They had made their expedition to the Forest in John’s two-seater, calling for Nora on the way. And now, having eaten the bananas and buns they had bought for lunch at a village shop, they were sitting among the bracken on a high slope within sound of Water-Break-Its-Neck, in profound peace and loneliness, surrounded by great trees where pigeons cooed and ghostly owls slept on the branches.
“I had a letter from Isabel to-day,” murmured Nora pensively. “Just a duty letter, you know, written as soon as she got home. She says her aunt isn’t seriously ill, after all. She writes from the same address. Mr. Christmas—” She hesitated, puckering her fair brows.
“Isn’t it possible that they both have flats in the same house? Isabel and her aunt live in a flat, I know. I can’t believe—”
“What?” asked John gently. “That Isabel is Mrs. Field’s niece?”
“That Isabel could be so—so secretive. And yet, oh dear! I can believe it! I suppose it’s just because I can believe it so easily that I feel ashamed to!” She half smiled, half sighed. “Isabel was always a little strange. She told one nothing, though she talked so much. She knows everything about me. But now I come to think of it, what do I know about her? Nothing!”
“How long have you known Isabel?” asked John musingly.
“Since the middle of June. She came to the art-school then.”
“What art-school do you go to?”
“The South Kensington. She came in the middle of the term. She’d just come to England with her aunt, she said. She’d been living for two years in—” Nora caught her breath, suddenly realizing as she spoke that there might be great significance in what she said. “Canada,” she finished in a low voice.
“Ah!” said John. “She’d been living for two years in Canada. Canada is a large place, of course. Did she say where in Canada?”
“No. She’d been living there with her aunt, and they had both come over to England to live. She said she had no father or mother.”
Nora paused, frowning and pulling a bracken frond to pieces.
“Really, that’s all I know. She was very popular at school, because she’s so amusing, and we made friends. But she never talked much about herself.”
“She made friends with you, and she made friends with Felix. Was she more friendly with you two than with any of the others?”
“Yes. With me, at first. And then, of course, as I know Felix awfully well, she was friends with Felix too. We used to go about together a lot. Museums and theatres and things. I live with my sister in Kensington during term-time. And Isabel used to come and see me a lot. So did Felix.”
“Did she ever ask you to visit her and her aunt?”
“No. I never saw her aunt, nor heard her name. I took it for granted her aunt’s name was Donne.”
“Now, Nora, what made you ask Isabel to come and stay with you?”
Nora looked a little surprised.
“Well, we thought it would be fun. What generally makes one invite people to stay with one?”
“She didn’t—invite herself?”
“No. At least—”
“Ah!”
“No, but she didn’t invite herself, John! Only, one evening when Felix and I first got the idea of bicycling home with Lion, and were talking it over, she said that she loved cycling. And soon afterwards it came out that she had no plans for the holidays. So of course I said: ‘Come with us.’”
“And she said?”
“She didn’t know whether her aunt could spare her at first. But next time I saw her she said she would love to come for ten days. But there’s nothing in that! I mean, you can’t call that inviting herself!”
“No, perhaps not. Let’s call it gentle encouragement of a potential hostess.”
John rolled over and lay chin on hands looking across the deep, narrow gorge of Water-Break-Its-Neck to the great mossy boulders and forests of tall bracken on the other side.
“Now, what do we know about Mrs. Field? One: she lives at the same address in London as Isabel Donne. Two: she was anxious to rent a cottage near Penlow during the time that Isabel was staying with the Brownings. Three: she left in a hurry on the day of the inquest, alleging that her niece was ill in London. Four: she paid her rent with a five-pound note which had been in Charles’s possession four days earlier. Yes, Nora, Felix got the numbers from the bank manager in Penlow. And the number on our note is one of them.”
“But good heavens, nobody but a half-wit would abstract five-pound notes from the pockets of a person they’d just murdered!”
“Softly, my dear Miss Watson! We’re not accusing anybody of the murder yet. We’re just reciting the facts. Now for Clytie Meadows. Blodwen was quite successful in pumping old Penrose about her. One: she was the daughter of a successful hotel-keeper in Bristol. Two: she married Morris Price in 1905, and lived with him in Bristol. Three: she left Morris Price in 1908. There was no divorce. Mr. Penrose did his best at the time to persuade Morris to apply for a divorce, but he refused, on the grounds that he did not believe in divorce and would never think of marrying again. Four: her description, allowing for the passage of twenty years, would be a good description of Mrs. Field. And now we come to a third person, the mysterious lady who called at Rhyllan Hall on August twenty-fifth, two days before the murder, and left a note for Morris Price. We have only a slight and vague description of her, but such as it is, it would do both for Mrs. Field and for Clytie Meadows, or Clytie Price, as her name must be. And the fact that she came to Rhyllan Hall on a bicycle suggests that she did not come from far. From Sheepshanks Cottage to Rhyllan Hall is about twelve miles, quite a nice cycling expedition. Altogether, I am inclined to think that Clytie Meadows, Mrs. Field, Isabel’s aunt and the mysterious visitor are one and the same lady. Can either of you think of a sound objection to this theory?”
