesitated, taking a full minute for evident consideration.

"I will answer that to a certain extent," he replied at last. "At the time of his death, no! None!"

"Had there been previously?"

"At one time--yes. It was over."

"You and he were good friends?"

"Absolutely! Both in private and public--I mean in public affairs. I was in complete touch and sympathy with him as regards his public work."

"Now, Dr. Wellesley, I think that for your own sake you ought to give us some information on one or two points. Mrs. Saumarez said on oath that you asked her to marry you, two or three times. She also said that the late Mayor asked her too. Now----"

Wellesley suddenly brought down his hand on the ledge of the witness-box.

"I have already told you, sir, that I am not going to discuss my affairs with Mrs. Saumarez nor with the late Mayor in relation to Mrs. Saumarez!" he exclaimed with some show of anger. "They are private and have nothing to do with this inquiry. I shall not answer any question relating to them."

"In that case, Dr. Wellesley, you will lay yourself open to whatever conclusions the jury chooses to make," said Meeking. "We have already heard Mrs. Saumarez say--what she did say. But, as you won't answer, I will pass to another matter. You have already told us that the evidence of your assistant, Dr. Carstairs, is correct as to your movements between half-past seven and eleven minutes to eight, or, rather, as to your absence from the surgery during those nineteen minutes. You adhere to that?"

"Certainly! Carstairs is quite correct."

"Very well. Where were you during that time--nineteen minutes?"

"For the most part of the time, in my drawing-room."

"What do you mean by most part of the time?"

"Well, I should say three parts of it."

"And the other part?"

"Spent in letting a caller in and letting the caller out."

"By your front door?"

"No; by a side door--a private door."

"You took this caller to your drawing-room?"

"Yes."

"For a private interview?"

"Precisely."

Meeking allowed a minute to elapse, during which he affected to look at his papers. Suddenly he turned full on his witness.

"Who was the caller?"

Wellesley drew his tall figure still more erect.

"I refuse to say!"

"Why?"

"Because I am not going to drag in the name of my caller! The business my caller came upon was of a very private and confidential nature, and I am not going to break my rule of professional silence. I shall not give the name."

Meeking again paused. Finally, with a glance at the Coroner, he turned to his witness and began to speak more earnestly.

"Let me put this to you," he said. "Consider calmly, if you please, what we have heard already, from previous witnesses, and what you yourself have admitted. Mrs. Saumarez has sworn that you and the late Mayor were rivals for her hand and that there was jealousy between you. You admit that Mrs. Marriner is correct in identifying the burnt and blood-stained fragment of handkerchief found in the Mayor's Parlour after the murder as your property; you also acknowledge the existence of a door communicating between your house and the Moot Hall. You further admit that you were away from your surgery for nineteen minutes at the very time the murder was committed--according to the medical evidence--and that you were in your drawing-room from an inner room of which the door I have just referred to opens. Now I suggest to you, Dr. Wellesley, that you should give us the name of the person who was with you in your drawing-room?"

Wellesley, who, during this exordium, had steadily watched his questioner, shook his head more decidedly than before.

"No!" he answered promptly. "I shall not say who my caller was."

Meeking spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. He turned to the Coroner who, for the last few minutes, had shown signs of being ill at ease, and had frequently shaken his head at Wellesley's point-blank refusals.

"I don't know if it is any use appealing to you, sir," said Meeking. "The witness----"

The Coroner leaned towards Wellesley, his whole attitude conciliatory and inviting.

"I really think that it would be better, doctor, if you could find it in your way to answer Mr. Meeking's question----"

"I have answered it, sir," interrupted Wellesley. "My answer is--no!"

"Yes, yes, but I don't want the jury to get any false impressions--to draw any wrong conclusions," said the Coroner a little testily. "I feel sure that in your own interest----"

"I am not thinking of my own interest," declared Wellesley. "Once again--I shall not give the name of my caller."

There was a further pause, during which Meeking and the Coroner exchanged glances. Then Meeking suddenly turned again to the witness-box.

"Was your caller a man or a woman?" he asked.

"That I shan't say!" answered Wellesley steadily.

"Who admitted him--or her?"

"I did."

"How--by what door of your house?"

"By the side-door in Piper's Passage."

"Did any of your servants see the caller?"

"No."

"How came that about? You have several servants."

"My caller came to that door by arrangement with myself at a certain time--7.30--was admitted by me, and taken straight up to my drawing-room by a side staircase. My caller left, when the interview was over, by the same way."

"The interview, then, was a secret one?"

"Precisely! Secret; private; confidential."

"And you flatly refuse to give us the caller's name?"

"Flatly!"

Meeking hesitated a moment. Then, with a sudden gesture, as though he washed his hands of the whole episode, he dropped back into his seat, bundled his papers together, and made some evidently cynical remark to Hawthwaite who sat near to him. But Hawthwaite made no response: he was watching the Coroner, and in answer to a questioning glance he shook his head.

"No more evidence," whispered Tansley to Brent, as Wellesley, dismissed, stepped down from the witness-box. "Whew! this is a queer business, and our non-responsive medical friend may come to rue his obstinacy. I wonder what old Seagrave will make of it? He'll have to sum it all up now."

