Missing or Murdered (33 page)

“By God, I'm thankful, but damme if I ever liked the angle at which Sutton always wore his topper. A trifle, you may think, but psychologically pregnant. It always put the wind up me!”

The final editions of the evening papers announced the stupendous news that Mr. Raymond Braby had been arrested and that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of his partner and right-hand man, whose whereabouts at the moment were unknown. Dealings in the Braby shares were now being transacted at absurd prices. After the Exchange closed, 15s. shares were offered at half a crown in the street and nobody would buy, and through thousands of once bright little homes in Great Britain there stole the appalling conviction that all the hard renunciations of life, bitter oblations to the great God of Security, had been in vain. Those symbols of wealth which they had treasured as the visible rewards of the worship of that deity were so much waste paper. Ruin, to paraphrase Wilde, was drawing the curtains of their beds!

Meanwhile at Nuthill, a resident at the White Hart Hotel, but a stranger to the district, had been behaving in a very singular fashion. He had breakfasted on brandy and continued to drink brandy steadily until lunch. He lunched on brandy and became morosely drunk. John Salt, it appeared, bore some deep-seated and wholly irrational hatred to all financiers, whom he kept calling with increasing difficulty “silk-hatted sneak-thieves.” He was foolish enough to remark when he heard of Sutton Armadale's death, which had occurred not a mile distant from the inn, that it “served the perisher damned well right too!” Later in the afternoon, in a grimly drunken mood, he loudly boasted to a crowded bar that he himself had “bumped the slab-jawed swindler off,” and was promptly arrested. Growing sober under the cooling effects of police interrogation, he proved his complete innocence and was discharged. Of such incongruous stuff is the fabric of life woven!