Murder in the Mill-Race

by E. C. R. Lorac

  “It was her eyes, poor soul,” said Hannah. “Sister wouldn’t never have them seen to. She had a pair of glasses for reading, but she got them from the market, same as I did before the National Health. That’d be it, you mark my words. ‘You can’t see them stairs like you used, Sister,’ I said. ‘We’re none of us so young as we were.’”

  “Who cleaned her bedroom?” enquired Macdonald.

  “I did. I always done it, ever since I come, and it was the easiest room in the house to clean, Sister being that tidy. Never a thing left about.”

  “Do you know if she took any medicine? Were there any medicine bottles in her room?”

  “That there were not. All the medicine in this house is kept in the medicine cupboard. If Sister took a dose at times, it wasn’t my business to dose her.”

  Macdonald next asked about the routine of the house in the mornings. Nurse Barrow was first up. She rang a bell on the landing at six-fifteen sharp every morning. The maids were allowed a quarter of an hour to dress. At six-thirty one went down to lay breakfast and help cook. One came to Nurse Barrow to help wash and dress the children. Some days Sister Monica came in to assist and inspect, some days she didn’t, but breakfast was at seven-thirty, winter and summer alike, and Sister was always there to the tick to say grace.

  “Did you take the Warden a cup of tea up to her bedroom?” enquired Macdonald, and Hannah Barrow repudiated the idea with scorn.

  “You don’t understand about Sister,” she said loftily, her speech slipping more and more into her natural idiom. ‘Tier never had nothing we didn’t have. Tea in bed? Never. Sister’s brought me a cup of tea in bed whiles I’ve been poorly, but her never had none herself, and often enough she’d be outdoors before breakfast, a-communing on holy thoughts.”

  Hannah Barrow told Macdonald the routine of the household, together with the free times of the two maids. An hour off every day they had, she said, afternoon or evening, and a free afternoon once a week: Hannah or Cook took them shopping and to church on Sundays. Hannah Barrow said proudly that she never worried about time off herself “and no more did Sister. Her work was her life, Sister said, and as for holidays, her never wanted holidays.” At night, Hannah went to bed at nine o’clock and so did Cook and so did the young maids. Sister locked up. What Sister did after the others went to bed was no business of Hannah’s, but she knew Sister often went out for a walk after dark, “after her had finished all her writing and accounts,” Hannah added. “Her did all that of an evening after supper.”

  While she ran on, increasingly garrulous as she got used to the strangers, Macdonald pondered over the life she had led. For twenty-two years she had worked in this austere house, rising at six, working the clock round, apparently contented, worshipping Sister Monica. Was it as simple as that? Macdonald wondered.

  “I see you came here in 1929, Miss Barrow. You were then forty years of age. Had you done work in a similar institution before?”

  The thin lips suddenly shut tight and the pale eyes looked wary. “I’d been in private service,” she replied. “In Exeter ’twas, and then in Barnsford. Children’s nurse I’d been. Sister, her looked into everything, my character and that. Her took me on trial. Sister often laughed over that. ‘You’re still on trial, Hannah,’ she’d say after I’d worked for her years and years.”

  “On trial.” Macdonald repeated the words slowly, watching the wrinkled face. Then he said: “I’m afraid I’ve kept you a long time. I should like to see round the house next. I think Inspector Reeves has written down the main facts you have told us. Will you read it through and sign it, if you are satisfied it is correct?”

  Reeves got up and laid his notes on the table. They were very simple and written in an admirably clear hand. Nurse Barrow stood and studied the sheet of paper until Macdonald asked quietly, “Shall I read it to you?”

  “If you please. My eyes aren’t that good.”

  Macdonald read the statement aloud; then he said quietly, “You can’t read, can you?”

  She flushed, the dull red covering her lace. “I never had much schooling,” she said, “but Sister, her knew I did my work. Her never found nothing to complain of.”

  “You’ve worked for her for over twenty years. That speaks for itself,” replied Macdonald. She took Reeves’s pen and signed her name, slowly and laboriously. Then she turned to the door.

  “Please to step this way,” she said. She was obviously accustomed to showing people round the house.

