“But they are a bit sour, Mr Sheringham,” protested the inspector. “Really!”
“So are the grapes too, I’m afraid,” Roger grinned. “Never mind, Inspector; perhaps I shan’t be on your next case. So the story books are right after all when they talk about Scotland Yard’s professional jealousy of the amateur.”
“True, sir,” said the inspector, shaking his head. “Terribly true.”
“See in the paper this morning that Glamorgan have won their eleventh match this season, Anthony?” Roger remarked airily. “Extraordinary how they’ve come on, isn’t it? We shall see them head of the table soon.”
“Yes, it’s nice to see a county that plays more than one amateur doing well for a change,” Anthony responded with alacrity.
Roger kept the conversation firmly upon cricket till the inspector had swallowed his last mouthful and the dinner things had been cleared away, and even till the inspectorial pipe was well alight and the inspectorial countenance decidedly bored.
“By the way, sir,” remarked Inspector Moresby, relaxing comfortably in the armchair to which he had transferred himself. “By the way, didn’t I hear you say something about having solved the mystery?”
“I thought you’d come round, with time and gentle treatment,” Roger laughed. “Yes, Inspector, joking apart, I really think I have solved it. Care to hear?”
“Of course I would, sir. You mustn’t mind if I pull your leg now and then.”
“Well, I do a bit of that myself,” Roger admitted. “But look here, the trouble is Anthony. I haven’t told him yet, because it’s all bound up with what you confided to me the other night; but of course he wants to hear. Can’t you stretch a point and let me just give him a quick idea of what you told me?”
The inspector hesitated. “You’ll give me your word that it wouldn’t go any further, then, Mr Walton? Not to another mortal soul?”
“On my oath,” Anthony agreed eagerly.
“It’s highly irregular,” sighed the inspector, “but – very well, Mr Sheringham; fire away!”
Roger proceeded to give Anthony a brief outline of how Meadows had met his death and the discovery of the aconitine in the tobacco jar.
“And that’s why I was so interested in tobacco this morning, Anthony, you see,” he concluded, and went on at once to acquaint the inspector with the new discoveries he had then made.
The inspector nodded sagely. “Yes, I wondered whether you’d get hold of that,” he remarked.
“You knew it already?” Roger asked, somewhat dashed.
“A week ago,” replied the inspector laconically.
“But she never told me she’d told anyone before.”
“She didn’t know she had. She doesn’t know she’s told you now. With that sort of person, if you don’t ask ‘em direct questions but just let ‘em dribble their information out in their own way, they’ll tell you everything they know just the same and they won’t realise five minutes later that they’ve told you anything at all. Yes, well, what did you make of it all, Mr Sheringham?”
Roger drew a deep breath.
chapter twenty-five
Roger Solves the Mystery
“Well, I’d better begin at the beginning,” said Roger.
“Now, in the very first place I made up my mind, as you know, Inspector, that the person whom you seemed to be suspecting (whether you really did or not, I don’t know; but you certainly gave me that impression) – I made up my mind that that person was not responsible for Mrs Vane’s death. The evidence was against her, of course, and badly, but there are some cases where circumstantial evidence, however apparently convincing, can lead one rather badly astray, and I was sure this was one of them. I admit that I had nothing definite to go on; my reasons were purely psychological. I felt, quite simply, that to suspect Margaret Cross of murder – and a seemingly cold-blooded, carefully-planned murder at that – was nothing short of ridiculous. The girl was transparently sincere and honest.”
“If it wasn’t she, then, who was it?”
“Well, both of you know that my suspicions finally centred upon this fellow Meadows, alias all the rest of it. I thought I had a pretty good case against him even before we knew anything about him at all; afterward it almost amounted to a foregone conclusion. And then Meadows apparently committed suicide. Well, that didn’t affect my case; if anything (and the circumstances being as they were) it was actually strengthened. But Meadows, it turned out, could hardly have committed suicide at all. He must have been murdered. How did that make things look?