The Coroner was already turning to the jury. He began with his notes of the first day's proceedings and spent some time over them, but eventually he told his listeners that all that had transpired in the opening stages of the inquiry faded into comparative insignificance when viewed in the light of the evidence they had heard that morning. He analysed that evidence with the acumen of the cute old lawyer that everybody knew him to be, and at last got to what the sharper intellects amongst his hearers felt, with him, to be the crux of the situation--was there jealousy of an appreciable nature between Wallingford and Wellesley in respect of Mrs. Saumarez? If there was--and he brushed aside, rather cavalierly, Wellesley's denial that it existed at the time of Wallingford's death, estimating lightly that denial in face of the fact that the cause was still there, and that Wellesley had admitted that it had existed, at one time--then the evidence as they had it clearly showed that between 7.30 and 7.49 on the evening of the late Mayor's death, Wellesley had ready and easy means of access to the Mayor's Parlour. Something might have occurred which had revivified the old jealousy--there might have been a sudden scene, a quarrel, high words: it was a pity, a thousand pities, that Dr. Wellesley refused to give the name of the person who, according to his story, was with him during the nineteen minutes' interval which----

"Going dead against him!" whispered Tansley to Brent. "The old chap's taken Meeking's job out of his hands. Good thing this is a coroner's court--if a judge said as much as Seagrave's saying to an assize jury, Gad! Wellesley would hang! Look at these jurymen! They're half dead-certain that Wellesley's guilty already!"

"Well?" muttered Brent. "I'm not so far off that stage myself. Why didn't he speak out, and be done with it. There's been more in that love affair than I guessed at, Tansley--that's where it is! The woman's anxious enough anyway--look at her!"

Mrs. Saumarez had come back into court. She was pale enough and eager enough--and it seemed to Brent that she was almost holding her breath as the old Coroner, in his slow, carefully-measured accents and phrases, went on piling up the damning conclusions that might be drawn against Wellesley.

"You must not allow yourselves to forget, gentlemen," he was saying, "that Dr. Wellesley's assertion that he was busy with a caller during the fateful nineteen minutes is wholly uncorroborated. There are several--four or five, I think--domestic servants in his establishment, and there was also his assistant in the house, and there were patients going in and out of the surgery, but no one has been brought forward to prove that he was engaged with a visitor in his drawing-room. Now you are only concerned with the evidence that has been put before you, and I am bound to tell you that there is no evidence that Dr. Wellesley had any caller----"

A woman's voice suddenly rang out, clear and sharp, from a point of the audience immediately facing the Coroner.

"He had! I was the caller!"

In the excitement of the moment Tansley sprang to his feet, stared, sank back again.

"Good God!" he exclaimed. "Mrs. Mallett! Who'd have thought it!"

Brent, too, got up and looked. He saw a handsome, determined-looking woman standing amidst the closely-packed spectators. Mallett sat by her side; he was evidently struck dumb with sudden amazement and was staring open-mouthed at her; on the other side, two or three men and women, evidently friends, were expostulating with the interrupter. But Mrs. Mallett was oblivious of her husband's wonder and her friends' entreaties; confronting the Coroner she spoke again.

"Mr. Seagrave, I am the person who called on Dr. Wellesley!" she said in a loud, clear voice. "I was there all the time you're discussing, and if you'll let me give evidence you shall have it on my oath. I am not going to sit here and hear an innocent man traduced for lack of a word of mine."

The Coroner, who looked none too well pleased at this interruption, motioned Mrs. Mallett to come forward. He waved aside impatiently a protest from Wellesley, who seemed to be begging this voluntary witness to go back to her seat and say nothing, and, as Mrs. Mallett entered the witness-box, turned to Meeking.

"Perhaps you'll be good enough to examine this witness," he said a little irritably. "These irregular interruptions! But let her say what she has to say."

Mrs. Mallett, in Brent's opinion, looked precisely the sort of lady to have her say, and to have it right out. She was calm enough now, and when she had taken the oath and told her questioner formally who she was, she faced him with equanimity. Meeking, somewhat uncertain of his ground, took his cue from the witness's dramatic intervention.

"Mrs. Mallett, did you call on Dr. Wellesley at 7.30 on the evening in question--the evening on which Mr. Wallingford met his death?"

"I did."

"By arrangement?"

"Certainly--by arrangement."

"When was the arrangement made?"

"That afternoon. Dr. Wellesley and I met, in the market-place, about four o'clock. We made it then."

"Was it to be a strictly private interview?"

"Yes, it was. That was why I went to the side door in Piper's Passage."

"Did Dr. Wellesley admit you himself?"

"Yes, he did, and he took me straight up to his drawing-room by a side staircase."

"No one saw you going in?"

"No; nor leaving, either!"

"Why all this privacy, Mrs. Mallett?"

"My business was of a private sort, sir!"

"Will you tell us what it was?"

"I will tell you that I had reasons of my own--my particular own--for seeing Dr. Wellesley and the Mayor."

"The Mayor! Did you see the Mayor--there?"

"No. I meant to see him, but I didn't."

"Do you mean that you expected to meet him there--in Dr. Wellesley's drawing-room?"

"No. Dr. Wellesley had told me of the door between his house and the Moot Hall, and he said that after he and I had had our talk I could go through that door to the Mayor's Parlour, where I should be sure to find Mr. Wallingford at that time."

"I see. Then, did you go to see Mr. Wallingford?"

"I did."

"After talking with Dr. Wellesley?"

"Yes. He showed me the way--opened the door for me----"

"Stay, what time would that be?"

"About 7.35 or so. I went along the passage to the Mayor's Parlour, but I never entered."

"Never entered? Why, now, Mrs. Mallett?"

"Because, as I reached the door, I heard people talking inside the Parlour. So I went back."