Murder Jigsaw

by E.

  As they did so, there was an ejaculation from Robson. Manson turned quickly round with a smile. “Remembered something else?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. Seeing you get off here suddenly reminded me.”

  “I rather hoped that it might,” said the scientist with a smile. “What is it?”

  “I remember now where the woman went,” was the reply.

  “Where?”

  “She turned up the lane there, sir.” And he pointed to the lane which Manson and Merry knew led to the copse and the river-side.

  “Thanks, Robson. That’s very useful.”

  “So far so good,” commented Manson, and led the way up the lane. A sharp walk of some minutes landed the three by the side of the cattle drinking pool. Penryn surveyed what the three now recognised as the scene of the colonel’s death. “And what do we do now?” he asked.

  “We survey the scenery until after two o’clock,” was the reply. “We can usefully occupy the time by visualising what happened here on that day. The colonel was fishing somewhere near here, probably from the little knoll there.” The scientist pointed to a clear spot on the riverbank.

  “What!” Penryn said, startled. “Fishing here?”

  “Certainly.” Manson looked surprised. “Of course he was fishing here. If my theory is correct, he came here to fish on the invitation of Mrs. Devereux herself. And he never went away again—at least, not on his feet.”

  The scientist walked across to the copse and from there surveyed his two companions. He walked into the copse itself, looked down at the remains of the footprint which still showed, and then he stepped close beside it and glanced towards the pool. The result brought a surprised exclamation to his lips. From the spot, he had a clear vision, completely unobstructed, between overhanging branches, of Penryn and Merry standing beside the pool.

  He stared steadily for a few moments, whistling softly. “I wonder . . . I wonder,” he said; and, still whistling, retraced his footsteps to his companions.

  “Now, Merry,” he said, after consulting his watch. You remember the major’s story of seeing a woman’s figure at the entrance to the Avenue, there? I’d like you to go to the spot where the major says he leaned against the bank and saw his vision. When you get there, watch.”

  The sergeant departed. Manson watched until he could no longer see him, and then, consulting his watch, walked to the Avenue. Near the entrance he paused, but seeing nothing, walked forward. He had traversed some hundred yards before he was able to catch a glimpse of Merry, and before the sergeant could answer his wave, Manson, turning, took stock of his position. Instead of being in the entrance to the Avenue, he was a good 150 feet from it, and in a line with the pool.

  He retraced his steps, and, watch in hand, stood as though playing a part, and waiting for the cue to make his entrance. At half-past two, calling to Penryn and Merry, he started back along the path. Arrived at the main road, the three turned right and still led by the scientist, strolled in the direction of Tavistock. They had walked no longer than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, when a bus came up behind. Hailing it, the three climbed aboard. Manson remaining in the entrance, prepared to pay the fares demanded. “By the way,” he said to the conductor, “you were conducting this bus on Monday were you not?”

  “Yes, sir.” The man eyed the scientist inquiringly.

  “Can you remember whether at the spot at which we hailed you, or somewhere close to it, you picked up a woman on that day?”

  “I can, sir.” A broad smile came over the busman’s face. “We didn’t pick anybody up round here, nor on this side of Tavistock. Mind you, we were hailed times enough. Only the bus was full up, see?”

  “I see,” agreed the scientist. “Now, what time is the next bus behind?”

  “About an hour, sir.”

  “Then, if you would not mind signalling the driver, I think we will wait for that bus.”

  The three men clambered back on to the road, and recommenced their walking. “That, I think, must have been rather a nasty setback for Mrs. Devereux,” Manson opined. “It upset her plans and lengthened an alibi which she wanted to be as short as possible.”

  He made a mental calculation. “Yes, I think the theory still hangs together all right,” he decided. “We should be in Tavistock by about 4.15. Now, what are we going to do for an hour?”

  He repeated the question to Penryn. “What, if you were Mrs. Devereux, would you have done. Put yourself in her place.”

