The Blind Side

by Patricia Wentworth

  About a third of the way through this speech Lee took her hand off the jamb and stepped back. She tried to draw Miss Challoner with her, and she tried to stem the flow of her words. She might have spared herself the pains. Nobody had ever yet succeeded in interrupting Miss Challoner, and nobody ever would. She merely raised her voice, increased its volume, and pronounced each word more forcibly. What she began to say, that she would finish. She finished.

  Lee said in a trembling voice, “Oh, do please come inside,” but it was too late.

  Detective Abbott came out of Ross Craddock’s flat and crossed the landing. He said,

  “Just a moment, madam. I think the Inspector would like to see you.”

  Miss Challoner swung round.

  “The Inspector?”

  “Yes, madam. I think he would like to know at what hour Miss Lucy Craddock reached you in the agitated state which you have just described to Miss Fenton.”

  “I can’t see what it’s got to do with the police,” said Miss Challoner briskly, “but I am sure I have nothing to conceal. Miss Craddock knocked me up at a quarter past three this morning.”

  Chapter XXI

  Inspector Lamb sat at Ross Craddock’s writing-table and gazed frowningly at what the fingerprint experts had sent him. The heat of yesterday had turned to heavy cloud and the threat of rain.

  “I’ve taken a dislike to this place, Abbott,” he said.

  “Did you say ‘place,’ or ‘case,’ sir?”

  “Both,” said the Inspector succinctly. He threw a gloomy glance at the large photograph of Miss Mavis Grey which Peterson’s ministrations had restored to an upright position and placed upon the mantelpiece. It had been found on the floor with a crack across the glass and across Miss Grey’s slender neck. “That girl’s a liar if I ever saw one,” he added. “Now look here, I’m going to run over what we’ve got against the lot of them-just to clear my own mind, as it were. You can take it down.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  “Number one-Mr. Peter Renshaw. Plenty of stuff there. He is on bad terms with his cousin. He has words with him about Miss Grey. He is seen just inside his open door when Miss Grey comes back to the flat at three a.m., when, to my mind, there’s no doubt at all that the murder had already been committed. And he comes in for most of the money. On the top of that we have his suspicious behaviour with the revolver. Apart from this there is no other fingerprint of his inside the flat. Got that down?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Number two-Miss Mavis Grey. All her behaviour very suspicious, and a real determined liar. What’s the sense of her admitting she was in the flat with Mr. Craddock and ran away from him to Mr. Renshaw, and then denying that she went back to the flat again, when the same witness can swear to having seen her enter Mr. Renshaw’s flat on both occasions? Plenty of her fingerprints everywhere-on the glass, on the decanter, on the table that was knocked over, and, for all we know, on the revolver before Mr. Renshaw started playing with it. Why can’t she say what she was doing that second time, confound her?”

  Detective Abbott looked up.

  “It seems to me, sir, that she admits the first visit because she doesn’t mind admitting that she hit Craddock over the head with the decanter, but she won’t admit the second visit because she then either shot Craddock herself or saw someone else shoot him.”

  “Mr. Peter Renshaw?”

  “Not necessarily-” He hesitated.

  “If you’ve got anything to say, say it!”

  “It was something that struck me as rather curious.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday-just before I brought Miss Challoner in to you. She was talking to Miss Fenton at the open door of number seven, and Miss Fenton was trying to get her to come in. Well, just as I said that you would like to see her, the sitting-room door opened and Mavis Grey came out. Renshaw was behind her, and I’m pretty sure they’d been quarrelling. Both of them had the look of it, and the girl was in a hurry to get away. Well, this is what I noticed. She was in a hurry, but she wasn’t in such a hurry that she would pass Miss Fenton. She would have had to touch her, you know, and she wouldn’t do it. She baulked, and when Miss Fenton did move she shied past her just like a horse does when it’s scared. I thought it was odd, sir.”

  “Might only mean she’d been quarrelling with Mr. Renshaw about Miss Fenton.”

  Without speaking, Detective Abbott registered a polite rejection of this theory.

  The Inspector said somewhat testily,

  “Number three is Miss Lucy Craddock. Very suspicious behaviour indeed. She disapproves of Mr. Craddock’s attentions to her niece, quarrels with him, and is told she will have to turn out of her flat. Instead of leaving Victoria at seven-thirty-three as she had planned, on a trip to the Continent, she puts her luggage in the cloakroom and goes off to find Miss Mavis Grey. She calls at Mr. Ernest Grey’s house in Holland Park at a quarter to nine, and is told that Miss Grey is out. Between then and a quarter past three in the morning, when she arrives at Miss Challoner’s flat in Portland Place, we haven’t been able to trace her movements. She was probably trying to find Miss Grey. She may have come back here to find her, or she may not. All we know for sure is that she was looking for her, and that when she turned up at Miss Challoner’s she was in an unhinged and distracted condition. Her doctor says she won’t be fit to make a statement for a day or two. Fingerprints which correspond to what are probably hers, taken from objects in her own flat, have been found on the back of one of the chairs in here. But as Miss Bingham saw her leave this flat in the afternoon that doesn’t prove anything.”

  “She may have wandered in and found him dead. That would account for the shock.”

  “Then why didn’t she raise the house? What would you expect a timid old lady to do? Yell her head off and rouse the house. Why didn’t she do it? And I say the answer to that is, either she shot him herself, or she saw the person who shot him and she didn’t want to give him away.”

