The Best Crime Stories Ever Told (6 page)

Selby paused, and unlocked a drawer in the table before him. He took out a lady’s black velvet bag and a folded sheet of thin ruled paper.

“It was Lord Aviemore,” he said, “who found this note in the cabin, and was the first to read it. While I read it, he sat on the cabin-bed with his face in his hands. All through what followed—the official inquiries and so forth—he seemed scarcely awake to what was happening, and I had to do most of the talking. When I had brought him back to London, the firm wrote telling him about the will, which I had not mentioned to him for fear of upsetting him yet more during the journey. Later on, when I saw him about the disposal of Lady Aviemore’s personal effects and valuables, I mentioned that there was a handkerchief bag, with a few trifles in it. ‘Give it away,’ he said. ‘Do what you like with it.’ Well I kept it,” said Selby, with an air of slight embarrassment, “as a sort of memento. And I kept the note too. Here it is.”

Selby ceased, and handed the note to Trent. He read these words, written in a large, firm, rounded hand:

I have loved more, and been more happy, than is good for anyone. And it was through me that they died. Such an ending to such a marriage as ours has been is far worse than death to me. This is not sorrow that I feel; it is destruction, absolute ruin. My soul is quite empty. I have been kept up this month past only by the resolution I took on the day when I lost them, by the thought of what I am going to do now. I take my leave of a world I cannot bear any more.

There followed the initials “L.A.” Trent read and re-read the pitiful message, so full of the awful egoism of grief. He asked at length, “Is this her usual handwriting?”

“Except that it seems to have been written with a bad pen it is just like her usual writing. But now listen, Trent. I asked you here today because of your reputation for getting at the truth of things. Soon after the suicide I got an idea into my head, and I have puzzled over these relics of Lady Aviemore a good many times without much result. I did find out a fact or two, though; and it struck me that if I could discover something, you would probably do much better.”

Trent, studying the paper, ignored this tribute. “Well,” he said, finally, “what is your idea?”

“I’d rather not state it, Trent. But I can tell you a fact or two, as I said. That sheet, as you see, is a sheet torn from an ordinary ruled writing-pad. Now here is a point. I have taken that sheet to a friend of mine who is in the paper business. He has told me that it is a make of paper never sold in Europe at all, but sold a good deal in Canada. Next, Lady Aviemore never was in Canada. And the pad from which the sheet was torn was not in her dressing-case or anywhere in the cabin. Nor was there any pen and ink there, or any fountain-pen. The ink, you see, is a nasty-looking grey ink.”

“Continental hotel ink, in fact. She wrote it in the hotel, then, with an hotel pen. But not on hotel paper. Yes, I see,” remarked Trent, gazing at the other thoughtfully. “And the other things?” he inquired, suddenly.

“Suggest nothing to me,” remarked Selby. “But you have a look at them.” He turned the little bag out upon the table, “Here you are—handkerchief, powder-box and puff, mirror, nail-file, hairpins—”

“Of course,” Trent murmured, “hair-pins.” He took them in his hand, “Four hair-pins—quite new, I should say. Do they tell a story, Selby?”

“I don’t see how. They’re just ordinary black hair-pins—as you say, they look too fresh and bright to have been used.”

“And that last thing?”

“This is a box of Ixtil, the anti-seasick stuff. Two doses are gone, I believe it’s very good.”

“I didn’t know,” Trent remarked, idly, turning the box about, “that you could buy it abroad.”

“I was with Lady Aviemore when she bought it at Brindisi, just before going on board.”

“Did she buy anything else?”

“I really can’t tell you,” Selby replied, with a touch of pique. Trent seemed to be asking aimless questions while he stared at the capsules in their tiny box. “She went shopping for an hour or so before dinner, but she was alone, and I didn’t see her again until she came down to dinner.”

“And so you noticed nothing curious at all,” mused Trent, “except this about the paper, and the note having been prepared in advance—which is certainly queer enough. Just cast your mind back beyond the last day. All through the time you were with them nothing came under your notice that seemed strange in the circumstances?”

Selby fingered his chin. “If you put it like that, I can remember a rather funny thing that I never thought of again until now. But I can’t see how it could possibly—”

“Yes, I know. But you asked me here to consider the case in my own way, didn’t you?”

