Four Days' Wonder

by A. A. Milne

  ‘Here, wait a bit,’ said the Inspector. ‘How d’you get that?’

  ‘There was no sign of any struggle,’ said Dr. Hatch patiently. ‘On the contrary——’

  ‘Well, but if the Shah of Persia was to walk into this room now, and I was to catch him suddenly on the head with an inkstand, that wouldn’t hardly prove I was on friendly terms with him, would it? I’m not, anyway,’ he added, so as to have it quite clear.

  Dr. Willoughby Hatch put up an eye-glass and surveyed the Inspector dispassionately. He nodded to himself, as if he had expected to see something like that, but had thought it his duty to make sure. He stood up.

  ‘Is there anything more you want to know?’

  ‘Here, wait a bit, Doctor. I’m not disputing anything you say’—a faint smile curved the Doctor’s lips—‘but I’ve got to look at it all round.’ He began to write. ‘Short, stout man, left-handed — sedentary occupation?——’ He looked up with a question in his eyes.

  ‘That’s in your department,’ said the Expert, sitting down again. ‘I merely state that he was stout and not in good condition. Make any deduction from the facts that you feel are justified.

  ‘“Sedentary occupation”,’ wrote the Inspector, feeling that it was justified. ‘“And known to the deceased.” Now can you give us anything about the girl?’

  ‘I understood you to tell me that you knew all about her.’

  ‘I know who she is, if that’s what you mean, but that doesn’t say I know what she did.’

  ‘Ah! Well, Miss Latour and Miss Windell were engaged in conversation when the murder took place. As Miss Latour was struck she fell against the girl’s shoulder, and from there to the floor.’

  ‘Certain?’

  Dr. Hatch began to feel for his eye-glass again, and the Inspector hurriedly held up a large, preventive hand.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘I just wondered how you knew, that’s all.’

  ‘There was a minute bruise on the right wall of the chest made at the moment of death. As there was nothing against which she could have fallen——’

  ‘The floor,’ said the Inspector, but not really hopefully.

  ‘In that case the area of the bruising would have been more extensive. Moreover, the absence of any marked contusion on the knees——’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said the Inspector. ‘Well, but this looks as if she might have been an accomplice, eh? Held the dead woman in talk, while the murderer——’

  Dr. Willoughby Hatch shrugged. Facts, not deductions, were all that concerned him.

  ‘Or, of course, not an accomplice,’ said the Inspector, wishing to do himself complete justice. ‘As you say, we got to look at it all round.’

  The Doctor, who had said nothing of the sort, stood up.

  ‘Inquest to-morrow,’ said the Inspector. He looked at his notes. ‘Well, we’re getting on.’

  They were indeed getting on. A complete description of Miss Jenny Windell in walking costume and picture hat was in all the evening papers. This description, in order to leave nothing to chance, was supplemented by yet another photograph of Inspector Marigold, and by a camera-study of Miss Windell, in evening costume and without a hat, showing how delightfully the curls clustered round her head and over her ears. By some sort of gentleman’s agreement among the editors, however, the name ‘Windell’ was discarded thereafter as unhelpful, and the public was asked to look out for ‘Jenny’, and if it saw ‘Jenny’ to communicate immediately with Scotland Yard or the nearest police-station.

  WHERE IS JENNY?

  asked one poster, and another announced:

  JENNY IDENTIFIED: WHERE IS SHE?

  A more direct appeal was made by a third, which put it squarely to the passer-by:

  HAVE YOU SEEN JENNY?

  There was now no sort of suggestion that Jenny was an accessory to the murder. The Law being what it was, no gentleman would hint such a thing against a ward of Watterson, Watterson and Hinchcoe’s. Jenny, it was assumed, was a fellow-victim, now probably on her way to the Argentine. A well-known Harley-street physician discussed the possibility of drugging (and removing to the Argentine) a girl of Jenny’s build, and seemed to think that, unless she had been deceived into thinking that some one dear to her had been suddenly taken ill in the Argentine, and was calling for her, it was impossible that the trans-shipment could be effected safely, a certain amount of cooperation on Jenny’s part being almost essential. On the other hand, a lady novelist of repute, in an article entitled ‘Are Our Girls Safe?’, gave one or two remarkable instances of what had nearly happened to the daughters of friends of hers when walking up Regent Street and passing a hospital nurse. It was obvious that, if the murderer had been disguised as a hospital nurse, almost anything might have happened.

