Eight Murders In the Suburbs (25 page)

“And did you?”

“Yes. That is, I went straight upstairs and he followed a minute or two later.”

“That point has already been established,” interposed the Coroner. “The housemaid testified that she was awake and heard them both go up, as witness describes.”

“True, sir. That witness also told us that deceased was in the habit of turning off the gas at the main before going to bed.” He spoke directly to Elsie. “Before following you upstairs, did your husband turn off the gas at the main?”

“As I was upstairs at the time, I don't know what he did.”

“By ten thirty-five you were both in your bedroom?” As Elsie assented: “Between ten thirty-five that night and seven thirty-five the following morning, when you were found in a state of light coma—did you leave that bedroom, Mrs. Grantham?—for any purpose whatever?”

“No,” said Elsie, in satisfaction of the formula.

“If you did not leave that room for any purpose whatever, does it not strike you as remarkable that you yourself have survived to—er—tell the tale?”

Elsie looked at the Coroner.

“I don't understand what he's asking me.”

“I will simplify my question. Here are two persons lying within a few feet of each other in a gas-filled room. Medical evidence establishes that one of them is killed by the gas approximately three hours before seven-thirty-five. The other person—yourself, Mrs. Grantham—is only slight affected and recovers in a few minutes. Can you offer any explanation of that quite astounding circumstance?”

“No, I can't!” said Elsie and—with a wisdom which we must assume to have been intuitive—left it at that.

“I have only one more question, Mrs. Grantham. Did your husband ever speak to you of—the possibility of suicide?”

The Coroner disallowed the question. But everyone in court understood that the solicitor was groping for a suicide pact in which Elsie was the lucky survivor. After Elsie had returned to London the theory was a popular one in Benchester.

The police, on the whole, preferred the theory that an obstruction had been placed in the flue of the gas stove and removed in time. They did not know that Elsie was prudently wearing the ‘obstruction,' while she was giving evidence, but they did know that they had not discovered a tittle of evidence against her.

Notwithstanding the verdict of death by misadventure, Benchester, of course, became too hot to hold Elsie, so she lost no time in returning to London.

In a comfortable little flat in Bloomsbury, she was able to face the future without misgiving. The experiment to which she had been subjected, cruel though it might have been, was at least thorough and, by its own standard, sincere. She was sole beneficiary, except for small legacies to the servants. When probate was granted she would step into an income, from a trust fund, of some twelve hundred pounds. In the meantime, her solicitors had provided her with cash in anticipation of the sale of the house, which was also an item of her inheritance.

In short, the life of well-fed indolence was assured. There was no hitch anywhere. In time, the first half-yearly instalment of her annuity was paid, and there was still some loose change from the sale of the house. She was not even debarred from a second marriage. Not that matrimony now had any charm for her. For many years—she was not yet thirty—she would be able to pick and choose at whim.

Two happy years passed, undisturbed, when Benchester crept into her favourite paper.
‘Benchester Fair Scandals,'
she read,
‘Millard Files Petition: S. Yard Represented.'
She skimmed a few lines, with little understanding. She remembered Jeremy's note:
‘Financially v. insecure!'
Oh, well, it couldn't matter now. The picture of a bathing belle diverted her attention.

In fact, she was forgetting and erroneously supposed that Benchester was forgetting her. She had given the quiet little town the only sensation it had enjoyed for a couple of generations. The suicide pact theory, based on the incalculable effects of draught, still held pride of place; next to it in popularity was the suspicion that Elsie might have hit on some slick little cockney trick for outmanoeuvring the police. True, too, that her name was often coupled with that of Millard, though no one suggested that he had been privy to the murder, if murder there had been. That he had once been a gas officer was dismissed as irrelevant.

Such seeming irrelevancies, however, were the stock-in-trade of the Department of Dead Ends. To Detective Inspector Rason had drifted the papers resulting from an unsuccessful attempts to uncover a series of small illicit transactions in Bearer Bonds. The name of Millard had appeared frequently but always at a safe distance.

In the dossier was a letter, dated 25th May, 1934, from a fellow townsman of Millard's—one Jeremy Grantham—enclosing a correspondence with Millard to which the writer invited the attention of the Yard. The evidence, however, had proved insufficient.

Since Millard had been elected to the committee of the Benchester Fair, he had broadened his operations. He was doing nicely with one or two land investment schemes of his own when a bungled attempt to extract a profit from the Fair brought down his house of cards. Rason began by turning up his personal record, where he learnt that Millard had served in the Army as a senior gas officer.

Millard—Benchester—Grantham. Presently, he remembered the Grantham case, which he knew from the newspaper accounts only, as Scotland Yard had never been called in. The memory betrayed Rason into perpetrating one of his over-facile juxtapositions.

“Grantham warns us that Millard is a crook. Grantham dies of gas poisoning. Millard was a poison gas expert.”

Rason cheered himself up. If it so happened that Millard had gassed Grantham, all that headachey stuff about Bonds and company flotations could be by-passed.

