Sting of Death

by Shelley Smith

  “It was unusual, then, for your niece to retire to her room?”

  “I’ve just said so.”

  “Why did she, do you suppose?”

  “I thought she looked tired. Rather white. I advised her to have a rest, and she said she would.”

  “Did she seem herself otherwise? Not depressed, or worried, or unhappy?”

  “She seemed herself. Who isn’t depressed or worried or unhappy in these days? Now I’m tired of answering questions. Go away, my dear sir.” She closed her eyes decisively.

  Ivor Campion was smiling cynically when he joined them outside.

  “So you’ve been interviewed by Miss Sharpe, have you? What did you think of her?”

  “She took it very well, I thought,” said Trevor moderately.

  “Old bitch!” said Ivor. “Wait till you know her better. What a life she led that poor girl! If Linda hadn’t been a saint, she’d have throttled her.”

  “Did she seem any different from usual today? Mrs. Campion, I mean, not Miss Sharpe of course.”

  Ivor turned his head away and stared across the park.

  “Here come the children. Poor little rats, they’ll have to be told too... No, she didn’t seem any different to me.”

  “We’ll have the husband’s London address, if you please. Drake, make a note of it!”

  The children were slanting away from the front of the house, toward the back. Trevor followed casually after. They were twittering shrilly together like birds. A ladder, like a bit of Freudian surrealism, leaned against the house and the children ducked underneath it with fingers crossed in a wish. A small dark-haired girl drew back suddenly against a taller girl’s skirts. A boy darted forward and seized her by the hand to drag her through…

  “Come on!” they heard him cry impatiently. “You got to, silly!”

  She said: “No!” and pulled away.

  An older boy pushed her from behind. She was encircled by their ominous goblin faces. Even Priss didn’t understand. In despair the small girl flung herself on the ground and bellowed till her lace was as red as a dahlia. Priscilla said wearily:

  “There! You’ve made her cry again. You are naughty boys!” and picked her up laboriously in her skinny little arms. They disappeared inside.

  “Odd little animals!” commented Ivor vaguely.

  “What’s the ladder for?” asked Trevor, more interested in getting the lay of the land than in little girl’s nerve storms.

  “Cleaning the gutters of old bird nests and rubbish before the bad weather comes. I’m getting quite nimble with my foot,” he said conceitedly.

  “Where did you lose it?”

  “When I was a P.O.W. in Italy. It went gangrenous with frostbite on the Long March. When we arrived in Germany they had to take it off. But of course I didn’t get a new foot till I got back home, the week before V-E Day.”

  As they drove away Inspector Trevor looked back at the shabby Palladian façade and said thoughtfully:

  “This Werner Hauser. I gather he died fairly recently by what the merry widow said. Was it an accident?”

  “Suicide, sir. It happened less than a month ago. He was missing three days before we found him in one of the attics that used to be a servant’s bedroom – when they had servants. He puts us off the track, you see, sir, because he borrowed the car and drove off in it. Then some four miles from here, we figure he got out, left the car there, and walked back to Hawkswood, entered the house unseen, and crept up into the attic to die alone. Sad, really.”

  “No question of anything but suicide?”

  “No, sir. An overdose: one of the barbiturates.”

  “Any suggestion why he should have killed himself come out at the inquest?”

  “Oh, well, sir, it was pretty plain really. All that persecution does send them off their rockers a bit, don’t you think?”

  “Were they persecuted here?”

  Sergeant Drake looked shocked.

  “Oh, no, sir. But he’d been in one of these here concentration camps, it came out.”

  “And so just when his enemies were beaten, he elects to kill himself. It seems an inopportune moment to me. What did the merry widow say?”

  “Very cut up, sir, very tearful.” He met the inspector’s eye. “You can’t ever tell with some women though, can you? I mean, it may have been genuine enough and she may have been just putting on an act this afternoon.”

  “It’s quite a possibility. But there was no ‘act’ about the eau de cologne she’d been swilling. I bet she’s one of those quiet, helpless little tipplers who privately soak it up like a sponge...”

