Puzzle of the Silver Persian

by Stuart Palmer

  “The diary,” interrupted Miss Withers. “But go on.”

  “There isn’t much more,” said Cannon. “Except that I had a pretty good idea that Candida was the mysterious ‘Mrs. Charles’ who slipped from cheap hotel to cheaper boarding house here and there in London. She was seen smoking a ‘cigar,’ you remember. The sergeant saw through that—it was one of the Porto Rican brown-paper cigarettes that both girls smoked on board ship. Secker was sure it meant that Rosemary Fraser was alive. When we got the report from the autopsy and knew that she couldn’t have been, I jumped at the conclusion that the cigar-smoker was Candida. It wasn’t much to go on, and no wonder the D.P.P. refused me a warrant.” The chief inspector leaned forward. “But to come back to you. Why were you so worried when you heard that I was planning to come down here to arrest the girl?”

  “Because I thought it wouldn’t be justice,” Miss Withers told him. “Not knowing how much you knew, I still hoped to present the facts of the case to you in such a light that you wouldn’t be able to go ahead with the arrest.”

  “What? But why, in the name of—”

  “Oh, I was wrong, terribly wrong,” Miss Withers assured him. “But I thought that I had a chance to play judge and jury. You see, I came over on this trip to forget a case out in California where I was the instrument in bringing a young man and a girl to the gallows. Theirs was a brutal crime, murder for money, but all the same I had a rather bad night of it when I knew that they were to step off into thin air when daybreak came to dreary San Quentin prison.”

  Cannon knew that feeling. “But I never let any murderer get away because I couldn’t stomach his being hung.”

  “Wait,” said Miss Withers quickly. “I knew that Candida killed Peter Noel and Andrew Todd—both of them persons that the world could do well without. She had a twisted sort of justification, I thought, for killing them. I didn’t think at the time that she meant to go any farther. I was sure that the warning letters were simply to throw a scare into the hearts of those whose laughter had driven Rosemary Fraser to suicide.”

  “Suicide?” cut in Cannon. “I’m not convinced of that. Seems to me that Candida Noring started all this in order to make sure of getting the person who murdered her room mate—a personal ‘vengeance is mine’ affair.”

  “Please!” said Miss Withers. “Let me tell it my own way. I still have work to do tonight, unless you decide to arrest me as an accessory after the fact.

  “I’ll begin at the beginning,” she said. “On board the American Diplomat. Candida and Rosemary Fraser, a younger girl who had been her charge since both were children, started on a trip which was to be a world cruise. Rosemary was a peculiar girl, emotional, easily swayed, and likely to lose her head. She snubbed Andy Todd in the bar of the ship, when his only fault was in being too loud and too friendly. She refused his drink because she didn’t like his voice or his accent or something. He was not the type to forget that, you see. And when that detestable Hammond child informed him that she was friendlier with other men, and that she was having an assignation with the handsome bar steward, Todd planned a cruel and vicious revenge. He nearly missed—for he found the blanket locker empty when he led the others to it. But he saw, from the hairs of a fur coat caught in the lid, that Rosemary had been there. And he waited—a nasty person, Todd. Not typical at all of the Rhodes scholars that America sends to Oxford, or of his own university.

  “Rosemary was filled with shame at the thought of what she had done—or what she appeared to have done. That is why she hid herself in her stateroom until the night of the captain’s dinner—a real event on board, when the sea was as calm as a mill pond and her absence would, as Candida must have assured her, be taken as a sure sign of guilt. She came down to dinner, and Todd, still smarting from her refusal to dance or drink with him, was prepared for her. He had bribed the table steward to make a change in the gift parcel which was placed at her side, and he made certain that a key marked ‘key to the blanket locker’ was waiting there. It assured the poor girl that her sin—if it was a sin—was known to someone. Up to then she may have been hoping that she had gotten by with it.

