Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (11 page)

“Why not?” asked Anthony.

“Because he’s probably a young man, living with his parents (isn’t that a young man’s note, Mr Sheringham, eh?); in which case, of course, he wouldn’t be mentioned. No, I shall have to spend the afternoon making enquiries. In the meantime, I’d be much obliged if you two gentlemen would not say anything about this. I stretched a point in showing you what was on that paper, and I want you to reciprocate by keeping quiet about it, I don’t want
anybody
told, you understand,” he added, with a significant look at Anthony; “male
or
female! You can promise me that, can’t you?”

“Naturally,” Roger said with a slight smile.

“Of course,” Anthony said stiffly.

“Then that’s all right,” observed the inspector with great heartiness. “I shan’t be able to do anything until my man comes down with the original document, of course; but he ought to be here anytime now. And by the way,” he added to Roger, “it may interest you to hear that I’m officially in charge of this case now. I got my authorisation from headquarters this morning.”

Roger picked up his cue. “I’ll mention that in my report tonight, Inspector.”

“Well, you can if you want to, sir, of course,” said the inspector with an air of innocent surprise.

As if by tacit agreement, the talk for the rest of the meal turned upon general topics.

As soon as his pipe was alight the inspector rose to go. Roger waited until he had left the room, then rose from his chair and darted in his wake, closing the sitting-room door behind him.

“Inspector,” he said in a low voice, as he caught him up on the landing, “there’s one question I must ask you. Are you intending to arrest Miss Cross?”

The inspector looked at him quizzically. “Are you speaking as a newspaperman or as a friend of the lady’s, sir?”

“Neither. As Roger Sheringham, private and inquisitive citizen.”

“Well,” the inspector said slowly, “to a newspaperman I should answer, ‘Don’t ask me leading questions’; to the friend of the lady’s, ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about’; and to Mr Sheringham, private citizen and personal friend of my own, if I may say so, ‘No, I’m not!’”

“Ah!”

“For one thing, you see,” the inspector added with a smile, “the evidence against her isn’t quite complete yet.”

“But look here, you don’t mean to say you still think that she may have –”

The inspector waved aside the awkward question with a large hand. “I’m not going to say what I think about that, even to you, Mr Sheringham. But one word of warning I will give you, to pass on to your cousin or not as you think fit – things aren’t always what they seem.”

“Ah!” Roger observed. “In other words, I suppose, ladies strongly under suspicion on circumstantial evidence aren’t necessarily guilty after all. Is that what you mean?”

“Well, sir,” replied the inspector, who seemed not a little pleased with his conundrum, “that’s all I’ve got to
say
. What I
mean
, you must decide for yourself.”

“Inspector, you’re hopeless!” Roger laughed, turning back to the sitting-room.

Anthony was brooding darkly over his empty cheese plate.

“I say, Roger,” he said at once, looking up, “does that damned inspector still think that Margaret had anything to do with it?”

“No, I don’t imagine so, really. He may, but I’m more inclined to think that he’s pulling our legs about her – yours especially. And you are a bit of a trout over Margaret, aren’t you, Anthony? You rise to any fly that he dangles over you.”

Anthony made a non-committal growling sound, but said nothing. Roger began to pace the little room with restless steps.

“Dash that infernal letter!” he burst out a few minutes later. “There’s no doubt that it does complicate matters most awkwardly. Though it doesn’t rule out my bright solution of before lunch by any means. The inspector ought to have seen that. What she was doing with friend Colin doesn’t affect in the slightest degree the bad blood between her and Mrs Russell. We mustn’t get confused by issues that lie outside the main chance.”

There was another pause.

“I must see Margaret!” Roger announced suddenly, stopping short in his stride. “You muttered something this morning about having arranged a meeting. For when?”

“Well, we didn’t actually
arrange
anything,” Anthony replied with preternatural innocence. “She happened to say that she’d probably be going out to that ledge this afternoon about three o’clock with a book, and I just mentioned that –”

“Cease your puling!” Roger interrupted rudely. “It’s a quarter to three now. Get your hat and come along.”