  3

  “I’ll lay any money Nurse Barrow has been ‘inside,’” said Reeves reflectively as the two men left the house and went through the gate in the clipped yew hedge which divided the Gramarye drive from the park.

  Macdonald nodded. “I’m with you. We’ll have to get on to Records. It’s curious how it came out: she made a perfectly spontaneous anecdotal statement: ‘You’re on trial, Hannah.’ That remark had become a joke and she repeated it without thinking and then suddenly became aware of the form of words she’d used.”

  “I know. I saw her eyes contract and her jaw tighten as you repeated her words,” said Reeves.

  “It’d have been so much in character,” said Macdonald slowly. “Monica Emily Torrington liked to have people about her whom she’d got a hold over. It’s quite possible she got Hannah Barrow through one of the Prisoners’ Aid Societies. Got her, kept her, and dominated her. I can well believe that if Hannah Barrow showed any signs of rebelliousness when she first came here the Warden would just say, ‘You’re on trial, Hannah,’ and the double-edged words became a sort of joke as the years went on. I wonder what she was tried for.”

  “For her life,” said Reeves. “It’s over twenty years ago, and when you repeated ‘on trial’ she was shaken to her boots, poor old trout. A little thing like a sentence for petty larceny never kept its terror for twenty years.”

  “I think you’re right there, Reeves. I may query your navigation occasionally, but when it comes to a judgment of that kind, you’re more often right than any magistrate I ever met.”

  “Old lags,” said Reeves meditatively. “I’ll go out of my way to talk to ‘em whenever I get the chance. And I’ve sometimes felt I’d turn the job in. These high-hats talk a lot of hot air about reform. The system does something to ‘em, but it doesn’t reform them. It drives the devil which possesses them under cover, deep down, and clamps it down with fear.”

  Macdonald stopped and stared at the other. “So you feel like that about it?”

  “Yes, Chief. So do you. That old trouts worked her fingers to the bone for over twenty years. I wish one of these social-welfare dames had fitted a pedometer to Hannah Barrow’s flat feet and noted how many miles a day she walked in that penitentiary she’s so proud of. Twenty years—and at the end of it the sight of you and me, making her remember, turned her stomach. Oh, I know someone’s got to do our job and it’s a good job by and large, but I often feel we’ve slipped up somewhere when I see the mixture of cunning and fear on an old lag’s lace.”

  “Cunning and fear,” said Macdonald reflectively. “Flow much fear was there and what was she afraid of, past or present?”

  Reeves stopped by a trail of wild roses, stared at them as though fascinated, and then took out his knife, snipped a flower off, and put it in his buttonhole. “I hardly believe in them,” he said. “There’s something about them. Sorry. About the old trout. I agree the worm may turn. May get suddenly browned off and run amok. I’ve been learning quite a bit about this Monica Emily. Twenty years of her. Twenty years of being alternately sweated and prayed over. Twenty years of saying, ‘She’s wonderful’ and then running amok over some small silly thing. I agree it’s in character. But look at the size of the little cuss. About five feet nothing. She’d have had to stand on tiptoes to reach Monica Emily with a coal hammer. And the old trout puffs like a grampus and her stays squeak with every breath she takes and she sucks her teeth. Likewise she’s sot shocking corns, not to mention bunions, and her evesight’s about as
good as a bat’s.’

  “All quite true,” said Macdonald, “particularly about the stays. But she could have taken the stays off.

  “That’s right out of character.” said Reeves firmly. “Women like the old trout led lost without their stays, and they never realise they squeak because they’re conditioned to it. My grandmother-in law had squeaky stays, but she said they didn’t. My missis told me so.” Reeves suddenly laughed, his thin keen lace boyish in his mirth. “I hand it to you for high class quotes. Chief, to say nothing of the law of the lever and items like radioactive isotopes, but when it comes to stays I can leave you standing. And her coins aren’t irrelevant, either. This path we re on is steep and rough. I bet the old trout never comes down here. It’d be pain and grief to her with those feet. Where do we go from here?”

  “To see the Medical Officer responsible for Gramarye,” replied Macdonald.

  “Old Dr. Brown,” said Reeves. “He’s highly thought of in the village. This is where I do my silent act. Incidentally, it was pretty snappy of you to spot that Hannah Barrow can’t read. It all adds up.”

