Death Comes to Cambers

by E. R. Punshon

  Colonel Lawson and Moulland exchanged whispered comments. Bobby ventured to make a suggestion, and Lawson, adopting it, turned back to Amy and continued: ‘No doubt sometimes the keys would be put in a drawer, either here or upstairs – at night, for instance?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Amy answered promptly. ‘At night she always had her bag on the table near the bed, and I’ve never known her put the keys anywhere but in her bag.’

  Lawson consulted the other two again. Amy seemed to become once more lost in her own distant thoughts. Lawson said sharply: ‘You are sure about that?’

  Amy seemed to be considering, not whether she was sure, but what possible reason these people could have for asking her if she were sure of a statement when once she had made it. Finally, as if by way of a concession, she said: ‘Oh, yes. If you like to ask the others, they will all tell you the same.’

  ‘What about the combination number?’ Lawson asked. ‘Of the lock of the safe, I mean? The butler tells us it was forgotten once and the makers had to be sent for.’

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ Amy answered slowly. ‘I forget how long exactly. Afterwards, when the lock was set to a fresh number, Lady Cambers generally told me what it was. She thought we wouldn’t both forget. But I used to make a note of it, in case.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On a piece of paper,’ Amy answered patiently, very much in the manner of one answering the persistent questions of a troublesome child one does not, however, wish to discourage.

  Colonel Lawson was looking all he felt. Moulland was looking even more so. Bobby contented himself with looking at Amy, who on her part appeared again to have forgotten their existence and once more to be fixing her far-off gaze upon the wall-paper above their heads as though there alone was anything to interest her.

  ‘And, pray,’ demanded Colonel Lawson with an immense irony and a still more immense self-control, ‘what did you do with the piece of paper?’

  ‘I think generally I put it in my purse,’ Amy answered; ‘or somewhere safe,’ she added; and the chief constable snorted indignantly at this last word. ‘Sometimes Lady Cambers didn’t tell me if she didn’t think of it or I wasn’t there. Then she generally made a note herself.’

  ‘Where? On a piece of paper, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. Or in her blotting-book. I remember she told me to look there once for the right number when the key wouldn’t turn.’

  ‘What it comes to,’ observed the chief constable, ‘is that the number of the combination might be lying about on any bit of paper, or in the blotting-book where anyone could see it.’

  ‘If they did, they wouldn’t have the key,’ Amy pointed out gently, ‘so it was quite all right really. She was always most careful about her keys. So was I. If I had them for any reason I always gave them back to her immediately, and if I forgot she always asked for them.’

  ‘And last night?’

  ‘Last night,’ Amy answered, ‘the keys were in her bag on the table in her bedroom as usual. She asked me for something from her bag, and I remember taking the keys out to get it and then putting them back just before I said good night.’

  ‘Then how,’ demanded Lawson, ‘do you account for their being in this drawer of the writing-table where I found them a few moments ago?’

  He pulled open the drawer in question as he spoke by way of demonstration, but Amy shook her head.

  ‘Oh, no, they wouldn’t be there,’ she declared; ‘they couldn’t be.’

  It took some time to persuade her that the fact was really so. Then all she could say was that she could neither understand nor explain. Lady Cambers had always been most careful about her keys; she never left them lying about, never allowed them out of her possession except on rare and brief occasions; never kept them anywhere but in her bag. Most certainly she had them, as usual, with her in her room the previous night after retiring to bed, since Amy, as she had already testified, had herself seen them there, taken them out of the hand-bag, replaced them in it again.

  ‘Then,’ said Lawson, ‘that means she must either have put the keys in the drawer for safety before she left the house, or else her murderer brought them back, used them to open the safe and secure the jewellery, and then left them behind in the drawer here. If it was like that, he could have got in easily enough, since Lady Cambers must have left a door open to return by, but how did he get out again, if all the doors and windows were locked on the inside this morning? Unless he had an accomplice in the house. Or was he an inmate of it himself?’

