Comes a Stranger

by E. R. Punshon

  “I never thought to hear a man stand up and tell how he had done a thing like that—and us police and all.”

  “Murder all right, and he done it,” his companion said; “and he knows we know, and he don’t give that—” The speaker snapped finger and thumb together. “For why? because he knows he’ll never hang.”

  “There are worse deaths than hanging,” Bobby said, and wondered, when the others looked at him, why he had said that, for the words had come spontaneously, as if his tongue had repeated something whispered in his ear.

  “We’ll never even know who she was, poor soul,” Killick said.

  Major Harley turned to Bobby.

  “What do you think, Owen?” he asked.

  “I think, sir, if we both wrote down a name, it would be the same,” Bobby answered.

  “You’ll write the same name, Killick, when you’ve had time to look through the papers more carefully,” the Major explained to the puzzled looking superintendent. “At least, I expect you will but we’ll see. Only I don’t know what action we can take.”

  They went on with their work. The poor remaining relics were collected. The turned-up earth was examined almost grain by grain to see if anything further could be found, but without success. Not even a shred or remnant of clothing, no button or clasp or buckle, no article of jewellery, none of those more durable objects that most of us carry in our pockets or that are a part of our clothes.

  “He said ‘stripped’,” one of the searchers remarked. “You noticed that? ‘Stripped’, he said. Means she was put in there stark naked so as to make sure nothing shouldn’t ever be found. How did he know that if it wasn’t him did it?”

  “Never be proved,” said another, “and so he’ll never swing, and if there’s worse waiting for him, same as the London bloke said just now, well, I hope it won’t be long.”

  “Well, anyhow,” Killick said, “the poor soul will have Christian burial now.”

  This fresh discovery involved a good deal of extra work. The coroner had to be notified, since an inquest would be necessary. Various other formalities of routine had to be gone through. Journalists, for the news was beginning to get about now, had to be dealt with. It was late before Bobby could slip away to get lunch—his breakfast had been no more than the hurried outline of a meal—and at the inn he found as he had hoped might be the case, Olive waiting for him.

  “I suppose you’ve heard,” he said.

  “It’s so terrible,” she said, “to think all this time—and often and often I’ve gone there to sit. Bobby, who can she have been?”

  “You heard it was a woman?” he asked. “We were trying not to let that out yet.”

  “Miss Perkins told me,” Olive explained. “I met her in the drive as she was coming to work, and she told me a woman had been buried there, and you had found the skeleton.”

  “Oh, yes,” Bobby said. “She came up while we were digging. I am wondering how she happened to be there?”

  “She told me she couldn’t sleep. I don’t wonder either. She said she got up to have a walk because of having been awake all night, and she thought a walk would do her good, and then she saw you there and went to see what was happening. Mr. Broast was there, too, she said.”

  “Yes, he was,” agreed Bobby moodily.

  “Miss Perkins said he laughed. He said you would never be able to do anything because it was all so long ago. Then he laughed. Miss Perkins said he needn’t be too sure. She was very excited and upset, almost as much by his laughing as by what you found. She said it was dreadful to hear him laughing, and I expect it was.”

  “He shouldn’t have laughed,” Bobby said. “He shouldn’t have let her see him laughing.”

  “I think it was horrid of him,” Olive said, “only I think every one is so upset, we are none of us quite normal. What’s going to happen now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bobby. “Major Harley’s very worried. He doesn’t know what action to take. Not much he can do. Does Miss Kayne know?”

  “Yes. We told her as soon as she came downstairs. She didn’t say anything except one thing, I don’t know what it means. She said:— ‘I knew her at once.’ She said that before. Does she mean she knows who it is was buried there? She went to ask Mr. Broast about it. It’s the first time I’ve known her visit the library for ever so long. She looked awful. Bobby, how long is it since—since it was done?”

  “Since the body was hidden?” Bobby asked. “I haven’t much idea. Major Harley will try to get expert opinion. Good long time anyhow—some years. I wonder if Miss Kayne has any idea?”

