“Well, seeing that you’d had them in your hands not twenty-four hours before, I thought you might have recognised them. Didn’t you get hold of a pair of Mrs Russell’s shoes, and give them to Miss Cross to give back for you?”
“Great Scott, you don’t mean to say those were the ones?”
“Indeed they were, sir, as it wouldn’t have taken you five minutes to find out, if you’d ever thought of it. The girl lost her head a bit over that. It’s easy enough to see what happened. You’d been putting forward the idea that the murderer was a man, who made those marks with a pair of woman’s shoes to throw us off the track. She’s getting pretty desperate by then, seeing how strongly I suspected her (I never troubled to hide that), so she makes some excuse to get away, nips back to the house, slashes the shoes up the sides to give the impression they’d been prepared for big feet, and throws them over the top of the cliff. Then she makes another excuse to get you down on the ledge, where they can be found. Why, bless you, sir, you never found those shoes! She did!”
“It’s perfectly true,” Roger muttered. “She did. I remember.”
“Yes, it’s all plain enough as far as common sense goes, but no good for a court of law, I’m afraid. A smart counsel could tear all that to shreds with his eyes shut. The same with the second case too.”
“Yes, go on to that.”
“Well, there, sir, I really did my best to put you on the right track. I told you that Meadows was murdered by the same person who killed Mrs Vane, and because he’d seen the first murder done, I told you that, and I told you that it must have been someone who had access to aconitine. You said just now you thought I meant Dr Vane, but I didn’t, of course; I meant the girl. And then the funny thing is you thought I was trying to pull your leg. Why, it’s all been staring you in the face. I’ve heard you with my own ears talking with Mr Walton about how funnily Miss Cross was behaving, wanting to go over to France one minute and stay here the next and all the rest of it; and all you thought was that it was nerves. So it was, but not the kind you meant!
“And I’d given you another hint long before that, when I told you there was real bad blood in that family. I told you straight out they were practically all of them criminals; and still you thought she couldn’t be, just because she had an innocent face. Of course the first thing I’d done was to have the records searched for her at the Yard, and found her in them too. Never actually been in prison, you understand, but mixed up before she came here with a very shady crew indeed; a house she got a job in as a parlourmaid was burgled, for instance, and another where she was supposed to be the governess; we never laid our hands on the lot that did it but there’s no doubt that she was in with them, though nothing could be proved against her. Oh, and several other things too. She was a bad lot all right before she ever came here, but clever – oh, yes, clever enough.”
“Go on to the second case,” said Roger feebly.
The inspector paused and marshalled his ideas. “Well, now, there, sir, you made a very bad mistake indeed,” he said with some severity. “You jumped to the conclusion that Meadows was killed by aconitine in his tobacco. If you’d troubled to read up aconitine as you ought to have done, you’d have found out that it’s a vegetable alkaloid, and vegetable alkaloids lose all their power if they’re burnt. You can smoke as much aconitine in your tobacco as you like, and it isn’t going to do you any harm.”
“But that’s what killed him,” Roger protested.
“Oh, no, it isn’t, sir, if you’ll pardon me. He was killed by aconitine placed in his pipe, not his tobacco. Aconitine was put in the bowl or the stem of his pipe, sir, where his saliva melted it, and he swallowed it before he knew what he’d done. And that not only proves that it couldn’t have been put there three weeks before, as you thought, but must have been during the previous night, but also that it was put there by someone who knew a little about poisons but not very much, for otherwise there’d have been none wasted in the tobacco. She meant to make sure of the job all right, by the way; there was enough of the stuff there to kill a hundred people.”
“But wait a minute!” Roger interrupted. “You’re wrong there, Inspector. It could have been put there by Mrs Vane. I found out that Meadows only smoked his pipes a week at a time, remember!”
The inspector’s expression was more pitying than chagrined. “Yes, but did you find out when he changed them, Mr Sheringham, sir? I did, you see. On Sunday mornings. So it couldn’t have been Mrs Vane after all. It was somebody who came during that previous night, while he was asleep. It wasn’t the doctor, because he’d never have put the stuff in the tobacco; there’s no conceivable reason why it should have been Miss Williamson; it must have been Miss Cross. But there again there’s no absolute proof.”
“Well,” said Roger, “I’ll be damned!”
The inspector helped himself with an absent air from the bottle of whisky which stood, flanked by a couple of syphons, on a small table at his elbows. He sipped his drink thoughtfully.
“And you’re not going to apply for a warrant?” Roger asked, when all this had sunk into him. “You’re going to let her get away with it?”
The inspector allowed a little whisky to sink into him. “No help for it, I’m sorry to say. We could never get a conviction. As I said, I think you’ll find that the verdict next Thursday will be suicide, and we shall let it rest at that; the verdict of accidental death on Mrs Vane as well. It isn’t the first time this has happened, you know. There’s any number of people walking about today, free men and women, that we know to be murderers, but we can’t prove it to the satisfaction of a court.”
“Yes, I know that, of course,” Roger nodded. “Legal proof is a very different thing from moral conviction. Well, I must say I’m not sorry. They were two distinctly unpleasant specimens of humanity of which she ridded the world, and I should be sorry to hear of her hanging for them. But – poor Colin!”
“Be thankful she hasn’t got into your own family, Mr Sheringham, sir,” replied the inspector philosophically. “And I dare say she won’t make him a bad wife when all’s said and done. It was his money she was after, of course; now she’s got that, and an established position, she may settle down all right.”
“Not the sort of wife I’d choose myself for all that,” Roger said with a little shiver. “Yes, she must have been after his money, I suppose. As no doubt Mrs Vane was before her.”
“No, sir,” said the inspector meditatively. “I’m inclined to think Mrs Vane wasn’t; I think she was genuinely fond of the boy. Margaret knew about her affair with him, of course, and that was another reason for wanting her out of the way. That’s why the engagement was kept so secret too. She knew her cousin would never give him up to her, and would certainly cut her out of her will as well. By the way, it may interest you to know that the doctor’s marriage settlement is invalidated, as Mrs Vane was never his legal wife; I had the wording looked into and a legal opinion taken. So the girl doesn’t get that ten thousand after all.”
‘ “Much Ado About Nothing’,” Roger commented ironically.
“Or ‘The Dead Hand’,” smiled the inspector. “That was a good title of yours after all, sir, because it was the button in Mrs Vane’s dead hand that makes the whole thing so certain.”
Roger stifled a yawn and looked at his watch. “Good Heavens, do you know it’s past two, Inspector? We’d better get to bed. Though whether I shall sleep very much is another question. All this is a little upsetting, you must understand. By Jove,” he added as he rose to his feet, “do you know, even now I can hardly believe that she did it!”
The inspector smiled at him tolerantly as he also rose. “Because she looked pretty and innocent, and you thought at one time she might be going to make a match of it with your cousin, sir? Because you saw her, in fact, as the pretty little heroine of one of your own books?”
“I suppose so,” Roger admitted.
The inspector patted him on the shoulder with a large and consoling hand. “Do y
ou know what’s the matter with you, sir?” he said kindly. “You’ve been reading too many of those detective stories.”
Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery Page 23
