The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries

by E. X. Ferrars

  “The insane, though that isn’t the fashionable word for them nowadays, can be remarkably cunning at concealing their peculiarities from the people round them,” the doctor responded. “But I don’t expect there’ll be any difficulties at the inquest. If you know she’d that fear in her mind, it gave her a good reason for doing what she did.”

  The police arrived only a few minutes later.

  A shortish, stolid-looking man in plain clothes, who introduced himself as Detective Inspector Foskin, was in charge, and a uniformed sergeant and a constable were with him. Charles and Dr. Summers took the three men up to Aunt Emma’s room while Marion and I waited in the drawing room below, listening for sounds from upstairs. But after the first tramping about there was a remarkable silence.

  Then one of the men came down and used the telephone in the hall. I thought he would be ringing for an ambulance, but it seemed to be a call to the police station, asking for a photographer to be sent as well as someone connected with fingerprints. I heard Marion let out a long breath. She was standing rigidly in front of the fireplace, where the ashes from yesterday’s fire were still in a heap. A woman who cleaned the house and cleared the grate and laid a new fire, came in on most mornings, but not on a Saturday.

  The sergeant who had been telephoning entered the drawing room and said that Inspector Foskin would be glad if Marion and I would join him upstairs and tell him exactly what had happened that morning.

  We went up, the sergeant following us, and into the bedroom.

  I heard Marion give a little gasp of shock. It did not surprise me. The tea-tray, which had been on the chest of drawers by the door when she had left the room, was now back on the bedside table where it had been when I had first entered the room that morning.

  Inspector Foskin seemed very interested in it.

  “I understand from your husband,” he said to Marion, “that it was you who discovered the body this morning. Would you mind telling me exactly what happened?”

  She stood there, staring at the tea-tray. Then she turned and gave me a long look. Then she turned back to the inspector.

  “I came in, as I usually do, about a quarter to eight,” she said. “I brought my aunt her tea, as I did every morning, and I saw her with the gun at her head. I think I shouted, ‘Don’t!’ or something like that, and I ran across the room to her, but before I got to her bedside she’d pulled the trigger. And I believe I started screaming. I’m not really sure what I did. The next thing I remember clearly is my sister shaking me and asking what had happened.”

  “But the tray you were carrying,” the detective said in his stolid way. “What did you do with it?”

  “The tray?” she repeated stupidly, as if she did not know what he was talking about, although her attention had been on it ever since she and I had come into the room. “I don’t know. I suppose I put it down somewhere.”

  “Here on this table,” he said, pointing. “Although you saw your aunt with a gun at her head, you carried the tray across the room and round the foot of the bed and you put it down here and only then started screaming. I find that very hard to envisage. If you’d simply dropped the whole works on the floor, or put it down on the nearest thing you could – that chest of drawers by the door, for instance – I could understand it and I should probably believe your story. As it is, I’m inclined to believe it may have been you who pulled the trigger after you’d put the tray down on this table.”

  Marion’s eyes met mine again. I suppose she was thinking of the time, while she had been making coffee, that I had had to myself, getting dressed and then no doubt returning to this room and putting the tray back where I had seen it when I first came into the room. Believing that she had rectified her error of leaving it on the bedside table before she killed Aunt Emma, she had been feeling reasonably safe. And so she might still have been if she had kept her head, if she had not turned on me and tried to scratch my eyes out with her nails! The evidence against her was actually very scanty.

  But she was not really the type to attempt murder, any more than I am myself. I went so far as to deny that I had touched the tray and as I had been very careful to leave no fingerprints on it I was believed. In the end, after another attack of shrieking, she broke down completely and confessed that she had killed Aunt Emma. To the end she believed that Aunt Emma had been about to change her will, cutting her and Charles out of it.

  She was sentenced to life.