  In these circumstances it was a comfort to know that the ports were being watched . . .

  Nancy read all this in a tea-shop in Bloomsbury. She had stayed at her work a little later than usual, so as to be sure of not missing Mr. Fenton; for Mr. Archibald Fenton was not merely returning from his club this afternoon, but from the pawnbroker’s, with money in his pocket for Joyce’s big sister. At five o’clock, she decided that she could wait no longer. In any case, she told herself, the money could not be sent to Tunbridge Wells, until she had heard from Jenny. She went out, bought all the papers, and settled down to them over a pot of tea and a Bath bun.

  She tried to imagine herself searching for the Jenny of the description and the photograph. Hopeless, with no more knowledge of her than this, to identify the real Jenny. The photographer had caught Miss Windell in one of those unfortunate moments when one is wearing evening-dress in the afternoon, and looking at a very ugly little man in a large bow-tie, and Nancy felt that too many girls had been surprised in just this position for any one of them to excite attention. And then, reading of all the horrible things which hadn’t happened to Jenny, another thought came to her. Wouldn’t Mr. and Mrs. Watterson be feeling rather anxious?

  Mr. Watterson, of course, was a Guardian and a Solicitor, thus belonging to the two classes which were most notoriously unanxious when a ward, whose money they were handling, disappeared. Moreover, he was eighty, and at nineteen Nancy felt that the only things an old gentleman of eighty would be anxious about were the conditions and prospects in the next world. Still, even so, and even though he and Mrs. Watterson were no sort of relation to Jenny, they might be worrying about her. Oughtn’t she to relieve that anxiety?

  But how? An anonymous letter in a disguised handwriting? Safer than typing, because detectives always recognized the faulty ‘e’ in a typewriter, and then searched London until they found it. She wouldn’t post it in Chelsea, but would buy a letter-card in the nearest post office, and send it off now.

  In capital letters, written with the left hand, the message said:

  ‘YR NEICE SAFE AND ZOUND CANOT SAY MORE NO FAKE RENTON FRERS IN SHOSE A FREIND’

  Once more Nancy felt rather pleased with herself as a writer of letters. First the ‘neice’. Nobody, by reading the papers, would suppose that Jenny was Mr. Watterson’s niece, but anybody meeting Jenny, and hearing her talk of ‘Uncle Hubert’, might make just that mistake. Then the shoes. Jenny’s shoes, bought from Renton Frères, were now in Nancy’s flat. Without some sort of identification the letter might be dismissed by Mr. Watterson as the work of any half-witted humorist; with its reference to the shoes, which one of the servants could confirm, added to the mistake about the niece, it became convincingly genuine. She dropped the letter-card into the box, and made her way home. On her omnibus she wondered about A FREIND, and decided that he was the captain of a sailing-barge now making its slow way to Newcastle.

  II

  Alice said, ‘Well! If I didn’t go and forget ’er watch.’

  Cook was telling them about a friend of hers called Alfred Truby, whose thumb had b
een taken right off by a circular saw.

  ‘What did it look like, Mrs. Price?’ asked Hilda. ‘Hot, this tea is,’ she added, pouring it into her saucer, and blowing on it.

  ‘Not nice,’ said Cook, shaking her head. ‘Unnatural, as you might say. Well, I’m just telling you. You never know what may happen. Five minutes before the hour, there he was, and the last thing he was thinking of was losing his thumb—five minutes after, and there’s his thumb gone, and not all the finest surgeons in the country can put it back for him.’

  ‘Wouldn’t take ten minutes for a saw to get it off, would it?’ said Hilda, who had now discovered a most attractive way of blowing ripples. ‘Be like in a flash. Look, Alice, see that?’ She blew again. ‘Like sort of little waves.’

  Alice said: ‘Well, fancy me going and forgetting ’er watch. ’Tisn’t like me.’