  Amy said nothing. She was looking now at her hands folded in her lap, and had again her air of being wrapped in deep and somewhat aloof meditation. Lawson stared at her mistrustfully and began to fidget with some notes he had been making, though it was Bobby who was taking all this down in careful shorthand. Presently Lawson said: ‘Let’s try to get the times more accurately. Lady Cambers went to bed about eleven. Can you say exactly when? Was that her usual time?’

  ‘Yes, but she was often a little earlier or later. Last night I was sitting in her room waiting for her. I can’t be sure to a minute or two, but it was soon after eleven, during that very heavy rain. She put on her dressing-gown and said she didn’t want me anymore and I could go to bed. It wasn’t more than five minutes after she came upstairs. I think the rain was just stopping; it stopped nearly as suddenly as it began.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything about going out again?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘You can’t throw any light on that, or why she took her suit-case with her?’

  Amy shook her head, somehow managing to put into that slight gesture a wealth of passionate denial, of dread, of horror of the unknown; and again Lawson looked at her very doubtfully and Bobby with intense and questioning interest.

  ‘About the jewellery,’ Lawson said, leaving the question of the time of Lady Cambers’s retirement. ‘I understand it was worth a great deal of money? Thirty thousand pounds?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what it was worth,’ Amy replied. ‘A lot of money, I suppose, but I don’t know. It was very lovely. There was one pearl – the Cleopatra pearl – the loveliest thing that I have ever seen,’ she added with a kind of grave, impersonal delight.

  ‘There was something about it in one of the papers a week or two ago, wasn’t there?’ Bobby asked.

  ‘No,’ answered Amy, ‘that was the other one. There are two. They are supposed to have belonged to Cleopatra; she is said to have worn them as ear-rings – that is why they are called the Cleopatra pearls. Lady Cambers had one and Mr. Tyler has the other. He is a gentleman from America. He wanted to buy Lady Cambers’s, so that he could have them both for Mrs. Tyler to wear as ear-rings, too, but Lady Cambers wouldn’t agree. He came to see her about it a month ago, and she showed him hers but she wouldn’t sell it, and he went off in a temper; he wouldn’t even have a cup of tea, he was so angry. He said he had offered more than twice what it was worth.’

  ‘And now it’s gone, and all the rest as well,’ Lawson mused, and looked again at the safe as if he would force it to reveal its secret, and breathed harder than ever. He said: ‘Could the jewellery have been removed without your knowledge?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Amy answered doubtfully. ‘I think I should have known, though, unless Lady Cambers took a lot of trouble for me not to, and why should she? It was there last Wednesday, because I remember we had it out that morning. Why?’

  ‘Why had you it out?’ countered Lawson, ignoring her question.

  ‘Lady Cambers liked to look at it sometimes,’ Amy explained. ‘That was why she didn’t want to put it in the bank, where she could never see it. It is very beautiful,’ Amy added, with a kind of slow appreciation that, in Bobby’s mind at least, called up a picture of the two women sitting there with the jewellery outspread before them, both of them loving the sheer beauty of the glittering toys.

  He found himself wondering if anyone else had by any chance been a spectator of that scene.

  ‘Well, seems
it’s gone,’ Lawson said abruptly. ‘There’s no sign of any jewellery in the safe now.’

  ‘It’s always there,’ Amy persisted gently, and, when Lawson shook his head, she said: ‘But it must be. Let me look.’

  It was plain she thought they had not looked in the right place. Lawson gave her the keys. She picked out the right one at once, went across to the safe, set the combination, and opened it. After a moment she turned round, her expression less tranquil now, her voice a little breathless as she said: ‘It’s not there... it’s gone.... I don’t understand.’

  ‘Lady Cambers took a small suit-case with her when she went out last night,’ Lawson told her.

  ‘Yes, I know; I heard,’ Amy said.

  ‘Could she have had the jewellery with her in it?’ Lawson asked.

  Amy did not answer at first. She looked from her questioner to the safe and back again. Presently she said: ‘You don’t mean you think she put all the jewellery in a suitcase and took it out with her alone at that time of night?’

  ‘We have to consider every possibility,’ Lawson answered, a little irritably. ‘We have to consider the facts. There’s the suit-case, empty now, but presumably there was something in it or why did she take it with her? There’s the safe, empty now, but containing the jewels before. There’s the fact that the keys were left here, in a drawer, as if they didn’t matter much, as they wouldn’t if the safe had been emptied of everything of value. Those are facts. We’ve got to interpret them.’

