“Well, don’t go away from Croxburn, anyway,” said Inspector Holly, awkwardly. Mannheim bowed again, and turned away. The two men watched the squat figure walk heavily off. “The factory speaks well of him,” said Atkins. “We’re inclined to think he’s O.K. He wouldn’t be about if we didn’t, anyhow.”
The Inspector’s last interview had been with the Vicar, but he had not thought it worth while to make any pressing inquiries. He did not seriously include him in the list of suspects. The only information he got, indeed, was that the Vicar was quite recovered from his rash, which had yielded within the day to the ointment left over from the last attack. There was nothing whatever to show, indeed, that it was anything else but a recrudescence of that disease.
He drew a line under the record of that conversation and stared at the list in front of him. It was half-past ten: perhaps in the morning, he thought, he would get enlightenment.
He pushed the papers aside and deliberately let his thoughts wander. He began to think about the characters in the case separately, as individuals. When this case was over, how would they appear to him? When he met Ransom in the streets—if Ransom was not guilty—he would be quite a different person. Only another Home Guard, a slightly touchy, insignificant-looking, hardworking man, with nothing mysterious about him and no aura of danger and cruelty. Those two fair-haired and undiscoverable workmen, who kept troubling him—who were they and what were they? If they were nothing to do with this case, they would probably be, and remain for ever, just that—two fair-haired workmen with a liking for childish and vulgar jokes. They could not ever be of interest to him again; they were only of interest to him now because of something which, very probably, did not concern them at all and wasn’t even known to them. At one minute of time, if he was successful, all but one of these people would suddenly become not significant at all to him. They would vanish, and one important figure alone would remain. The story of Councillor Grayling, for all but one of them, was an irrelevance in the pattern of their lives. The light it threw on them and the character it gave them was for all but one false and meaningless. Indeed, there was no pattern.
These people were unrelated. They were each one individual persons—who were important—“valid” would be the literary cant word—in themselves and must be looked at alone. Then, maybe, he could find which one would carry on into the next episode and which would vanish and be forgotten. They did not, in fact, did they, have any other connection than that they had travelled in a single coach on a single journey, which had a relation with the crime. If it did have.
He stopped there and looked at the figures. Rolandson; take away the pattern-making and what remained? A rabbit. And rabbits don’t kill. He looked at the workmen; only this thirst for correlation could have made him continue to trouble about them. The Vicar? Well, he had never thought very seriously about him any way; he at least was certainly a man with a life of his own, which had nothing to do with this problem. It was centred round St. Mary the Virgin, that ugly and unwanted church, and made up of small rebuffs and well-meant but ill-directed attempts to reform the parish. He inclined, too, to regard the German doctor’s appearance on the record as accidental. Suppose he was a spy. It was still not likely that a German spy should travel the very strange path that would lead to killing a disagreeable and unimportant town councillor. You could make yourself think so; he had done so for a moment. But it was not sensible. Ransom too—Holly had the policeman’s usual respect for the importance of a “record,” but the record was only of picking pockets; and he too seemed an accident.
Forethought; where could he suspect forethought? There was only one person whose connection was not accidental, whose life itself was not necessarily intertwined with Grayling’s life, and death, whom he could not picture as surviving unchanged after all was over. And that was the person whom he had least pressed, Mrs. Grayling.
She had seemed “out.” But that was because her statements had been accepted as true, with only a limited checking up. Suppose they were all false—as they would be if she were guilty. He decided to test them—to tap them all over as one taps a wall to discover a hollow sound which may indicate a hiding-place.