“Now, this is where we jumped to the wrong conclusion, Inspector. At least I did, I can’t answer for you; I’ve never known what was really in your mind from the very beginning. Misled, intentionally or otherwise, by you, I practically assumed that the two murders had been committed by one and the same person – or if I didn’t actually assume that, I came so near it as automatically to wash out the idea that Meadows committed the first. We agreed that they must almost certainly be interdependent, and I accepted your very plausible theory that the strongest and most obvious motive for the second was that Meadows had been an actual eyewitness of the first. And that theory of course eliminated him from the list of suspects. At the same time you made out a very useful case against Vane for the double murder.
“And now I’m afraid we become a little personal.
“Thinking things over in bed last night, away from your magnetic influence, I was suddenly struck by this bright thought: why does Inspector Moresby go to such pains to plant in my mind the idea that both murders were committed by the same person, and to give me the impression that this is what he himself thinks? He’s a reticent sort of devil; he’s never volunteered any ideas of his own worth speaking of before; he knows that in a way we’re rivals here; the last person he’d want to help toward a solution is Roger Sheringham – why? And of course the answer to that came pat: because he wants to put me on the wrong track! He doesn’t think those murders were committed by the same person. On the contrary, he’s convinced they weren’t. How’s that, Inspector?”
The inspector laughed heartily. “No, no, Mr Sheringham,” he said, shaking his head. “You do me an injustice, you do really. That was my honest opinion when I was talking to you last night. I had no doubt at all that Mrs Vane and Meadows were murdered by the same person and I don’t mind admitting it.”
“Humph!” observed Roger, not altogether without scepticism. “And do you still think so?”
“I’m always open to conviction, I hope,” replied the inspector carefully. “Yes, go on, sir. This is very interesting.”
“Well, whether you really thought there were two murderers or whether you didn’t, my base suspicions of you did me one good turn: they biased me in favour of thinking so myself. So when I set out to pay a visit to Meadows’ lodgings this morning, I was already prepared to look for his murderer in somebody other than that of Mrs Vane. Well, I made my investigations, I unearthed a few new facts which looked interesting but which I was blessed at the moment if I could make head or tail of, and I sat down after lunch to try to think the whole thing out.” Roger relit his pipe, which had gone out, and settled himself more comfortably in his chair.
“It wasn’t for some little time that a very simple question occurred to me, to which the answer began at last to put me on the right track. The question was this: what after all has happened to make it so impossible that Meadows should be the murderer of Mrs Vane, as seemed so obvious before? And the answer, of course, was – nothing! Very well, then. Could I get any further with the second mystery by utilising my theory of the two agents to make Meadows the solution of the first?
“Now there were two pointers toward the murderer of Meadows, both somewhat vague – motive and aconitine. Assuming, as I think one had every right to do, that Meadows would not have shrinked from blackmail, the first of these was so wide that I shelved it for a time and concentrated on the second. This was wide too, but it could be narrowed down. If one took
the working assumption that the aconitine had come from Dr Vane’s laboratory, there were, excluding servants and so on, three people who could have got hold of it: Dr Vane himself, Miss Williamson and Miss Cross. Well, for some reason or other (psychological again) I wasn’t drawn toward Dr Vane as the murderer although, as you showed, Inspector, it was possible to make out a pretty convincing case against him – probably because you had gone out of your way to make a pretty convincing case against him, perhaps. In the same way, of course, I had already discarded Miss Cross. There remained Miss Williamson.
“Well, Miss Williamson was a difficulty. Why in the name of goodness should she want to kill Meadows? I could see no possible reason. There would have been a reason, of course, if she had already murdered Mrs Vane – an idea that had already occurred to me by the way, Inspector, and for the same motive, before you put it forward once as a joke, if you remember. There would have been a motive in that case, if Meadows had seen her do it; but I was working on the theory that he had murdered Mrs Vane himself. For the life of me I couldn’t see, if that were the case, how she could possibly be his murderess.”
“Out of the question, I should have said,” interjected the inspector.
