The Catherine Wheel

by Patricia Wentworth

  Miss Silver turned from it, her face grave.

  “I am afraid that there must be something wrong. I think, Eily, that you had better fetch Mr. Castell.”

  Eily looked scared.

  “Should I just take a look through the keyhole?”

  Miss Silver coughed.

  “The key will be in the lock-”

  But Eily was already stooping down.

  “But it isn’t,” she said. “I can see right over the bed… Oh, Miss Silver, she isn’t there-it’s not been slept in!”

  “Can you see any sign of Mrs. Duke?”

  “Oh, no, I can’t! There’s the bed turned down-like I left it-”

  Miss Silver said in a quiet voice,

  “Go and fetch your uncle.”

  As they stood waiting, Geoffrey Taverner came along the opposite passage from his room and crossed the landing to join them.

  “Is anything wrong, Miss Silver?”

  “I am afraid that there may be. I think you had better take your sister away.”

  But Mildred refused to go-or at any rate no farther than Miss Silver’s room, where she sat trembling on the edge of the bed and shed weak, forlorn tears. They dripped upon the Venetian beads, and so down into her lap as she listened whilst Castell enquired of all and sundry why heaven should be thus afflicting him.

  “My respectable house!” he groaned. “Mrs. Duke-are you there? If you are asleep, will you wake up and speak to us! We are getting alarmed. I shall have to break in the door if you do not answer.” He raised his voice to a bellow-“Mrs. Duke!” then turned away with a gesture of despair. “It is no good. She may be ill-she may have taken too much of a sleeping draught-she does not hear-we shall have to break the door-”

  Jeremy and Jane had arrived to swell the crowd. Jacob Taverner came across the landing wrapped in his greatcoat. Freddy Thorpe-Ennington, fully dressed but with his fair hair wildly unbrushed, stared from the threshold of his room. Jeremy said,

  “Wait a bit-don’t any of these other keys fit?”

  “Fool!” said Castell, smiting himself upon the breast. “Idiot- imbecile! Why did I not think of that? I tell you I am out of my senses with all this trouble! The key of the cupboard at the end of the passage, perhaps that will fit-I do not know. It fits one of these rooms, but I have forgotten which. It may be this one, or it may be one of the others-I do not know any more. I have no memory left-the brain gives way-I am distracted!”

  In this state of distraction he precipitated himself along the passage, wrenched the key from a cupboard door, rushed back with it, and forced it violently into the lock. It grated, creaked, and under the utmost pressure turned.

  Castell jerked at the handle and threw the door wide open. Every inch of the rather dingy room was visible. One side of the curtains had been pulled back. The daylight which entered was not bright, but it was sufficient. It showed the bed as Eily had described it, stripped of its coverlet and turned down for the night. It showed the space beneath it quite empty. It showed a worn square of carpet on the floor, a chest of drawers, a washstand, and two chairs. It showed a hanging-cupboard with the door fallen open. Inside it hung the bright blue coat and skirt and the sheepskin coat in which Florence Duke had arrived. But of Florence Duke herself there was no sign whatever. Except for its ordinary furniture the room was empty.

  CHAPTER 35

  It was the police who had found her getting on for an hour later. She had gone over the cliff at its highest point, about a hundred yards beyond the hotel. She had fallen upon the rocks, and must have been killed immediately. The body had not been in the water, since this heaped and tumbled mass of rocks was covered only at the highest tides. She was wearing what she had worn the night before, the brightly flowered dress of artificial silk, the silk stockings, and indoor shoes. One of the shoes had come off and had been caught up on a small straggling bush about half way down.

  A little later in Castell’s office Inspector Crisp was giving it as his opinion that it was a plain case of suicide, and that in the circumstances it was as good as a confession to the murder of Luke White.

  “Clears the whole thing up, if you ask me. Can’t see any reason for putting the other inquest off myself, but the Chief Constable seems to think it would be better.”

  Frank Abbott nodded.

  “Yes-I think so.”

  “Well, I can’t see it myself. But there, I’m not the Chief Constable-as I expect you were going to say.” He laughed quite good-humouredly.

  Miss Silver, who had so far contributed nothing to the conversation, now gave a slight dry cough. Frank Abbott turned his head as if expecting her to speak, but she did not do so. For the moment her eyes were upon her knitting. The blue dress approached completion. He turned back to Crisp.

  “You are satisfied that it was suicide?”

  Crisp made a gesture.

  “What else? She killed Luke White-jealousy over that girl Eily-and when I rang her up and told her she would have to identify the body she got the wind up. Wouldn’t face it-went and chucked herself over the cliff. “ He gazed complacently at the London man who couldn’t see a simple solution when he’d got it right under his nose. “Psychology,” he said-“that’s what you’ve got to bear in mind, especially when you’re dealing with women. This Florence Duke-you’ve got to put yourself in her place, look at it from her point of view. She was jealous of Eily Fogarty. This Luke White, he’d got the name for being able to get round any woman, and by all accounts he got round a good few of them. He got round Florence Duke, married her, and left her. Then she comes here and finds him making love to this girl Eily. On her own admission she went down to meet him the night he was murdered, and she was found practically standing over the body with his blood on her hands. Well, a woman will stab a man she’s been fond of if she’s jealous enough. But this is where psychology comes in. She’s done the murder when she was all worked up, but when she’s told she’s got to come in cold blood and look at the corpse she just can’t face it-she goes and chucks herself over the cliff. That’s psychology.”

