The Silk Stocking Murders (24 page)

“Blast the fellow!” observed Mr. Newsome uneasily. “He seems to have succeeded, too.”

“And as soon as your footsteps resounded on the stairs again, he just got on with the job and proceeded to hang the lady at his leisure.”

“Well, but who was he?”

“That, I must say,” Roger had to admit, “does completely baffle me. According to our evidence, it can’t have been anyone. Bother that old solicitor! His time of arrival is exactly right, he sounds like the type, he’d be our man for a certainty—if only he hadn’t most inconveniently gone away before the girl could have died. Well, we decided that the murderer must have arrived between twelve and one, so the only inference is that the porter
did
overlook him. And I don’t believe he did for a minute!”

“This seems a bit of a muddle,” observed Mr. Newsome sapiently.

Roger mused for a while in silence. “Supposing he tied the girl up, went away to establish his alibi in full view of the porter, and came back after one-fifteen to finish her off. How’s that? That fits the facts. And it means a knowledge of the Mansions’ internal arrangements which, as I’ve already thought, would be interesting if it were true.”

“I believe you’ve hit on it,” said Newsome triumphantly. “Roger, I do really. It was the solicitor. Now then, how the deuce are we going to get hold of him?”

“How, indeed? That’s just as much of a problem as the other. And what’s his connection with the other cases? So far as we know, none. No bearded solicitor crops up in any of the other cases to my knowledge.”

“No,” agreed Newsome. “That certainly is a bit of a snag.”

“Nevertheless, the murderer must have been tolerably well known to Janet Manners, to Lady Ursula and to Dorothy Fielder. Can’t we possibly find anyone whose orbit touched the case at those three points? Not, I’m afraid, in the time at our disposal.”

They lapsed into silence again. Roger had carried his conclusions a little further forward, but once again they seemed to have brought him into a blind alley.

“That damned old solicitor,” Roger murmured. “He’s our man right enough.”

Newsome remained respectfully silent.

“Let’s try something else,” Roger went on after a minute or two. “There’s been something at the back of my mind all along concerning Dorothy Fielder. I’ve just remembered what it is: those indentations on the backs of her thighs.” He explained what had been pointed out to them by the doctor. “He didn’t seem to attach any importance to them, nor did the police. But I wonder…”

The audience was as expectantly attentive as the most exacting detective could require.

Roger reflected.

“They were made during life, of course, and the girl had been dead about three hours when we saw them. That means they must have been very much deeper at the time of death. Now what on earth could have caused dents so deep that their traces remained three hours after death? Steady pressure, the doctor said, applied for quite a considerable time. When the man tied her up, did he leave her with her legs pressing on some sharp-edged object, in such a position that most of her weight came on them? It’s curious.”

“But look here,” Newsome ventured to interpose, “about his tying her up and going away for a time; I thought you said some time ago that this girl hadn’t been tied up, so far as they could tell? No marks on the wrists or ankles, and all that.”

Roger’s face fell. “By Jove, yes; I’d forgotten that. And no marks on the body either, except these two small dents. No signs of a struggle, in fact. And she wouldn’t have let him tie her up without a struggle, would she?”

“Perhaps he chloroformed her?”

Roger told his companion in a few well-chosen words of the fatuity of this suggestion.

“Well, biffed her on the head, then, and put her out.”

“The doctor said nothing about a bruise,” Roger pointed out. “He’d certainly have found it if there’d been one.”

“Then I give it up,” said Newsome.

Roger summed up his own convictions. “If there was no struggle and he didn’t tie her up, then he laid her out in some other way; for of one thing, Jerry, I’m sure, and that is that when you rang that bell the girl was alive inside, but unconscious. We know she was alive, and I’m certain she was both in the flat and unconscious. But how on earth could he have managed it? It’s no good suggesting morphia or anything like that. The doctor would have found out at the post-mortem if any drug had been used on her, and it hadn’t. Great Scott, this man’s a genius in his own line.”

And there, for that evening, they left it. For, as Roger remarked, they had now clarified the issues as much as possible and any further discussion would only addle them.