  ‘If the jewellery’s been stolen, that may be the motive for the murder,’ suggested Moulland.

  ‘Is there any list of it, any inventory?’ Lawson asked.

  ‘There was an inventory,’ Amy answered, ‘but I think Sir Albert took it away with him when he left home.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘There was a disagreement about it,’ Amy explained. ‘Sir Albert lost a very great deal of money a little while ago. It was something about pepper. I don’t know exactly. I suppose the lawyers could tell you. The entail was broken, and Lady Cambers bought the estate from Sir Albert with her own money, so that he could pay what he owed about the pepper. Lady Cambers wanted her nephew, Mr. Sterling, to be her heir and have the estate, as they had no children themselves. I think Sir Albert wanted it to go to a cousin of his, so it could stop in the family. Of course, after Lady Cambers bought the estate she could have left it to anyone else, if she quarrelled with her nephew. Sir Albert might easily have had his own way in the end if he had waited and they had come to make things up again between themselves.’

  ‘About the jewellery,’ Lawson asked. ‘Was there any quarrel about it in especial, did you mean?’

  ‘Lady Cambers thought it was her own to do what she liked with. Sir Albert said some of it was heirloom and went with the entail, and now the entail was broken it was his, as it hadn’t been sold with the estate – or, at any rate, some of it that he said he had never actually given her. Lady Cambers said he should never have it. I think she thought he really wanted to give it to someone else. She was very upset about it. I expect it was all a misunderstanding because they were so angry with each other.’

  ‘Was the jewellery insured, do you know?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I remember Lady Cambers saying the insurance company asked such a lot.’

  ‘Yet she was nervous about burglars?’

  ‘Only after Sir Albert went away and after we heard there was a strange man in the village asking a lot of questions and hanging about the place. She never seemed nervous before.’

  The chief constable subsided into moody silence. Lady Cambers murdered; her jewellery gone; her keys where they had never been before, in a drawer of her writing – table in the same room with the empty safe; a hint of bitter domestic disputes in the background; no explanation of the solitary midnight expedition that had ended so tragically – the chief constable saw no line to follow likely to lead to a solution through so tangled a labyrinth. Moulland sat upright, waiting for instructions. To Bobby it seemed that half a dozen lines of inquiry presented themselves, simply asking to be followed up. He could hardly bear to sit still upon his chair when there was so much to be done. As for Amy, she seemed to have relapsed again into her habitual solitude of mind, and there to be once more communing alone with her own thoughts. When Lawson spoke again, she had again the air of having been called back from a remote and distant place.

  ‘Mr. Sterling?’ she repeated. ‘His first name is Timothy; Lady Cambers always called him Tim. She promised to make him her heir, but she seemed to think he wasn’t grateful enough. I think he didn’t want to count upon it. She could have changed her mind, and perhaps he thought she might. He has a small factory where they make wireless things.’

  ‘I wonder if there’s a will and if he does inherit?’ observed Colonel Lawson. ‘Well, Emmers, I don’t think we need keep you any longer. Emmers is your name, I think?’

  ‘My name is Amy Margaret Emmers,’ she answered in her aloof, indifferent way as she rose to go. ‘I am generally called Miss Emmers.’

  In the same calm, distant way she went gently from the room, and the chief constable, staring after her, went slowly redder and redder in the face.

  ‘I... I... I...’ he stuttered at last. ‘I believe she meant that. I believe she meant I wasn’t to call her Emmers.’

  As it was quite evident that that, indeed, was precisely what she had meant, neither Bobby nor Moulland ventured any comment. The chief constable went on growing red and looking bewildered, for such a thing as a lady’s maid rebuking a colonel had never yet entered into his conception of the scheme of things. With a certain courage Moulland made a plunge.

  ‘In my humble opinion, sir,’ he said, ‘that girl knows a good deal more than she’s told.’

  ‘Then she’ll have to be made to tell,’ declared Lawson very fiercely.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Moulland, in a tone that seemed to hint he saw difficulties in the way.

