The Silk Stocking Murders (14 page)

“And the front, doctor?” suggested Moresby, who seemed anxious to have this point cleared up.

The doctor turned the body over and scrutinised the skin with close attention. “Not a mark!” he announced finally. “I’ll carry out an autopsy, Sir Paul, if you like, but I don’t see that there’s anything to be learnt from it.”

“Better, I think,” murmured the Assistant Commissioner. “And you see no signs of a struggle?”

“None at all. There can’t have been a struggle. Even her wrists aren’t bruised; nor her ankles. And she’s been dead, I should say, about three hours. Not more than three and a half at the outside. What’s the time now? Half-past four. As near as I can put it, she died between one-twenty and one-thirty-five; she was almost certainly alive at one o’clock, and she was almost certainly dead by a quarter-to-two. Rigor hasn’t set in yet, you see. Well, that’s all I can do here. You’ll have the body moved to the mortuary later, I suppose.”

“You’ve, finished, doctor?” said the Superintendent. “Then will you turn her on her face again? I want those marks on her legs recorded.”

The doctor nodded and did so, spreading the flimsy little garment over her before making his preparations for departure.

Roger was staring at the still form. “One o’clock!” he was thinking. “At one o’clock, when she was alive, I was ordering Pleydell’s steak; at one-thirty when she was probably dying, I ordered another half-pint of beer; at two o’clock, when she was certainly dead, I was paying my bill.” It seemed somehow horribly callous and shocking that he and Pleydell should have been eating lunch while this unhappy girl was being done to death. Yet people must eat as well as die.

Roger told himself, without much conviction, that he was a sentimental fool.

W
ITH
the departure of the doctor the group round the divan broke up. The photographer was brought back and, while Moresby and Inspector Tucker conferred in low tones near by, Superintendent Green gave his orders.

“See these marks?” he said, exposing the backs of the dead girl’s thighs again, but keeping the rest of the body covered. “I want as good a picture of them as you can get. Move the divan if the light’s better for you from behind, but put it back again in the same place. You can go and get the plates developed after that; there are no other marks on the body.”

He joined Moresby and Tucker. “As the doctor said, I don’t suppose they’re of any importance, those marks,” he observed, “but we’d better have a record of them, just in case.”

“If he can get one,” agreed Moresby. “Not an easy thing to photograph.” They went on talking.

Roger strolled across the room and examined the door. He had already noticed that there were no scratches on the lower part such as might have been made by a pair of high-heeled shoes, struggling desperately, as had been the case with Janet Manners; he now saw that there were no marks on the upper part either, which bore out the doctor’s statement that nothing was to be learnt from the girl’s nails. Evidently poor little Dorothy Fielder had died peacefully at any rate, which neither Janet nor (as he had heard since) Elsie Benham had done.

In front of the door, lying on its back with the top rail towards the doorway, was still the overturned chair. Roger looked at it closely, but could not see that anything was to be learnt from it. The chair was of the low-seated, high-backed
prie-dieu
type, with a moulded wooden rail at the top of the back; in fact, the seat was so low that Roger was a little surprised that it had proved adequate for its purpose. The surface was only about a foot above the castors, and unless the girl had been standing on it on tiptoes he would have expected the stocking to be stretched far enough to enable her to get her toes on the ground. Then he remembered that the chair was, after all, merely part of the stage-setting for suicide and had no other importance. But it was curious, nevertheless, that the murderer, so very much on the spot in all other respects, should have chosen the one chair in the room which suited his purpose least.

He turned away, and saw the Assistant Commissioner approaching him.

“You’re Sheringham, aren’t you?” said Sir Paul pleasantly holding out his hand. “I must apologise for not speaking to you before, but things have been so busy. My predecessor told me about that brilliant piece of work of yours down at Wychford. Well, what do you feel about all this?”

“That I oughtn’t to be here” Roger replied promptly. “I never felt so insignificant in my life.”

