Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (8 page)

“I tell you I don’t
care
!” Anthony almost shouted. “To say that girl had anything to do with the wretched woman’s death is too damned silly for words!”

“But I’m not saying so,” Roger pointed out patiently. “I don’t think she had, in spite of everything. What I am saying is that we can’t dismiss the possibility of it in this cocksure way just because she’s got a pretty face. The inspector isn’t–”

“Blast the inspector!” observed Anthony savagely.

“Blast him by all means, but, as I was saying, he isn’t by any means a fool, and it’s quite obvious what his opinion about Mrs Vane’s death is at present. After all, you must face the fact that the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.”

“If his opinion is that Miss Cross murdered her cousin, then he
is
a fool,” growled Anthony finally; “and a damned fool at that.”

It was the following morning, and the two men were walking along the top of the cliffs to keep their appointment with Margaret Cross. The inspector had betaken himself to bed on the previous evening soon after the bursting of his bombshell, and the discussion between Anthony and Roger had lasted well into the small hours of the morning, broken only by an interval of half an hour while Roger telephoned through to the
Courier
. It was still raging.

Anthony had refused point-blank to consider even the possibility that Margaret had not spoken the exact truth in every detail or had wilfully suppressed any material fact, while as for the only logical deduction to be drawn from the facts as they were then known, he would rather have been torn in pieces by red-hot pincers than admit it within the category of bare feasibilities. To Roger, who was no less anxious that the girl’s name should be cleared, but had a livelier conception of the difficulties in the way of doing so, this attitude was a little trying. To Anthony’s final remark he forbore to reply, only sighing gently to himself. It required an effort of will, but no good purpose would be served by quarrelling with Anthony, and Anthony was very ready to quarrel with someone. They traversed the rest of the journey in difficult silence.

Margaret Cross was waiting for them by the little ledge, her face anxious and bearing the marks of a sleepless night.

“Oh, I am glad to see you!” she exclaimed as she shook hands with Roger. “Really I feel as if you were the only friend I’d got in the world.”

“Don’t forget me, Miss Cross,” Anthony smiled, shaking hands with her in his turn.

“No, of course not,” said the girl in a voice that was neither enthusiastic nor chilling – just indifferent; and she snatched away the hand that Anthony was manifestly attempting to press and, turning ostentatiously back to Roger, began to question him eagerly as to whether anything fresh had transpired.

Over Anthony’s face passed an expression such as might have been seen on the face of a dog which has put out a paw to toy with a fly and discovered it to be a wasp – hurt and yet puzzled. As Margaret Cross continued to display to him only her back the puzzled part of his expression gave way to resentment; as she made no effort to include him in her eager conversation, but on the contrary quite pointedly ignored him, resentment and chagrin alike were swallowed up by sheer annoyance. As ostentatiously as herself, he strolled a few paces away and began to amuse himself by throwing stones over the edge of the cliff. Anthony was sulking.

Had he been a little wiser, he might have felt flattered. As it was, how could he be expected to guess that to a young lady who is accustomed to pride herself not a little on her self-reliance and strength of mind, the thought of having been such a sloppy little idiot as to weep on the shoulder of a complete stranger and actually grovel before the protective feel of his unknown arm about her, might possibly be a singularly ignominious one? In which case, of course (so the older and wiser Anthony might have complacently assumed), her resentment, directed naturally against himself as the witness of her humiliation, would be only complimentary. But Anthony was neither older nor wiser.

“I say, Anthony, come and listen to this!” called Roger, who had a shrewd idea of the way in which the wind was blowing.

Very nonchalantly Anthony strolled across. “Yes?” he said in a voice that was neither rude nor frigid – just bored.

“I’ve been telling Miss Cross about the coat-button. It may not be quite playing the game with the inspector, but I really think it’s only fair that she should know.” He turned to the girl. “And you say you must have lost it on that walk?”

“Yes, I must have lost it on the walk,” the girl said in puzzled tones, “but where, I haven’t the least idea. All I know is that it was on when I started, and I noticed that it was off when I got back. It might have dropped simply anywhere. How it got into Elsie’s hand I can’t imagine. Mightn’t she have picked it up and been meaning to give it back to me?”