  Miss Silver laid her knitting down in her lap and coughed again.

  “That would be one explanation, Inspector, but it is not the only one.”

  Crisp looked hard at her.

  “Look here, Miss Silver, you were the last person to see Florence Duke or to have any conversation with her. Was she, or was she not, in a state of nervous depression?”

  “I have already told you that she was.”

  “She was nervous and depressed because she knew she had got to see her husband’s body and give evidence at the inquest?”

  “She was frightened and nervous about the identification. I would remind you, Inspector, that I had particularly desired she should not be told until this morning that she would have to identify the body.”

  Crisp frowned.

  “I thought it best to let her know. Now, Miss Silver-are you prepared to state that there was nothing in Mrs. Duke’s conversation or behaviour to support the idea of suicide?”

  Miss Silver looked at him in a candid manner and said,

  “No.”

  “Then I think I have a right to ask you what she did say.”

  Miss Silver said gravely,

  “She spoke of her married life. It was obviously very much on her mind. She spoke of there being things which she could not forget. When I warned her that she might be in danger and begged her to let Captain Taverner take her to a place of safety for the night-”

  He interrupted forcibly.

  “You did that?”

  She inclined her head.

  “I am thankful to be able to recall that I did. She would not listen to me. She said she did not care. She went so far as to say, ‘If someone was to bring me a good glass of poison this minute, I’d drink it.’ ”

  Crisp brought his fist down with a bang on the table.

  “That’s all I want, thank you, and that’s all the jury will want! Short of someone seeing her go over the cliff it
’s all anyone could want!”

  Miss Silver coughed.

  “I wish to be perfectly fair, and I have told you what the poor woman said. But I did not believe at the time, nor do I believe now, that she had any serious intention of taking her own life. She was in the mood to wish herself dead as an alternative to the painful position in which she found herself, but I have to state that I do not believe she committed suicide. I believe that she was murdered.”

  Crisp threw himself back in his chair.

  “Come, come, Miss Silver, you can’t expect us to swallow that! On your own showing Mrs. Duke locked herself into her room last night. You left your own door open, and you say that you are a very light sleeper and that the slightest noise in the passage would have waked you, yet you heard nothing. Are you going to ask us to believe that someone got into Mrs. Duke’s room, overpowered her, got her downstairs, and threw her over the cliff, all without making any sound at all?”

  “No, Inspector.”

  He went on in a tone flavored with contempt.

  “To start with, according to you she had her key in the door, so no other key could have been used from the outside. To go on with, she walked down that passage on her own feet. There was powder spilt there, and she had walked through it-her stockings were full of the stuff. Look here, it’s simple enough what she did. She knew you were watching her, and she meant to give you the slip. You say you went over to the bathroom to wash. Well, as soon as you’d gone she unlocked her door, locked it again on the outside in case you tried the handle, took her shoes in her hand, and went off along the passage and down the stairs in her stocking feet. That’s how she picked up the powder. Castell found the back door unlocked this morning, so that’s how she got out of the house. Then all she’d got to do was walk up the hill to the top of the cliff and throw herself over. And to cap it all, there’s the missing key in her pocket. It’s as plain as a pikestaff.”

  Miss Silver coughed, but she had no time to do more, for at that moment the door opened and the Chief Constable came into the room.

  CHAPTER 36

  Half an hour later Randal March sat looking across the table with something very like exasperation dominating his thought. He now possessed all the information with which a zealous and efficient subordinate could supply him. The medical evidence was not to hand, but as Crisp had put it, “When a woman has broken her neck you can’t get from it. And if she hadn’t done it herself, it looks as if the law would have had to do it for her. A clear case of murder and suicide-and how anyone can make out anything else, well, it passes me.”

  March was inclined to agree with him. But there sat Miss Maud Silver with that mild air of deferring to authority which, as he very well knew, could mask a quite incalculable degree of obstinacy. He had sent the estimable Crisp to take statements from other members of the party, and was now alone in the office with Frank Abbott propping the mantelshelf and Miss Silver who sat with her hands folded in her lap upon little Josephine’s completed dress. On his first entrance she had risen to go, but he had detained her. Crisp, undeterred by her presence, had expressed himself quite vigorously on the subject of amateur detectives and their theories, to all of which Miss Silver had listened with unruffled calm. She had not, as a matter of fact, advanced any theories of her own. She had actually hardly opened her lips, but she undoubtedly conveyed an impression of uncompromising disbelief in the theory advanced by Inspector Crisp. She sat there with folded hands and waited in very much the same way in which she had been used to wait when she was governess to the March family and Randal did not know his lesson. He was Chief Constable of the county now, and she was a little elderly person with no status at all, but the atmosphere of that schoolroom and its moral values persisted.

