Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (28 page)

“Oh, so you’re not going to apply for a warrant after all?” said Roger sarcastically.

“No, sir, I’m not.”

“Very nice for the girl’s reputation, I must say, to be careering about the Continent with a young man for goodness knows how long.”

“She’s engaged to him,” the inspector pointed out mildly. “It
is
possible for them to get married abroad, you know.”

Roger snorted.

There was silence.

“You seem very put out on her behalf,” the inspector ventured, curiosity overcoming discretion. “Considering how she’s been treating your cousin, I mean.”

“She was a minx, I admit,” Roger said, with a little laugh. “I also admit that she took me in properly; I really thought she was quite fond of Anthony. But after all, I suppose she had some justification. If she was engaged to friend Colin all the time, the position must have been a very difficult one for her, both before Mrs Vane’s death and afterward, whether she knew anything about her fiancé’s intrigue with that lady or not. She couldn’t admit the engagement while she was under that cloud, you see, and all her energies must have been concentrated on clearing her name. I don’t say she behaved very nicely, but that must be the explanation. Having had it forcibly impressed on her that not only public opinion but the official police as well were dead against her, she deliberately set out to attach Anthony to her in order to make sure of getting him and me on her side and enlisting our energies on her behalf. Don’t you think that’s the truth of the matter?”

“Not a doubt of it, sir,” agreed the inspector heartily. “That’s the truth of that all right.”

“And very well she succeeded,” added Roger modestly. “Well, now that the whole thing’s at an end, so to speak, Inspector, what about a little bed?”

The inspector’s answer was not a direct one. “So you think the whole thing’s at an end, do you, Mr Sheringham?” he said, with a return to his quizzical expression.

“I do, yes,” said Roger, surprised. “Don’t you?”

“I’m very much afraid it is,” the inspector agreed.

Roger looked at him. “What are you driving at, Inspector? Have you still got a card or two up your sleeve? You surely don’t mean to say you don’t accept my solution of the mystery?”

The inspector puffed once or twice at his pipe. “If you’d asked me that question before, when Mr Walton was still here,” he said slowly, “I should have said that I did accept it. But as we’re alone – well, no! I certainly don’t accept it.”

“But – but why ever not?” Roger asked in astonishment.

“Because I happen to know it isn’t correct, sir,” returned the inspector placidly.

Roger stared at him through the blue haze of tobacco smoke. “Isn’t correct? But – but – well, dash it, man, it must be correct!”

The inspector shook his head. “Oh, no, sir, if you’ll pardon me. It isn’t correct at all. You see, my trouble hasn’t been to find out the truth; I’ve known that all along. My trouble has been to prove it. To prove it, I mean, definitely enough to satisfy a court of law. And that I haven’t been able to do, and I’m afraid, never shall. The truth’s plain enough, but there’s too many gaps in the chain of legal proof. It’s a great pity.” The inspector shook his head again, this time expressing gentle regret.

“What on earth are you talking about?” Roger cried. “Truth obvious all the time? What do you mean? I haven’t found the truth obvious all the time!”

Once more the inspector shook his head, now conveying the disappointed reproof of the master at the too easy failure of a fairly gifted pupil. “And yet it was staring at you in the face all the time, sir,” he said in tones of reproach. “The trouble was you wouldn’t look at it.” He drew again at his pipe for a moment or two, as if collecting in his mind what he wanted to say. Roger watched him in frank amazement.

“Yes, that was your trouble, sir,” resumed the inspector, in a slightly didactic voice. “All the time you’ve been refusing to look the facts in the face. This was a simple case, so far as just finding out the truth went; as simple as ever I’ve come across. But that wouldn’t do for you. Oh, dear, no! You must go and make a complicated business out of it. As simple a little murder as ever was, but you want to run about and raise all sorts of irrelevant issues that had nothing to do with the case at all.”

“Who did murder Mrs Vane, then?” demanded Rogers, disregarding these strictures. “If Meadows didn’t, as you seem to be meaning, who the devil did?”

“That’s the trouble with you people with too much imagination,” pursued the inspector. “A simple murder’s never enough for you. You can’t believe a murder can be simple. You’ve got to waste your time ferreting out a lot of stuff to try to make it look less simple than it really is. No good detective ought to have too much imagination. He doesn’t need it. When all –”

“Oh, cut the cackle for the time being!” interrupted Roger rudely. “Who
did
murder Mrs Vane?”

