Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (26 page)

“I don’t see that I’m called upon to give you my reasons.”

“Of course not,” the inspector agreed with the utmost heartiness. “Worst thing in the world you could do. Never give reasons, that’s my advice. Have some more veal? Mr Walton, you’ve finished; cut Mr Woodthorpe some more veal.”

Anthony, who had been watching this exchange with open mouth, started violently and began to cut the bread.

“I don’t want any more veal, thank you,” said Mr Woodthorpe, flushing angrily.

“Just as you like, sir, of course,” murmured the inspector, and bestowed a large wink on Roger.

Roger, to whom the gleam of light had now become a broad beam, returned the wink with interest.

Unfortunately Woodthorpe intercepted both. He sprang wrathfully to his feet again, knocking his chair over behind him. “Look here,” he burst out, “I’ve had about enough of this fooling. I told you what I came here for, Inspector. Are you going to arrest me or are you not?”

The inspector looked up from his plate. “Well, sir,” he said blandly, “since you ask me so candidly – no, I’m not! – but I’d like to ask you a few questions, perhaps.”

For a long moment the eyes of the two men held each other, while a deep flush slowly overspread the younger’s face. Then Woodthorpe turned away and marched over to the door.

“Then you can jolly well come up to my home and ask me them there,” he announced as he opened it. “I’ve had about enough of this.” The door closed behind him with a bang.

“That looks like a walk for me, I’m afraid,” observed the inspector with regret.

“Yes,” Roger laughed. “He got one back on you there, Inspector.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Anthony. “Good Lord!”

“What’s the matter, Anthony?” Roger asked sympathetically.

“You mean – the chap never did it at all?”

“No, not exactly that, Anthony,” said Roger with a grave face. “It’s simply that Inspector Moresby has a conscientious objection to arresting anybody for murder under the age of thirty.”

“Ass!” growled his cousin, and helped himself to stewed gooseberries. “Well, what about your story now, then? Did you know Roger had solved the mystery, Inspector?”

“No, Mr Walton, I didn’t,” said the inspector with interest. “Has he?”

“Well, he thinks he has,” said Anthony nastily.

“Now, now, Anthony,” Roger reproved. “Don’t be vindictive. Yes,” he added modestly to the inspector. “I’ve solved the mystery all right. And I warn you that I’m going to telephone part of it at any rate to London tonight, though not the bit you wanted suppressed for the present, of course.”

“Well, well!” said the inspector. “These gooseberries seem to me a bit sour, didn’t you think?”

“Inspector Moresby,” said Roger with heat, “there are some people for whose murder it’s well worthwhile to be hanged. You’re one of them. So take this as a friendly warning and don’t try me too far.”

“But they are a bit sour, Mr Sheringham,” protested the inspector. “Really!”

“So are the grapes too, I’m afraid,” Roger grinned. “Never mind, Inspector; perhaps I shan’t be on your next case. So the story books are right after all when they talk about Scotland Yard’s professional jealousy of the amateur.”

“True, sir,” said the inspector, shaking his head. “Terribly true.”

“See in the paper this morning that Glamorgan have won their eleventh match this season, Anthony?” Roger remarked airily. “Extraordinary how they’ve come on, isn’t it? We shall see them head of the table soon.”

“Yes, it’s nice to see a county that plays more than one amateur doing well for a change,” Anthony responded with alacrity.

Roger kept the conversation firmly upon cricket till the inspector had swallowed his last mouthful and the dinner things had been cleared away, and even till the inspectorial pipe was well alight and the inspectorial countenance decidedly bored.

“By the way, sir,” remarked Inspector Moresby, relaxing comfortably in the armchair to which he had transferred himself. “By the way, didn’t I hear you say something about having solved the mystery?”

“I thought you’d come round, with time and gentle treatment,” Roger laughed. “Yes, Inspector, joking apart, I really think I have solved it. Care to hear?”

“Of course I would, sir. You mustn’t mind if I pull your leg now and then.”

“Well, I do a bit of that myself,” Roger admitted. “But look here, the trouble is Anthony. I haven’t told him yet, because it’s all bound up with what you confided to me the other night; but of course he wants to hear. Can’t you stretch a point and let me just give him a quick idea of what you told me?”