  “She won’t say anything,” Olive said. “She just sits there and you can almost see her waiting, but you don’t know what for. It’s almost like the way you think people condemned to death sit and wait. Bobby, I don’t think I can stand it much longer.”

  “I don’t think you ought to,” Bobby said. “I don’t think you ought to have stood it as long as you have.”

  “I shall tell her I can’t, it’s not right,” Olive said passionately. “I shall tell her she must come away to London with me. Bobby, what is Major Harley going to do?”

  Bobby shook his head.

  “I’ve no idea,” he said. “There’s to be a conference.”

  “Do you think—do they think this was murder, too?”

  “There’s nothing to suggest murder, except, of course, the secrecy of the burial,” Bobby answered. “That suggests murder, but it’s not proof. There does not seem to be any injury showing to prove violence. Major Harley was talking of having the soil analysed to see if any trace of poison could be found. Doesn’t sound very hopeful to me. There’ll be all sorts of experts turned loose, I expect. I don’t see what they can prove, I don’t see how identity is going to be proved, either. You may know things you can’t prove. It looks as if the body had been stripped”—he hesitated before he used the word—“stripped of everything that would be likely to resist decay and afford any clue. All we have to go on is that it was a woman of a certain height, and most likely the doctors will be able to make a good guess at her age and weight, and perhaps give some idea of her appearance—I believe they claim they can reconstruct a face from the line of the skull, though only to a very limited degree. There’ll be a lot of inquiries made, but they’ll have to be made in the dark. Of course, there’s always the chance of someone knowing something and coming forward.”

  “Will Miss Kayne have to be questioned? I don’t think she’s in a fit state.”

  “Well, I believe Major Harley intends to see her this afternoon. I heard him say something to Killick.”

  “Not to you?”

  “No. My job this afternoon is to draw up a memo. I’ve put a theory to Major Harley he wants me to get down on paper in full details. He knows what it is, of course, but he wants it for the conference, and then I think he means to take the advice of the Public Prosecutor’s office. I think, myself, we ought to act at once. I’m afraid of—well, of something else happening. I don’t feel as if we were at the end yet. We ought to take precautionary action. I know it’s difficult.”

  “Doesn’t Major Harley want to do that?”

  “It would be his responsibility. It’s one thing for a sergeant to advise, privately, another for a chief constable to act publicly. In this country the police have jolly well got to watch their step. English people keep a sharp eye on their police—quite right, too. A policeman can easily turn into a bully, he has a little brief authority and it’s up to the public to see he plays no fantastic tricks to make the angels weep. Killick is strongly against taking any action—yet. Against precipitate action, he says, before it’s ripe.”

  “What does he mean—ripe?”

  “Cunning old beggar. No flies on Killick. His idea is for us to lie low and wait for a mistake. It’s a good plan very often. If you do nothing, then they think you must be doing something, and they get nervous, and then they do something themselves, and that’s where you get them. Only—sometimes what happens is
n’t what you expected.”

  “You’ve got something in your mind, Bobby? The theory you are putting in your memo?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “I’ve got to have a chat with Mrs. Payne first though—you know, Mrs. Somerville’s friend. She’s been away visiting a daughter, but I did make sure that she was about the only person in the village who isn’t on the wireless.”

  “Is that important?” Olive asked, and Bobby nodded, though without explaining why, and after they had talked a little Olive returned to the Lodge firm in her resolve to insist on Miss Kayne’s leaving at once for London, while Bobby devoted himself to the composition of his memorandum.

  It was long and elaborate, a mass indeed of small details. But now it began to seem to him that in this accumulation of detail the pattern of a logical development and plan was becoming manifest.

  It was possible now, for instance, to be sure that of those points so carefully lettered from A to K that he and Major Harley had from the start thought worth careful consideration, only those they had called H and K seemed wholly irrelevant. In the others, the whole series of recent events had been implicit, if only it had been possible then to appreciate their full and true significance.