“I want to clear my mind of the whole thing and come back to it later on quite fresh,” he said. “That’s the way to get results. So what about a few shillings’ worth of that rotten show where Anne is wasting her talents and friend Moira is enhancing hers?”

Newsome agreed with alacrity.

They went, and Roger spent an unhappy evening. Let it be enough to say that he had a respectful admiration for Anne, and to be compelled to watch her impersonate in turn a Hawaiian belle, a small girl of six, a private in a Scotch regiment, a powder-puff, a blue bird (species unknown), a lingerie mannequin, an ornament on a wedding-cake and a Deauville bathing beauty, in company with Miss Carruthers and some twenty-two other mechanically smiling maidens, left him not merely cold, but frozen. He would have stalked out of the place as soon as the Scotch regiment appeared, had not Mr. Newsome seemed to find these representations the last word in wit, beauty, art and dramatic genius.

However, if Roger wanted contrast with his recent pre-occupations he had the consolation of knowing that he had certainly found it.

It was between two and three a.m. that inspiration had the habit of paying Roger a happy visit. In previous cases he had found that, after turning them over and over in his mind for a couple of hours after getting into bed, just when everything seemed so inextricably muddled that nothing could ever evolve out of the chaos, some illuminating ray would suddenly shoot across his mental vision. And so it was that night. Having decided that the only thing left to do was to get up, go to his study, read through six pages chosen at random from the
Encyclopœdia Britannica
, swallow a strong whisky and then go back to bed again—having already lifted one arm out of the coverings to switch on the lamp by his bedside, there suddenly occurred to Roger in one single blinding, flash exactly what that villainous old solicitor really had done, and precisely what those dents on Dorothy Fielder’s legs must mean.

Whereupon he turned over on his other side and fell instantly asleep.

The next morning conviction was not quite so strong, but it remained conviction. As he shaved, Roger argued against his idea, battered it, pummelled it, and generally did his best to reduce it to pulp. Nothing of the sort happened. The idea continued to stand, upright and smiling, and quite refused even to be shaken.

Impressed, Roger went out after breakfast to test it.

There was only one test he could think of to apply, and that involved an interview with the constable whose arm Zelma Deeping had clutched in Gray’s Inn Road. This constable, therefore, Roger sought out and finally ran down on his beat not a hundred yards from the same block of Mansions.

He introduced himself, and the constable, who remembered seeing him in intimate conversation on the very scene of the crime with no less a person than Chief Inspector Moresby of the C. I. D., felt no compunction in giving such information as the gentleman seemed to require.

“Now tell me this very carefully,” Roger said in his most impressive manner. “When you opened the door of the room, did it open quite easily or did it seem to be obstructed in any way?”

“Well, it opened easily enough, sir, but the chair was lying close up against it, and of course that had to be pushed back as the door opened.”

Roger nodded as if that information, at any rate, was no news to him. “Do you remember if the chair was actually lying up against the door, or did the door strike on it when it was partly open?”

The constable ruminated. “Well, sir, it’s difficult to say now, but to the best of my recollection it was lying right up against the door. At least, I don’t seem to remember it striking on it. I should have gone steady if I’d felt it do that.”

“Yes. And when you got inside, the chair was lying just as we saw it later? On its back, with the feet pointing at an angle away from the doorway?”

“That’s right, sir. It wasn’t touched any more till the Superintendent and Mr. Moresby went.”

“And the wrapper was where I saw it, over the back of that green chair?”

“Yes, sir. Nothing was touched at all but the body, which I lifted down to make sure life was extinct.”

“That’s right. Well, I want to have a look at the flat. Is there still a constable there?”

“No, sir. The place is locked up, but the porter’s got a key. Nobody’s allowed in but the police; but if I walk back with you and tell the porter, that’ll be all right, sir.”

They paced majestically along the pavement. Even at so solemn a moment Roger could not help wondering whether any of the passers-by were under the impression that he was in custody and, if so, what particular crime they would favour him with.