She said he had come home late, and ill. Suppose that he had come home at the ordinary time, perfectly well. Would anyone have noticed? No, it was the maid’s night out and the night was pitch black. Could anything have happened between then and the time when the doctor came? Well, how long was that time? He looked again at the papers. Mrs. Grayling had refused to be exact; the doctor had not noted the time, but knew that it was “after ten.” The Vicar had been sent for by Mrs. Grayling for what seemed on consideration to be insufficient reasons, and it had been eleven by the time he came. It could have been Mrs. Grayling’s idea that he would help to provide a sort of alibi; he certainly had helped to create the atmosphere she wanted and frame the picture of a dutiful wife doing all that she could for her stricken husband. But he was no use as a witness to time. If Grayling had arrived at the usual time, soon after seven, there were some three hours to be accounted for before the doctor had arrived. Did an innocent wife, with a telephone to her hand, leave her husband dying all that time? Or, what was perhaps a more pertinent question, could she have killed him in that time, and how?
The door of his room opened and the sergeant-in-charge came in. “Working late to-night, sir,” he said. “I thought you’d like a cup of tea.” “Thank you,” said the Inspector. The tea was hot, dark, sweet and made with tinned milk. Holly poured part of it into the saucer, which was not very clean, and drank it slowly and with noise. He filled up the saucer again afterwards, and, that having finished the tea, said: “Thank you. Yes, a cup of tea’s a comfort. I’ll be going along now.”
He had hoped to continue his thoughts as he picked his way along the dark street, but within five minutes he had stepped hard against a fixed sandbin, and had realized that he had better give all his attention to his journey. He had broken the skin of his shin and blood was running down inside his clothes, forming a thick and sticky clot lengthwise in his heavy woollen underpants. In bed, the trivial wound tied clumsily up with a handkerchief, and aching, he took up his disturbed argument.
There was time enough for Mrs. Grayling to have murdered her husband by the use of mustard gas. Yes. That was sure. If she could have induced him to breathe the gas for much less than those three hours he would have died. But how on earth could she? Supposing she had drugged him somehow? There were no traces mentioned of chloroform, but that was not final; it could easily have been missed in the surprising and highly noticeable symptoms caused by poison gas—and, as a matter of fact, he reflected, these would conveniently conceal the usual symptoms of chloroform. But it was incredible that he could have meekly consented to be chloroformed. He would have fought her; and she was not noticeably a strong woman; he might have won. Certainly, there would have been some noise; and inquiries of neighbours on both sides had shown that they at least had noticed no noise. If she had come behind him and slugged him without warning, then there would have been marks of a bruise on the head or the body. There were none; as a matter of routine he had inquired about that at the very beginning.
He fidgeted in his bed and turned on the other side. The solution was slipping out of his hands. Yet he felt sure—well, fairly sure—that his eyes were at last fixed on the guilty person. And then an even more vexing objection occurred to him. Suppose somehow Mrs. Grayling knocked her husband out silently, without leaving a mark and then calmly gassed him—as she would have been quite capable of doing. What happened to the gas? The house would have reeked of it, if he had had enough to kill him. She would have had to receive Doctor Hopkins with her gasmask on; and everyone who had been in the house would have been as sick as a dog in the morning. Yet nobody was affected at all.
It wouldn’t work. The poison must have been administered in the open air. Possibly, as he had thought before, the victim might have been tricked into giving it to himself, in little pac
kets each time he used his handkerchief in the railway carriage. But apart from that theory, which he now thought was far-fetched, it was inconceivable that it could have been administered except out of doors. By no other means could the murderer have got the stuff to clear away under some hours.
He grunted, threw out his hot-water bottle, and went to sleep.
