Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (24 page)

Roger, who had been gazing thoughtfully out of the low window, turned around. “Did anybody come to see Mr Meadows before breakfast on the morning of his death?” he asked abruptly.

The landlady was so taken aback that she answered with equal brevity. “No, sir, that there wasn’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“Quite sure, sir,” replied the landlady, recovering herself. “You see, I was in me kitchen from –”

“Did he have a visitor on the previous day, do you remember?” Roger cut in ruthlessly.

“No, sir; he never had a visitor all the time he was here, not till you came. Very quiet gentleman, he was; very quiet. I remember saying to Mrs Mullins, not three days before the end, ‘Mrs Mullins,’ I said, ‘there’s lodgers
and
lodgers, as you know as well as I do, but the Rev. Meadows, he –”

“Did you go to bed early the night before Mr Meadows’ death?” asked Roger.

“Well, in good time, as you might say,” replied the landlady, instantly directing her steady stream along this new course. “But then I always do. Candle out by ten o’clock’s my rule and always has been. An hour’s sleep before midnight’s worth two after, I always say. Now my husband, when he was alive, would sit –”

“So if Mr Meadows had had a late visitor, you wouldn’t have known?”

“Well, it’s funny you should say that, sir,” said the stout landlady, in no wise disconcerted, “because as a matter of fact I should have known. I
should
have heard the bell, you see. Because I didn’t get to sleep after all that night, not till it was quite light I didn’t. I had the toothache something chronic. I do get like that sometimes, and then it’s as much as I can do to get a wink of sleep at all. I remember it was that night, because when I heard about poor Mr Meadows the next morning, well, troubles never come singly, I thought. Not but what I know the toothache oughtn’t to be mentioned in the same breath as –”

“But supposing the visitor hadn’t rung the bell,” Roger persisted. “Supposing he’d come round and tapped at this window and Mr Meadows had gone to the door and let him in. You wouldn’t have known anything about it then, would you?”

“Well, it’s funny you should say that, too, because as it happens I
should
have. I should have heard them talking in here, you see. My bedroom’s just above this room, and you can hear the voices through the ceiling as plain as plain. Not what they’re saying, I don’t mean, but just the voices. And I know
that
,” continued the landlady with an air of mild triumph, “because I heard it meself a matter of three weeks ago or more, when somebody did come to see Mr Meadows after I’d gone to bed, just like you said.”

“Oh? Someone did come to see him, eh? But I thought you said he had no visitors?”

“Well, I did,” admitted the landlady handsomely, “and that’s a fact. But not having let this one in meself, well, it slipped my memory, I suppose. Yes, the Rev. Meadows did have a visitor one night, and I know that although I’d gone to sleep, because they woke me up with their talking.”

“It was pretty late, then, and they were talking loudly. Good! Have you any idea who it was?”

The landlady hesitated. “No, sir, I couldn’t say that, I’m afraid.”

“What could you say, though?” Roger asked, with his most winning smile.

“Well, sir, I’m not one for scandal,” said the landlady rapidly; “never have been, and please God never will be.

But this I must and will say: if it’d been anybody else but the Rev. Meadows I should’ve gone down to them then and there, in bed though I was and goodness knows tired enough already. My house has always been respectable, but seeing it was the Rev. Meadows – well, what’s wrong for other people would be right for him, I thought. Being a clergyman does make a difference, doesn’t it, sir? So I just shut my eyes –”

“Do you mean,” Roger put in gently, “that Rev. Meadows’ visitor was a lady?”

“Well, I don’t know about that, sir,” said the landlady doubtfully. “I don’t know whether you’d call her a
lady
. You see, she was talking that loud I could hardly get to sleep again, try as I might. And the Rev. Meadows, he was talking louder than a clergyman ought, if you ask me, sir. Not but what we ought to say any good of the dead, as the saying goes, and the Rev. Meadows always being such a pleasant, soft-spoken gentleman in the ordinary way, but –”

“Were they quarrelling, then?”

“Well, I suppose if you put it like that, sir,” said the landlady with reluctance, “they were.”

Roger exchanged a significant look with Anthony. “And you haven’t the least idea who she was?” he asked.

“Oh, no, sir; I don’t know who she was. I never saw her, you see, and she didn’t leave nothing behind her, only a handkerchief.”