  But of course a life sentence does not literally mean for life and the years have been passing. Charles and I have been living together for a long time now, but I am not quite sure what will happen when Marion is released from prison. I think he is happy with me. I gave up my job long ago and we live in the old house in Elwell Street. We have plenty of money and entertain a good deal, which he enjoys. But the scandal of the murder did him a fair amount of damage and he never obtained the professorship that he would have liked.

  I still do not know for certain if he was involved in the shooting of my aunt, or if the whole guilt was Marion’s, and I do not like to dig too deep. She never said anything to incriminate him, but perhaps, as his wife, she would not have been able to do so. However, he has always claimed that he really did not know what she intended to do that morning when she went downstairs to make the tea. All the same, sometimes I see him looking at me in a way that makes me wonder about the future....

  THE HANDBAG

  I think I noticed the excitement on Vivian Alford’s face as soon as we met for breakfast in the small, dark dining-room of the little hotel. But as there was usually only one explanation of that peculiar brightness in her eyes and the darting smile which kept tugging at the corners of her wide, soft mouth, I gave these hardly any attention.

  They meant, I felt fairly sure, that she’d seen some other guest in the hotel who was male and attractive and, although in the past I’d often been a sympathetic listener when she felt she had to discuss her hopes and successes with me, that morning I wasn’t in a responsive mood. I was too tired and still too sore with grief, and I’d already begun to get over my gratitude to her for the way she’d come, unasked, after an interval of three years, to find me after my father’s funeral and, before I’d been able to collect my wits enough to ask myself what she was really up to, had packed for me, bought my ticket, made all arrangements and swept me away to this lonely spot in the bleak border country for what she’d called a good rest.

  That my thankfulness for having been rescued from the total emptiness that had followed the funeral was a little dimmed was for quite selfish reasons, and I was rather ashamed of it. The truth was that, almost at once, I’d begun to feel it would have been wiser on my part either to have insisted on taking that good rest all by myself or to have gone straight on with the life which, from now on, I should have to live. At the same time, I was still moved by Vivian’s astonishing kindness. She was secretary to a doctor in Wimpole Street and her holidays weren’t long, so for her to have given up one whole precious week to cheering me up seemed generous in the extreme. I’d been surprised at her choice of this place for our holiday together, but I’d thought that in bringing me to this small inn in the midst of this gray silence, where there was nothing to do but look at the rain that blotted out the smooth curves of the hills and the lonely sweep of the high moorland, she’d believed she was doing what was best for me in my exhausted state. It wasn’t until later in our first day there that suspicion of her motives crept into my mind.

  I’d spent the morning reading and didn’t know what she’d been doing, but when she came to join me and we went into the dining-room together for lunch, I couldn’t help noticing the excitement in her manner. Abruptly she told me, as we sat down at our table, that after lunch we were going on a sightseeing expedition to look at Harestone House.

  “It’s hundreds of years old, Dorothy, and it’s a fascinating place,” she said with an airiness that didn’t quite ring true. “I’ve been reading it up in the guidebook. There are people living in
it, but today’s the day they let the public in to see the house. I’d hate to do that in their place, wouldn’t you? But I believe it helps with the taxes or something. And it’s only about ten minutes’ walk from here, so we might as well go.”

  “I don’t think I feel awfully like going,” I said. “Rain or not, I think I’ll go for a walk.”

  At once her temper flared. Unmistakeably it blazed in her big, long-lashed eyes before she decided that was the wrong way to go about it and let me have charm instead. Because I was too tired for argument, I gave in almost at once, but it was as I did so that I began to think that, after all, she’d sought me out and brought me here for some curious reason of her own and that, as very often before, she had a use for me.

  I didn’t mind much. In a way, I began to feel more at ease with a Vivian Alford who was running true to form than I had with the unfamiliar, almost too selfless Vivian, and as we set out after lunch through the light rain that was still falling, I found her eager concentration on her own affairs, whatever they were, actually had a bracing effect on me. During the months of my father’s long illness, I’d become used to being treated by my friends almost as if I were some sort of invalid myself. To be at last with someone who wasn’t trying to conceal the fact she had far more important things on her mind than sympathy for me in my sorrow was very good for me.