Five minutes later they were walking briskly up the rise from the road to the top of the cliffs, the wind blowing coolly about their heads. It is perhaps not uninteresting to note in passing that Anthony wore a hat and Roger did not. And one might go on to add at the same time that Anthony’s grey flannel trousers were faultlessly creased, while in Roger’s not a vestige of a crease could be seen. From this sort of thing the keen psychologist draws any number of interesting deductions.

“I say, you don’t mind me coming along, Anthony, do you?” Roger was asking with an appearance of great anxiety.

“Of course I don’t. Why should I?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Isn’t there some old saying about the difference between a couple and a trio in connection with company? I mean –”

“Oh, dry up, for Heaven’s sake! You’re not funny, Roger.”

“That,” Roger maintained firmly, “is a matter of opinion. Well, let us talk very seriously about gulls. There are no less than seven hundred and forty distinct species of gulls known to the entomologist, of which one hundred and eighty-two may be found by the intrepid explorer around the rocky coasts of these Islands. Perhaps the most common variety is the
Patum
Perperium
, or Black-hearted Wombat, which may be distinguished by –”

“What
are
you talking about?” demanded his bewildered listener.

“Gulls, Anthony,” replied Roger, and went on doing so with singular ardour right up to the ledge itself.

“Hullo, Margaret,” he greeted its occupant pleasantly. “Anthony and I have been talking about gulls. Do you think you could invite us to tea this afternoon with you?”

“To tea? Whatever for?”

“Well, it’s such a long way back to our own. Yours is so much easier.”

“Don’t take any notice of him, Margaret,” Anthony advised. “He’s only being funny. He’s been funny ever since we left the Crown.”

“Yes, and about gulls, too,” Roger added with pride. “Extraordinarily difficult things to be funny about, as you’ll readily understand. But I’m quite serious about tea, Margaret. I want to have the chance to study the occupants of your household at close quarters.”

“Oh, I see. But why?”

“No particular reason, except that I ought to have as close a view as possible of everybody mixed up with the case. And I must confess that I’m rather interested to have a look at this doctor-man of yours; he sounds interesting. Can it be done?”

The girl wrinkled her brow. “Ye-es, I should think so. Yes, of course it can! I’m keeping house for the time being, you know. I’ll just take you in with me, and that’s all there’ll be to it.”

“Good! You needn’t say what we are or anything about us. Just introduce us as two friends of yours who are staying down here.”

“Yes, I understand, Miss Williamson will be there, of course, but I don’t know about George; as often as not he has a tray sent into the laboratory for him. Still, you can take the chance.”

“Thanks, we will,” Roger said, descending to the little ledge. “And now, as we’ve got an hour or so to spare, I propose we devote it to an elevating discussion upon some subject as remote as possible from the business in hand. How say you, my children?”

“Right!” agreed Anthony, who had taken the opportunity of propping himself with his back to the rock as near as possible to Margaret’s side as was consistent with the convention that a young man shall not sit directly on top of a young woman to whom he is not engaged. “Anything you like – except gulls!”

During the next excellent hour Roger, lying on his back in the shade a couple of yards away and staring up into the blue sky, could not possibly have seen a tentative hand emerge from Anthony’s pocket, grope about the turf in an apparently aimless way for at least ten minutes and then pluck up the courage at last to fasten firmly upon another, and very much smaller, hand which had been lying quite still by its owner’s side the whole time. He could not possibly have seen – but he quite definitely knew all about it.

“By the way, I ought to warn you. Miss Williamson isn’t exactly an ordinary secretary: she’s rather an important person. She does any secretarial work George wants, of course, which is very little, but her chief job is to help him in the laboratory. She took a science degree at Cambridge – and I must say,” Margaret added with a little laugh, “she looks it.”

It was nearly half past four, and the three of them were sitting in Dr Vane’s drawing-room, waiting for tea and for the other members of the household. Margaret and Anthony showed distinct signs of nervousness, though for what exact reason was not really apparent to either of them; Roger was as collected as ever. The five-odd minutes which had elapsed since they entered the room had been spent happily by him in examining with no little interest the really fine collection of china which filled two large glass-fronted cabinets and overflowed on to two or three shelves and, in the case of a few plates, even the walls themselves. Roger’s knowledge of china was not a large one, but he had a sufficiently good smattering to enable him to talk intelligently on the subject with a collector.

