Miss Silver Comes To Stay (15 page)

Mrs. Crook brought in tea, and reported afterwards to her friend Mrs. Grover that the Chief Constable was ever such a nicelooking gentleman and ever so polite, “but no appetite for his tea, and the scones were lovely though I say it myself.” In these circumstances the meal was not prolonged. When March refused a third cup of tea, Miss Silver coughed in a deprecating manner and said,

“I should like to ask you to do me a favour, Randal.”

He smiled.

“What is it—the half of my kingdom?”

“I hope I should never ask you for what you would find it impossible to give.”

“You alarm me! Let me know the worst!”

She gave him her own charming smile.

“It is really a very simple matter. I would very much like to see the study at Melling House.”

“Well, it will make talk, you know.”

“My dear Randal, do you imagine that people are not talking now?”

“Not for a moment. But I am not anxious that they should talk about a triangle consisting of you and me and Rietta Cray.”

“It is quite impossible to stop people gossiping—especially in a village.”

“What do you hope to effect? Drake is highly efficient. Everything will have been gone over with a microscope.”

“I have no doubt of it.”

Under her mildly obstinate gaze he gave way.

“Very well. You’re taking an unfair advantage of me, you know. I am too anxious about this case to be sure of what I ought to do.”

“My dear Randal—”

He pushed back his chair and got up.

“We had better make the best of a bad job,” he said.

Mayhew, answering the door a little later, peered out. It was a dark afternoon, and the light was on in the hall. He ought to be able to see who it was in the car, but he couldn’t. He blinked up at the Chief Constable and wondered what had brought him back again. Dreadful times when you had to brace yourself up every time the front door bell rang.

He said, “Yes, sir?” in an enquiring tone, and went on bracing himself.

It appeared that no blow was about to fall. March was saying,

“I’m sorry to trouble you again. I just want to go through to the study. Nothing’s been done to the room yet, I suppose?”

“No, sir. Superintendent Drake told me they’d finished and we could get on with it, but I thought I’d leave it till the morning.”

“Oh, well, I shan’t be long. I’ve a lady with me. She may find it cold waiting in the car. I’ll just ask her if she would prefer to come in.”

With this discreet piece of camouflage, March ran down the steps again. His voice came back to Mayhew at the door.

“It’s cold for you here. Perhaps you would rather come in. I won’t be any longer than I can help.”

Miss Silver emerged. Mayhew knew her at once—the little governessy person who was staying with Mrs. Voycey. Mrs. Crook had a tale of her being some kind of a detective. Maybe she had a fancy to see the room where a murder had been done. Maybe not. It wasn’t his business. He’d enough on his mind without troubling about other people’s affairs. Anyway she was coming in with the Chief Constable.

He showed them to the study, switched on the lights, and went over to draw the curtains. Then he went across the hall, and through the baize door to the housekeeper’s room where his wife sat dabbing her eyes and staring at the unwashed tea-things.

Randal March gave him time to get away before he said,

“Well, here you are. What do you make of it? The stain on the writing-table shows you where he fell forward. It won’t come out. The grate was choked with burnt paper. Drake had it removed and gone through, but there was nothing left. If your memorandum went that way it’s gone for good.”

Miss Silver shook her head.

“I do not imagine that the murderer would have risked waiting to burn it here. The ash came from Miss Cray’s letters.”

His face was quite impassive.

“You are probably right. There was a full set of her prints on the mantelshelf—none anywhere else. If Carr was here, he did not leave any. Mrs. Mayhew’s prints are on the outer knob of the door into the hall. That’s where she stood and listened. The handle of the poker had been wiped clean, and so had the outer handle and edge of the glass door to the garden. The inner handle had Lessiter’s prints.”

“Yes—he opened the door to Miss Cray.”

“I forgot to say that a stained half-burnt handkerchief was found on the top of the ash in the fireplace. It is Lessiter’s own, and is presumably the one he lent Miss Cray when he noticed the scratch on her wrist. That is about all I can tell you.”

She went over to the window and parted the curtains.

“Miss Cray found this door shut when she arrived. She knocked, and Mr. Lessiter let her in. She went away in a hurry, and may have left it ajar. I shall be glad if you will help me with a little experiment. I am going outside. When I have shut the door, will you go over to the other side of the writing-table and say anything you like in your natural voice?”