“She left a handkerchief, did she?”

“Yes, sir; I found it the next morning, when I was doing this room before Rev. Meadows was up. I meant to give it to him to give back to her, but kept putting it off somehow. I thought, perhaps, he mightn’t like me knowing anything about it, you see, him not having said a word about her being here at all; and after all, least said soonest mended, as the saying goes.”

“You haven’t,” said Roger, with elaborate carelessness, “still got that handkerchief by you, have you?”

“Well, it’s funny you should say that, sir, because just as it happens, I have. I kep’ it by me, you see, meaning –”

“Would it be too much trouble to let me have a look at it for a moment?” Roger asked in honeyed tones.

“Not a bit, sir,” replied the landlady cheerfully. “I’ll go and get it now, if you wouldn’t mind waiting a minute.”

She bustled out of the room, and Anthony looked at his cousin with raised eyebrows.

“Mrs Vane, of course?” he said.

“Of course,” Roger nodded. “She could easily get in at the window without being seen.”

“But it’s natural enough, isn’t it? I mean, why the excitement?”

“I’m not excited. And it is perfectly natural. She probably came here several times. But having unearthed a brand new fact, we may as well find out all there is to be known about it. I admit that I don’t see any fresh development that it can lead to, but there’s no harm in following it up.”

The landlady bustled back again, decidedly the worse for breath, and handed Roger a small piece of cambric entirely surrounded by lace. Roger examined it and silently pointed out to Anthony a small E embroidered in one corner. He turned to the landlady and significantly rattled his loose change.

“I’d like to keep this, if I may,” he told her.

“And welcome,” responded the landlady with alacrity. If her visitors were ready to pay good cash for such an insignificant souvenir of the tragedy, who was she to stand in their way?

“I suppose you can’t say at all definitely which evening it was, can you?” Roger asked, tucking the flimsy thing away in his pocketbook.

“Yes, I can, sir,” returned the landlady, not without triumph. “It was the very night before that poor Mrs Vane was thrown over the cliff. That fixed it in my memory, like. Wasn’t that a dreadful thing, sir? Really, I don’t know what’s happening to Ludmouth. First Mrs Vane and then the Rev. Meadows! Do you think that police inspector is going to find out anything, sir? You being with him last week and all, I thought perhaps –”

Roger discouraged her inquisitiveness with gentle firmness and began to prowl round the room. The excuse he had given for his presence, that the dead man was an old friend of his, could be easily stretched to cover any curiosity, bordering on the indecent, which he might display regarding that old friend’s habits and possessions.

A rack on the wall containing three or four pipes arrested his attention, and he drew one out of its socket. “Mr Meadows was a heavy smoker, wasn’t he?” he remarked.

“Well, it’s funny you should say that, sir,” observed the landlady, who had been following his movements with interest, “because I shouldn’t have said he was, myself, at all. Leastways, not compared with my husband, he wasn’t. He’d smoke his pipe after breakfast, the Rev. Meadows would, and again after his dinner and perhaps a bit in the evening if he felt like it, but not much more than that. Now my husband; you’d hardly ever see him without he had a pipe in –”

“But Mr Meadows had a lot of pipes for so small a smoker?”

“Well, yes, he had, sir; I’d noticed that myself. But he was very funny about his pipes, the Rev. Meadows was. He used to smoke them one at a time, for a week; in roteration, he called it. Very comical about it, he was too. ‘Pipes are like wives, ma,’ he used to say (always called me ma, he did; said I mothered him better than his own mother ever had; a very friendly sort of gentleman, the Rev. Meadows was). Yes, ‘Pipes are like wives,’ he’d say; ‘a man ought never to have more than one of ‘em going at a time.’ That was just one of his comicalities, you see. Always full of jokes like that, he was. ‘Pipes are like wives,’ indeed! You see what he meant: a man ought never –”

“Yes, very comical indeed,” Roger agreed gravely. “Ha, ha! By the way, you don’t know where Mr Meadows bought his tobacco, do you?”

“Well, it’s funny you should say that, sir, because as it happens I do. Next door but one the shop is, and that’s the only place they sell it in the village. Barring the Three Swans and the Crown, of course; and the Three Swans being over a mile outside the village, you could hardly expect him to go there for it, could you?”