  “Get as far from this vicinity as possible and in the quickest possible time,” was the prompt reply.

  “Right! Then we will continue walking—slowly. A woman could not move very quickly—at least, not the woman of whom we are thinking. Nor would she walk far.”

  They had covered some half-a-mile when Manson called a halt. For the last five minutes he had been scanning each side of the road, apparently in search of something or other. He now crossed to the grass verge, where the bank was broken for a width of about six feet, and where a track ran up into a copse. A gate barred the way to the copse, but a stile afforded passage way for the pedestrian. A wide, projecting bottom step had been built to assist progress over the stile. Manson sat on the step. “I think,” he said, “we might wait here for the bus. I do not think that Mrs. Devereux would walk much further, and this spot, lying as it does, back from the roadway, would give her the seclusion she undoubtedly would want. If you two will find places to sit on the stile or on the grass banking, we can wait comfortably.”

  Merry produced a box and the three men lit up from one light. There was nothing superstitious about these hard-headed man-hunters! After he had lit his own cigarette the sergeant, with a flick of his fingers, sent the match spinning into the grass at the edge of the gate. Manson followed it with his eyes. A little flicker of flame sprang up. “Carelessness, Merry,” he commented, and walking across, picked up the still lighted stalk and extinguished it between finger and thumb. Bending down, he beat out the few blades of dry grass which had become ignited. As he did so, and parted other blades of grass, a cigarette stub was revealed, lying at the bottom of one of the gate-posts. The scientist eyed it curiously.

  “Now, that is a strange thing to find here,” he said.

  Penryn smiled. “Strange? I should not have considered it so, Doctor,” he said. “When we have finished these cigarettes we shall, in all probability, toss our stumps here.” He eyed the fag-end which Manson still held in his fingers. “Looks as though it has been here some time, too, Doctor. It’s stained brown by the weather.”

  “I agree that a cigarette-end would not be out of place here, Penryn,” was the reply. “It is the kind of cigarette-end that excites my curiosity. The paper is not stained by the weather; it is, in fact, its natural colour. This was a Russian cigarette, and an expensive one at that. About fifteen shillings a hundred, if I remember rightly—and the brand is Melikoffs. I know it quite well.” He produced his magnifying glass and inspected the stub-end closely. “If you look through this, you can just make out the name,” he added.

  Penryn confirmed the name after a moment’s perusal through the glass. “It’s got purplish lipstick markings on it, too,” he said.

  “I should not have thought that Melikoffs were the kind of cigarettes the people who walked along this road, and so far from the town, would smoke,” the scientist went on. “Especially the sort who would occupy their time sitting on this gate. That is why I said it was a strange thing to come across.” He put the stub into his wallet. A smile from Penryn he answered with his own. “Never let unusual things pass by, Penryn,” he said. “Not until you are sure that they will not be of some service to you. Now, Merry will label this and put it away in our curiosity cupboard, and there it will stay for six months. It may be nothing; frequently the exhibits find their way to the dustbin. But not always. We did just this very thing, once with a peculiar-coloured stone that was quite foreign to all the other stones in the vicinity. It got a man seven years a few weeks later. If we
hadn’t kept it—”

  A noise in the distance caused him to break off. “That,” he said, “sounds like the bus.” He stepped out and looked down the road. “Yes, it’s coming along. Now I would like to practise a little more psychology. We’ll stay here until the bus is pretty well on to us, then step out and hail it.”

  The trio carried out the manoeuvre. The startled driver jammed his foot on the brake and the vehicle pulled up with a screeching of the tyres. As they climbed aboard Manson noticed that the conductor stared at them and then across at the opening in the bank. Finally, turning again to the three, he scratched his head. Manson smiled a satisfied smile to himself. “We reminded you of something, conductor?” he asked.

  “Funny you should ask that, sir,” was the reply. “You coming out o’ there, sudden-like, sort of startled me. Only ever been stopped there once before, and that were exactly the same way. Only . . .”