“When all the evidence points to one person, and motive and opportunity and everything else as well, the real detective doesn’t waste his time saying, ‘Ah, yes! I know a thing or two worth that. When all the evidence and the rest of it points to one person, then the odds are that that person is innocent and someone else has made it look like that. That’s how I should commit a murder, by Jove! I’d fake all the evidence to point to somebody else. That’s what must have been done in this case. So whoever may be guilty, we know one person at any rate who isn’t, and that’s the one that the foolish inspector from Scotland Yard, who hasn’t got a nice big imagination like me, is going to go and suspect. Haw, haw!’” The mincing accent with which the inspector strove to represent the speech of this superior person with imagination was offensive in the extreme.

“Who murdered Mrs Vane, Inspector?” asked Roger coldly.

“Why ask me, Mr Sheringham?” retorted the inspector, still more offensively. “I’m only the man from Scotland Yard, without any imagination. Don’t ask yourself either, though, because the answer’s staring you in the face; so of course you’d never be able to see it. Go and ask any child of ten in the village. He’d know. He’s known all the time, for the matter of that.”

“Good God!” Roger exclaimed, genuinely shocked. “You don’t seriously mean that –” He paused.

“Of course I do!” returned the inspector more genially. “Good gracious, sir, I can’t think how you can have persuaded yourself she didn’t. Everything was against her – every single thing! There wasn’t a loophole, so far as common sense went (I’m not talking about legal proof, mind you.) Of course she did it!” He lay back in his chair and roared with callous laughter at Roger’s unmistakable discomfiture. It was the inspector’s hour, and he was evidently going to enjoy every minute of it.

“But – but I can’t believe it!” Roger stammered. “Margaret Cross! Good Lord!”

“Well, perhaps I ought not to laugh at you, sir,” the inspector went on, continuing nevertheless to do so with the utmost heartiness. “After all, you’re not the first one to be taken in by a pretty face and a nice, innocent, appealing sort of manner, are you? Why, there’s mugs in London being taken in by ‘em every day!”

The country mug winced slightly, but no words came to him.

“Of course I wouldn’t be saying any of this if Mr Walton were here,” said the inspector, ceasing to laugh. “It’d be a nasty shock for him, very nasty indeed; and the one he’s got already is quite enough. You’ll keep it all dark from him, of course.”

Roger found his voice. “Who killed Meadows, then?” he asked abruptly.

“Why, the girl!” ejaculated the inspector. “She killed ‘em both, I keep telling you. Meadows saw her with Mrs Vane, lay low for a few days, then sprang it on her and started in to blackmail her, no doubt; probably wanted most of that ten thousand pounds she was to get under the will. So she finished him off, too.”

“Oh, rot!” Roger cried incredulously.

“It’s true enough, sir,” said the inspector more seriously. “I saw it all the time; knew he must have been murdered when we found him there dead. It was a nasty blow for me too, I can tell you, because he was my only witness against her for the murder of Mrs Vane. That’s what I was going to arrest him for, as a matter of fact, to keep him safe in prison and make him talk – not because I thought he’d committed the murder himself, like you; I never did think so. In fact, I knew he hadn’t. Yes, she spoilt my case against her there completely.”

“But – but look here, can you prove these extraordinary assertions in any way, Inspector?”

“Well enough for common sense, sir, though not beyond all reasonable doubt, which is what the law wants. Let’s take the two cases in turn. What were the clues in the first one?

The coat-button and the footprints. Well, the footprints had been made by a number six shoe, fairly new, the heels not worn at the side; Miss Cross, I found out, had been wearing shoes that afternoon which answered to that description. That wasn’t conclusive, of course; half a dozen people might have been wearing shoes like that. But the coat-button was. There was no getting round that. The maid was dead certain that button had been on Miss Cross’ coat when she went out, and there it was in the dead woman’s hand. That would want a lot of explaining away.”

“But it
could
be explained away.”

“Oh, yes, sir; it could,” agreed the inspector cheerfully. “I showed you how myself.”

“But what about those shoes I found in the sea? You said they were Mrs Russell’s.”

“So they were, sir. But what about them? You never seriously thought those were really the shoes the murderer had worn, did you?”