  So was her vitality. Her quick, light movements, her laugh, the red-gold hair that showed under the black beret that she had put on because of the rain, the small, delicate face with glowing cheeks, with the chin hidden in the upturned collar of her tweed coat – were all so alive they were like light in my eyes after the shadows of the sickroom.

  We didn’t have to walk the whole way to Harestone House. Before we’d reached the first bend in the road a car stopped beside us and Mr. Birkett, a man I’d noticed in the hotel, leaned out and asked if we’d like a lift. He was small, gray-haired and about sixty. His wife, who was also small, gray-haired and elderly, was in the car with him. Smiling, she beckoned to us to get in, asking where we’d like to be taken.

  “We’re going to look at Harestone House,” Vivian said, “but if that’s out of your way, please don’t bother about us.”

  “Why, that’s where we’re going ourselves,” Mrs. Birkett said. “I saw in the hotel it’s the day they let the public go around and, on a wet day like this, it seems the only thing to do.”

  “Yes, that’s what we thought, too,” Vivian said, and if I hadn’t remembered that flash of anger when I’d objected to going out with her, I’d have thought from her tone that the weather was all there was to it.

  I hadn’t any idea yet what else there could be, yet if I hadn’t already become suspicious, I think I should have done so when I saw Harestone House. It lay in a valley, with bare hills rising up steeply around it. That day, in the misty rain, they looked a mere dingy patchwork of grays and browns, with here and there a few dark blots of gorse and broom. Some black-faced sheep nibbled the grass alongside the narrow road that led to some iron gates. The house was of gray stone, a straggling building which had obviously been added to at different times. At first sight it seemed both shapeless and grim. I didn’t find it at all attractive and, though I supposed a keen student of history might think it an important place to visit, it didn’t seem to me likely that Vivian had developed a burning interest in history.

  Probably because of the weather, the party taken around the house that day was a small one. There were only the Birketts, Vivian and I and a man who had arrived on a motor-bicycle just ahead of us and was stripping off his cape and leggings in the shelter of a stone archway. He was young, tall and rather stooping, with a longish, thin face that might have been good-looking if one cheek hadn’t been puckered in an ugly scar. He wore spectacles and dragged one foot slightly. Something about the cut of his clothes made me think he was foreign – Dutch, perhaps, or Scandinavian – and a minute or two later I found I was right in this, because when the heavy old door of the house was opened to us by a girl with a roll of tickets in her hand, the accent in which he asked for one and then his helplessness with the handful of change he brought out of his pocket, made it plain he hadn’t been in the country long.

  The girl picked two shillings out of his hand and told him to put the rest away. She was slender and dark-haired with a soft, cool voice and eyes of that deep blue that one occasionally sees with dark hair. She wore a tweed skirt and a pale blue cashmere jumper. Something about the startled way Vivian looked at her made me sure she hadn’t expected to see the girl and was worried by her being there. But the girl didn’t stay with us then. Leaving us in a group in the panelled, stone-paved entrance hall, guarded by what looked like a couple of men in armor with lances in their mailed fists, she disappeared through a low doorway and a moment later an elderly woman came out, walking towards us slowly, leaning on a stick.

  She was a very big woman, with a great breadth of shoulder and massive wrists and ankles. She had straight gray hair, cut short, and a big, square face with harsh features. Ancient, faded tweeds hung loosely on her great body. At first sight she seemed both grotesque and formidable, yet as she came forward into the light that fell through a narrow, leaded window, I saw her face had an extraordinarily vague and gentle expression. As she seemed to take us in without quite looking at any of us and asked, oddly, I thought, how many of us there were. I was struck by an air of uncertainty, almost of helplessness about her which contrasted very strangely with her look of stern strength.