  “Only that time it was a woman, eh?” the scientist broke in. “And on your last rota on this route?”

  “That’s right enough, sir . . .” He stopped and gazed at Manson. “But how would you know that, sir?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know it, conductor. I only guessed it. Where did she go?”

  “Right into Tavistock, sir.”

  “Then we will go to the same place. The woman was wearing tweeds and a beret, was she not?”

  “Yes, sir. Very fashionable lady. Which made it funny seeing her out in the wilds, as you might say.”

  The three officers settled down for the journey into the town.

  It was 4.20 when the bus chugged into Tavistock. Penryn checked his watch. “A little on the early side, isn’t it, Doctor?” he asked. “If she dashed to the tea-shop to make as short an absence as she hoped to with the first bus she missed, she would have reached the tea-rooms before 4.45.”

  Manson made no reply, but stopped and seemed to be searching the street for something. He failed, apparently, to find it, for he crossed the road and spoke to a constable on point duty. The officer pointed ahead, and a turning movement of his hand suggested to Merry and Penryn that he was directing the Doctor to a street on the left. This proved, indeed, to be the case. With Manson in the van, the three entered a side turning, where Manson stopped in front of a sign, “Ladies.” He tapped at the door. To a woman who answered he revealed his official standing. “I wonder if you can cast your mind back to about this time four days ago,” he said. “I have reason to believe that a woman came here at this hour and may have sought some attention from you.”

  “Many women do, sir.”

  “Quite. But perhaps this woman was a little out of the ordinary. Firstly, she was a lady. And I think that possibly she would have had mud-stained shoes and dirty hands, and . . .”

  The woman broke in on his description. “Oh, yes, sir,” she said.

  “I remember her very well. She had been walking in the country because she’d missed the bus and she had an appointment for tea. I cleaned her shoes for her . . .”

  “And probably lent her a comb and glass to do her hair?”

  “I did that, sir.”

  “How long would she have been here, would you say?”

  “Nearly twenty minutes, sir.”

  “Would you know her again if you saw her?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m sure I should. She was a very nice lady.” Manson produced the photograph of Mrs. Devereux taken by the street camera-man and handed it to the woman.

  “Oh, yes, sir. That’s her. Why, it’s the same clothes and hat!”

  “Now, Mrs.—?”

  “Allison is the name, sir.”

  “Now, Mrs. Allison. I shall be sending along, presently, a police constable, and I would be very much obliged if you would answer the questions he will ask you. They will be the same questions which I have asked you. He will write them down and ask you to sign the statement. Will you do that?”

  “Well, sir. I don’t think the Council would like me to tell things about the customers.”

  “Never mind about the Council, Mrs. Allison. This is a police matter. I will see that the Council permission is obtained.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  Thanking her, Manson rejoined his companions. Timing themselves, they left the cloakroom entrance at 4.10 and, regaining the main street, walked to the Devonshire Tea Rooms and entered. The time was within a minute of 4.45. Penryn walked up to the counter. “I left my sti . . .” he began, but was interrupted by the manageress. “Your stick, sir. Yes, I have it here. It was on the back of your chair.”

  “Thank you very much. Now, may we have some tea?”

  They sat down at the table where, four hours earlier, they had eaten lunch; and the inspector gazed at Doctor Manson. “By Gad, Doctor,” he said. “You had that worked out almost to a second. How the hell did you do it?” He paused. Then: “You know, I wouldn’t like to be any man whom you were after.”

  Manson was human enough to feel pleasure at the genuine admiration in the voice of the inspector. “How?” he echoed. “Just a little logical reasoning in a very suspicious mind, Penryn. And as a result . . .”

  “Mrs. Devereux’s alibi has gone,” said Penryn.

  CHAPTER XX

  A ROD—AND A FLY

  Doctor Manson was a puzzled man. In an armchair in his room at the Tremarden Arms he stared through the windows, along the blossom-flamed gardens of the hotel. The wrinkles were back on his forehead, and the fingers were tapping restlessly on the arms of the chair. He was as near perturbation as Doctor Manson could ever be.