  “It would be nice to know what she was really up to while she was supposed to be taking a bath, too. Wouldn’t it? Did you feel the pipes? They were stone cold.”

  “Yes, the lady way lying, I’m afraid. Why, I wonder?”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Can I pour you a cup, Mrs. Potter?” said Mrs. Hacker civilly, reaching down from the dresser a blue cup and a white one with a pink rim and setting them in fawn and gold saucers because no matching china was left.

  “I won’t say no,” said Nanny Potter in her slow comfortable voice that sounded like a fat old family cat talking, and with a cat’s comfortable wisdom, too. “Cut yourself a nice slice of bread and dripping.”

  “Couldn’t touch a thing,” declared Mrs. Hacker, rolling the sleeves of her emerald “woollie” up her stout red arms. “It’s quite put me off; upsets always fly straight to me stomach. And what it must have been like for you, Mrs. Potter, I shudder to contemplate; I do really. You having been with the family so long, it must feel like losing one of your own. And to think it might have been you who found her!”

  “Little pitchers!” remarked Nanny Potter inconsequentially, stirring her tea. Without turning her head she said: “Don’t hang about in the doorway, ducky. Either come in or go out.”

  “Can I have some bread and dripping, Nanny?”

  Oliver was a little thin boy of six with pale sandy hair and a small nervous face beneath a lofty brow.

  “Poor little mite!” said Mrs. Hacker in the heartfelt tones of Lady Isobel of East Lynne, slapping dripping lavishly on the loaf. “Do they know?” she asked Nanny Potter in a stagey whisper.

  “Say thank you, Oliver. And then run along outside.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hacker,” he said politely. “I want to get my horse, Nanny... Please,” he added like a devout Amen. He scampered off and paused outside the door to hear Mrs. Hacker say: “Whatever are you going to tell them?”

  “We’ve told them she’s gone away. Though mind you, I think Lionel ought to be told, him being the eldest. Still, we’ll leave that for his father to decide.”

  “When I think of those little motherless mites it makes my heart bleed,” said Mrs. Hacker impassioned, pressing the loaf to her breast as if to staunch the flow and absently cutting herself a thick slice, for properly to relish a tragedy one must keep up one’s strength. “Just a corner, Mrs. Potter. Do. To oblige me,” she urged. “You must keep up your strength. Now more than ever. Who have those kiddies got but you, when all’s said and done?”

  “They have their father.”

  “But he’s more like a stranger, isn’t he?”

  “He’s not to blame for that.”

  “No, indeed,” said Mrs. Hacker agreeably. “Another cup, Mrs. Potter? I suppose he’ll be down sometime today?”

  “That I am not in a position to say.”

  “It’ll be a blow to him, I make no doubt. I do wonder how ever it happened. Poor madam! Such a sweet young lady as she was. There’ll be more than one that’ll miss her that I know.” She looked at Nanny sideways out of her round brown eye like a bird.

  “Oh, as to that....” said Nanny ambiguously.

  “He was the one that found her, wasn’t he? Ts, ts! What a turn it must of give him. Fancy, two deaths in less than a month! It makes your flesh creep, don’t it? There’ll b
e more bad luck before this lot is through, you mark my words. Oliver!” she cried sharply, her eye caught by a movement behind the door. “You come on out from there! Well, whoever would have thought he’d be so sly?” she said with an indignant flush, rolling her sleeves nervously up and down. “I declare, your Nanny ought to give you a good hiding.”

  “Nanny doesn’t hide us ever,” Oliver said haughtily.

  “Run and play, then.”

  The little boy skipped airily away.

  “Would you believe it? Little monkey!” exclaimed Mrs. Hacker. “Aren’t they sharp? I shouldn’t wonder he didn’t take it in, for all that.”

  “All children are inquisitive. Something is up; but I should know soon enough if they had found out the truth. Priscilla has been told of course, but she’s a very reliable little girl. The only one I’ve been worried about is Jane. Priscilla says she was very difficult yesterday, and she woke up in the night screaming. Some nightmare about a horrible man, she said. I gave her a little dose. All this psychology I don’t believe in: an upset tummy mostly, believe me.”