“That does seem the only possible explanation,” Roger agreed. He did not think it necessary for the moment to point out that as Mrs Vane’s subsequent steps would hardly have covered any of the ground that she and Margaret had passed over together, the explanation was not very probable.

“Oh, Mr Sheringham, I do wish I could get away from this dreadful atmosphere of suspicion!” cried the girl suddenly, her strained nerves overcoming for the moment her self-control. “It’s really getting almost unbearable! Every fresh fact that comes to light only makes it worse. I shall really begin to think of jumping over the cliff myself if something doesn’t happen soon. And they’re evidently beginning to talk in the village already. Mrs Russell cut me dead outside her own house this morning.”

“Dear Mrs Russell!” Roger murmured. “Wouldn’t I like to flay the hag. Christian charity, I suppose she calls that. But look here, don’t you give way before any nonsense like that, Margaret, my dear.” Roger invariably addressed every unmarried lady below the age of thirty by her Christian name after the briefest possible acquaintance, it accorded with his reputation for mild Bohemianism, and it saved an awful lot of trouble. “We’re going to see you through this, Cousin Anthony and I. So keep your chin up and let all the old cats go to the devil!”

Margaret turned away for a moment, biting her lip. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said in rather a shaky voice. “I really can’t think what I should have done if I hadn’t met you two, Mr Sheringham.”

“Roger!” exclaimed Roger briskly. “For Heaven’s sake do call me Roger, Margaret! Only people who owe me money call me ‘Mr Sheringham’. It has a nasty, sinister sound.”

“Very well, then,” the girl smiled. “Thank you – Roger!”

Roger drew a breath of relief as he saw the threatened tears disappear before his calculated nonsense. “And this is Anthony,” he went on with mock seriousness. “Let me introduce you. Anthony, Margaret. Margaret, Anthony. Now shake hands and tell each other what a lovely day it is.”

“How do you do, Anthony?” Margaret said gravely, a little smile dancing in her brown eyes; and somehow she managed to convey the impression that she was sorry for having made a pig of herself ten minutes before, that this was her apology and that would he please forgive her?

“How do you do, Margaret?” said Anthony, taking the slim fingers in his great paw; and the slight pressure he gave them said perfectly plainly that it wasn’t his place to forgive anything; wouldn’t she rather forgive him instead for sulking in that childish way, for which he was heartily sorry?

So that was all right.

“Why stand up when we can sit down?” Roger remarked, observing the results of his tactfulness with some satisfaction; and he set a good example by throwing himself at full length on the springy turf. The others followed suit.

“Now what we’ve got to do,” he went on, lying on his back and puffing hard at his pipe, “is to form an offensive and defensive alliance of three. Your job, Margaret, will be to get us any information we want about the household and so on, and mine to put that information to the most advantageous use.”

“What about Anthony?” asked Margaret.

“Oh, he’s the idiot friend. He came down on purpose to be it. We mustn’t do him out of that, or he’d be awfully disappointed.”

“Poor Anthony!” Margaret laughed. “Roger, I think you’re horrid.”

“Not horrid,” Anthony said lazily. “Just an ass. But pretend not to notice it, Margaret. We always try to ignore it in the family.”

“Reverting to the topic in hand,” Roger observed, unperturbed, “there’s one thing that I really must impress on both of you. Rather a nasty thing, but we’ve got to face it. From the facts as we know them at present, there’s simply only one deduction to be drawn; if we want new deductions, we must have new facts.”

“I see what you mean,” Margaret said slowly. “Yes, and I see that it’s quite true too. But how on earth are we to get any new facts?”

“Well, let’s see if a little judicious questioning will bring anything to light.” Roger paused for a moment as if considering. “I suppose you were very fond of your cousin, Margaret?” he said after a second or two in an almost careless voice.

It was Margaret’s turn to pause and consider. Then: “No!” she said almost harshly. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you, though I realise that it doesn’t make my position any better. I detested her!”

“You detested her?” Roger repeated, raising himself on his elbow to look at her in his astonishment. “But I thought she’d been so kind to you? I thought she was such a charming woman?”