  On the table in front of him were his examination logbook, his notes of the colonel’s death, and various memoranda which, from time to time, he had made. They were augmented by copies of interviews taken from witnesses who had so far told their stories; and the written results (just to refresh his memory as he put it, though nobody could ever remember the time when Manson’s memory needed refreshing) of his and Merry’s investigations, as well as those of Superintendent Burns and Inspector Penryn.

  He had been reading through the collection and collating them into a mental precis. An hour’s hard work on this task had produced the wrinkles and the doubts shown in the restless fingers. The Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard would have recognised the signs as denoting that something had gone wrong with the scientist’s jigsaw placing: he would have diagnosed that somewhere in Manson’s brain there was a piece that would not fit, and until it did the pattern could not be completed, at least, not so as to satisfy the precise mind of the scientist.

  There were, in fact, three pieces that Manson could not join in the pattern. Presently, he walked across to a side table and gazed down at them. First, he eyed a boot-print cast. From that his eyes moved to an artificial fishing-fly housed in a pill-box fitted with a glass lid; and finally, they came to rest on the colonel’s fishing rod. He roved from one to the other. If he was hoping that they could of themselves solve his difficulties, he was disillusioned, for after a few minutes he returned to his chair to resume his mental deliberations.

  Presently, he seemed to arrive at some decision, for he lifted the telephone receiver and asked to be put through to police headquarters. The answer came a few minutes later, in the entrance of Inspector Penryn and Sergeant Merry. It was to Merry that Manson first spoke.

  “Merry, find out from Franky where Mrs. Devereux is fishing this morning,” he said. “Then, go down to her and ask her some questions. Any questions will do so long as you get her up from the river. I want her to cease fishing quite naturally, as any fisherman would do when asked to chat. And I want you to watch her and see exactly what she does, and how she does it. That is the important thing. Nothing else matters, not even what she says in reply to your questions. Just watch her, and describe to me when you come back what she did.”

  He dismissed Merry to his task with a wave of the hand and turned to Penryn. “Now you, Inspector, I want you to tell me again with all the detail you can what your Indian friend told you about Mrs. De
vereux, in India. Tell me anything you can think of, without bothering whether you consider it interesting or not.”

  Penryn produced his note-book. “It will help me, Doctor, if I refresh myself from the report I made after the talk with Major Ruddock.” For half-an-hour the inspector went over the details of the major’s talk. At the end he sat back and regarded Manson anxiously. “Any help, Doctor?” he asked.

  Manson answered with a question of his own. “Did Major Ruddock say anything of what Mrs. Devereux did after her husband’s death?”

  “Not a great deal, Doctor. I gather that she lost no time in clearing out of India, which she had said she had never liked as a place of residence. Though I gathered, too, that she had had rather a gay time there in spite of that.”

  “Yes, I think that she had had a gay time from what Merry’s old woman said. She seems to have found consolation for a husband in a variety of lovers. However, that has nothing to do with us, except as an insight into her character. We haven’t any evidence that the colonel knew about any of her Riviera lovers; and was holding it as a lever against her in connection with her forthcoming marriage to Sir John Shepstone. That’s what was in your mind, wasn’t it?”

  Penryn grimaced. “Well . . . I had thought of something like that, Doctor,” he said.

  “Yes, but it must be on something that the colonel knew about, and could produce chapter and verse for, Penryn. And Donoughmore, so far as we can find out, had never been to Monte Carlo. There isn’t a single trace of any notes in his possession even mentioning Mrs. Devereux’s name. Now, if Mrs. Devereux had had any lovers in India . . . All right, Penryn, old chap. I don’t see that we can get much further on this trail.”

  With the inspector gone, Doctor Manson sat down again at the table. He extracted a pocket-book, after reading through a number of notes he replaced the book and drawing a sheet of paper to his hand, commenced to write rapidly. The result was a tabulated statement: