But as I say, I knew nothing of all this that Friday night, the second after Mrs. Lancaster had been killed; nor of Herbert Dean’s reputation among the police of various cities. I did not know of Jim’s wire which had brought him in a plane some five hundred miles in less than as many minutes, although the police did! As a matter of fact, Mr. Dean’s first visit on his arrival had been to the Commissioner. That had been on Friday afternoon, after he had heard Jim’s story.
“What I would like to do,” he said, “is to look over the lay of the land for a day or two, before even your own fellows know I’m on the case. If that’s all right with you—”
“Anything’s all right with me, Dean. We’re in a hole over this case and it’s falling in on us. It’s sink or swim.” And having thus neatly mixed his metaphors, he inquired as to how Herbert Dean proposed to go about it.
“I’m taking a job in the Wellington house. The story’s somewhere along that Crescent, Blake. It has to be. And maybe the servants will talk.”
Which last reveals an optimism not justified by the facts. Our servants may have talked among themselves, almost certainly they did. But never did they more than pass the time of day with Mr. Herbert Ranchester Dean, expert criminologist and for a few days what he called gentleman’s gentleman and cook-butler to Jim Wellington.
But I knew nothing of this when, the glove carefully wrapped in a bit of old newspaper, Mr. Dean slipped out the kitchen door like a shadow, and I closed and locked it behind him. It was not until I got upstairs that I became uneasy. After all, I had only this man’s word that he was working for Jim, and that vague recollection of having seen him there once on the porch at a party. It was well after twelve then, and from that time until almost two in the morning I simply walked the floor, uncertain and wretched.
It was two by my clock when I finally undressed, put out my light and went to a window to raise the shade.
I was in that state of exhaustion which makes sleep a remote thing, and so I stood by the window for a moment or two. Beneath me lay the two gardens, the Lancasters’ and our own; and that strip of lawn where Eben had been mowing the grass when Miss Emily had run shrieking out of the house. Between the two properties is a thin line of Lombardy poplars, slim and graceful, and suddenly a movement among them caught my attention.
There was a man standing there, close to the trunk of one of the trees and rather behind it. As I stared down he left his hiding place and sliding from tree to tree began to make his way silently and more rapidly than it sounds toward the rear and No Man’s Land. When he had left the poplars he abandoned all caution and commenced to move rapidly toward the rear. Who he was, whether tall or short, heavy or lean, I could not tell.
I stood by the window, stunned with astonishment. Before me was the Lancaster house, shrouded in trees save for that side entrance and for the roof which rose above them. It was dark, except for the faint light in Mr. Lancaster’s bathroom which he always kept on. Only when my eyes traveled to the roof did I see anything unusual, and then my previous astonishment turned to real alarm.
There was another man up there. A figure, anyhow. It was not erect. It was crawling on hands and knees, slowly and cautiously; and now and then it seemed to stop and to peer over the edge to where the mansard of the third floor ended in a gutter. There was something so deliberate and dreadful about the whole thing, outlined as it was against the moon, that at first I could scarcely move. Then at last I got myself under control and rushing down to the telephone, called the Lancaster house.
It was Emily who answered, her voice heavy and thick with sleep.
“What is it?” she said.
“It’s Louisa Hall, Miss Emily.”
“Good heavens, Louisa! Is anything wrong? I’ve had a sleeping powder, and I’d just got to sleep.”
“Listen, Miss Emily. Please don’t be frightened, and don’t make a noise or anything. I think there’s someone on your roof.”
“On the roof?” she said dully. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. He must have used a ladder to get there. If you’ll waken someone and take away the ladder you’ll have him trapped, and I’ll get the police.”
She made no immediate reply. She seemed to be standing there, undecided and heavy with whatever narcotic had been given her. But at last she spoke again.
“I can’t believe it; but I’ll tell Margaret.”
She did not even hang up the receiver, and I wondered what had happened. Then I heard the sound of her rather heavy footsteps in the hall, and knew that she was on her way to call Margaret.
When I went back to look at the roof the figure was gone. Perhaps through the open windows it had heard the shrill sound of the telephone bell. Indeed now I think there is no doubt of it. Anyhow that part of the roof which I could see was empty; and when I had reached the street and located the officer who was still on duty around the Lancaster house, we could find no sign of any ladder whatever.
The officer was skeptical.
“Maybe you dreamed it, miss.”
“Dreamed it? I haven’t even been to bed!”
He eyed me in the moonlight.
“Keep pretty late hours around here, don’t you? For a quiet place.”
“Perhaps you consider it quiet. Personally I don’t.”
Margaret joined us on the front porch then, and was as much at a loss as we were.
“It doesn’t seem possible, Louisa,” she said, with a worried frown. “I got Father’s revolver, and Emily and I went up to the cedar room. The ladder is where it ought to be, and nothing has been disturbed.”
I explained to the officer. Both the Lancaster house and ours have on the third floor a small cedar room, with a trap door in the ceiling; and each house keeps in the cedar room a portable ladder for the use of the men who periodically go over the roofs and paint the gutters. It was to this ladder that Margaret referred, and to this room that she took the policeman while I went back home. Only a few minutes later I saw the officer himself on the flat roof and staring about him, but apparently he discovered nothing suspicious, and soon he too disappeared.
