The Ginger Cat Mystery (14 page)

“‘Never throw a sucked orange on the pavement,' is another of my wisecracks, Mr. Vereker. It's dangerous to the next man coming along and you might tread on it yourself if you happen to come that way again yourself. The best thing to do with a sucked orange is to put it away in your pocket and make it think it's still full of juice till it's dry enough to leave somewhere with safety. Of course, it's only one of my wisecracks because I was never given to sucking oranges. As for Miss Stella, she's a strong favourite in my betting list. She's an injured woman or may think herself one. She knew the house and her man. She was the very person to make a secret appointment with him. She was intimate with Mrs. Cornell and probably knew that lady kept an automatic in the music room bureau, which, by the way, Mrs. Cornell never locked up for she's a most casual woman. Then you have the matter of the duplicate keys. Doubtless either young Cornell or she had got possession of that set after Mr. David Cornell handed them back. If they used the music room as a secret trysting place in wet weather, this seems a very safe supposition. She's a clever girl, I should say, with an excellent command of her feelings in some respects. She was certainly a bit nervous when I questioned her this morning, but I know the type well. When face to face with danger they lose every trace of nerves and become deadly cool and very difficult to upset. The very presence of danger seems to key them up and give every faculty an added sharpness. I was doubly cautious with her when I saw she had taken command of herself and by becoming friendly and confidential, tried to make her overconfident. I think she saw through this trick and countered it by being artfully naive and guardedly helpful. I tried to leave her with the impression that I thought she was above suspicion and ought to give us a hand in tracing her cousin's murderer. If I have lulled her into feeling fairly safe, it will give us a chance of watching her more closely and finally giving her a nasty surprise as soon as she makes a false move. Once upset she'd promptly fall to pieces.”

“You horrible old humbug, Heather. I wouldn't have thought you capable of such guile only I know you too well. I have put a double star against the young lady myself, but still I'm open to rubbing them out. I haven't seen her father yet, but hope to do so to-morrow. He may be the very man we want.”

“He's our man!” said Heather with surprising emphasis. “If this was a yarn by a story merchant, I'd arrest him right away as the most unlikely person. He can't see to shoot a haystack, which makes it doubly probable he fired the shot.”

“Without joking, Heather, he's among the probables,” said Vereker seriously. “If he loves his daughter he might lose all sense of proportion over such things as sucked oranges for instance. He knows his way to the music room even at night, for darkness is not an obstacle to the blind. They rely on other faculties such as hearing and touch to an amazing degree. He may never have handed back the keys to the music room or he may have quietly regained possession of them. He may have known all about the automatic pistol in the bureau and thought that his very disability was an excellent cloak against discovery of guilt. What do you say?”

“I lie low,” replied Heather reflectively and glanced into his pewter mug. “Finished!” he remarked, “and seeing that it's getting late, I propose we call an end to the conference of The Big Two. The inquest is to-morrow and I'll call for an adjournment till we see things a bit more clearly. There's one little question on my mind which I must ask you. You needn't reply unless you like. What were the objects you were examining to-night under your microscope? Anything vital?”

“Two or three hairs, Heather, One I found on a lounge suit in Frank Cornell's wardrobe. It's a short human hair, almost black. I should say it came from the bobbed section of Miss Cornell's rather lovely mop, I visited her hairdresser to-day and in conversation found she'd had her hair cut last week. No inmate of the Manor has such perfectly black hair. It's a long shot, but I feel I'm not very wide of the mark. I found another of the same colour and texture, also a woman's hair, on the settee in the music room. Both of these hairs have sharp sections which, as you know, indicate that their owner recently had her hair cut. But the third hair's a bit of a surprise. As I've wandered into your domain just for the fun of orthodox detection, I'll tell you what it is. It certainly belongs to a ginger tabby cat. Now you've got something really distinctive to follow up!”

“Thanks for the information,” said Heather ironically. “I'll go round the district and take a census of the cats and hunt down all the ginger tabbies in Marston. You've overlooked the fact that it might be the property of a tortoiseshell but that won't make any difference to me.”