Nora nibbled thoughtfully at a grass stalk, and Rampson lit his pipe.
“I can’t,” he replied. “All I can say is, that the lady who gave us lemonade didn’t look to me at all like a person out of a crook play.”
“What did she look like?” asked Nora thoughtfully.
Rampson took several puffs at his pipe and considered the question carefully.
“A bazaar-opener,” he answered finally, with quiet conviction.
“Perhaps she’s that too,” said John cheerfully. “Bazaar-opening isn’t a full-time career.”
“My dear John, people with four aliases don’t open bazaars.”
“Nobody suggests that she’s got four aliases. She’s Clytie Meadows, Mrs. Field, Isabel’s aunt and a visitor to Rhyllan. Surely one can be an aunt and a visitor without leading a double life. By the way, Nora, didn’t Isabel ever mention her aunt’s Christian name?”
“Puffy.”
“Eh?”
“Isabel always spoke of her as Puffy.”
“Giving people nicknames,” remarked John sadly, “is a detestable practice which ought, in the interests of the detective profession, to be abolished by law. We’ll ask Mr. Penrose if he used to call Clytie Meadows Puffy.”
“He didn’t,” said Nora with conviction. “He called her my dear young lady, like he does me and Blodwen.” She added:“But I think you’re probably right. And I can see that if you are right the whole thing hangs together, and there’s a motive for the murder. It’s the details that seem so crude and unlikely. If Clytie Meadows wanted to murder Charles, have a reconciliation with Morris and come and live at Rhyllan Hall, would she have done the murder quite so near home? Would she have taken a cottage next door to the murder, so to speak? And that five-pound note! I can’t get over that!”
“Again, Miss Watson, you go too fast. Whether she did the murder or not will appear later, we hope. Meanwhile the facts are that a lady who may or may not be Clytie Meadows did rent Sheepshanks Cottage, and that one of Charles’s notes was in her possession after the murder. Our business is to follow up those two facts. They may lead us to the murderer, or they may lead us up against a blank wall. It�
��s wasting time to try to guess which. I think we may take it as certain that the lady who rented Sheepshanks Cottage is Isabel’s aunt, and we ought to be able to get at her through Isabel and find out if she is also Clytie Meadows.”
“I don’t quite see how,” said Nora pensively. “Of course I could write and ask Isabel. But she wouldn’t answer.”
“No, no. We’ll have to be more subtle than that. But let’s leave Mrs. Clytie alone now, and turn our attention to the other possible murderers.”
“Are there any?” asked Rampson with an appearance of surprise.
“Great Scot, yes! Now what are the two essential qualifications of the murderer, whoever he may have been?”
“One,” said Nora, “is that he hasn’t got an alibi for round about seven o’clock on August the twenty-seventh.”
“Yes. That’s the most important point, of course. And the second? That he must have had access to Morris’s revolver between August the eleventh, when Mrs. Maur saw it in the drawer in the library, and August the twenty-seventh, when the murder was committed.”
“He must have had a motive, too,” observed Nora, “unless he was a lunatic. And as he took the trouble to use another man’s revolver, I suppose we can leave stray lunatics out of it.”
“We’ll certainly leave them out,” said John decidedly. “Murders by wandering homicidal maniacs are rare enough to be ignored. As for the question of motive, I think we’ll leave it out too, until we’ve got our list of people who fulfil the other requirements. Motives are sometimes obvious and sometimes not, and we don’t know enough about Charles to be able to guess at the motive of his murderer. After all, until a few weeks ago he was living in Canada. We don’t know what enemies he may have made there. Well. Let’s try and clarify our ideas. Possible Murderers.”
Nora looked through a gap in the trees across the valley to the high ridge opposite, where a shepherd was walking with two small collies on the sky-line. As she watched, he took the sloping footpath and descended into the little valley.
“What do shepherds do all day?” asked Nora dreamily. “Walk about counting their sheep, I suppose, and contemplating the hills. I should like to be a shepherd.”
“There’s dipping and shearing and folding and lambing,” said Rampson the realist. “And foot-rot and maggots and—”
Nora laughed.
“Oh, don’t! My kind of shepherd just feeds his flocks on the mountain and in the fine weather he sits among the bracken and reads Chaucer, and in the wet weather he sits in his little hut and reads Spenser. There’s a shepherd’s hut on the ridge side a little farther along, and when I was a child I used to think it the most romantic place, and a shepherd’s life the most peaceful in the world. Don’t destroy my illusions. Well, John? Am I a possible murderer?”
“You don’t comply with either of the two conditions. Morris Price is the first and most obvious one. He was almost too obviously on the scene of the murder about the time it was committed, and he has an almost too obvious motive. And of all people, he most obviously had access to his own revolver. But as he has been arrested, and our business is to prove him not guilty, we’ll leave him out of it.”
“Of course.”
“Then there’s Mrs. Field. She’s obviously a woman of mystery. If, as we suppose, she was the woman who called at Rhyllan Hall last Saturday, she had access to the revolver in the library. She had one of Charles’s five-pound notes after the murder. And she left in a hurry on the day of the inquest. We certainly haven’t done with her yet. Then there’s Waters, the footman. Do you know Waters, Nora?”