  “She read the message aloud, hysterically. That was something that even the fiendish Todd had not hoped she would do. And everyone at the table laughed except Candida, who knew her friend’s suffering, and except myself who was ignorant of the scandal. The laughter drove Rosemary to her stateroom.

  “She turned to her diary and poured forth in its pages everything that she could not say. She wrote horrible, hateful things, and said much of death—for it was in her mind. The outpourings did not quiet her, and she could not cry. She was too young to know how little the scandals of shipboard matter when port is reached, and she feared that Colonel Wright, the business acquaintance of her father’s, would see that her family heard about it. Throwing aside the diary, she eluded Candida’s well-meant comfort and went up on deck. Probably she did not see me there, or thought me asleep as I lay in my deck chair. Anyway, she jumped overboard.”

  “You’re mad,” put in Cannon. “I follow you so far. But she didn’t jump into mid-Atlantic and come up in the Thames two weeks later.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “It’s quite impossible. But she did it all the same. And that’s what threw this whole case off balance. It was a queer trick of fate. She leaped into the sea—but having spent every summer at the seashore, she knew how to dive. She struck the water as a diver does, making almost no splash at all. She went deep beneath the surface…”

  “No matter how deep she dived, she couldn’t come up in the Thames,” objected Cannon. “It won’t wash.”

  “Wait,” commanded Miss Withers. “I’ll convince you. It seemed impossible to me—until I remembered the trailing blue scarf she wore. She went deep beneath the surface, and like most things flung into the water, she was sucked in by the powerful screws of the ship. That was what killed her—not drowning. I spent some time this morning—it seems years ago—in reading up on the mechanism of a ship. The propellers cause a tremendous flurry of water, you see. Enough to wind the loose silken scarf tightly around the rudder-post. And there Rosemary Fraser must have dangled, towed deep under water by the ship, until the American Diplomat docked in the Thames or after!

  “Then the scarf must have rotted or torn. The body remained under water until natural decomposition set it free and brought it to the surface.” Miss Withers saw that Cannon was frowning.

  “All right—then you tell me how she got there!”

  The chief inspector rubbed his chin. “There were marks of paint and rust on the fragments of the scarf,” he admitted. “But still—”

  “They would hardly have been there if the scarf had not been caught firmly on some part of a ship,” Miss Withers reminded him. “I found that there have been other cases of such things—in the Mediterranean a few years ago a French sailor fell overboard and was found next day hooked hard and fast to the rudder—because the ship refused to answer her helm. If the American Diplomat had not been worked by an automatic steering device I’ll wager that a helmsman would bear witness to the difficulty in steering on the remainder of the voyage.”

  “Ingenious,” admitted Cannon. “Very likely you’re right. But—”

  “But me no buts,” Miss Withers snapped. “But to go back to the ship. Suicides almost always leave some message behind—and Rosemary left her diary. Candida Noring found it that same night and knew the whole story. She tore the telltale sheets out of the diary—”

  “She didn’t get them ashore,” the Yard man interrupted. “Because we searched her baggage with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “Well, you didn’t search the mails with a fine-tooth comb,” Miss Withers told him. “Nor the bottom of her powder box—though that comes later. As a matter of fact, there was a letter-drop in the writing room of the ship. Candida simply tore out the sheets of the diary, put them into an envelope or several envelopes addressed to herself care the hotel or the American Express in London, and fou
nd them there soon after the ship landed. It was as simple as A B C.

  “Anyway, the morning after the disappearance of Rosemary, I saw Noel disposing of some scraps of paper. He said they were an old deck of cards, but I found one scrap and saw that it bore the letters ‘osem.’ That was part of Rosemary’s signature. She wouldn’t sign an entry in her diary, but she might very well have written him a note on one page. Perhaps she really loved the man, infatuated with his tales of adventure. ‘She loved him for the dangers he had met’ or whatever it is. At least she wrote to him.