“I'd give up facts and take to the intuitive method, Heather, if I were you,” said Vereker.

“The clue of the ginger tabby!” exclaimed Heather with a loud laugh and then remarked, “By the way, in the last chapter, so to speak, of our discussion, when we were jotting down the probables not living in the house, we didn't mention the possibility of a complete outsider.”

“It went without saying. We have both thought of the contingency of someone living in London, say, who was a deadly enemy of the murdered man. A young fellow like Cornell, who goes about philandering with women, happens at times to put it across somebody else's woman and there's promptly a cause for war. The other man objects and to sooth his wounded pride and anger blots out his adversary. Besides, Cornell with his drinking and gambling propensities was almost certain to have run into a rather questionable crowd of people or, to put it better, a crowd of people with some very disreputable and reckless members. I've already written to young Ricardo asking him to inquire among his many legal friends if any of them knew a Frank Cornell who was reading for the bar. He has chambers somewhere in the Inner Temple, I believe. But you and your myrmidons, Heather, can carry out that end of the investigation more thoroughly and I'm relying on you, partner, to let me know if you get a suspect beyond the Marston circle of inquiry. It would be damned unfair to let me go on nosing round here and then spring an unpleasant surprise on me after many days by saying you'd had the man arrested—name, Smith, address, London, for choice.”

“I'll play the game, Mr. Vereker, but I'm not bothering much about Smiths of London. Our hare is in Marston or I'm the biggest idiot ever. But I'm going to bed. Good night and God bless you.”

People afflicted with the tragedy of blindness had always evoked in Vereker as long as he could remember a faint sense of the uncanny. This feeling he could not wholly dispel by reasoning, nor could his quick sympathy for those who suffer misfortune entirely eradicate it. That blindness had some powerful, morbid appeal for the imagination was evident from the very fact that it had been used as a basic theme in both literary and dramatic art. Secretly ashamed of this irrational attitude in himself, he had often tried to discover from what source it sprung. He had seen Maeterlinck's drama and read Wells's story in his youth and had at first been inclined to ascribe his sensations to an echo of the bygone impressions made on his mind by these two powerful imaginations. Later, he felt certain that they were due to some curious association in his mind of blindness with the mystery of death. The eyes of the blind were as the eyes of the dead. The faces of the sightless lacked the quick responsiveness to things seen. When reacting to things heard and felt, the living flash that lit the ordinary man's eye with excitement, fear, hatred, anger or desire was missing. On meeting David Cornell for the first time, he was again conscious in a marked degree of this sense of uncanniness. In spite of himself he could not keep his eyes off the man's face which in repose wore a strange resignation, some faint likeness to the marmoreal fixity of death, and as he watched he observed how his host's sense of touch and hearing rose to the difficult synthesis called perception by an added quality of sharpness.

Soon after his arrival at the bungalow, Miss Cornell had gone out and left him to talk music with her father. The topic was not long in coming to the surface of their conversation, and once roused the old man held forth vigorously. Vereker, ignorant of the subject, was pleased to play the part of a patient listener. David Cornell deplored the recent trend of musical art. He said it was the expression of an age without faith or belief in itself. Music was an emotional expression and our cold intellectualism and cynicism were antagonistic to greatness in the art, Vereker combated this theory by hinting that the mind of to-day was explorative and that modern musical art must necessarily be tentative, searching for a new outlook on which to base a faith. At length, after a disquisition on the beauty of the nineteenth-century romantics, the topic died out and David Cornell apologized for riding his hobby horse so long. To change the subject he suddenly asked: “What's your real profession, Mr. Vereker?”

“I'm supposed to be a landscape artist, but some time ago I took up criminal investigation as a mental relaxation and now it's playing a very prominent rôle in my life.”

“It must be extremely interesting,” said Cornell, “and do you think you'll manage to unravel the mystery of my unfortunate young nephew's death?”