“Oh, we’re all insignificant cogs in the same big wheel, if it comes to that,” laughed the other. He swept a glance round the room and his eyes grew grave again as they rested on the dead girl. “This is really an appalling business isn’t it?” he said soberly. “Assuming. I mean, that it really is murder. It’s the first big case I’ve had since my appointment, of course, and candidly I don’t like it at all. And there’s going to be some fur flying when the papers get hold of it, of course, if we can’t lay our hands on the man. Do you remember what they had to say about us at the time of Jack the Ripper?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t Scotland Yard’s fault. They had nothing to work on.”

“Nor have we now,” responded Sir Paul ruefully. “We haven’t unearthed a single fresh clue here yet. The man must be a criminal genius. Not a sign of a finger-print, even.”

“It’s the devil,” muttered Roger.

“It certainly is,” agreed the Assistant Commissioner with gloom. “And so is he.”

They watched the others for a few moments in silence. The room was getting emptier now. The photographer had gone, and so had the Divisional Inspector, to give orders to his men about keeping the approaches to the flat guarded and the removal of the body. The finger-print man had returned and continued to prowl, but his face had quite lost its hopeful expression. Moresby and the Superintendent were still conferring in a corner.

“And I was having lunch at my club when it happened,” Roger muttered. “Hell! With Pleydell, by the way; Lady Ursula’s fiancé, you remember.”

“Yes, I know him slightly. He’ll be smelling a rat soon.”

“He’s smelt it already.”

The Assistant Commissioner sighed. “We can’t keep it out of the papers much longer.”

They fell into silence again.

“And there are no signs of a struggle at all, this time,” Roger mused. “It’s curious.”

“None in the room, as you can see; and so far as the doctor could find, none on the body. He’s going to carry out an autopsy, but I can’t see how that can add anything to our knowledge. The cause of death is obvious enough, even to our lay eyes.”

“And no bruises at the wrists.”

“Apparently not even that, nor the ankles.”

Roger ruminated. “Lady Ursula’s wrists were faintly bruised, weren’t they? Yes, I remember they were. And her ankles too?”

“Yes, very slightly. She’d evidently been bound, if that’s what you mean.”

“And this girl hadn’t? That’s odd. Or with something that didn’t mark, at any rate.”

“I don’t suppose he used exactly the same methods every time,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “The other two girls’ wrists weren’t bruised, did you know?”

“No, I didn’t. Moresby told me they were going to be examined.”

“Yes, I got the report this morning. No bruises on the bodies of either of them; in other words, apparently no struggle. Yes, Superintendent?”

Superintendent Green had approached. He nodded slightly to Roger as if to convey that though they were only just acquainted he knew enough about him not to resent his presence; but it was not a very cordial nod.

“I’m afraid this case isn’t going to help us much, sir,” he said. “Moresby and I can’t find a blessed thing. This man knows his job all right, but it’s none of our regulars, I’ll swear.”

“No,” agreed Sir Paul. “I never thought it was. Well, you and Moresby had better go over the ground again, just to make sure you’ve missed nothing. We’ve simply got to get this fellow somehow, you know, now that the absence of finger-prints on that book does seem to point definitely to his existence at last.”

The Superintendent seemed a trifle hurt; it was clear that he did not like the suggestion that he might have missed something. Roger was inclined to agree with him. The Superintendent looked as if he would miss very little.

“And the papers will be on to us now, I expect,” Sir Paul added unhappily. “I wonder we haven’t had any journalists nosing round here already.”

The Superintendent glanced at Roger as if not quite sure that one was not here already. “What are we to tell them if they do come, sir?” he asked. “We don’t want to scare our bird by letting them tell him that we’re on his tail.”

“No, certainly not. You’d better have a chit sent round to the various editors asking them not to comment on the case, I think. You can just say tactfully that Scotland Yard isn’t altogether satisfied, but doesn’t want any public interest roused pending their investigations. You know, the usual sort of thing.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it.”

“And by the way, Superintendent, what about another line of approach? This man’s obviously mad, as Moresby says. I think you’d better have inquiries made as to any homicidal maniacs at large for the last couple of months.”

“Yes, sir, we can do that, of course,” admitted the Superintendent, a little condescendingly. “But I think if you or I were to meet him, not knowing who he was, we’d no more guess he was mad than we should each other.”

“That’s just what I’ve been saying all the time,” Roger put in.