“Yes, that’s what I decided. Well, there were all my three suspects discharged without a stain on their characters; so I was driven to the conclusion that either the aconitine had not come from Dr Vane’s laboratory at all, or else Meadows had not killed Mrs Vane. In either case I was in an impasse and had to go back a little way. I went back to motive.
“Now this is where we really do begin to warm up. Do you remember last night, Inspector, you asked me who had the biggest motive for wanting Meadows out of the way, and I replied, somewhat facetiously, that Mrs Vane had? I began to play with that idea.”
“Mrs Vane?” repeated Anthony incredulously. “But she was dead already.”
“When Meadows died, yes; but she had plenty of motive, I imagine, for wanting him out of the way before she died herself. Anyhow you see the idea. I was asking myself, with growing excitement: was there any way in which Mrs Vane could have brought about Meadows’ death, although she herself was already dead? And the answer, of course, was obvious. Yes, there was!” Roger leaned back in his chair and beamed triumphantly at his audience.
“This is very clever, Mr Sheringham,” said the inspector ungrudgingly. “Very clever indeed. Yes, I see now what you’re driving at, but let’s have it in your own words.”
“Well, as you probably discovered yourself, Meadows had had no visitors during the last few weeks, so far as the landlady knew. Any theory, then, which was to cover the insertion of poison in his tobacco must presuppose the murderer’s visit late at night and, probably, through the sitting-room window, with or without Meadows’ own knowledge. But on the night before the murder the landlady, though awake, heard no sounds at all, whereas she had heard a visitor’s voice, quite distinctly, some three weeks beforehand, that visitor being proved to be Mrs Vane.”
“Wait a minute, sir,” said the inspector. “What’s all this about? I don’t know anything of a visit of Mrs Vane’s.”
“Ah!” Roger grinned. “Well, I’m one up on you there at any rate. Look at this!” He drew the little handkerchief out of his pocketbook, tossed it over to the other and explained how it had come into his possession.
“Yes,” agreed the inspector with a rueful air. “Yes, you’re certainly one up on me there, Mr Sheringham.”
“That’s good,” said Roger with undisguised satisfaction. “Well, to continue. Apart from the information about Mrs Vane’s visit, two other facts emerged: one, that Meadows changed his pipes once a week, to which no significance appears to attach, the other, that he was a very small smoker – and that’s very important indeed. I found out from the village shop, you see, that he bought a quarter of a pound at a time, but only smoked it at the rate of an ounce a week. As he evidently emptied the whole lot into that tobacco jar in his room which you sent away to be analysed, that would mean that the bottom of the contents of the jar would remain in place for between three and four weeks. For anybody conversant with his habits, this knowledge might be very useful indeed.”
The inspector nodded slowly. “Very ingenious, sir; very ingenious.”
“Glad you think so, Inspector,” Roger smiled. “I’m quite sure that praise from you is praise worth having. Well, that’s my theory. Mrs Vane and Meadows, to cut a long story short, were both planning to murder each other. Meadows believed in direct methods; Mrs Vane was more painstaking. Both their motives are obvious, I think. Meadows had been threatening her with exposure, no doubt, if she didn’t satisfy his financial demands, which, as Mrs Vane with her knowledge of the type must have realised, would gradually grow bigger and bigger. She had retaliated by threatening to inform the police of his whereabouts, knowing that he was badly wanted by them on more than one charge. The result was that both had succeeded in thoroughly frightening the other, and each decided on the other’s elimination as the only escape from an intolerable situation. That’s perfectly reasonable, I think?”
“Perfectly,” assented the inspector at once.
“Damned cunning,” commented Anthony warmly.
“Thank you, Anthony. Well, Mrs Vane was the more painstaking of the two. She elaborated her plan with, I think, considerable ingenuity. Her knowledge of poisons, you see, was probably twofold; her father was with a firm of wholesale chemists, you said, and she might well have picked up a few tips from him, apart from what she could have got out of her husband’s books. She knew enough at any rate to recognise aconitine as pre-eminently her requirement. And she hit upon poison in the first place, I should have said, because she had an unlimited supply of all brands ready to her hand. What did she do, then? Simply this: having made an excuse for visiting her real husband’s rooms (necessarily in circumstances of profound secrecy), she sent him out of the room on some pretext, slipped the stuff into the bottom of his tobacco jar, and went calmly away to await developments.”