“You are so jolly professional, Trent,” Selby complained. “It was simply this. Two or three days before we left Taormina I was standing in the hotel office when the mail arrived. As I was waiting to see if there was anything for me, the porter put down on the counter a rather smart-looking package that had just come—done up the way they do it at a really first-class shop, if you know what I mean. It looked like a biggish book, or box of chocolates, or something—about twelve inches by ten, at a guess—and it had French stamps on it, but the postmark I didn’t notice. And this, I saw, was addressed to Mile. Maria Krogh, if you please—Lady Aviemore’s Norwegian maid, about the plainest and stodgiest-looking girl in the world, I should say. Well, Maria was there waiting, too, and presently the man handed it to her. She showed no surprise, but went off with it, and just then her mistress came down the big stairs. She saw the parcel and just held out her hand for it as if it was a matter of course; and Maria handed it over in the same way, and the Countess went upstairs with it. But her name wasn’t on the parcel, that I’ll swear; and Maria hadn’t even cut the string. I thought it was quaint, but I forgot it almost at once, because Lady Aviemore decided that evening to leave the place, and I had plenty to attend to. And if you want to know,” added Selby, with a hint of irritation, as Trent opened his lips to speak, “where Maria Krogh is, all I can tell you is that I took her ticket for her in London to Christiansand, where her home is, because she was too much upset to do things for herself; and I never thought of her again until we sent her the fifty pounds that was left her, which she acknowledged. Now, then!”

Trent laughed at the solicitor’s tone, and Selby laughed also. His friend walked to the fireplace and pensively adjusted his tie. “Well, I must be off,” he announced, suddenly. “What do you say to dining with me on Friday? If by that time I’ve anything to suggest about this thing, I will tell you then. You will? That’s splendid.” And he hastened away.

But on Friday, Trent seemed to have nothing to suggest. He was so reluctant to approach the subject that Selby supposed him to be chagrined at his failure to accomplish anything, and did not press the matter.

It was some months later, on a day in September, that Trent walked up the valley road at Myklebostad, looking farewell at the mountain at the end of the valley, the whitecapped father of the torrent that roared down a twenty-foot fall beside him. He had been a week at this most remote backwater of Europe, three hours by steamer from the nearest place that ranked as a town, and with full sixty miles of rugged hills between him and a railway station. The savage beauty of that watery landscape, where sun and rain worked together daily to achieve an unearthly purity in the scene, had justified far better than he had hoped his story that he had come there in search of matter for his brush.

He had painted busily while the light lasted, and he had learned in the evenings as much as he could of his neighbours. It was little enough, for the postmaster, in whose cottage he had a room, spoke only an indifferent German; and no one else, so far as he could discover, had anything but Norwegian, of which Trent knew scarcely a dozen traveller’s phrases. But he had seen, he thought every man, woman, and child in the valley, and he had closely attended to the household of Knut Wergeland, the rich man of the place, who had the largest farm. He and his wife, both elderly and grim-faced peasants, lived with two servants in an old turf-roofed steading. Not another person, Trent was certain, inhabited the house. They had two sons, he learned, in America.

He had decided at length that his voyage of curiosity to Myklebostad had been ill-inspired. Knut and his wife were no more than a thrifty peasant pair. They had given him a meal at their house one day when he was sketching near the place, and they had refused with gentle firmness to take any payment. Both produced upon him an impression of illimitable trustworthiness and competency in the life they led so utterly out of the world.

That day, as Trent gazed up to the mountain, his eye was caught by a flash of the sunlight against the dense growth of birches that ran from bottom to top of the precipitous height that was the valley wall to his left.

It was a bright blink, about half a mile from where he stood; it remained steady, and at several points above and below he saw the same bright appearance. Considering it, he perceived that there must be a wire somehow led up the steep hill-face, among the trees. A merely idle curiosity drew his steps towards the spot on the road whence the wire seemed to be taken upwards. In a few minutes he came to the opening among the trees of a rough track leading upwards among rocks and roots, at such an angle that only a vigorous climber could attempt it. Close by, in the edge of the thicket, stood a tall post, from the top of which a bright wire stretched upwards through the branches in the same direction as the path.