On the constable’s gruff injunctions Roger was shown into the flat and left there. He waited till the outer door was closed, then hurried into the sitting-room and examined the inner side of the door with minute attention. After a lengthy search he found exactly what he had hoped to find—two very slight dints in the surface, so shallow as to have hardly more than dinted the paint, about eighteen inches apart and a couple of feet from the bottom, on the side farther from the hinges; from each dint ran a faint scratch right to the bottom edge of the door. Roger measured their distance apart with a pocket tape-measure, scrutinised them through a strong magnifying-glass which he had brought for the purpose, and made one or two other measurements. Then he rose from his hands and knees, opened the door to its fullest extent and with the magnifying-glass began minutely to examine the paint-work on the inside of the frame, on the hinge side of the door.

“Ah!” he exclaimed happily, as a deeper dint, from which the paint had been chipped, caught his eye. He pounced down on his knees and began poking about with a finger in the dust at the angle where the lining met the floor. Fragments of a nutshell emerged into the light. He picked up the largest and looked at it.

“Walnut!” he muttered, with satisfaction. “Yes, of course. That would be much better.”

Putting the pieces of shell back where he had found them, he rose and made his way out of the flat. Not for the first time in his life Roger was uncommonly pleased with Roger.

On the steps he ran straight into Anne Manners.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, and blushed rather nicely.

“Anne Manners,” said Roger sternly. “Subordinate Anne Manners, or rather, insubordinate Anne Manners—what are you doing here?”

“Investigating,” said Anne Manners, with a certain defiance.

Roger grasped her elbow, turned her round and walked her down the street. “This is the time for my elevenses,” he said, taking no notice of her vehement protests. “A cup of malt extract and a rusk. You’re coming too.”

“I’m not!” said Miss Manners, who never had liked malt extract and had always hated rusks.

“You are,” said Roger. “I’ve got a few questions I want to ask you, Anne Manners.”

As Anne had no wish (
a
) to cause a crowd to collect by belabouring Roger with her umbrella; (
b
) to be picked up and carried in broad daylight down Gray’s Inn Road and into Holborn, she went quietly.

Seated some minutes later in the best restaurant in Holborn, with a cup of coffee and cream by her side and a plate of opulent and delightfully indigestible cakes in front of her, Anne consented to thaw.

“Very well, very well,” she said, unable to help smiling at her companion’s insistence. “I’ll tell you. I wanted to talk to the porter about beards.”

“Beards?” repeated Roger. “Oh! I see. Anne Manners, this is very clever of you. Beards, I take it, in connection with elderly solicitors?”

Anne nodded. “Exactly.”

Roger regarded his subordinate with admiration. “Do you mean to say you’d hit on the solicitor too, Anne? Really and truly? Quite on your own?”

“Oh!” Anne exclaimed excitedly. “Then you think so too? He’s the man, Mr. Sheringham. I’m sure he is. What made you think so?”

“Wait a minute,” said Roger. “You realise that according to the porter’s evidence he can’t possibly be the man, don’t you?”

“Evidence!” said Anne scornfully. “I
know
he’s the man.”

“Well, between ourselves, so do I. And I think I know how he comes to be the man, in spite of the porter. But what I don’t know is who he can be. He’s disguised, of course. The gold-rimmed spectacles and all that. Obviously a disguise. Why, a silk hat’s almost a disguise in itself nowadays.”

“I know who he is,” said Anne, and looked extremely wise. “At least, I think I do. I just wanted to ask the porter a few questions to see if I could make sure.”

“And he certainly wouldn’t have answered them. So you know who he is, do you? I suppose this is what you were being so mysterious about at tea yesterday?”

“I believe I did refer to it,” said Anne with dignity, and took another cake.

“Would it be too much for your superior officer to ask you to tell him who it is?”

“Much,” said Anne, through cake. “I said I’d tell you at tea to-day, and so I will. But not before. I think we shall have got a little more proof by then.”

“‘We!’” Roger repeated. “Are you working with Jerry on this?”

It is difficult to look dignified when struggling with an éclair, but Anne did her best. “Certainly not. With Mr. Pleydell. As a matter of fact,” Anne confided, “I did ring you up, just after breakfast, but you were out; so I rang Mr. Pleydell up instead.”

“What about?”

Anne looked dubious. “I’m not sure that I ought to tell you.”