“Which turned out to be somewhat different from what she’d expected,” supplied the inspector.
“Very much so. But of course she thought she was on velvet. She knew the fact of her having been to Meadows’ rooms that night would never leak out, because it was to his advantage to keep quiet about it (though it certainly was short-sighted of her to talk loudly enough to waken the landlady); and having placed the poison at the bottom of the jar, with two or three ounces of harmless stuff on top of it, she knew that it would be at least a fortnight before he would reach it, and by that time she would be miles away with a complete alibi established.”
“Ah, but how do you know that, sir?” asked the inspector, with the air of one who puts his finger on a weak point.
“Because Miss Cross happened to mention it casually to Anthony!” Roger returned triumphantly. “I’d got as far as that in my reasoning, you see, when it occurred to me that the only possible purpose Mrs Vane could have in delaying the death was this one, to provide herself with an alibi. If I could find out, I felt at that stage, that Mrs Vane actually had expressed her intention of going away in the very near future, then my case was as good as clinched. And up pops Anthony with the very information I wanted!”
“So I haven’t lived in vain after all, Inspector, you see,” murmured Anthony facetiously.
“Well, hitherto I’d been working entirely on guesswork, but that seemed to give me the one bit of proof I wanted. After that it was simply a case of using one’s imagination to reconstruct what must have happened. And what did happen can be put blandly in a couple of sentences. Before Mrs Vane’s ingenious scheme could take effect, Meadows had pushed its author over the cliff. Result, Meadows murdered Mrs Vane and Mrs Vane murdered Meadows, in spite of the handicap of being already dead herself. I should think that must be the first time in Scotland Yard’s history that a man had been murdered by a corpse, Inspector, isn’t it? If I wanted to make a detective story out of it and was looking for a nice lurid
title, I should call it The Dead Hand’. Well, now, comments, please. What have you got to say about it all?”
“I’ll say this, sir,” replied the inspector without hesitation. “It’s as clever a bit of constructive reasoning as I’ve ever heard.”
“And the idea had never occurred to you?” pursued Roger, pleased.
“Never,” admitted the inspector handsomely. “And so after all this excitement the public is to be disappointed of an arrest, eh?”
“Well, I’m afraid so.”
There was a little silence.
“Of course it isn’t capable of what you might call proof, Mr Sheringham, is it?” remarked the inspector thoughtfully. “Not the kind of proof to satisfy a court, I mean.”
“No, it isn’t; I know that. But as they’re both dead, justice isn’t going to be cheated.”
“You’re going to publish your solution in the Courier, after the facts have come out at the inquest next Thursday?”
“Yes, but only as an interesting theory, of course. I don’t know whether there’s any law about libelling the dead, but in any case I couldn’t very well do more than put it forward as a workable solution, in the complete absence, as you say, of all proof.”
The inspector smoked a few more minutes in silence.
“I think, sir,” he said slowly, “that you’ll find the official explanation of the whole thing, for the benefit of the public, will be that Mrs Vane’s death was an accident and Meadows committed suicide.”
Roger nodded. “Yes, I’d rather expected that. It’s tame, of course, but it’s safe. Do you mean, you don’t want me to attack that too fiercely in the Courier?”
“Well, we don’t want to stir up mud which it’s impossible to clarify,” replied the inspector, in somewhat deprecating tones.
“I see that. Very well, I promise not to be sarcastic. You must let me put my theory forward, just as an interesting piece of deductive reasoning, but I won’t insist upon its being the truth – and after all,” Roger added, “I can’t defend it, except on the grounds of probability and common sense. However convinced we ourselves may be that it’s the right solution, we’re always up against this unfortunate absence of decisive proof.”
Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery Page 21