“All right… Be careful—there are two steps.”

When the door had closed behind her he crossed the room and stood before the empty hearth.

“Is this what you want? Can you hear me at all? One feels a good deal of a fool, saying something just for the sake of saying it.”

The door opened and the curtains were divided. The pansies on Miss Silver’s hat appeared.

“No more than on many social occasions, my dear Randal. I could hear you perfectly.”

“Then come in out of the cold, my dear Miss Silver.” He said the last words with a disarming smile.

She shook her head.

“Not just yet.”

She disappeared again. A cold draught blew in. Coming out upon the steps, he found her standing on the path below, in the act of producing a torch from her capacious handbag.

“What are you looking at?”

She said, “This.”

After the brightly lighted room the dusk baffled him. She switched on the torch and directed its disc of light upon a small patch of earth at the extreme edge of the lower step. He said,

“What of it?”

“It has dropped from someone’s shoe.”

“The men have been up and down.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“It is soft black earth mixed with white particles. I think you will find them to be lime. The gardener who works at Cecilia Voycey’s has been spreading lime upon the roots of her lilac bushes this week. Lilacs apparently require a great deal of lime. I am not a gardener, but that is what Cecilia tells me.”

“Yes.”

“The path leading to these steps is of flagged stone, but here, where the shrubbery ends by the window, there are lilac bushes. Let us see if their roots have been dressed with lime.”

He came down to where she stood and parted the bushes. The torch sent a most efficient beam into the opening, picking out every small twig and passing to and fro across the earth below. It had been newly dug. Everywhere on the soft turned surface the light picked up those white particles. It picked up more than that—footprints deeply sunk in the soil.

March exclaimed, reached back with his left hand, and took the torch. It was plain enough that someone had stood among the lilacs. The deepest prints were farthest in. Someone had stood there. Four prints in all—one going in; one coming out, and the two deep ones nearest to the wall. They were the prints of a woman’s shoe.

Randal March stood back and switched off the torch. His mind was dark. He had nothing to say.

Miss Silver coughed.

“You are troubling yourself unnecessarily. Miss Cray has a well shaped foot at least two sizes larger than the one which made those prints. She is a tall woman.”

The darkness passed. He said,

“I’m a fool. As you probably guess, I’m—vulnerable.”

She said, “Yes,” very kindly. And then, “This is important evidence, Randal. It means that a woman who was not Miss Cray stood here among the bushes and afterwards ascended the steps. This would seem to indicate that she had suddenly to find some place of concealment. Let us say that she had come up here to see Mr. Lessiter, that she heard someone else approaching, that she stepped back amongst the bushes. It may have been Miss Cray who disturbed her. The thought then suggests itself that she may have mounted the steps and listened at the door. She could, in that case, have overheard the greater part of Miss Cray’s interview with Mr. Lessiter. We must not assume that she had any motive for wishing him dead. But if—I say if—she had such a motive, how suggestive that conversation would be. It would inform her that Mr. Carr Robertson had just identified Mr. Lessiter as the seducer of his wife, and that he had rushed out of the house in a state so alarming to Miss Cray as to bring her up to Melling House to warn Mr. Lessiter. She would also learn of the existence of the will benefiting Miss Cray. If you desired to commit murder, could you hope for a situation better calculated to enable you to do so with impunity?”

He laughed a little unsteadily.

“I suppose not. And now, I suppose, you are going to give me a description of the hypothetical murderess.”

She said very composedly,

“Not at present. I think I had better leave you now. You will wish to communicate with the Superintendent and have casts made of these footprints. It is fortunate that no rain has fallen since Wednesday, but it is never safe to trust to a continuance of fine weather. I think it possible that a very careful search would disclose particles of lime on the upper step, and on the study carpet if this person did indeed enter the room. Have you a torch—or shall I leave you mine?”

“I have one in the car.”

“Then I will leave you. The air is quite pleasant now. I shall enjoy the walk.”

Randal March went back into the study and rang up Lenton police station.