  “All this time Candida was boiling. She felt that her friend had been murdered—forced into suicide. The next day I myself advised her, when she came out of the bath, to seek out the ship’s doctor and get a sleeping draught. Evidently she arrived at his office when the doctor was out—he spent most of his time chatting to the lady passengers—and the sight of the unlocked medicine cabinet gave her a black inspiration. She would kill Peter Noel in such a way that no one would ever know—and yet Rosemary would be avenged upon her seducer. Candida had had enough college chemistry to tell her what the symbols meant, and she stole a whole bottle of cyanide of potassium.”

  “I don’t suppose you know where she hid it?” Cannon asked.

  “Of course! Remember the japanned powder box that was a favor at the captain’s dinner? I wondered, when I saw it on her dressing table in the hotel, just why she had kept such an unpleasant reminder of that night. The cyanide was dumped in the bottom and perhaps covered over with powder.”

  Cannon leaped to his feet. “Then we’ve got our case. If we can find that—”

  “Sit down,” Miss Withers told him. “You won’t find it. I’ve been through her room. Either she destroyed it in London, or else she used the last of it to pack the cigarettes with. But she was versatile, you see, and quick-witted. I searched her cabin on board while she was at the bath, but she had already got rid of the diary pages—all but one sheet, which she must have carried around with her.

  “She had a use for that. As soon as she knew that there would be an investigation into Rosemary’s death, she worked out a devilishly ingenious plot. Noel had already given her the idea—Mrs. Hammond told me about his yarn of a card-game in Alaska in which he swallowed an extra card and won the pot.

  “She gave information to you of such a nature that you were sure to place Noel under arrest. Yet only a few moments before she had slipped a piece of paper in his pocket—a note in Rosemary’s writing. No doubt it was the girl’s last accusation of the man. At any rate, he had no chance to get rid of it in front of all the assembled passengers. And, until he found himself under arrest, no need to do so. But if that came to light, he stood a good chance to lose his berth on the ship, and possibly the rich widow for whom he was angling out in Minneapolis.

  “It was a long shot, but if it failed, Candida lost nothing. It succeeded—Noel remembered his own story of the card and swiftly swallowed the incriminating message as you arrested him. Then he dropped—for the paper had been soaked in a solution of Candida’s stolen cyanide. Clever, eh?”

  “Damnably! But what was her motive? A girl doesn’t usually kill in order to avenge a friend—not even an old friend.” The chief inspector hesitated. “Unless of course there was—”

  “No need to get Freudian,” Miss Withers cut him off. “Murderers are always neurotic, but in this case I think we can ignore the possibility of anything abnormal. My own opinion is that Candida felt toward Rosemary a tremendously protective and fierce motherliness. That tendency in her character came out later, when she adopted poor helpless Leslie Reverson.

  “When Candida got to the hotel she found, in her mail, the letter she had sent to herself containing the diary pages. She set to work preparing warning notes, using sentences here and there from the diary and combining them to intensify their meaning, and pasted them upon black paper to confuse the fact.

  “I entered her room and almost surprised her. But she had one letter ready for herself as writers of poison-pen letters always do. That was a clue, however, for if the letters were from Rosemary, as they appeared to be, Candida herself was the one person who should not have received one.

  “She sent a letter immediately to Andy Todd, perhaps by placing it under his door. She thought it dramatic justice to send each person the message that poor Rosemary had penned in the last hour of her life. She addressed the envelopes in a copy of Rosemary’s writing—there wasn’t enough written on any of them to give handwriting experts much to work from.

  “Then that night both Andy Todd, who felt guilty about what he had done, and Leslie Reverson, who sensed the new and vivid personality that Candida had put on with her new mission, argued over who should take her out. She went with Leslie, but I saw her whisper something to Todd which I later came to believe must have been a promise to meet him after she returned. I wondered why he looked so appeased. Anyway, he came up to her room on the fifth floor that night, probably rather drunk. Perhaps he became amorous—he was the type, if admitted to a girl’s room late at night. That may have made it easier for Candida. Anyway, she killed him.”