That was, as I have said, on Friday night, or rather early Saturday morning. It was two-thirty when at last I crawled into bed, and fell into the sleep of utter exhaustion.
Chapter XVI
WE DO NOT OVERSLEEP in the Crescent, no matter what our nights have been, and as I think I have said, we breakfast downstairs. Mother was better that next morning, Saturday, and we were still at the table when Miss Margaret came over and through the French door into the dining room.
She was shrouded in black, even to her hat with its crêpe-edged veil, and although it was not yet nine we knew she was ready for the ordeal of the inquest. She had come to ask if Holmes could or would stay in the house while they were all gone.
“It will be safe enough,” she said, “and I have never left the house empty. You see we all have to go, even the maids.”
“Of course, Margaret,” Mother agreed. “Although I’d as soon put a rabbit on guard. Still, if you want him—Certainly. Louisa can go with the Daltons although why she should want to go at all I cannot understand.”
Emily, Margaret said, was still asleep and not well. She had been in a sort of daze for the last two days, and she would not rouse her until the last minute. Upon which Mother insisted on ordering some creamed chicken prepared and sent over later, and by going back to speak to Mary left us alone for a minute or two.
I can still see Margaret suddenly throwing back her veil and bending toward me.
“Tell me something, Louisa,” she said in a low voice. “Just what did you see on our roof last night?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It looked like a man, on his hands and knees.”
“On his hands and knees!” she repeated, astonished. “Just crawling about, you mean?”
“He seemed to be that way so he could get to the edge; for safety. Or so I thought.”
“And when he got to the edge?”
“I thought
he looked over, into the gutter.”
“You didn’t dream all this?”
“I hadn’t even been to bed, Miss Margaret,” I said.
“At two in the morning?” Her keen eyes searched my face, and I felt myself coloring.
“I’ve been worried. Naturally.”
That seemed to satisfy her, for she drew down her veil again and nodded.
“Jim, of course. Well, Louisa, I wish you’d keep it to yourself. The servants are ready to bolt at any minute anyhow. And you may be wrong. By the time I’d got Father’s revolver, and Emily and I got to the cedar room, the trap was fastened and the ladder where it belongs. I’ve convinced Emily that you had a nightmare, so it would better rest at that. I wouldn’t even talk to her about it. Or to anybody.”
And of course I agreed.
Perhaps in writing all of this I have left out too much of the excitement our murder had caused; have said too little of the curious crowds which were held back at the gate by a uniformed policeman, but which had discovered Euclid Street and No Man’s Land, and had periodically to be driven out of the latter; have ignored the press, bored and in the summer doldrums and so now in a state of hysterical excitement. And it is possible too that I have underestimated the local importance of the Crescent families.
Every city I dare say has its group of old families which in their day have written the local history. In time they pass out of the social columns and into the obituary; indeed sometimes they have to die to be remembered. Nevertheless, the names still are important, and even their ordinary deaths are news.
Now in one of these families had occurred a savage and shocking murder, and since the crime both press and people had shown not only curiosity but a very real pride in us. We discovered to our own surprise that we were the last stand of fashionable exclusiveness, that we were among the few survivors of an earlier and more formal age, that even royalty was more accessible, and that our rare invitations were eagerly sought by all the nouveaux riches of the town!
And that propaganda had had its result by the time our various cars started out that Saturday morning. There was a large crowd outside our gates as I drove out with the Daltons, and downtown in the city proper police reserves had had to be called out to control the masses who had gathered to see the grieving family arrive for the inquest.
I had not been prepared for all this, and to add to my discomfort the ride was constrained and painful. Bryan Dalton had barely spoken, devoting all his attention to the car and now and then running a finger around his immaculate collar as though it choked him. And Mrs. Dalton, beside me in the rear seat and looking pale and drawn, had chattered all the way; not so much to me as at him.
“Of course, Louisa,” she said. “You know and I know that no lunatic did this thing. It’s my opinion it was thought out and worked out to the last second of time. And who could do that?”
“I haven’t an idea,” I replied dutifully.
“Well, think about it! It had to be someone who knew all about that house, didn’t it?”
“You can’t mean a member of the family!”
“I didn’t say that,” she said sharply. “There are other ways of finding out. And even with all this money gone she must have left something. Those two women ought to be well fixed.”
That was the only time Mr. Dalton spoke, and he spoke without turning his head.
“You might say to my wife that I regard this talk about money just now as execrably bad taste.”
She laughed her small frozen laugh.
“I would be interested to know when Mr. Dalton ever before regarded any talk about money as in bad taste,” she said.
All in all, I was glad when we had reached the building, passed through a barrage of camera men and the aisle made for us by the police, and into the building itself.
It was my first experience of an inquest, and I had never even seen a coroner before. This one turned out to be rather a hortatory person, who explained to us and to the six men of the jury that a coroner’s inquest is a preliminary inquiry, that it corresponds in many ways to an examination before a magistrate, and that testimony is taken under oath.