In Benchester, he soon picked up the main lines of local gossip. The suggestion that Millard and Mrs. Grantham had been lovers he dismissed as wishful thinking. On the third day, a passing remark by the potman of the hotel set him galloping.

“Millard ought never to have got on to the Fair committee,” said the potman. “That was poor old Jeremy Grantham's fault, for supporting him. Thought Millard was one o' the best, did Grantham.”

But Grantham, Rason knew, had not thought Millard one of the best. Grantham would certainly not have supported the candidature. He went in search of the secretary of the Fair, who was not at home. While he was waiting, he took shelter from the rain in the public library, where he entertained himself by studying the file of the local paper—in particular, the inquest on Jeremy Grantham. It was sufficiently clear from the account that it was Millard who had sat at Mrs. Grantham's table for morning coffee.

‘… we talked about the Fair, which was all he wanted to see me about, knowing I helped my husband with the organisation work.'

Rason put two and two together, producing, as not infrequently happened, a total running into three figures.

“So she was his girl-friend after all! He talks to her about the Fair—gives her some expert counter-dope to protect her against the gas—and she helps with the organisation so's he'll be on the committee. I'm going to sit on that secretary's doorstep even if it is raining.”

“And if the girl says her boy friend did
not
happen to turn on the gas as far as she knows,” said Chief Inspector Karslake on the way to Elsie's flat, “we say we're sorry and it's only red tape. And if she says he wasn't her boy friend, and she never wangled him on the committee—”

“But she did!” cut in Rason. “We can prove her handwriting in that Report Book. ‘Recommended' she wrote. And if you remember—sir—I told you this was only a try-out—”

“Try-
on
, more like!” snorted Karslake. “That's what the girl will say when she kicks us out.”

But Elsie did not say anything so rude. She was amiable and communicative, because she was indifferent to Millard's misfortunes, wishing him neither good nor ill.

“It seems Millard wasn't content with taking a hand-out for special pitches at the Fair,” explained Rason. “He used his standing as a committee man to influence investment—where it oughtn't to be given any influence, if you understand me. And my superior officer wants to know why you, Mrs. Grantham, wangled him on to the committee.”

“Me!” echoed Elsie in genuine forgetfulness, “How could I wangle anybody anywhere in that little hole of a town!”

Rason produced the Report Book, turned the pages, then set it before her.

“That word ‘recommended'—alongside Millard's name, there—it's your handwriting, isn't it?—same as a lot of other entries?”

“Oh, so there's going to be bother about that, is there?” pouted Elsie.

“Did you make that entry on your husband's instructions?”

Elsie spotted it as one of those sneaky questions to which the questioner knows the answer.

“No, I did it on my own!” she said resignedly. “Now I've started, I'd better go on. That book used to come to us once a year to be filled in from the notes and correspondence which was kept in our morning room—took up the whole desk. It was a long job, and I used to make the entries, only bothering my husband when I got stuck. He had made a note earlier in the year approving of Millard for the committee. That note was struck out and my husband had put in another: ‘Objection: financially very insecure.' I didn't know it meant Millard was going to turn out to be a crook, and I thought it mean to blot him out because he might be hard up later on, so I wrote ‘recommended.' And Millard didn't know what I'd done. He wasn't a special friend of mine, even if you think he was.”

Karslake stood up and cleared his throat.

“That was a very wrong action of yours, Mrs. Grantham.” He glared at Rason and moved towards the door. “But it is a satisfactory answer to our question.”

“Yeh!” ejaculated Rason. “And let's have a satisfactory answer to this one, too! Putting a man on the committee when your husband had turned him down! How could you hope to get away with that—
if your husband had lived another month?
”

“I didn't look at it like that!” Elsie for the first time scented the danger which, in two years, she had almost forgotten.

“When did you make that entry—and all the other entries—in this book?”

“I don't remember the exact date—”

“Nor do I!” confessed Rason. He opened his attache case and began to fumble. “Ah, here we are! Statement by Bewley, salaried clerk to the committee. ‘I delivered the Report Book at Mr. Graham's house at eight fifteen, pip emma, on the night of June the first.' That was when you were at the cinema with your husband, if I've got it right. And when you came in, you both went straight up to bed and you didn't leave the bedroom until you were carried out next morning.”

“What about it!” demanded Elsie. “I must have done the book—oh, any time before I left Benchester!”

“Must have, eh!” Rason flourished the statement signed by Bewley. “At nine o'clock on the morning of June the second—remember? —Bewley called and asked the housemaid if she could get him this book back without causing disturbance at such a time. The disturbance meaning Grantham found dead—and you prostrated with shock, the housemaid told Bewley. She found the Report Book in the morning room and gave it to him. Bewley reckoned it must have taken five hours or more to make all those entries. When did you put in that five hours' work, Mrs. Grantham?”

Elsie made no answer. Again there floated in her mind's eye the day of her mother's funeral. That was a respectable funeral. With relations and neighbours at the graveside.

First published in 1954 by Faber & Faber

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Copyright © Roy Vickers, 1954

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