  ‘Watch?’ said Cook, ready for a change of subject.

  ‘Your telling us about that saw suddenly put it into me ’ead. Miss Jenny’s watch.’

  ‘Look, Alice, see that?’ said Hilda.

  ‘D’you mean her watch that she wears?’

  ‘That’s it. Covered with diamonds and all. And I never told that Mr. Marigold nothing about it.’

  ‘Now look, Alice! I got it lovely.’

  ‘Never mind that, Hilda,’ said Cook sharply. ‘This is something we’ve got to think about. Her watch, Alice? Well, how could you have been so silly?’

  ‘It just didn’t come into me ’ead.’

  ‘What does the silly old watch matter?’ said Hilda, annoyed, as any artist would be, at interruption just when perfection was reached.

  ‘Why of course it matters.’

  ‘Well, if you ask me, I should say if you can’t reckernize a person by ’er hat and dress, you aren’t going to do it by asking ’er the time and then taking a snoop at ’er watch.’

  ‘It isn’t that, Hilda,’ explained Alice. ‘It’s just that if anything—if poor Miss Jenny—if she is——’ She gulped, and had to leave it to Cook.

  ‘First thing they’d do’, said Cook impressively to Hilda, ‘would be to sell that watch. He’d get a good price for a watch like that. Reel diamonds, wasn’t it, Alice?’

  Alice nodded.

  ‘That’s right. And what the Police would do is to send round to all the——’

  ‘Fences,’ said Alice, knowing about it from Jenny’s books.

  ‘To all the pawnbrokers, to say “’As anybody been trying to sell the aforesaid watch?” and then they get a description of him, and that’s a clue, d’you see?’

  ‘Oh, all right!’ said Hilda, and drank up her tea.

  So when Mr. Watterson came back from the office at six o’clock, Alice went up and told him what she had forgotten. Mr. Watterson rang up the Inspector; and then Alice told the Inspector exactly what Jenny’s watch was like; and then Inspector Marigold did just what Cook had said he would do. And at about ten o’clock Mr. Watterson rang up Inspector Marigold again, and again the Inspector went round to Acacia Road. Once more Alice went into the study, but this time only to be asked a question about Miss Jenny’s shoes. When she had answered it, the Inspector and Mr. Watterson nodded solemnly at each other, and a little later Inspector Marigold left; and at eleven o’clock, under the impression that he had now cleared the ground as thoroughly as he had ever cleared it in the old days at Lord’s, he went early to bed, in readiness for a full day’s play to-morrow.

  III

  At twenty minutes to seven Mr. Archibald Fenton crossed Chelsea Bridge in his Sandeman Six on his way to Endover. As a critic had said, the success of A Flock of Sheep had raised many problems—one of them being whether one should have a chauffeur or drive the car oneself. Mr. Fenton decided against a chauffeur, on the very reasonable grounds that if one drove the car oneself, one always had it, whereas if a chauffeur drove it, one’s wife might want it at some inconvenient moment; and he felt that a wife could not go on admiring a husband, if he were continually explaining to her how necessary it was for his art that he should have the car this afternoon. Of course he did not say all this to Fanny. He explained quite simply that it was necessary for his art that they should live well within their means, and that, however inconvenient to both of them, he thought that they should try to do without a chauffeur. Fanny then, rather foolishly, offered to learn to drive a car too, but her husband said that he knew it was absurd of him, but he would feel horribly nervous to think of Fanny driving about alone, particularly in London.

  Mr. Fenton drove well. It was his one physical attainment, unless pure stoutness is to be reckoned as such; for, though in these last two years he had become an enthusiastic cricketer, he excelled as a bad player rather than as a good one, doing so with the air of one who preferred it this way, as being more in the literary tradition. As he drove, he thought with the pleased satisfaction which occasionally eluded him, of his negotiations with the pawnbrokers. He had been, he thought, completely in the character, even to the detail of removing his tie, but secretly, before going in, and turning up the coat of his collar. His poverty being thus apparent, he had told the story of a sick wife, Jessie, to whom he had given the watch as a wedding present, and the urgent necessity of taking her into the country for a fortnight. His name was William Makepeace Thackeray—and, thought Mr. Fenton, a very good name, too. The pawnbroker, who didn’t seem to mind how many sick wives Mr. Thackeray had, reluctantly doled out twelve pounds ten. Mr. W. M. Thackeray left the shop, the pawn-ticket in his waistcoat pocket. He found his car. He put on his tie again and turned down his collar. And it was not until then that he remembered Julia, and the urgent necessity of taking her into the country for a fortnight.