In the morning, drinking tea and eating, to his great pleasure and surprise, a kipper, he reconsidered Mrs. Grayling’s evidence; and quite suddenly a light came in his face. Hadn’t she said that she took her husband into the kitchen where “the window was broken and the blackout torn down”? Why had she said that? No doubt because it was true; and because she thought he might discover it anyhow. What did it mean? Easy, go easy! He held the thought, and almost watched it. She broke it, and she tore down the black-out. She wanted a room where no one could go into—during the hours of darkness, anyway—and a room from which poison gas would clear away easily. No one could go into that room until nearly eight the next morning, or the wardens would be down on them when the light was turned on. No doubt she had put a notice on the door—probably, locked it, too. By the morning even a high concentration of gas would have escaped through the broken windows. Certainly, she told the truth when she said that she had taken her husband into the kitchen. And when he was there she had stunned him and made him powerless some way (that could be left vague for the minute) and kept him under gas for as long as she felt it necessary. Holly felt he could see her calmly doing this, wearing her gasmask and probably a pair of rubber gloves, quite coolly and efficiently in the dark. He wondered whether she stayed by her husband to make sure that he died and did not recover his senses, or whether she went out and shut the door, sitting in the front room and pretending to wait for him, while he slowly choked to death beside the kitchen table. She was a good liar, he thought respectfully; she obeyed the central principle of skilled lying, which was to tell as near to the truth as you possibly can, and omit or change only the essential. She had told the police almost everything that occurred, and almost exactly. He would be prepared to swear that all minor details were correct, even where they could not be corroborated. He was pretty sure that she knew nothing about the missing money, for example.
He had spent longer than usual over his breakfast, but at the end had decided that he would that morning consult the Superintendent and ask him whether he thought there was enough evidence to take out a warrant against Mrs. Grayling. He was not yet sure of his hypothesis; he wanted support. He arrived twenty minutes late at the station, to be told that the Super, had left seven minutes before. He had been called to London, to a conference of suburban police heads summoned by the Home Office. It was announced to be of considerable importance and was to be addressed by Mr. Herbert Morrison in person. It would probably last all the day, and it was quite out of the question to get a message to the Super., still less bring him away from it.
Holly reflected a few minutes, considered abandoning his plans for a day, and then decided that he must at least do something. He would not himself apply for a warrant. That was a very grave step; if he turned out to be wrong there would be a deep black mark against him. But he would do the next best thing. He would go and call on Mrs. Grayling, taking with him a shorthand writer, and he would warn her before he questioned her. He would do his very best to shake her by his manner; and he would take her through every detail of the evening. He would end by warning her not to leave Croxburn and he would have her watched—not making too much concealment about it, either. He might by these means get enough evidence to persuade the Super, to-morrow to ask for a warrant.
He arrived at the Graylings’ house, in uniform and with a uniformed shorthand writer, at eleven that morning. Mrs. Grayling’s maid had left her, and she opened the door to them herself. She invited them in civilly; Holly marched into the sitting-room without replying a word.
“Certain facts have come to our knowledge, madam,” he said, “which make it necessary for me to question you again. You are not, of course, compelled to answer these questions; I shall, naturally, however, draw my own conclusions if you refuse. The constable who is with me will take notes of your replies and I should warn you that they may be used in evidence.”
Renata Grayling said nothing. She licked her lips, and looked rather white. But she was probably no paler than usual, Holly reflected. As she did not answer, he began:
“What was your husband’s usual time for homecoming?”
She waited perceptibly, and then said: “Ten past seven.”
“You told me before that it was half-past seven.”
“I do not remember doing so. I was mistaken if I did.”
“I think I know why you did. Never mind that, now, though. Where did you take your husband after, as you said, he fell in at the door?”
“I told you. To the kitchen.”
“Why?”
“To bathe his face.”
“You said, I think, that the window was broken and the black-out destroyed. When did you break that window, Mrs. Grayling, and why?”
“I did not break it.”
“Who did then? The servant? She will remember, I suppose.”
There was again a pause, and Mrs. Grayling said: “I suppose a boy must have thrown a stone, or something. I haven’t thought about it.”
“Indeed?” Holly did as good a sneer as he could manage. “Very well, then. Now let me ask about times again. Do you still claim that your husband did not come in till nearly eight—taking almost an hour for a ten-minute walk?”
“I—I am not sure. I did not notice the time. It may have been earlier.”
“It may have been earlier. I see. Now, when did you telephone for Dr. Hopkins?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you be surprised if I told you that it was well after ten o’clock?”
Renata said nothing.
“Come, Mrs. Grayling, this will not do. You tell me that your husband is in this house, in state of collapse and in the most obvious pain and danger, and you let three hours pass before you even trouble to telephone the doctor?”
