John’s murder had remained unsolved, and was passing into the oblivion of public forgetfulness, when curiosity was again aroused by the strange wording of[52] the clause in Sir John’s will. All other clues had failed. Here was the chance of a clue. The sensational Press thundered for a full revelation of this secret trust, arguing speciously that the mystery of Sir John’s death was a matter of public concern, and private interests must bow to public necessities. The partners met the demand by a point-blank refusal to disclose any information whatever. As one of them—Arthur Baxter—said to an inquisitive reporter: “The public know of the clause in the will—the law has compelled us to disclose it; but if we could have avoided doing so, we should not have made even that much public. It would have been possible, by making other arrangements for Sir John, to have obviated even that disclosure; but you can take it from me that a secret trust in a will is not an uncommon occurrence. If Sir John had not been murdered, the clause would never have attracted[53] any attention. But Sir John was a clever lawyer, and he knew perfectly well, when he drew that clause, that public curiosity as to its meaning need not be satisfied, and no doubt he preferred to run the risk of that curiosity rather than constitute the trust in his own lifetime. So you can tell your editor, with my compliments and the compliments of the firm and my partners individually and collectively, that we will see him and his paper and all of the rest of the Press a good deal further on its way to an undesirable place before we give one word of explanation of that clause.”

[52]

[53]

It was an unwise remark to have made. Mr. Baxter, a steady-going solicitor, in the security of his knowledge of the law, scoffed at the possibility of interference. He had no experience of the inquisitive prying of a sensational evening paper. The latter, irritated by the contempt of the solicitor, laid itself out to teach him a due[54] and proper respect for the power of the Press. Day after day it returned to the attack, demanding, in the interests of justice, a full disclosure. So reiterated became the demand, so irritating to the public curiosity was the blank non possumus of the solicitors, that at last the inevitable happened and the public came to believe (a perfectly unwarranted hypothesis) that in the details of the trust which had been created lay the explanation of the murder, and the partners and executors were publicly hounded into the position of accomplices in the crime, on the assumption that by keeping the trust secret they were assisting the culprit to evade 

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