“I came down to Marston with that intention. Success depends on so many things and hangs on such delicate threads that it'd be foolish to say just now how the business will turn out.”

“Of course, of course, but I daresay you'll have formed some idea as to who committed the murder.”

“No, I would hardly say that. You see, Mr. Cornell, in detective work the facts you gather range themselves together in your mind, then they seem to cluster in associated groups and finally turn your suspicion towards a person or several persons. You don't start with suspecting a person and then see if the facts agree. Preconceptions are amazingly easy to form and are often most dangerous to success. They frequently lead down the wrong road and are terribly hard to eradicate when once formed. Valuable time is wasted and your work rendered futile and exasperating.”

“The facts you've already gathered must have given you some direction in the matter. You must surely suspect someone?”

“Oh, yes, I suspect two or three people in a tentative way,” agreed Vereker, highly satisfied that the conversation had taken the turn he desired. He wanted Mr. David Cornell to talk. He was one of the Cornell family; he was the cause of the exhumation of his brother's body. He might unconsciously reveal some factor which up till now had evaded the investigator's pursuit. “Are you interested in detection, Mr. Cornell?” he asked.

“Yes, in a general way, but in this particular case certainly,” replied Cornell at once. “I suppose you start on such a job by hunting for the weapon?”

“Well, yes, that's a very important factor, but so far we've been unsuccessful. The search is still proceeding.”

“Have you searched the music room?” came the next question to Vereker's great surprise.

“Yes, but I hope you won't think me impertinent if I ask you what prompted your question?” replied Vereker observing the old man's face closely. A slight quiver of the upper lip, almost a hint of a smile was born on his passive features. The gentleness and nobility of his general expression gave place to a certain contemptuous hardness.

“No, I don't think you're impertinent. It's part of your job to ask questions. I mentioned the music room for the simple reason that Mrs. Cornell used to keep her automatic pistol in a drawer of the bureau near the door.”

“Ah, yes, I see,” said Vereker and decided that he must be cautious in dealing with Mr. David Cornell. Apart from his musical leanings, the broad forehead and shrewd, sensitive lines of the face hinted at an unusual breadth of intellect and quickness of intuition.

“It was a miniature automatic, what they call a vest-pocket automatic. I took a large .45 automatic out with me to France, satisfied that I had the latest thing in destruction. But for warfare they're not so useful as one would imagine. The mechanism is comparatively delicate and the action jams easily, especially when there's mud about. They're not nearly so good as a revolver for accurate shooting in my opinion. I gave up the .45 for the regular service revolver.”

“You've never seen Mrs. Cornell's pistol?” asked Vereker casually.

“Hardly, but I've felt it,” replied Cornell with a wan smile.

“Can you tell me if it was anything like this?” asked Vereker and drawing from his pocket the pistol he had borrowed from Heather, he handed it to Cornell. Cornell took the weapon in his hands and felt it carefully.

“Exactly similar, I should say,” he remarked and holding the pistol by the barrel extended it to Vereker. The latter, satisfied that Cornell's finger-prints were now on the barrel, took the weapon by the grip and slipped it very carefully into his pocket once more.

“Not much of a weapon if you mean to kill,” continued Cornell, “but, of course, useful to scare anyone in self-defence. Frank Cornell was an unlucky young man; he got the packet, so to speak, in the most deadly spot from such an uncertain weapon. Had he been hit anywhere else, he'd have been alive to-day. I should say the shot was fired at close range. What d'you think?”

“That's my opinion, but it would be unwise to be too definite,” commented Vereker, an expression of surprise on his face.

“Of course. Were there any marks of powder?”

“I believe not. In any case with modern, smokeless powder they are not always present even when the shot has been fired at close range.”

“That's very interesting, very interesting. I should say the shot was fired from the music room, wouldn't you?”

“Yes, I concluded it had from the fact that the report was not heard by anyone on the first floor corridor,” replied Vereker, again surprised at David Cornell's power of drawing a likely inference.