Jonathan Moore set down his cup, said, “No, thank you, my dear,” in rather an absent voice, and continued to gaze vaguely at his niece Elizabeth and at the gloomy young man to whom she had, rather precipitately he considered, reengaged herself. The radiant air of a betrothal was entirely absent. He might be out of touch with the world—it pleased him to think so, because there was a good deal about this post-war world that he disliked—but it was borne in upon him that Carr Robertson was being talked about, and that Elizabeth had been precipitate. The quality of the look with which he now regarded Carr began to resemble that with which he was wont to consider some object of doubtful authenticity. True, he had known Carr for a long time, but look at the pedigree he had got with that buhl writing-table! Fifty years in the one family, and a receipted bill from the old marquis with the guarantee of another hundred years before that. Yet at some time in that hundred and fifty years a fake had been substituted. There are times in a man’s life when he may turn to fakery. Conscience slips, the pressure of events comes down hard upon a weak spot, and the honest man turns rogue. Easier still to picture the sudden splintering of control, followed by a quick protective build-up to hide the smash.

Elizabeth could read his thoughts so well that it was with a good deal of relief that she saw him shake his head doubtfully, get up, and go out of the room. As the sound of his feet retreated, Carr said,

“Not much doubt about what Jonathan thinks.”

She gave him a strange look. Her eyes were always bright. They had now the added brilliance of unshed tears. She said,

“Oh, yes, there’s plenty of doubt. If there wasn’t—”

“I wouldn’t be here?”

She nodded.

“Something like that. Officially forbidden the house, and I’d be getting out at the back to meet you in a purlieu.”

“Would you?”

Her voice had all the sweetness in the world as she said,

“Yes, my darling.”

It brought him to his knees beside her chair. Without word or kiss he pressed his head against her shoulder, holding her close. They stayed like that for a long time.

When he raised his head it was to say,

“Holderness has changed his mind. He says I’ll have to make a statement at the inquest but I’d better not wait for it to be dragged out of me. He thinks it will make a better impression if I go to the police now.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to talk to you about it. It seems to me the moment I make that statement they’re bound to arrest me—or Rietta.” His face went hard and bleak as he repeated the last words—“Or Rietta.”

“Carr!”

“The man was dead by half past ten, a couple of hours after I had threatened him. Sometime in those two hours I was there, and Rietta was there. Sometime in those two hours he was killed. And I fetched away Rietta’s raincoat soaked with blood. The fact that it wasn’t really Rietta’s coat but an old one of mine just helps to distribute the probable guilt— Rietta gets half a million, and I get my revenge. The scales are about equal there. I should think it’s fifty-fifty as between murder for money and murder for revenge.”

He was still kneeling beside her, but drawn back from touching her. She made no attempt to bridge the gap between them, only looked at him and said thoughtfully,

“You think Rietta did it—”

He drew back farther still, got up, and stood there with his hands clenched.

“I don’t think anything—I can’t. I can just see the facts— I can’t deal with them at all. If you put those facts before a thousand people, at least nine hundred and ninety-nine of them are going to say that if Rietta didn’t kill him, I did. We shan’t have a thousand opinions to spread the chances, we shall have twelve. It’s very long odds they’d make it unanimous.”

Her soft wordless protest fired him.

“What’s the use? It lies between the two of us. If I didn’t do it, Rietta did. Well, I didn’t—so what?”

“Carr, you don’t really think—”

“I told you I couldn’t, and I can’t. When I try, it always comes out like that—Rietta or me—me or Rietta.”

“And when you don’t think, Carr?”

“I get quite long sane patches when I know she couldn’t have done it.”

“I’m glad you call them sane.”

The dark look had come back. He said,

“But we’re not sane any longer, my dear—we’re in a nightmare. When you’re in Rome you do as the Romans do—à la guerre comme à la guerre, and all the rest of the proverbs. What in the name of all that is damnable has sanity got to do with our nightmare?”

She got up and came to him.

“Well, I think it’s what is going to pull us through.”

“Us?”

“Yes, darling.”

His hand closed so hard upon her arm that she found a bruise there afterwards.

“If I was sure about Rietta I’d make this damned statement and be done with it.”

“I’m sure.”

“Why?”

“Oh, because—” She broke off with something that was half a laugh, and half a sob. “Oh, Carr, please wake up! It must be a very bad dream in which you can think that Rietta could creep up behind someone and hit him over the head with a poker. You couldn’t let it worry you for a moment if you weren’t fast asleep. Wake up! It’s just too silly for words.”