Trent slapped the post with a sounding blow. “Heavens and earth!” he exclaimed. “I had forgotten the saeter!”

At once he began to climb.

A thicket carpet of rich pasture began where the deep birchbelt ended at the top of the height. It stretched away for miles over a gentlysloping upland. As Trent came into the open, panting, after a strenuous forty-minute climb, the heads of a few browsing cattle were sleepily turned towards him. Beyond them wandered many more, and a hundred yards away stood a tiny wooden hut, turf-roofed. This plateau was the saeter, a thing of which Trent had read in some guide-book, and never thought since; the high grass-land attached to some valley farm. The wire he had seen was stretched from bottom to top, the fall being very steep, so that the bales of the hay-crop could be slid down to the valley without carrying. At the summer’s end, cows were led by an easier detour to the uplands, there to remain grazing for six weeks or more, attended by some robust peasant-woman who lived solitary with the herd.

And there, at the side of the hut, bending over a rough table, a woman stood. Trent, as he slowly approached, noted her short, rough skirt and coarse, sack-like upper garment, her thick grey stockings and clumsy clogs. About her bare head her pale gold hair was fastened in tight plaits. As she looked up on hearing Trent’s footfall, two heavy silver ear-rings dangled about the tanned and toil-worn face of this very type of the middle-aged peasant-woman of the region.

She ceased her task of scraping a large cake of chocolate into a bowl, and straightened her tall body; smiling, with her lean hands on her hips, she spoke in Norwegian, greeting him. Trent made the proper reply. “And that,” he added, in English, “is almost all of the language I know. Perhaps, madam, you speak English?”

Her light blue eyes looked puzzlement, and she spoke again in Norwegian, pointing downward to the valley. He nodded, and she began to talk pleasantly in her unknown tongue. From within the hut she brought two thick mugs; she pointed rapidly to the chocolate in the bowl, to himself and herself, then downward again to the village.

“I should like it of all things,” he said; “you are most kind and hospitable, like all your people. What a pity it is we have no language in common!” She brought him a stool and gave him the chocolate cake and a knife, making signs that he should continue the scraping; then within the hut she kindled a fire of twigs, and began to boil water in a black pot. Plainly it was her dwelling, the roughest Trent had ever seen. On two small shelves against the rough planks of the wall were ranged a few pieces of earthenware, coarse and chipped, but clean. A wooden bedplace, with straw and two neatly-folded blankets, filled a third of the space of the hut. All the carpentering was of the rudest. From a small chest in a corner she drew a biscuit-tin, half-full of flat cakes of stale bread. There seemed to be nothing else in the tiny place save a heap of twigs for firing.

She made chocolate in the two mugs, and then, on Trent’s insistence, sat upon the only stool at the little table outside the hut, while he made a seat of an upturned milk-pail. She continued to talk amiably, while he finished with difficulty one of the bread-cakes.

“I believe,” he said, at last, setting down his empty mug, “you are talking merely to hear the sound of your own voice, madam. It is excusable in you. You don’t understand English, so I will tell you to your face it is a most beautiful voice. I should say,” he went on, thoughtfully, “that you ought, with training, to have been one of the greatest soprano singers who ever lived.”

She heard him calmly, and shook her head, as not understanding.

“Well, don’t say I didn’t break it gently,” Trent protested. He rose to his feet. “Madam, I know that you are Lady Aviemore. I have broken in upon your solitude, and I ask your pardon for that; but I could not be sure unless I saw you. I give you my word that no one knows, and no one shall know from me, what I know.”

He made as if to return by the way he came. But the woman held up her hand. A singular change had come over her brown face. An open and lively spirit now looked out of her desolate blue eyes, and she smiled another and much more intelligent smile. After a few minutes she spoke in English, fluent but quaintly pronounced. “Sir,” she said, “you have behaved very nicely up till now. It has been amusing for me; there is not much comedy on the sater. Now will you have the goodness to explain.’’

He told her in a few words that he had suspected she was still alive; that he had thought over the facts which had come to his knowledge; and that he had been led to think she was probably in that place. “I thought you might guess that I had recognised you,” he added. “So it seemed best to assure you that your secret was safe. Was it wrong to speak?”