  “Miss Priscilla says she’s mislaid her bicycle. I told her it was lucky her head was screwed on tight so she couldn’t lose that. Of course being an orphan herself, she’ll be able to sympathize with those mites. She must be a great help to you; four kiddies to look after at your age can’t be much joke.”

  “I’m used to children,” said Nanny Potter quietly. “I was nursemaid to Mr. Edmund’s mother when I was fourteen and I’ll be content to end my days looking after her grandchildren.”

  “That’s the spirit, Mrs. Potter dear,” said Mrs. Hacker in a conciliating tone, rattling the ashes out of the boiler. “Mr. Edmund’ll be bound to be down for the inquest, won’t he? Tomorrow did you say it was?”

  *

  “Exhibit A,” said Dr. Wellesley cheerily, handing Inspector Trevor a fine silver chain from which hung a small medallion. “Worn round the deceased’s neck as a rule, but in this instance I found it in her hand, her left hand. I’ll tell you about that in a minute.”

  Trevor turned it over in his fingers. It was not a locket or a pendant. It was an oval of silver about the size of a shilling and on one surface was enamelled in blue a representation of a girl’s head in profile with a rayed halo behind it. The fine chain dangled between his fingers like threads of gossamer in the sunlight. It was broken: the links close to the fastening had been violently wrenched apart. Round the edge of the medallion was written minutely: The Little Flower of Jesus, St. Teresa of Lisieux.

  “Ever heard of cadaveric spasm?” asked the doctor.

  “You mean a sort of rigor mortis, only simultaneous with death. At the moment of death the hand contracts and fixes like that. The drowning man literally clutches at a straw. Isn’t that it?”

  “Yes. That is how Mrs. Campion, deceased, clutched that trinket. You can see where the chain was torn away. The skin at the back of the neck is considerably abraded. Look!” He pushed the heavy black hair away from the slender neck cinctured with a thin violet line.

  “Could she have done that in cadaveric spasm?”

  “She could,” the little doctor conceded. “But she didn’t, you know.” He pointed to the violet mark on the dead girl’s neck. “That was done after she was dead, for some reason. Ye-es,” he went on pensively, “she died some two or three hours before I saw her.”

  “Making it roughly some time between quarter-past three and quarter-past four? That’s not possible, surely? She couldn’t have lain in the hall for nearly three hours. Someone would have been bound to see her.”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed the doctor. “She can’t have lain in the hall, as you say. That brings us to Exhibit B.” He picked up a small silky garment of a fancy mesh. He shook out the skimpy little vest and held it up by its thin ribbon straps. “See there, a little brownish smear? Blood. There’s nothing to show externally in the way of a wound, but that little spot of blood gave me a hint of what to look for. A little puncture under the left breast. The weapon penetrated the cage of the ribs and perforated the heart. Death must have been instantaneous. Moreover, she was lying on her back when she was killed or she fell on her back as she died, and she remained in that position for some not inconsiderable time. The condition of the blood vessels internally and on the buttocks and back, compressed by their position, show the characteristic changes we call hypostasis. The weapon was withdrawn from the heart, and later the body was dropped down the well of the stairs. That’s about all I can tell you,” said Dr. Wellesley with assumed nonchalance.

  “Quite enough, too, thank you. What a horribly unsavoury affair. Beastly cold-blooded! The idea was to make it look like an accident, of course. That practically rules out suicide, man-slaughter, and homicide, I’m afraid, and leaves us with a singularly brutal murder.”

  *

  Contrary to Nanny Potter’s expectations, and everyone else’s, Edmund Campion was not at the inquest – for the simple reason that he had not yet been found. When there was no reply to Ivor’s telegram and even the last train of the day did not bring him in, Ivor phoned The Bath Club. The porter said Mr. Campion had not been in to collect his wire; he had gone away and left no forwarding address. Odd, said everybody; very rum! Edmund could hardly have chosen a more awkward moment, both for himself and the family, to disappear.