“Don’t be catty, Margaret,” he said now, examining a Dresden ornament depicting four persons at a whist table, the lace of the little ladies’ gowns and of the miniature fans they fluttered being picked out with almost incredible daintiness. “I say, surely your cousin never amassed this collection, did she?”

“No. It’s George’s. The only hobby he’s got apart from his test tubes and things. Why?”

“I thought it didn’t seem to fit in well with the synopsis you gave me of the lady’s character. Anyhow, that’s all to the good; I’ll congratulate George on his collection and he’ll love me like a brother. I’ve met these china maniacs before and I think I know how to deal with them.”

“You’re perfectly right,” Margaret smiled. “It’s certainly the shortest cut to George’s heart.”

“And before George is much older he’s going to hear a few things about china,” Anthony was begining with heavy sarcasm, when the opening of the drawing-room door cut him short.

Of the two people who entered the room the next moment, it is hard to say which presented the most striking figure. Miss Williamson, who preceded her employer, would have drawn attention in any company. She was a tall, angular woman, with high cheekbones and close-cropped fair hair, and the pince-nez she wore seemed to add emphasis to the darting looks of her cold, slightly prominent blue eyes. Her clothes were neat to the point of severity and there was that air of brisk efficiency about her which is likely to reduce the ordinary man to a condition of tongue-tied uneasiness when he encounters it in a strange female, it clashes so persistently with all his ideas of what the word “feminine” ought to convey. Yet with it all the secretary was not one of those distressing creatures, a mannish woman; and though by no means beautiful, she was not in a way unhandsome. “A distinct personality here,” Roger told himself before his eyes had been resting longer than two seconds upon her.

Dr Vane, who followed close on her heels, bore out the picture Margaret had already given – a great hulking man, six feet two inches tall at least, with an enormous black beard and a stern eye, yet with a gentleness and delicacy of movement which was in striking contrast with the rugged strength of his appearance; as he closed the door behind him, one could scarcely hear it meet the lintel, so restrained was his action.

Margaret jumped to her feet as the two entered.

“Oh, George, these are two friends of mine, Mr Sheringham and Mr Walton,” she said, not without confusion. “They called in to see me, not knowing about – about –”

“I am very glad for you to welcome your friends here, Margaret,” the doctor said with grave courteousness. “It is after all the very least I can do now that you are so kindly looking after things here for me.”

Margaret thanked him with a quick smile, and introduced the two to Miss Williamson. Bows were exchanged, and the latter rang the bell for tea.

“We’ve only got ten minutes, Margaret,” she said briskly. “In the middle of something rather important, and it was as much as I could do to drag George in here at all.”

The two girls and Anthony formed a group by the window, and Roger approached Dr Vane.

“A magnificent collection of china you’ve got here, doctor,” he said easily. “I’ve been admiring it ever since I came in. I’ve never seen finer Spode in my life than those bits over there.”

Into the doctor’s stern eye leapt the light of the collector who hears his collection praised, which is much the same as that of a mother who is told that her infant possesses her own nose. “You are interested in china, Mr Sheringham?”

“I am crazy about it,” returned Roger untruthfully.

The rest simply followed.

With the arrival of tea the conversation became more general, and Roger was able to allow the novelist in him to rise to the surface and survey this truly piquant situation. Here was a man whose wife only three days ago had met with a violent death in circumstances which were, to say the least of it, suspicious, receiving his teacup from the hands of a young and pretty girl who, as he could hardly fail to realise after Inspector Moresby’s visit, had come very closely under the notice of the police in connection with the same violent death. Yet the relations between the two, which might have been expected to be almost intolerable, did not appear, on the surface at any rate, to be so much as strange. Margaret was perfectly natural; Dr Vane courteous, gentle and mildly affectionate. The more Roger watched, the more he marvelled. Unconventional though he was in literature as he was in life, he would hardly have dared to make use of such a situation for one of his books; it would have been voted too wildly improbable.