  “Yes. It adds up—to a portrait of Miss Monica Emily Torrington.”

  “Some of the high-ups are going to get a bit of a shock,” meditated Reeves. “Or aren’t they? The person I’m looking forward to seeing is her ladyship, as the village has it. If she didn’t know, why didn’t she?”

  “It’s often more convenient not to know,” rejoined Macdonald.

  CHAPTER X

  “Sister Monica was an exceedingly obstinate woman,” said Dr. Brown. He spoke wearily, and his voice, despite the conditioned note of professional certitude, sounded disillusioned.

  Macdonald and Reeves were sitting with the old doctor in the latter’s consulting room. Reeves, doing his “silent act,” was very much aware of his surroundings. Even on this day in midsummer the room was dim and dank and green. “Like a newfangled aquarium with the lights turned off,” thought Reeves; “we might all begin to swim in a minute, like deep-sea fishes.”

  Green walls, green paint, green curtains, green carpet, all faded to despondency; green aspidistras in the fireplace, green rhododendrons and laurels and yews too close to the windows; green mosses and algae in glass tanks and beakers and test tubes, for Dr. Brown had turned naturalist in his retirement and was writing a treatise on fresh-water algae. (“Spirogyra and Hydrodictyon? See dictionary,” noted Reeves.) “I’d hate to be doctored by him: this room must be a real breeding place for bugs. I shall be getting a sore throat myself next,” thought the hardened Cockney while Dr. Brown went on:

  “Of course she was too old for the job. I admit it and I admit I knew it. But when you’re old yourself you find it hard to be censorious about people who’re a dozen years younger than yourself. She’d run that place for nearly thirty years, and she’d run it well, efficiently, wisely, economically. When younger folks complained she was old-fashioned and harsh in her methods, I reminded them that that house had a better record for health than any other children’s home I know of. She’d worked non-stop, unsparingly, without holidays and without diversion. Unwise of her? Maybe, but I come of a generation that respects hard work. She’d worked herself out, like an old cart horse. She didn’t want to give up and I didn’t want to be the one to tell her to pack up. I was wrong. I admit it—but I’m not ashamed of it.”

  “I respect your point of view, sir,” said Macdonald quietly, “but I have been sent here to get facts. The most important facts you can give me are those concerning Miss Torrington’s health. You were her medical adviser.”

  The old man snorted. “Yes. I was her medical adviser. During all the years I’ve known her she’s never complained to me about her health, never asked for physic, never taken to her bed. I said just now she was like a horse, and she was as strong as a horse. Barring looking at her tongue, peering down her throat, taking her pulse, and taking her temperature—which she was quite capable of taking herself—I’ve never examined her. Never so much as seen her with her uniform frock unbuttoned. No need to. She’s had colds, she’s had throats, but she’s never been really ill. Not up till this last six months. And then it wasn’t disease. It was anno domini, tiredness, frayed nerves, and the knowledge that she herself was failing. I knew it couldn’t go on, but I’d set a term to it in my own mind, and I’d told her so. This was the result. It preyed on her mind and broke her up.”

  “Will you enlarge on that point, sir?” asked Macdonald, and the old man cleared his throat noisily.

  “You know I retired last spring. I kept on Gramarye at Sister Monica’s request. She didn’t want a change, not at her age. For over a quarter of a century, barring my own holidays, I’d been to that house at eleven o’clock every Monday morning. The drill was always the same. Hannah showed me up to the little dispensary where Sister Monica was waiting, and Hannah paraded those tots past me, each taught to say ‘Good morning, Doctor’ and ‘Thank you.’ If there were any cot cases, those two women would march me up to the dormitories, regulation hospital fashion. I’ve seen them through their measles and mumps and chicken pox, prescribing the same medicine and treatment, which Sister Monica knew as well or better than I did. At the end of it Hannah would march me to the front door—always the same, Monday after Monday. Sister Monica, and Hannah too, knew all about the treatment for children’s ailments, knew it by heart. They didn’t want any bright young fellow with new ideas coming along, turning everything upside down.” He broke off and sighed, a heavy, old man’s sigh, and then went on: “When I retired, I thought I’d live out my natural span here, pottering about with algae and fossils, but it wasn’t so easy. That young chap, Ferens, he’s a capable fellow: up-to-date, au fait with all this hooey over glands and hormones and vitamins and antitoxins and antibodies and all the rest. Quite right, too. But his very existence up there was an implicit criticism of all I’d ever done. I’m not criticising, mind you, and I’m not grumbling. But when old Anna Freemantle lost her husband—my wife was a Freemantle—when Anna suggested she’d got a big comfortable house and not too much money to run it on and why not come along and share the expenses and the comfort, well, I thought it was a good idea.”