  Of course, besides these, there were other incidents and details that now appeared invested with a meaning hidden at the time.

  Very important, for instance, seemed that glimpse of Miss Perkins at her bedroom window he and Mills had had as they drove by on the night of the Kayne murder. Important, too, in the same connection was the fact he had just mentioned to Olive that in a village of wireless devotees Mrs. Somerville had that same night been visiting the only one of the inhabitants not provided with a wireless set.

  In his memorandum, too, he drew special attention to three things said and done by Miss Kayne: first, her cry mentioned by Olive that there was an unspecified person she had recognized again at once. Bobby now felt fairly certain who that person must be, and why Miss Kayne had been so sure of her recognition. Secondly, there was her half contemptuous, half challenging declaration to Bobby himself that Virtue’s story was both a lie and the truth. Bobby felt he could now understand how that might be. Thirdly, too, there was her futile, and on the face of it meaningless, accusation of theft against Miss Perkins, the accusation that Mr. Broast had simply laughed away. Bobby was inclined to think that he could guess both why the accusation had been made and why it had been withdrawn.

  Another point to which he felt that it was necessary to attach great significance was the abrupt manner in which Miss Perkins had announced her belief in a marriage existing between Mr. Broast and Miss Kayne. She must have suspected it long enough, and Bobby thought he perceived now why she had chosen that particular moment to tell him of it.

  Miss Kayne’s story of her former lover’s buried letters and poems had naturally always been in the forefront of his mind, and though now he was inclined to think it untrue, yet he felt also it might well contain the cause and origin of these so many deaths that had come, as a stranger, into this quiet countryside.

  Finally, there was the incident of the damage done to the portrait Olive’s father had painted of Miss Kayne as a young girl as well as the more recent incident of the forget-me-nots some unknown person had sent him.

  All these things it seemed to him now took their place in a coherent scheme, a closely-woven pattern of cause and effect: a series in terms of, because that was, therefore this must be.

  When at last he finished, feeling that now his theory was complete and that even the Public Prosecutor’s department, adepts though they are at the job, would have some difficulty in picking holes in it, he went back to the police station, where he found Killick. He handed in his memo, and with some hesitation, for it is a delicate matter to suggest a course of action to superior officers, he said:

  “You know, sir, if I may say so, and if Major Harley agrees, I do think it would be better to act at once without bothering about the Public Prosecutor’s office or anything else. I feel a bit uneasy after that scene this morning.”

  “Yes, I know,” agreed Killick, not usually a nervous man, but now evidently on edge. “I’ll get in touch with Major Harley at once. I’ll back you up now, and I don’t suppose he’ll object. It’s taking a big responsibility, but then so is waiting any longer.”

  The telephone bell rang. They heard the constable on duty answer it. He was one of those who had helped in the digging that morning. A moment later he came running.

  “The Lodge, sir—that was Miss Perkins. She says as Mr. Broast has done himself in and will we go along at once? Poison, she says, and she saw him take it.”

  “Suicide,” said Killick dispassionately. “Well, that’s that, and some ways it’s best.”

  “Plain enough it was, after how he carried on this morning,” said the constable. “Defiant, I call it. Defiant, a sort of ‘Yes, that’s me, and what are you going to do about it?’ Well, now he’s gone and been and saved us a lot of trouble.”

  “No hurry now,” observed Bobby. “We can take our time, now.”

  “Only,” said Killick thoughtfully. “I wonder why? when he made it so plain this morning he felt as safe as houses.”

  “It gets them in the end,” said the constable; “it does that, I’ve seen it before. In the end it gets them.”

  CHAPTER XXVI

  TEACUPS

  At the lodge Major Harley, Killick, Bobby, were received by Olive, who had been obliged to take charge of a thoroughly disorganized household, with two maids in recurring hysterics, Miss Kayne shut up in her bedroom and refusing to answer knocks at her door, the butler, Briggs, in a state of dithering helplessness.