“Certainly not,” Roger agreed with an air of great seriousness. “No, I couldn’t possibly expect that. Well, I mustn’t keep you any longer, I suppose. Thank you so much for letting me look around.” He held something out toward her which the landlady received with ready palm.

“And welcome, I’m sure,” she said genially. “Thank you kindly, sir. And if there’s anything else you want to see, you’ve only got to ask. Wouldn’t like to have a look around his bedroom, I suppose, now you’re here?”

“No, I don’t think we need trouble about that. Come along, Anthony. Good morning, madam.”

They were shown into the road and Roger turned to the left.

“Some day,” remarked Anthony chattily, “I must match you against that woman, if I can find somebody to put up a purse. You’ll enter the ring directly after breakfast and talk to each other till one of you gives up. If either of the combatants is found at the time of the contest to be suffering already from clergyman’s sore throat, he or she forfeits the stake money and all bets are null and void. Queensbury rules, no kidney-punch, towels and sponges to be provided by –”

“Cease prattling, Anthony,” Roger remarked in tolerant tones, diving into a shop on their left. “We’re going in here.”

They went in.

“By the way,” Roger opened the conversation, having paved the way by buying an ounce of tobacco that he didn’t want. “This is the same brand as poor Mr Meadows used to smoke, isn’t it? You remember; the clergyman who died next door but one last week.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” said the village grocer. “We all knew him here. But he didn’t smoke that, sir. Crown and Anchor Coarse Cut was what he always bought.”

“Is that so? I thought he told me once that he smoked this. But of course he never did smoke very much.”

“That’s right, sir. About an ounce a week, that’s all.”

“Used to come in here for his ounce every week, did he?”

“Oh, no; he didn’t do that. He used to buy it a quarter of a pound at a time; but that works out at an ounce a week you see.”

“So it does,” observed Roger with an air of mild surprise, and took his departure.

“So now, Anthony,” he confided to that young man outside, “we know what Samuel smoked, how he treated his pipes, how much tobacco he bought at a time and everything else; in fact, about the only thing we appear not to know in this connection is the name of Samuel’s tobacconist’s cousin’s great-aunt’s cat.”

“And what the deuce,” wondered Anthony, “do you imagine you’re going to get out of it all?”

“That Heaven alone knows!” replied Roger, with pious agnosticism.

They went back to the inn for lunch.

Inspector Moresby was evidently having a busy day. He did not put in an appearance at lunch, and when Roger and Anthony strolled down to the sea level to smoke their postprandial pipes there was still no sign of him. Anthony surmised vaguely that his investigations must be covering a larger field than their own.

Anthony had plenty of time for his surmises, for ever since their return to the inn Roger had lapsed into a highly accustomed state of taciturnity. To his cousin’s efforts to make conversation or discuss their discoveries of the morning he replied with only a brief word or grunt. Anthony, who was not always so tactless as he appeared, realised that his mind was busy with some knotty problem connected with the case, and was content to leave him to his meditations. They scrambled out to their usual rock and composed themselves to smoke in silence.

It was nearly three-quarters of an hour before Roger volunteered any clue as to what was puzzling him. “I’m sure,” he said abruptly, “that this information of the landlady’s ought to give us a pointer to the truth, if we could only interpret it correctly.”

“You mean, about Mrs Vane’s visit and their quarrel?” Anthony enquired.

“No, no,” Roger said with unusual testiness. “That doesn’t give us anything fresh. It’s natural enough for her to have visited him, and we’d gathered already that they were on bad terms. No, about those pipes.”

“Oh! But I don’t see how they come in.”

“Well, after all,” observed Roger sarcastically, “a pipe does play rather a leading part in the affair, doesn’t it?”

“What on earth are you talking about?” asked Anthony blankly.

Roger stared at him for a moment and then laughed. “Oh, sorry! I was forgetting that you don’t know anything about that. And you mustn’t ask me either, because I’m under the most fearful oath of secrecy. Anyhow, a pipe
does
play a leading part – but don’t tell Moresby I told you.”

“Mum’s the word,” agreed Anthony cheerfully. “All right, carry on, then. You’ll get to the bottom of it, Roger, if you work your grey matter hard enough.”

“Thank you, Anthony,” Roger murmured. “I do need a little encouragement, it’s true.” He relapsed into his brown study.