  Randal March’s exasperation proceeded from the fact that he found himself influenced by them. Whatever his reason said, he could never quite rid himself of the old feeling of respect with which Miss Silver had managed to imbue a singularly disrespectful little boy of eight. There were reinforcements in the shape of all those subsequent times when Miss Silver had taken her own line in the face of other people’s theories and earned a good deal of credit, not for herself but for the police.

  Frank Abbott, watching the two of them, was being a good deal diverted. His affection and admiration for his Miss Silver did not at all stand in the way of his considering her entertainment value to be high. He was perfectly well aware of what she was waiting for, and could spare a rather sardonic sympathy for Randal March. With all the evidence on one side and Maudie on the other, he was certainly in for a bad time.

  It was really only a minute or two before March said,

  “You know, Miss Silver, Crisp is perfectly right-no jury in the world is going to hesitate about its verdict.”

  Miss Silver looked at him mildly.

  “I have not said anything, Randal.”

  He gave a half-angry laugh.

  “Not in words perhaps, but the amount of solid disapproval with which you have been filling the room-”

  “My dear Randal!”

  He laughed again.

  “Are you going to tell me you don’t disagree, disapprove, and thoroughly dissociate yourself from Crisp and all his works?”

  She gave her prim little cough.

  “No, I shall not say that.”

  “Then what have you got to say? I would rather hear it, you know. There’s the evidence-part of it resting on your own statement. You saw the woman with the murdered man’s blood on her hands, and you heard her say that she didn’t care if anything happened to her or not, and that if anyone offered her a glass of poison she’d be glad of it. On the top of that, don’t you believe she murdered Luke White and then committed suicide?”

  “No, Randal.”

  “On what grounds? You must have reasons for refusing to accept all this evidence we’ve just been through. Do you expect me to disregard it?”

  “No, Randal.”

  “Then what do you expect me to do?”

  She coughed reprovingly.

  “It is not a case of expecting. It would, I think, be advisable-”

  “Yes?”

  “There are points upon which further evidence should be obtained.”

  “Are you going to tell me what they are?”

  She inclined her head.

  “I have mentioned them before. I should like, if I may, to urge them very strongly now. There should be more evidence as to where the first murder was committed. I have repeatedly asserted my belief that it did not take place in the hall, where the body was found. I suggested yesterday that there should be a careful examination of the carpet in this room. I think it extremely probable that the crime was committed here, in which case traces of blood may still be found. That is my first point.”

  Randal March looked at her gravely.

  “Well, I have no objection. What else?”

  Miss Silver met his look with one to the full as grave.

  “Thank you, Randal. The second point concerns the identification of the body.”

  Frank Abbott’s colourless eyebrows rose perceptibly. There was a brief but startled pause before March said,

  “Luke White’s body was seen by everyone in the house. Castell has made the formal identification. Do you suggest that there is any doubt about the matter?”

  “Yes, Randal, I do.”

  “My dear Miss Silver!”

  She coughed.

  “You say that the body was seen by everyone. There were three, or at the most four, people present to whom Luke White was not a complete stranger. They were Castell, Eily, Florence Duke, and perhaps Mr. Jacob Taverner. To the others-and I include myself-what they saw was a dead man lying face downwards dressed as they had all the previous evening seen Luke White dressed, in dark trousers and a grey linen coat. Let us now take the three or four people who really knew Luke White. Mr. Jacob Taverner did not go near the body. Eily was overcome with horror and half fainting. Castell identifies the dead man as Luke
White, and it is his identification that is in question. Florence Duke actually handled the body. We have no means of knowing whether her subsequent condition of shock was due to the fact that she accepted it as that of her husband, or-” She paused.

  March said,

  “Or what?”

  “Or that she did not.”

  “You suggest?”

  “That the body was not that of Luke White. If she had realized this she would, I think, have known that her husband must be a party to the murder. She knew him to be a most unscrupulous man. She may have known more than that, but she had once cared for him very much, and she had suddenly to decide whether she would shield him or give him away. I think all her behaviour is accounted for if you accept the theory that she made up her mind to shield him.”

  “But, my dear Miss Silver-” March broke off. “Are you suggesting that the murdered man was-”

  “Albert Miller.”

  Frank Abbott straightened up. March leaned forward.

  “Albert Miller!”

  “I think it possible.”

  “But-was there any likeness?”

  “Oh, yes, a very strong one. They were both grandsons of the disreputable Luke, old Jeremiah Taverner’s fourth son. Luke White was the elder, and much the stronger character, but the resemblance was very decided. I was struck by it as soon as I saw them.”

  “You did see them together?”

  “They were practically side by side whilst we were having coffee in the lounge on Saturday night. Even the difference in dress and the fact that one man was drunk and the other sober could not disguise the likeness. I do not mean that I would have mistaken one for the other in life, because there was a very obvious divergence of character, but if I had been shown the dead body of one dressed in the clothes of the other, I cannot say whether I would have suspected anything.”

  “Then what makes you suspect anything now?”

  Miss Silver gazed at him thoughtfully.