The inspector hesitated. “You’ll give me your word that it wouldn’t go any further, then, Mr Walton? Not to another mortal soul?”

“On my oath,” Anthony agreed eagerly.

“It’s highly irregular,” sighed the inspector, “but – very well, Mr Sheringham; fire away!”

Roger proceeded to give Anthony a brief outline of how Meadows had met his death and the discovery of the aconitine in the tobacco jar.

“And that’s why I was so interested in tobacco this morning, Anthony, you see,” he concluded, and went on at once to acquaint the inspector with the new discoveries he had then made.

The inspector nodded sagely. “Yes, I wondered whether you’d get hold of that,” he remarked.

“You knew it already?” Roger asked, somewhat dashed.

“A week ago,” replied the inspector laconically.

“But she never told me she’d told anyone before.”

“She didn’t know she had. She doesn’t know she’s told you now. With that sort of person, if you don’t ask ‘em direct questions but just let ‘em dribble their information out in their own way, they’ll tell you everything they know just the same and they won’t realise five minutes later that they’ve told you anything at all. Yes, well, what did you make of it all, Mr Sheringham?”

Roger drew a deep breath.

“Well, I’d better begin at the beginning,” said Roger.

“Now, in the very first place I made up my mind, as you know, Inspector, that the person whom you seemed to be suspecting (whether you really did or not, I don’t know; but you certainly gave me that impression) – I made up my mind that that person was not responsible for Mrs Vane’s death. The evidence was against her, of course, and badly, but there are some cases where circumstantial evidence, however apparently convincing, can lead one rather badly astray, and I was sure this was one of them. I admit that I had nothing definite to go on; my reasons were purely psychological. I felt, quite simply, that to suspect Margaret Cross of murder – and a seemingly cold-blooded, carefully-planned murder at that – was nothing short of ridiculous. The girl was transparently sincere and honest.”

“If it wasn’t she, then, who was it?”

“Well, both of you know that my suspicions finally centred upon this fellow Meadows,
a
li
as
all the rest of it. I thought I had a pretty good case against him even before we knew anything about him at all; afterward it almost amounted to a foregone conclusion. And then Meadows apparently committed suicide. Well, that didn’t affect my case; if anything (and the circumstances being as they were) it was actually strengthened. But Meadows, it turned out, could hardly have committed suicide at all. He must have been murdered. How did that make things look?

“Now, this is where we jumped to the wrong conclusion, Inspector. At least I did, I can’t answer for you; I’ve never known what was really in your mind from the very beginning. Misled, intentionally or otherwise, by you, I practically assumed that the two murders had been committed by one and the same person – or if I didn’t actually assume that, I came so near it as automatically to wash out the idea that Meadows committed the first. We agreed that they must almost certainly be interdependent, and I accepted your very plausible theory that the strongest and most obvious motive for the second was that Meadows had been an actual eyewitness of the first. And that theory of course eliminated him from the list of suspects. At the same time you made out a very useful case against Vane for the double murder.

“And now I’m afraid we become a little personal.

“Thinking things over in bed last night, away from your magnetic influence, I was suddenly struck by this bright thought:
why
does Inspector Moresby go to such pains to plant in my mind the idea that both murders were committed by the same person, and to give me the impression that this is what he himself thinks? He’s a reticent sort of devil; he’s never volunteered any ideas of his own worth speaking of before; he knows that in a way we’re rivals here; the last person he’d want to help toward a solution is Roger Sheringham – 
why?
And of course the answer to that came pat: because he wants to put me on the wrong track! He
doesn
’
t
think those murders were committed by the same person. On the contrary, he’s convinced they weren’t. How’s that, Inspector?”

The inspector laughed heartily. “No, no, Mr Sheringham,” he said, shaking his head. “You do me an injustice, you do really. That was my honest opinion when I was talking to you last night. I had no doubt at all that Mrs Vane and Meadows were murdered by the same person and I don’t mind admitting it.”

“Humph!” observed Roger, not altogether without scepticism. “And do you still think so?”

“I’m always open to conviction, I hope,” replied the inspector carefully. “Yes, go on, sir. This is very interesting.”