Margaret laughed bitterly. “Quite a number of people think that. Elsie took good care that they should. Isn’t there a saying about speaking only good of the dead? Well, I never have been a conventional person. Elsie was one of the most loathsome people who can ever have existed!”

“Oho!” said Roger softly. “She was, was she? Talk about new facts! This looks like opening up a whole new field of enquiry. Perpend, lady! Why was Elsie ‘one of the most loathsome people who can ever have existed’?”

“It is rather a sweeping charge, isn’t it?” said Margaret soberly. “Well, I’ll tell you the whole story and you can judge for yourself. When Elsie met George she was in rather the same position as I was in myself a few months ago – broke to the wide. But she didn’t let him know that. She pretended to belong to a good family and to have plenty of money of her own. In fact, she deliberately set out to deceive him. George believed every word she said, fell in love with her and married her – which, of course, was what she’d been aiming at.”

“You mean she married Dr Vane for his money?”

“Purely and simply! I know, because she used to boast of it to me, and advise me to do the same. Boast of it! How she’d taken him in and hoodwinked him from beginning to end. She got a tremendous marriage settlement out of him, too. All the money she left me. Ten thousand pounds settled on her absolutely. Of course she hadn’t a penny of her own. She often used to tell me how well she’d done for herself. Oh, Elsie was a true daughter of her grandfather – 
our
grandfather, I should say!”

“I see,” said Roger thoughtfully. “Yes, that does shed a somewhat different light on the lady. And she took you to live with her so that you could have the chance of meeting another wealthy man and hoodwinking him similarly?”

“Indeed she didn’t! That’s what she used to tell me, but nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that there were several reasons why she wanted me with her. In the first place, she wanted someone whom she could order about in a way that no servant would stand for a minute, someone who would do things for her that she would never have dared to ask any servant to do. Oh, Roger, you can’t imagine the things I’ve had to do since I came here! Menial things that she couldn’t have made anybody else in the world do for her. And yet nothing outrageous, if you understand – nothing that I could flare up at and flounce out of the house over. Oh, it’s extraordinarily difficult to explain. You see, you probably haven’t any idea what a beast one woman can be to another in a subordinate position without ever doing anything that you could actually call
beastly
.”

“I think I have, though, for all that,” Roger murmured sympathetically.

Margaret knitted her brows. “Well, suppose we’d been out for a walk together in the rain and come in rather tired, and rather wet and rather muddy. The first thing she’d do would be to send me upstairs with her wet coat and hat and tell me to bring down a pair of dry shoes. I should go down and find her sprawling in a chair in the drawing-room in front of the fire, but otherwise just as I’d left her. She’d want me to change her shoes for her, probably even pull her gloves off for her as well. Then she’d find out that her stockings were wet too, and I should be sent to get a dry pair – and probably dry those for her as well. Then she’d decide she didn’t like those shoes with those stockings, and off I’d have to go to get another pair. As soon as I’d done that, I’d be sent up again for something else that she’d pretend to have forgotten all about, and then for something more after that. In other words, she kept me on the go the whole time: I was hardly ever allowed to have a single second to myself.”

Roger nodded understandingly. “I know the type.”

“Well, that was one thing she wanted me for. Another was that she was a horrid little bully, and she must have someone to bully. You can’t bully servants; they give notice. There’s nobody like a poor relation for bullying. And all with a sweet smile you know, that seemed to make it even more unbearable if anything.”

“But why did you stick it?” Anthony asked indignantly.

Margaret flushed slightly. “Because I was a coward, I suppose. I’d had about enough of roughing it by then, and I
was
comfortable at any rate. Besides, there was that ten thousand pounds she was dangling over me. If you’d ever known what it was like not to be able to afford a penny bun or a cup of tea, you might realise what a tempting bait ten thousand pounds can be and what a lot you’ll put up with to qualify for it. Very mercenary, isn’t it? But Elsie knew all right. She’d been through it herself.”

“I’m sorry, Margaret,” Anthony said in some confusion. “I was an ass to say a thing like that. Of course I understand.”