Roger choked slightly, but made no reply.

“Oh, I can’t believe you thought that,” continued the inspector with relish. “Why, that was an old pair, not new like the pair that had made those footprints. A child could have seen that. Besides, they’d only been in the water an hour or two.”

“What?” Roger cried.

“Oh, didn’t you know that, sir?” asked the inspector innocently. “Oh, yes; they weren’t much more than wet through. And you don’t mean to say you never recognised them, sir? Well, dear me!”

“Rub it in, rub it in,” Roger groaned. “Dance on my body if you like. I’ve no doubt I deserve it. No, I didn’t recognise them. Would you mind explaining to my futile intelligence what exactly you mean by that?”

“Well, seeing that you’d had them in your hands not twenty-four hours before, I thought you might have recognised them. Didn’t you get hold of a pair of Mrs Russell’s shoes, and give them to Miss Cross to give back for you?”

“Great Scott, you don’t mean to say
those
were the ones?”

“Indeed they were, sir, as it wouldn’t have taken you five minutes to find out, if you’d ever thought of it. The girl lost her head a bit over that. It’s easy enough to see what happened. You’d been putting forward the idea that the murderer was a man, who made those marks with a pair of woman’s shoes to throw us off the track. She’s getting pretty desperate by then, seeing how strongly I suspected her (I never troubled to hide that), so she makes some excuse to get away, nips back to the house, slashes the shoes up the sides to give the impression they’d been prepared for big feet, and throws them over the top of the cliff. Then she makes another excuse to get you down on the ledge, where they can be found. Why, bless you, sir,
you
never found those shoes! She did!”

“It’s perfectly true,” Roger muttered. “She did. I remember.”

“Yes, it’s all plain enough as far as common sense goes, but no good for a court of law, I’m afraid. A smart counsel could tear all that to shreds with his eyes shut. The same with the second case too.”

“Yes, go on to that.”

“Well, there, sir, I really did my best to put you on the right track. I
told
you that Meadows was murdered by the same person who killed Mrs Vane, and because he’d seen the first murder done, I told you that, and I told you that it must have been someone who had access to aconitine. You said just now you thought I meant Dr Vane, but I didn’t, of course; I meant the girl. And then the funny thing is you thought I was trying to pull your leg. Why, it’s all been staring you in the face. I’ve heard you with my own ears talking with Mr Walton about how funnily Miss Cross was behaving, wanting to go over to France one minute and stay here the next and all the rest of it; and all you thought was that it was nerves. So it was, but not the kind you meant!

“And I’d given you another hint long before that, when I told you there was real bad blood in that family. I told you straight out they were practically all of them criminals; and still you thought she couldn’t be, just because she had an innocent face. Of course the first thing I’d done was to have the records searched for her at the Yard,
and
found her in them too. Never actually been in prison, you understand, but mixed up before she came here with a very shady crew indeed; a house she got a job in as a parlourmaid was burgled, for instance, and another where she was supposed to be the governess; we never laid our hands on the lot that did it but there’s no doubt that she was in with them, though nothing could be proved against her. Oh, and several other things too. She was a bad lot all right before she ever came here, but clever – oh, yes, clever enough.”

“Go on to the second case,” said Roger feebly.

The inspector paused and marshalled his ideas. “Well, now, there, sir, you made a very bad mistake indeed,” he said with some severity. “You jumped to the conclusion that Meadows was killed by aconitine in his tobacco. If you’d troubled to read up aconitine as you ought to have done, you’d have found out that it’s a vegetable alkaloid, and vegetable alkaloids lose all their power if they’re burnt. You can smoke as much aconitine in your tobacco as you like, and it isn’t going to do you any harm.”

“But that’s what killed him,” Roger protested.

“Oh, no, it isn’t, sir, if you’ll pardon me. He was killed by aconitine placed in his
pipe
, not his tobacco. Aconitine was put in the bowl or the stem of his
pipe
, sir, where his saliva melted it, and he swallowed it before he knew what he’d done. And that not only proves that it couldn’t have been put there three weeks before, as you thought, but must have been during the previous night, but also that it was put there by someone who knew a little about poisons but not very much, for otherwise there’d have been none wasted in the tobacco. She meant to make sure of the job all right, by the way; there was enough of the stuff there to kill a hundred people.”