Missing or Murdered

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Authors: Robin Forsythe
it was not to be disregarded without some explanation. Again there was Farnish’s strange behaviour—according to Walter’s account. Walter, perhaps an imaginative man in his own way, might be unduly suspicious. His kind, when they became suspicious, were nearly always recklessly so. They put the most damning constructions on the most innocent of occurrences. Then again, Heather’s discovery of the drawer of Bygrave’s bureau having been forced seemed to lend some vestige of importance to Walter’s story of Farnish’s visit to the study. Vereker felt that there was no reason to suspect the existence of a feud between the two men. Walter had spoken without any show of rancour or sense of injury at the hands of the butler.
    He smoked quietly for the space of a few moments and then rose and went up to Lord Bygrave’s study.
    It was a sparsely but beautifully furnished room. The thick, luxurious carpet deadened the sound of his footsteps; the dark oak wainscoting and one or two old portraits of the Bygraves, sombre with age, lent a gravity and severity to the general aspect of the study, which seemed remarkably in keeping with its owner’s serious and gentle turn of mind. The whole colouring of the furnishing was rich and low, for Lord Bygrave had often remarked to Vereker that nothing distracted him more roguishly from his studies than the sight of forceful or cheerful colour.
    â€œJust sit down in a rose-and-white drawing-room and try to understand some of the problems that Bergson or Einstein has offered for our mental digestion,” he had once said to his friend. “It’s impossible—you’d dismiss philosophy and mathematics and wind up by whistling airs from light opera.”
    â€œYou’re wrong, Henry,” Vereker had replied. “I should commence right away with the light opera. Bergson and Co. I should reserve for a scarlet room, where I could indulge in really loud laughter. I still think his essay on Laughter one of the humorous masterpieces of literature. Professor Sully’s was dull in comparison.”
    Vereker’s entrance into his friend’s study had vividly recalled the moment of that conversation. Little had he dreamed that it would ever be recalled under the shadow of a tragedy or even a mystery. He glanced round the room; its sombre tones seemed suddenly to affect him—every aspect was an expression of the temperament and individuality of his friend. A disconcerting sense of helplessness all at once overcame him. So far, in his investigations, all sorts of diverse facts had thrust themselves forward in a wildly unintelligible sequence. At times, one feature of the case had seemed most important. No sooner had he decided this, and determined to follow up a line of inquiry based on that salient feature, than something new thrust itself irrepressibly forward and disjointed all his carefully-pieced construction. Facts and clues had the disturbing mobility of fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. Up till now he had felt some confidence in himself, but Walter’s story of the woman and the possibility that Farnish might have broken open Lord Bygrave’s bureau came as devastating shocks to all his confirmed estimates of Lord Bygrave and of Farnish. He had always prided himself on his perspicacity with regard to human nature: the numbing thought assailed him now that human nature after all was too complex and elastic for such confidence in his own powers of vision and appraisement. Circumstances were very often more potent than principle, even though principle had armoured the soul through long habit. A human being never could be a fixed quantity. Chance might have at one stroke completely shattered that soul-stuff which went to the making of the individualities, Bygrave and Farnish, as he had known them up till now, and constructed and moulded it into two quite unrecognizable shapes.
    Vereker crossed over to the bureau and opened

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