  He had called up apparently every doctor he could think of, and two were already on the scene. Mr. Broast’s body had been carried into the dining-room and laid on a couch there. Death had already taken place before the arrival of either doctor, and the characteristic symptoms of poisoning by strychnine were too plainly marked for any doubt to exist concerning the cause of death.

  On the table lay, too, a neatly-typed statement, signed ‘Eliza Perkins,’ giving a very brief, yet clear and detailed account of what had happened.

  Two cups of tea had been brought to the library by one of the maids at four o’clock, as was part of the established routine of the household. Tea was always served at four and Miss Kayne always poured out two cups, which were taken, with a plate of biscuits, to the library, one cup for Mr. Broast and one for Miss Perkins. Miss Perkins kept one cup for herself and one or two of the biscuits, and took the other cup and the remaining biscuits to Mr. Broast.

  On this occasion all had passed as usual. But the statement went on to say that Miss Perkins had seen Mr. Broast shake a few grains of a white powder into the cup as soon as she put it down by his side. She had not, the statement said, attached any importance to the incident at the time. She had merely supposed that he was taking some kind of medicine or tonic. He had made a rather odd remark. It was: “Well, they’ve dug something up, but I know the answer to that.” She had not known what he meant. She had not asked because it was never wise to ask Mr. Broast what anything meant. He expected you to know. Sometimes, of course, you had to, and then you nearly got your head bitten off. On this occasion she had not thought it necessary to ask the meaning of a remark apparently not specially addressed to her. She had gone away to get on with her work, of which there was plenty waiting. At five o’clock, having occasion to speak to Mr. Broast to get his instructions, she had gone into the library again and had found him lying on the floor in convulsions. She had at once given the alarm.

  The statement was precise, very nicely typed, quite clear, and phrased in curiously formal language. When he had read it, Major Harley said discontentedly:

  “Might be a letter to a bookseller, ordering new stuff. Owen, ask if we can see Miss Kayne.”

  Bobby went to find her. Meanwhile the little party adjourned to the breakfast-room and the dead man’s body was removed to his own apartment. M
iss Kayne was still not visible, and when Bobby got Olive to go to her room, Olive returned looking a little worried.

  “She’s not there,” she said. “Briggs says he saw her a few minutes ago going down the library corridor. Bobby, why is she going to the library? Briggs says she looked so strange he asked if he could do anything, and she said, no, but there was something she must do, because now it was enough. What did she mean?”

  “What did she mean by the ‘something’ she had to do?” Bobby countered.

  “I don’t know,” Olive answered. “I think it’s the library, I mean something about the library. I think she hates it more and more every day, I think she thinks it has been the cause of everything.”

  “Better see what Major Harley thinks, I suppose,” Bobby said.

  He went back to the breakfast-room where the police party had now established itself. Major Harley was reading a telegram that had just arrived. It was the reply to the one Bobby had sent off to the Fromavon authorities and the Major handed it across to Bobby to read.

  “Much what you expected,” he said, and then returned to question the maid for whom he had sent and who now came into the room. She was still hovering on the border of hysterics, but finally, by tactful treatment, was induced to explain that she always collected the used tea cups from the library at half-past four, but on this occasion when she went for them she was given only Miss Perkins’s cup, Miss Perkins explaining that Mr. Broast had not yet drunk his tea. That had surprised her a little, but she hadn’t thought much of it.

  “It was unusual?” Major Harley asked.

  The maid could not remember that it had ever happened before. Not that she had given it a second thought at the time. But it was notorious that Mr. Broast liked his tea scalding hot. He always drank it at once, and grumbled if for any reason it had gone cold. It was the same at breakfast. He always drank it the moment it was poured out, and if it wasn’t hot—‘fair boiling’ was the maid’s expression—he would ask for it to be thrown away and fresh poured out at the desired temperature. Olive, questioned, agreed that this peculiarity was well known.