  At the inquest nothing was made of it of course. The whole affair was handled very deftly and tactfully. But all the tact in the world could not smooth over the only one verdict which could possibly be brought in (and the jury accordingly did so): “Wilful murder, by some person or persons unknown.”

  The police work then began in earnest. To follow every step would be as tedious as it was for them, but some of the conversations were not without interest. Mrs. Hauser, for instance, still stuck to it that she had been in her room all the afternoon “writing business letters.” (As might be expected, not one of them had a checkable alibi now that the germane time was between three and four.) Mrs. Hauser said she had been in her room from three o’clock approximately (as though that was any help!), for it had taken her the best part of an hour to clear and wash up after the midday meal. There had been no one to help her.

  “I do it all alone,” she said grandly. “Me. I make nothing of it, you understand; though some peoples think it is terrible thing that I, Ilse von Bergen that was, must do such things. In my country, it would be impossible. But me, I am very proud, and rather I do that than to live on charity which for me is quite dreadful. Also it pleases me very much to help this poor girl, Linda, who like all your English women is not at all clever at making a ménage. So I must always be showing her how it should be done.”

  “Was anyone with you, or near you, in the kitchen?”

  “Ah, you are waiting to see if I speak the truth,” she said with a merry laugh. “Yes, this old nurse is in the kitchen making ready the tea for the children because she is going out, so she leaves it for them prepared and that child Priscilla later will give it to them and for no one is it a trouble.”

  “I see. So till three, approximately, you have a witness to your whereabouts; after that time we have only your word for what you were doing and where you were.”

  “But of course,” she said ingenuously, opening wide her reddish-brown eyes.

  “Did you hear any disturbance, anything unusual, during the afternoon?”

  Ilse shook her head.

  “My room is quite at the end of the corridor on the second floor. I could not hear if anyone comes to attack that poor girl.”

  “Was the front door open all afternoon, do you know or not?”

  “I do not know that it was open that day, but it was always kept open except when the weather is too cold.”

  “You think it quite feasible for a person to enter the house and get upstairs without being seen?”

  “But, yes; my dear sir. Of course.” She looked at him seriously, large-eyed. “Is that not just what my poor Werner has d
one?”

  “I understand that your husband committed suicide, Mrs. Hauser. And quite recently.”

  “It is so. Life becomes too much for him.”

  “Ts, ts, how sad!” commented Trevor, looking at her sympathetically. “And just when the war had ended and things might be about to improve for him – for you both. Had he had bad news? Something of that sort?”

  Ilse glanced down at her soft white hands folded in her lap, so that her dark red hair fell prettily round her face.

  “For him it was bad news, because he has no longer the courage for life. And in this terrible world one must have very, very much courage, I think. But when Werner is in Dachau they take away all his courage—” her voice was quite expressionless – “and he never find it again. So when Linda tells us we should go now, he is much afraid. He thinks nowhere there is to go now for people like us, nowhere where he can have peace, except he goes Home to his Father. And I think that because he is homeless God will not turn him away.” She put her handkerchief to her eyes. Then she sighed and stared at him sadly, intensely.

  Trevor could feel himself blushing beneath the insistence of that dovelike dewy gaze. He had the impression that she was willing him to do or to say something.

  “How long have you been here, Mrs. Hauser?”

  “Oh, two years. We were living in London, and then our rooms became bombed, and so, one thing and another,” she shrugged expressively, “we came here.”

  “And here you would have been content to stay?”

  “Till we can go to America, yes.”

  “Only Mrs. Campion suggested your leaving before that, eh?”

  “Not suggested. Insisted,” said Ilse, with a look of sour triumph. “At once. A week’s notice, you understand, like defaulting servants.” The sudden bitterness in her dulcet voice was shocking.

  Trevor wondered who had given her that phrase – “defaulting servants” – but he merely asked, “Why?”

  Ilse’s mouth twisted sardonically.

  “It is quite simple, you see. Her husband was come home from the war and she wished to be alone with him, so we must ‘clear out’.”