  He cleared his throat again and said: “I’m rambling on, but let me tell you my own way. I’m too old to learn new tricks.”

  “I ask nothing better than for you to talk in your own way, sir,” said Macdonald. “You’re giving me a vivid picture of things which I’d only guessed at.”

  “You’re a good listener, Chief Inspector. Shows your wisdom and your manners, too,” growled old Brown. “Where was I?”

  “Anna Freemantle,” prompted Macdonald, and he went on:

  “Yes. Anna. Seventy-five last year, but spry as they make ’em. In Wiltshire she lives: nice place, nice stretch of river, a bit of fishing, and a good housekeeper and gardener. Worth thinking about. So I told her I’d pack up here round about Michaelmas, sell most of the furniture, and take a few bits along and have a little comfort for my last year or so. Well, there it was. I told Sister Monica what was in my mind and said: ‘Why not retire? Lady Ridding’ll see you have a good cottage and a bit of a pension, and Idannah Barrow will be only too glad to stay with you and look after you.’ She just said: ‘I don’t wish to retire. When it’s time for me to retire the Almighty will make it clear to me.’ You can’t argue with that, you know. Once a woman gets it into her head she’s being guided, there’s no use talking to her.”

  “True enough,” agreed Macdonald. “Now you said that Miss Torrington was tired and her nerves were strained. Did you prescribe anything for her?”

  “I did. Wilson, the chemist in Milham Prior, sent the stuff up. I gave her a sedative—the usual bromide. Wouldn’t have hurt a baby. And a bismuth mixture: more peppermint than anything else in it. She’d got a sort of nervous indigestion. Hannah told me about it. Faithful creature, she is. For all I know, Sister Monica poured the stuff down the sink.”

  “I don’t think she did that. The analyst
found traces of bismuth in her organs. He also found traces of alcohol.”

  Dr. Brown sat staring at Macdonald, his old face contracted into an amazed frown. “Good God,” he said slowly. “I never thought of that.” He broke off, and then added: “I’m too old to be surprised by the aberrations human nature’s capable of, Inspector. I’ve seen too many queer things done by ordinary people. Drink? It’s not the first time I’ve heard of a respectable woman falling into that snare. . . . It might explain a lot.”

  “Where did she get it from?”

  “Depends how much she had. Have you looked into that medicine cupboard at Gramarye? Yes? I thought so. Was there a bottle of brandy there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “There’s been one there for years. Good brandy, too. I sent it up myself. During the war they took evacuees into the house, and there was one old soul who was in a bad way. A heart case. I prescribed brandy to keep her heart going, a matter of a few drops. After the heart case had been moved on to hospital, Sister Monica wanted me to take the brandy away. I said no. She ought to have it in case of emergency. She ran our Red Cross unit and casualty station. It was never in action of course. She kept the brandy in the locked section of the cupboard labelled ‘Poisons’—though she’d not got anything that’d poison a babe in arms.”

  “It’s not there now,” said Macdonald.

  2

  “Why couldn’t she have given up?” growled old Brown sadly. He had had a respite from talking, mixing himself a modest whisky and soda with hands that shook. He looked a weary unhappy old man, and Macdonald had offered to go away and resume the conversation later, but Dr. Brown had replied: “Let’s get it over. The whole thing’s been a shock. I’ve known Sister a long time: worked with her, trusted her, respected her sterling qualities—aye, and told her my own troubles many a time. They’ll tell you in the village it was my fault she wasn’t pensioned off. That’s not true. I’ve advised her time and again to give up this last year or two, but I wasn’t going to see her packed off like a worn-out suit. After the years she’d worked at that place, she’d earned the right to choose her own time to retire. That’s how I saw it.”