“The young one? I’ve seen him once or twice at the hall. He’s new. I haven’t noticed him particularly.”
“He could have got hold of the revolver. He’s engaged to marry Ellie Letbe, the gardener’s daughter— you know, the one there was trouble about. And he looked capable of violent revenges—a cold, crafty face, I thought. Whether he has an alibi or not remains to be seen. It’s one of the first things we must look into.”
“Of course, all sorts of people may have been able to get hold of that revolver if it hadn’t been seen in the drawer since August the eleventh,” said Nora slowly. “The murderer may be somebody whose existence we don’t even know of.”
“Also,” said Rampson, chewing a contemplative harebell stalk, “it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you, John, that your Mrs. Maur, the housekeeper, may have been lying when she said she saw the revolver on August the eleventh.”
“Oh, it’s occurred to me all right! She may have been the murderer herself, for all we know yet. Though from what Blodwen said, I gather that it is a matter of complete indifference to her who she housekeeps for, as long as she housekeeps for somebody.”
“Funny old soul, Mrs. Maur,” said Nora thoughtfully. “She’s been at the hall three years and I’ve seen quite a lot of her, one way and another. But she always looks at me as if she’d never seen me before. She’s not human. She’s the perfect servant. And the perfect servant is not human. But Blodwen says she’s a marvellous housekeeper.”
John threw a little stone over the edge of the fall, and heard its faint tinkle on the rocks below.
“Does the perfect servant, I wonder, require the perfect master? Or is it part of her perfection that she can adapt herself to any master, even to the kind that dismisses lifelong gardeners and kisses housemaids?”
“My dear John!” Nora half laughed in surprise and opened her grey eyes wide. “You’re not going to suggest that Mrs. Maur might have murdered poor Charles because he didn’t come up to her standards as an employer? She’d have to be a lunatic to do such a thing!”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” said John lazily. “Only wondering what the perfect servant does when she gets an imperfect employer. And you said yourself that the perfect servant wasn’t human.”
Rampson suddenly sat up.
“When you’ve finished talking nonsense about what a hypothetical creature might do in an imaginary set of circumstances, may I say something sensible?” he asked meekly.
“Say on.”
“Well, listen. You and Nora have mentioned three or four people who, according to you, may have had access to Price’s revolver. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that there are several million people in the world and that all of them had access to the revolver.”
“No. No,” said John soothingly. “I think not. If the entire population of the world had converged upon Rhyllan Hall any time during the last three weeks we should have heard about it, I feel sure.”
“Any one of them, I mean, you ass. And not at Rhyllan Hall, either. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that Charles may have been carrying the revolver himself, and that the person who murdered him may have got possession of it from him, and not from the drawer in the library at all.”
There was a pause. John sighed.
“I’m awfully sorry to disappoint you, Sydenham, but it had occurred to me. But I think it’s unlikely. Of course, ordinary people don’t carry revolvers on peaceful bicycling tours through rural England. But Charles may not have been an ordinary person, so I won’t press that point. But if one carries a revolver, one carries one’s own revolver, not somebody else’s. And Charles had a revolver of his own. It was found in the chest in his bedroom the day after the murder, and is still there, so far as I know. You may remember that Felix told us the police had found a revolver in Charles’s room when they searched the house.”
Rampson looked a trifle crestfallen.
“Yes, I do remember now. But still,” he added obstinately, “there is no proof that Charles wasn’t carrying Morris’s revolver.”
“No proof,” agreed John, “but a strong presumption. And we’re at the stage where one has to work chiefly on presumptions. Proof will come afterwards.”
“That’s all very well, as long as you don’t let yourself forget that your presumptions, however plausible, aren’t proof. It’s very easy for a person with a hopelessly unscientific mind
like yours to overlook the difference between fact and conjecture.”
“I know,” said John humbly. “But you’ll never let me overlook it for long, Sydenham, so it’s all right. Still, you’ll agree that at this stage of the investigation I’m justified in the conjecture that the revolver was abstracted from the library drawer and not from Charles’s person?”
“Certainly,” agreed Rampson gravely. “But you must keep the other possibility always in your mind, until it is definitely disproved.”
“I will endeavour to do so,” responded John with equal gravity. “Now you know, Nora, why I won’t let Rampson go back to his microscope. I need a wet blanket, and the scientific mind is the wet blanket par excellence.”
“So I perceive. He won’t let even a shepherd be Arcadian.”
“Well, look at your shepherd,” remonstrated Rampson. “There he is, coming along the footpath, followed by his faithful and flea-ridden dogs. Does he look as if he could read his ABC, let alone Spenser? Do you think he ever contemplates the hills except as food for his sheep? Not he! Ask him.”
“I will, if he comes near enough,” replied Nora with a laugh. “I suppose he is a shepherd,” she added doubtfully, as the figure approached along the little footpath below. “He’s got a funny-looking sort of raincoat on, miles too big for him. And, Sydenham, he’s carrying a book under his arm!”
“So he is. But I’ll bet you a hundred pounds, if you like, it’s not Shakespeare or Spenser, or whoever your selections were. It’s probably ‘Diseases of Sheep.’”
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