Renata seemed at last a little disturbed. “I do not think it was so long,” she said at last.
“It was,” said Holly. “You must see that for yourself. Mrs. Grayling, isn’t there something you wish to add to your statement? You have not been telling the truth. That we are sure of. If you are protecting someone else, you should stop doing so now. It is no good; we know too much now. Was Mr. Rolandson here?” A pause followed, but no answer. “If it is yourself you are thinking of—believe me, it is still no good. Mrs. Grayling, I beg of you. Haven’t you something to say to me?”
The last words were spoken with all the solemnity he could manage. Renata only put her handkerchief to her mouth and shook her head.
“I must ask you not to leave Croxburn till further notice,” said the Inspector as he went. He did not look back as he left, but nodded to a plain clothes man standing at the corner.
2
Hugh Rolandson was a badly frightened young man. The Inspector had scared him very competently. His mistress, to whom as usual he had carried his troubles, had been silent and unwilling or unable to help him. Three days later he was still sleeping badly: he lay awake, the fear of death close to him, until five in the morning, and then fell from exhaustion into a heavy slumber. As a result he overslept and did not get up till nearly nine o’clock. He refused the hot coffee his mother querulously offered and ran for his train, thrusting into his pocket without reading it the one letter waiting for him on the hall table.
It was not until after the train had started that he drew the typewritten envelope out of his pocket and began to read the letter it contained. Then the change in his appearance was so remarkable that the woman opposite him thought he was gravely ill. When he got in, she had seen a rather slovenly, unshaven, fair young man, with dark rings under his eyes but otherwise in no way unusual. Her attention was called by a hoarse noise coming from
him, something between a rattle and a choke. His face had gone completely yellow and the whole of it glistened with sweat. His mouth had fallen open; unconsciously, he was dribbling slightly. His eyes were fixed on the paper before him; they gave the illusion of protruding. His nostrils were twitching curiously. She expected a fit, and held her hand ready to pull the alarm cord.
The letter was from Renata Grayling. It had been their old habit to type their envelopes, for concealment’s sake—a habit recently and disastrously abandoned. It said:
My darling Hugh,
I have written and rewritten this letter so often. I do not know if even now I can say exactly what I want to say, but it will have to do. I have all my life taken my own decisions and acted on my own responsibility. I am going to do so again now. I did so once too often before, when I killed Henry. For I did kill him, I am afraid that has got to come out now. It can’t be hidden any more. I have thought about it very carefully. I did not realize that the Inspector could make such a case against you: I never knew till too late that you had travelled home with Henry. I would not, my dear, anyway send you to the gallows. But I don’t think that I have that choice any longer. The Inspector called on me after he had talked to you and asked me a series of questions that made it quite clear, when I thought about them afterwards, that he knew what had happened and was collecting the last evidence. He took me carefully and slowly through a sort of time-table of that evening, asking me each little thing that I did, and as soon as he did that it was quite clear that nothing would be left of my story.
This is a very confused letter, but it is a confused and unhappy woman who is writing it. I suppose you will have to know what exactly I did, because of the police. Henry didn’t come home late, as I said, he came home just at the usual time. I waited till he had shut the door and then knocked him senseless. You know we had been taught how to do it in the unarmed combat lessons, with a blow from the side of your hand on the side of the temple. It doesn’t leave a mark. Then I pulled him into the kitchen and put a pad of chloroform on his face for a few minutes. I gave him enough to keep him under an hour or so and then burnt the pad in the kitchen boiler. Then I put on my gas mask and gloves and put another pad soaked in mustard gas on his face, with oiled silk on top of it to keep some of the gas from filling the room. But I also turned out the light, broke the kitchen window and tore down the black-out, so no one could go in and the fumes would have vanished by the morning. I left him breathing in thick poison gas for about two hours, I suppose. I didn’t call Dr. Hopkins till I was quite sure, later than I pretended. I carried him upstairs just before the doctor came.
Somebody at the Door Page 21