“What we shall want here today,” he said to the jury, “is a truthful statement from all witnesses so that you may render a verdict in accordance with the facts.”
I suppose the jury had already seen the body, for one or two of them looked rather white. And the formality of identification took only a moment, Doctor Armstrong doing this for the family.
After that the medical examiner was called, to testify as to the nature of the injuries. These he said had consisted of five blows with an axe, any one of which must have rendered the victim unconscious immediately. Most of them had been delivered on the right side of the head, but there was one which had struck the neck, and severed both the carotid artery and the jugular vein.
He considered it unlikely that the dead woman had survived the first blow, or had suffered any pain whatever; this I suppose for the benefit of the family.
The jury was then shown a map of the Crescent, and a detailed plan of the Lancaster house. And following that came the first witness, Emily Lancaster, who had discovered the body.
I do not think Doctor Armstrong had wanted Miss Emily to go on the stand at all. She had insisted, however, and after giving her some aromatic ammonia in water he helped her to her place. There was a murmur of sympathy as she took the stand, and a breathless silence while in a low voice she gave her testimony.
As to the time, she was absolutely certain.
“I have lived by the clock for so many years,” she explained. Otherwise her story was as before, save that she added something to what the police already knew. This was that while she was partially dressed she had again heard a sound from the direction of her mother’s room, and that she had then opened the door into the hall, but heard nothing and went back to her dressing.
“What was the nature of the sound?”
“It was—I can hardly say. Maybe a door closing, or a chair being overturned.”
“It did not occur to you to investigate further?”
“No. I listened and everything was quiet.”
They let her go at that. She looked so ill that even the coroner seemed moved to pity. And after that the rest of us followed along with our stories, Margaret, Eben, myself—highly nervous, Mrs. Talbot, the house servants, and the police. Testimony was offered that the house was carefully locked that day, and was still found locked after the crime. Details of the search throughout the house for bloodstains of any sort brought the crowd to the edges of their chairs, only to sit back when it was learned that none whatever had been found. The events of that afternoon were carefully detailed for the jury, Lydia Talbot’s brief call, her sister-in-law’s longer one, her departure with Mr. Lancaster at three-thirty, and the careful locking of the front door behind them.
I looked around the room. In the rear and standing I could see Mr. Dean and in a corner, looking more interested than anxious, was Helen Wellington. Mrs. Dalton had hardly moved since the inquest began, while on the other side of me her husband was restless and clearly uneasy.
The crowd, avid for sensation, was growing restless when at last Peggy, the Lancasters’ housemaid, was called, and the first stir came when she told her story of seeing Mr. Lancaster return some five minutes after he had left with Mrs. Talbot.
It stunned us all, including the old man himself. I saw him draw himself up, and then subside into a chair again. Yet when he was finally called he made rather a better explanation than we had expected.
“I had hoped to say nothing about this,” he said, straightforwardly enough. “But since it is known—My wife and I had had an argument that morning. When I left the house I was still irritated, but on thinking it over I decided to go back and apologize. After all, she was a sick woman, and after so many years of marriage—”
His voice broke.
“Did you see her when you returned?” asked the coroner, smoothly.
“No. Everything was quiet, and I decided she was asleep. So I went out again. I was not in the house two minutes.”
“Did you go up the stairs?”
“I did not.”
“Can you tell us just what you did do?”
“Easily. I walked into the hall, decided my wife was asleep, decided as it was hot to leave my gloves on the hall table, and having done so went out again.”
“That is all?”
“Absolutely all.”
“Now, Mr. Lancaster, will you tell us what this controversy with your wife was about? I’m sorry, but it may have some bearing on this inquiry.”
“It was a family matter.”
“Can’t you be more explicit than that?”
He hesitated.
“I can be entirely explicit,” he said at last. “It concerned the amount of gold and currency she kept in the house. I considered it, among other things, highly dangerous. In these days of crime—”
“It was not until you had left the house that you thought of that?”
“I had thought of it all along. But as I left the house with Mrs. Talbot she spoke of it. She is here. You can ask her if you like.”
“Had there been any other reason for this anxiety of yours? As I understand it, this hoarding had been going on for some months.”
It seemed to me that he hesitated again.
“No particular reason, no. My daughter Emily had claimed once or twice to have heard someone on the roof at night.”
“So, as I understand it, you decided to go back and urge that the money be placed in a safe place, and then changed your mind?”
“Precisely that, sir.”
“Are you certain that the front door was locked behind you when you left?”
“Absolutely certain. In view of what was worrying me, I tried it after I had closed it. It was locked.”
The remainder of his testimony referred largely to the events of the earlier part of the day, which I have already given. To my surprise and the disappointment of the crowd the matter of the chest and its contents was dropped for the time.
I know now that the police, working with the coroner, had determined to limit the inquiry as much as possible to the actual events of the day and particularly of the afternoon of the murder. Then too there may be rules as to evidence given before a coroner which eliminated the chest, save as it actually bore on the movements of certain people on that day. At the best I can only give my recollection of the questions and answers, but I think I have been fairly accurate.
Album Page 12