  ‘She’s given a lot of information,’ Bobby ventured to remark. ‘About the quarrel, and about the nephew, Mr. Sterling. And she was quite clear and emphatic about the keys.’

  A knock came at the door, and Farman appeared.

  ‘Mr. Bowman is here, sir. He says he understands you would like to see him. And Mr. Sterling, her ladyship’s nephew, is here too, sir.’

  ‘We’ll see Mr. Bowman first,’ Lawson decided. ‘Ask Mr. Sterling to wait. There’s this man we keep hearing about, too – the stranger Lady Cambers seems to have been nervous about. We had better get him along and see what he has to say. You had better see to that, Moulland.’

  Farman coughed – a butler’s discreet, informatory cough.

  ‘Well?’ said Lawson, understanding its significance.

  ‘I’m told, sir,’ Farman informed him, ‘that the person left hurriedly this morning. He paid his bill and went immediately on hearing what had happened. He said he might return, and would let them know if he did. He appeared in a great hurry.’

  The chief constable scowled and frowned, trying to think whom he could blame for action not having been taken more promptly.

  ‘Looks odd,’ he said. ‘Ought to have been seen to, Moulland. We shall have to trace him. Very likely there’s no connection, but it will have to be looked into. Ask Mr. Bowman to come in,’ he added to Farman.

  The butler retired and Mr. Bowman appeared. He was a short, round, fair man, who looked as if he did himself well and who was now in a not unnatural state of agitation and distress.

  ‘Dreadful business,’ he kept saying. ‘Greatest shock of my life. I couldn’t believe it when I saw who it was.’

  His account of his discovery was simple and coherent. It was now his custom to take the early train to Hirlpool, where he was in business as an accountant and estate-agent. He had no car, as he had recently sold it, and he had not yet bought a new one, so he went by train. He walked to the station at this end. On his way, when he noticed the figure lying in the field, he thought at first
it was a tramp sleeping out. But there seemed something unnatural in the figure’s attitude, and a tramp would most likely have sought the shelter of a bush or a haystack. He had gone to look, and he was quite unable to describe his surprise and horror when he realized who it was. It was then about twenty past seven, he supposed, though he had not looked at his watch. But the train he was on his way to catch left at a quarter to eight, and the station was about twenty minutes’ walk or so.

  ‘The body was on its face,’ he went on. ‘I turned it over. It was quite stiff. She must have been dead some time. I ran to Mr. Hardy’s place and told them, and they came at once. We took the body to that shed of young Dene’s. Hardy said he would tell the police and get a doctor – not that a doctor could do anything for her, poor soul. I went straight back home. I felt too upset and ill to be able to do any work. I rang up the office after a time to tell them what had happened and that I shouldn’t be coming. But I think I’ll go on now, if there’s nothing I can do to help. There are several things I ought to attend to.’

  The chief constable did not think there was anything Mr. Bowman could do just at present. Accordingly he departed, and Mr. Sterling was introduced.

  He proved a good-looking young man, with a thin, dark face, about twenty-three or four years old, tall and of vigorous appearance. He, too, was in a nervous, agitated state. The news of his aunt’s death had been a dreadful shock to him. He had heard of it at Hirlpool, where he had spent the night. Already everyone in Hirlpool was talking about it – the most sensational murder the district had ever known. He had started out from home the night before to visit his aunt, leaving his rooms on the outskirts of London, near his place of work, in quite good time. But the journey had been a series of misadventures. His motor-cycle had broken down repeatedly, and the more often he got it going the more certain it was to break down again. The ignition was all wrong. He began to enter into technical details that interested Bobby enormously, but that Colonel Lawson, who thought motor-cycles slightly vulgar, promptly checked. So Sterling apologized, and added that he had lost his way in the dark, and been caught in the rain, and had a skid and a tumble, and finally had reached Hirlpool somewhere in the small hours and then had knocked up a pub and secured shelter. It jolly well wouldn’t have done, he explained, to disturb his aunt and her household at such an hour. Of course, if he had known what had been happening, he added moodily, it would have been different. But who could have dreamed of such a tragedy?