  Quickly and eagerly, Vivian answered, “There are five of us, Mrs. Hunter.”

  Then Vivian looked annoyed with herself. She’d realized that she’d just betrayed more knowledge of the people who lived in this house than she’d been pretending she had. Yet it took me some time to realize just how much knowledge she’d betrayed and that it wasn’t only the name of the family. By the promptness of her answer, Vivian had given away that she knew the old woman couldn’t tell by herself the size of our party because she was blind.

  I don’t think anyone else found this out until we were in the big, shadowy drawing-room. Mrs. Hunter had led the way with unfaltering steps through several smaller rooms, pointing out in each the interesting features of the stone fireplaces and the carvings over the doorways and telling us some of the history of the people whose faces looked down from the walls. It was history with a good deal of bloodshed in it, as in that part of the country was only to be expected. She’d moved slowly and heavily, but quite confidently, among tables and chairs. But in the drawing-room, pointing with her stick at a glass case between two windows, she gave us a short lecture on a silver goblet out of which the Duke of Montrose was said once to have drunk, which she appeared to believe was inside the case. But the goblet was on a table nearby, with polishing cloth beside it. Someone had been interrupted in the work of cleaning the goblet and had not returned it to its proper place, and Mrs. Hunter did not know this.

  I’d already been finding the grim old house a curiously disturbing place. The stories of conflict and treachery as often as loyalty, and the low, dark rooms in which the eyes of the portraits sometimes seemed to follow us with a look of malice and resentment, made me feel as if the blood that had been spilled here had only just been washed off the stones. And now, as the tour went on and Mrs. Hunter continued telling us about the things around us in words which sounded as if she were seeing them more clearly than any of us, an extraordinary uneasiness grew in me.

  I felt that behind those empty, unfocussed eyes she must be hating us all as intruders and hating the necessity that put her at our disposal. Not that she gave any sign of such a feeling. If anything, she seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to talk about her home and her family.

  From the drawing-room we went along a short passage at the end of which a door stood open into the garden. We didn’t go out through the door, but stopped just before it at the foot of a spiral stair.

  Moving to one side, Mrs. Hunter said, “If you’ll go up, my daughte
r-in-law will show you the upper floor, then bring you down the main staircase.”

  She gave a friendly smile more or less in Vivian’s direction, then turned and walked slowly back to the drawing-room.

  I looked at Vivian in astonishment. She was standing as still as if she were frozen. All the color had suddenly drained out of her face. I couldn’t imagine what there had been in the old woman’s glance that could have affected her so much, and I asked her in a whisper if she wasn’t feeling well. I got no answer and she didn’t move, so I started up the spiral stairs without her.

  The Birketts followed me. At the top we found the dark-haired girl who’d sold us our tickets. She took us along a winding corridor, then into a bedroom and started to tell us about the great bed there and its embroidered hangings. She talked in a far more perfunctory way than her mother-in-law and, though I hadn’t been sure about the older woman’s feelings, I’d no doubt at all that the girl felt only an angry contempt for us and for our curiosity. She muttered her lecture so hurriedly that the lame man, taking much longer than the rest of us on the stairs, missed most of it.

  He paid her out by starting to ask questions. He seemed to be well-informed and, in awkward, ill-pronounced sentences, asked for dates and questioned the authenticity of the information she gave us. The girl answered him in a cold, weary voice. At last it was finished and we went down the main staircase, which was broad and well-lit, with handsomely carved bannisters. Since Vivian had not come upstairs at all, I expected to find her waiting for us in the paved hall below, but she was not there.

  As the dark-haired girl crossed the hall and opened the door by which we had first come into the house, I stood still and said apologetically, “I’m sorry, but we seem to have mislaid my friend. Do you mind if I wait for her?”

  The girl was in a hurry to get rid of us and looked annoyed.

  “Oh, yes, there were five of you, weren’t there? I’d forgotten,” she said. “Don’t you think she’s probably gone home?”