“Well, whether you really thought there were two murderers or whether you didn’t, my base suspicions of you did me one good turn: they biased me in favour of thinking so myself. So when I set out to pay a visit to Meadows’ lodgings this morning, I was already prepared to look for his murderer in somebody other than that of Mrs Vane. Well, I made my investigations, I unearthed a few new facts which looked interesting but which I was blessed at the moment if I could make head or tail of, and I sat down after lunch to try to think the whole thing out.” Roger relit his pipe, which had gone out, and settled himself more comfortably in his chair.

“It wasn’t for some little time that a very simple question occurred to me, to which the answer began at last to put me on the right track. The question was this: what after all has happened to make it so impossible that Meadows
should
be the murderer of Mrs Vane, as seemed so obvious before? And the answer, of course, was – nothing! Very well, then. Could I get any further with the second mystery by utilising my theory of the two agents to make Meadows the solution of the first?

“Now there were two pointers toward the murderer of Meadows, both somewhat vague – motive and aconitine. Assuming, as I think one had every right to do, that Meadows would not have shrinked from blackmail, the first of these was so wide that I shelved it for a time and concentrated on the second. This was wide too, but it could be narrowed down. If one took the working assumption that the aconitine had come from Dr Vane’s laboratory, there were, excluding servants and so on, three people who could have got hold of it: Dr Vane himself, Miss Williamson and Miss Cross. Well, for some reason or other (psychological again) I wasn’t drawn toward Dr Vane as the murderer although, as you showed, Inspector, it was possible to make out a pretty convincing case against him – probably because you
had
gone out of your way to make a pretty convincing case against him, perhaps. In the same way, of course, I had already discarded Miss Cross. There remained Miss Williamson.

“Well, Miss Williamson was a difficulty. Why in the name of goodness should she want to kill Meadows? I could see no possible reason. There would have been a reason, of course, if she had already murdered Mrs Vane – an idea that had already occurred to me by the way, Inspector, and for the same motive, before you put it forward once as a joke, if you remember. There would have been a motive in that case, if Meadows had seen her do it; but I was working on the theory that he had murdered Mrs Vane himself. For the life of me I couldn’t see, if that were the case, how she could possibly be his murderess.”

“Out of the question, I should have said,” interjected the inspector.

“Yes, that’s what I decided. Well, there were all my three suspects discharged without a stain on their characters; so I was driven to the conclusion that either the aconitine had not come from Dr Vane’s laboratory at all, or else Meadows had not killed Mrs Vane. In either case I was in an
impasse
and had to go back a little way. I went back to motive.

“Now this is where we really do begin to warm up. Do you remember last night, Inspector, you asked me who had the biggest motive for wanting Meadows out of the way, and I replied, somewhat facetiously, that Mrs Vane had? I began to play with that idea.”

“Mrs Vane?” repeated Anthony incredulously. “But she was dead already.”

“When Meadows died, yes; but she had plenty of motive, I imagine, for wanting him out of the way before she died herself. Anyhow you see the idea. I was asking myself, with growing excitement: was there any way in which Mrs Vane could have brought about Meadows’ death, although she herself was already dead? And the answer, of course, was obvious. Yes, there was!” Roger leaned back in his chair and beamed triumphantly at his audience.

“This is very clever, Mr Sheringham,” said the inspector ungrudgingly. “Very clever indeed. Yes, I see now what you’re driving at, but let’s have it in your own words.”

“Well, as you probably discovered yourself, Meadows had had no visitors during the last few weeks, so far as the landlady knew. Any theory, then, which was to cover the insertion of poison in his tobacco must presuppose the murderer’s visit late at night and, probably, through the sitting-room window, with or without Meadows’ own knowledge. But on the night before the murder the landlady, though awake, heard no sounds at all, whereas she had heard a visitor’s voice, quite distinctly, some three weeks beforehand, that visitor being proved to be Mrs Vane.”

“Wait a minute, sir,” said the inspector. “What’s all this about? I don’t know anything of a visit of Mrs Vane’s.”

“Ah!” Roger grinned. “Well, I’m one up on you there at any rate. Look at this!” He drew the little handkerchief out of his pocketbook, tossed it over to the other and explained how it had come into his possession.