  “Killed him how?” protested Cannon. “She’s only a girl—”

  “A strong, athletic girl, borne up by a terrific purpose,” Miss Withers reminded him. “And Todd was easy pickings that night. He had three bottles of whisky in his room when I called on him, and only one empty was ever found. He must have taken the others up to Candida’s room, and she encouraged him to drink himself into a stupor. It was not as difficult as it all sounds now—she told him some cock-and-bull story about hearing moans at the bottom of the elevator shaft. They went out together to look, and after she had put her hand through and opened the catch, she gave him a sudden push through the open door. His hand was too large to have done it, you see. Then she dropped the bottles after him and shut the door.”

  “From the fifth floor, eh? Then that’s why the body was so crushed—much more than the surgeon would have thought likely from a fall from the third,” Cannon said. Then his eyes narrowed. “You’re not guessing now,” he told her. “How did you happen to deduce that bit about moans at the bottom of the shaft?”

  Miss Withers realized that she had said too much.

  “I wasn’t guessing,” she admitted. “Candida told me. And she went on to say that, when there was no outcry or alarm at the fall of Todd, she went down and opened the elevator door on the third floor, wearing gloves, so that it would seem he fell from his own hallway. The hotel was quiet as a tomb, she said, at that hour.”

  “She told you?” Cannon was on his feet. “That’s a bit—”

  “Never mind that now,” she said wearily. “I’ll tell you everything. But let me tell it my own way. The next step for Candida was the attack on herself. She was afraid that the police, or perhaps myself might suspect her. So she bought the cigarettes in the character of the mysterious Mrs. Charles—”

  “Wait,” demanded Cannon. “What about the fur coat? She didn’t have any fur coat.”

  “She could have bought one,” Miss Withers told him. “Of course, she was lying when she said that Rosemary went to her death with their joint funds. Suicides don’t need carfare. Candida had the money, and she got a fur coat somehow. She was trying to make the police believe that Rosemary was alive, or else play-acting that she was Rosemary and carrying out the dead girl’s revenge…” Miss Withers frowned. “If only Rosemary’s belongings hadn’t been sent back to the States—”

  “Blimey!” said the chief inspector. “They weren’t! I just remembered. The personal effects of Rosemary Fraser were turned over, at the cabled instructions of her parents, to her friend Candida Noring. She was supposed to take care of sending them back!”

  “It’s a great pity,” Miss Withers remarked, “that you didn’t tell me that. It makes everything simple. She built up her identity in Rosemary’s clothes as ‘Mrs. Charles’—prepared her later letters in those cheap rooms, and no doubt left the things in one of them or in
a check room somewhere when she decided to come down here.

  “Anyway, I mustn’t get ahead of myself. Candida brought the gift cigarettes to the hotel, found the flowers which Leslie Reverson had sent her, and put his card into the ebony box. It was meant only as a herring across the trail, although she may not have felt toward him then as she did later. She offered me one of the poisoned cigarettes, perhaps hoping that I would take it and be put out of the way. I refused, and soon after I left the room she sat down before the fire with a doped cigarette, hoping to be found there…”

  “Here’s a bad flaw,” pointed out Cannon. “How’d she know you would return?”

  “She couldn’t have known, of course. I hurried back because I remembered that Leslie had touched his aunt for only ten shillings in the tea room, and the cigarettes cost much more. His flowers had probably been put into the plumbing. Candida didn’t count on my return—she wouldn’t have tried to fool me with a fake faint. Perhaps she really did pass out from the fumes of the cigarette burning beside her—you can rest assured that she did not puff on it—but she only planned on fooling the maid, who was due any moment with a hot-water bottle to turn the bed back for the night.

  “She was flushed with success of her plotting,” Miss Withers went on. “She was sure that she was getting by with it and that no one suspected her. As a matter of fact, at that time I didn’t. But you did—because you adjourned the inquest.”