“Is that so, Mr. Sheringham?” said the Superintendent very politely but without the least interest, and turned back to Moresby.

The Assistant Commissioner smothered a smile; he knew his Superintendent Green. “Well, Sheringham,” he said, “we can’t do much more here. Come along to my club and have a cup of tea. I’d like to have a chat with you about the case and hear what you think of it so far.”

“Thanks,” Roger replied. “I’d like to.” Roger never refused an invitation to talk.

As they passed out on to the stone landing Sir Paul jerked his head backwards. “There’s that other girl, of course, but we’ll let those two question her. It’s their business and they’d do it better than us, and too many of us would probably confuse her; she’s half hysterical as it is. But I don’t anticipate the slightest information from her. Heigho! This really is a perfectly damnable case.”

They got into a taxi and were driven to Pall Mall.

Finding a secluded table in a corner of the big lounge, Sir Paul ordered tea and they settled down. Roger described how his suspicions had been first aroused, and detailed the various conclusions at which he had arrived. Sir Paul was an admirable listener. Roger went on to express his doubts as to the advisability of pinning everything to the clue of the notepaper. But here Sir Paul was not in agreement.

“After all,” he pointed out, exactly as Moresby had done, “it’s the only real clue we’ve got, you know. It must be followed up to the limit.”

“I’ve a feeling,” said Roger, “that this case isn’t going to be solved by your ordinary methods. The clue isn’t strong enough. It was the same with Jack the Ripper, you remember.

I always have thought that the French way of approach might have produced results there.”

“We’ve got to stick to our own ways,” returned Sir Paul. “The British public would never stand for anything else. Look what a fuss there was not long ago about taking a suspect’s finger-prints. The man had nothing to lose by it if he was innocent, and possibly plenty to gain; but the great British public thought it an infringement of their liberty, and the papers talked a lot of nonsense about un-English methods, so that now our hands are tied and we’re not allowed to do even a small thing like that. No, Sheringham, it’s no good telling me to change our ways, even to catch a murderer. The British public would rather have all its murderers uncaught than change anything in the means of catching them. Surely you ought to know that.” It was evidently a subject on which Sir Paul felt rather strongly.

“I suppose there is a good deal in that,” Roger had to admit.

“There’s everything,” said Sir Paul, with feeling. “Besides, you must remember that a British jury, too, isn’t the same as a French jury. Only definite evidence carries any weight with a British jury. A Frenchman takes a pleasure in clever reasoning, but the Britisher doesn’t care a hang for it. You can try to dazzle him with brilliant reasoning and the most cunning deductions, and prove your case on those lines, to the hilt; but unless it rests on a firm basis of solid facts, your British jury won’t even blink. It’s unanswerable facts that we’ve got to lay before our courts of law, not just cleverness.”

“Yes,” Roger had to agree. “Moresby’s always rubbing into me the difference between being sure of your man and proving your case against him sufficiently to satisfy the law. And he seems to think that when we have found our man, we’re going to have a good deal of difficulty in proving things against him, in these cases.”

“I’ll bet we are,” Sir Paul concurred gloomily. “The beggar simply won’t leave us anything to fasten our proof on to. Just look at this last case. Except for that one bit of negative evidence about the lack of finger-prints on the books, which may convince us but wouldn’t necessarily convince a jury at all—except for that, there simply
isn’t
anything to prove that it isn’t suicide. We know it can’t be suicide, but how on earth are we going to prove merely that it’s murder at all, without even considering the case to be made but against any one man? Oh, we’re up badly against it here.”

“We certainly are,” said Roger, and registered his silent conviction yet again that, as the case stood at present, ordinary police methods would never secure a conviction. And if that really were so, what was he going to do about it? The answer, to Roger, was obvious. Scotland Yard might be hampered; he, on the other hand, was not.

They dropped into a desultory discussion of the crime in its relation to criminology in general, of which Sir Paul, like Roger, was an eager student.

“It’s almost perfect,” Sir Paul said, lighting a fresh cigarette. “So far as one can see, there isn’t a flaw. It’s the almost perfect crime—and it takes a madman to do it. There’s a nice comment on the professional criminal.”