  Julia Treherne was an extremely beautiful and intelligent actress, who had been wedded to her Art and Mr. Allison for ten years, and had no intention of being unfaithful to either. In fact, she loved them both devotedly. But Mr. Allison and she equally recognized that an actress is not as other women, and that, within certain specified limits, it was necessary for her to be all things to all men, particularly if they were, or might be, connected with the theatre. Julia kept exactly within the limits, enjoyed herself considerably, and saw as much of her husband as was possible without being ostentatious. Mr. Archibald Fenton (who did not, however, quite know the rules) was her latest conquest, and he had just remembered that it was her birthday on Friday.

  Friday. To-day was Wednesday. Easy to get her a present now before he left London, but too late to make it the personal gift which, if he had remembered earlier, he would have chosen with such loving care. And now here it was waiting for him: the watch with ‘J’ in diamonds for Julia!

  He went back to the shop. With the excuse of a suddenly remembered Uncle Makepeace from whom he had not yet borrowed, he redeemed the watch. He realized that, if he had thought of all this before, he could have bought it direct from Nancy at less expense, but he was oddly scrupulous about money matters, and was not sorry that the cheque which he was sending her had, as it were, the countersign of authority. He took the watch home with him. It was in his pocket now as he climbed up to the Crystal Palace. To-morrow he would send it to Julia with a letter . . . such a letter . . . and then!— who knew? Even next Sunday perhaps . . .

  As he came down River Hill he stopped thinking of this, and began to compose the letter. At Tonbridge it was almost a poem . . .

  THURSDAY

  Chapter Eleven

  Use for the Fourth Governess

  I

  Jenny, half-waking, half-sleeping, turned restlessly on to her back, and saw above her head the dim skeleton of some enormous animal.

  She had seen it before somewhere . . . in that Natural History Museum to which she had been taken so often by her third governess. It was a mega-something. Not a megaphone, that was the other thing. ‘Now this, Jenny, is one of those animals I was telling you about who lived long, long before there we
re any little girls in the world. They are called prehistoric animals, because they lived before history books were written. You see, history books couldn’t be written because there weren’t any men or women to write them!’ ‘Not Adam and Eve?’ had asked Jenny, and the third governess, not being quite sure what to do about that, because it was all very difficult if you weren’t to destroy a child’s innocent faith, decided that it was now time to go home. But, before they left, they spent a few minutes with a case of humming-birds, because humming-birds were perfectly safe, and wouldn’t put ideas into anybody’s head . . .

  To Jenny one skeleton more or less in the ridiculous confusion of her brain did not matter. She turned over to her left side, snuggled herself down and let herself back into her dream. In a moment she was asleep again. But not for long. The sun climbed slowly above the trees at the bottom of the meadow, and seeped through the curtains; outside the open windows starlings imitated themselves and other birds untiringly; kitchen stoves were being raked out below; animals were shifting slowly at the sound of men’s voices, and a hoof would hit suddenly and restlessly upon stone. Against the new insistent day Jenny’s sleep could not prevail. She woke . . . and wondered where she was.

  Even in the daylight the centre beam and crossbeams of the ceiling looked like the backbone of a giant sole. This had been in her dreams, and adventures with tramps who were policemen, and going about in the more public places with nothing on. Now she began to remember things more sharply. Derek Fenton . . . Bassetts . . . and what was her name? Naomi Fenton. She was in a bedroom at Bassetts. It was still almost like a dream.

  There was a knock at her door, and an ‘Are you awake, Miss Fenton?’ ‘Come in,’ called Jenny, and Mrs. Bassett came in.

  ‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea, miss. It’s a lovely morning. Shall I pull your curtains?’