  “Him-or her-” said Detective Abbott in a meditative voice.

  Inspector Lamb looked at him sharply. After a moment he said,

  “Number four-Miss Lee Fenton. Nothing against her except these.” He tapped a sheet covered with fingerprints.

  “The room was fairly plastered with them-both sides of the hall door, both sides of this door, backs of three chairs, and the mark of her whole hand on the corner of this writing-table. Now she couldn’t have been in in the afternoon, because she didn’t get here till eight o’clock, and then, she says, she had a bath and went straight to bed. Then there are those footprints. Peterson swears that they were the marks of a naked foot and quite distinct when he found the body. By the time he came back with Rush they were nothing but bloodstained smears. Now they weren’t Miss Grey’s footprints, because she was wearing silver shoes when Miss Bingham saw her-and, by the way, those shoes have never been found, so it’s likely they were badly stained. All she’ll say is that they were old, and that she threw them away.”

  “She might have dropped them in the river,” said Detective Abbott.

  The Inspector nodded.

  “She probably did. It’s handy, and even if they’re fished up now, the stains will be out of them, and we don’t get any farther than what she says-that she threw them away. Well, we’ve rather got off Miss Fenton, but there isn’t anything to get back to except those prints-and the way she looks. Talk about shock-that young woman’s had one if I’m not very much mistaken.”

  “She may have been fond of Craddock,” Detective Abbott put forward the suggestion blandly.

  “Then she was the only one of the lot that was.”

  “You never can tell, sir.”

  The Inspector turned over the papers in front of him with a frown.

  “The other prints found in here, besides Mr. Craddock’s own, are Peterson’s, Rush’s-he says he was in here speaking to him in the early afternoon-and a set of prints at present not identified-four fingers and a thumb of a man’s left
hand on the door of this room at a height of four foot seven. That means a man of about six foot. Also the same left-hand print from two places on the banisters-one just at the first turn as you go down, and the other near the bottom. These prints are very important indeed, as they point to the presence of another person, as yet unidentified, who may have been the murderer. Well, there we are. Go along down and see if that charwoman’s come back-what’s her name-Mrs. Green. Lintott checked up on her, and the people in the house where she lodges say she came home about half past nine on the evening of the murder so much the worse for liquor that they had to help her to bed. She lay all day yesterday, and she’s supposed to be coming back today. Go and see if she’s come. There’s a point or two I’d like to ask her about.”

  Chapter XXII

  Mrs. Green came in in her old Burberry with her battered black felt hat mournfully askew. The port-wine mark on her cheek showed up against the puffy pallor of the rest of her face. Her grey hair fuzzed out wildly in all directions. About her neck she wore, in lieu of the crochet shawl reserved for “turns,” the aged black feather boa which marked a return to the normal. A sallow handkerchief was clasped in one hand. On being invited to sit down she gulped and applied it to her eyes.

  “Thank you kindly, sir. I’m sure it’s all so ’orrible, I don’t hardly know where I am. And on top of one of my turns too, and this one so bad, and if it hadn’t been for the mite of brandy I come by just in time there’s no saying whether I’d be here now.”

  The Inspector relaxed.

  “Ah-it takes a good bit of brandy to pull you round out of one of those turns, doesn’t it, Mrs. Green?”

  Mrs. Green wiped her eyes.

  “If it’s Mrs. Smith where I lodge that’s been telling your young man that I drink, then she’s no lady,” she said with dignity. “I don’t wish her nor no one else to go through the h’agony that I go through when I gets one of my turns, and what they told me in the ’orspital was to take a mite of brandy and lay down quiet, and so I done. And if I’m to get the sack for it, well, it’s a cruel shame, and maybe they won’t find it so easy to get a respectable woman to come into an ’ouse like this, what with murders and goings on. And if it comes to getting the sack, there’s more than me was for it, if it wasn’t for Mr. Craddock being done in.”

  “And what do you mean by that, Mrs. Green?” said the Inspector.

  Mrs. Green eyed him sideways.

  “There’s those that gives themselves airs and talks haughty now that’d be singing on the other side of their mouth if it wasn’t for pore Mr. Craddock lying a mortual corpse at this moment instead of standing up on his two feet and telling them to be off out of here because they wasn’t wanted any longer.”

  “I really think you had better tell me what you mean, Mrs. Green.”

  The sideways look became a downcast one. The pale mouth primmed and said with mincing gentility,

  “I’m sure I was never one to put myself forward, sir.”

  The Inspector became hearty.

  “Pity there aren’t more like you in that way, Mrs. Green. But it’s everyone’s duty to help the police, you know, so I’m sure you’re going to tell me what this is all about. If you know of someone who was going to be dismissed by Mr. Craddock, I think you ought to tell me who it is.”

  “And him taking it on himself to say as how he’d see to it I got my notice!” said Mrs. Green with an angry toss of the head.

  “Were you alluding to Rush?”

  The head was tossed again.

  “If it was the last word I was h’ever to speak, I was, sir.”

  Detective Abbott began to write.

  “Rush was under threat of dismissal by Mr. Craddock?”

  “I heard him with my own ears, sir, as I was coming across the landing. The door of the flat was open, and the door of this room we’re in was on the jar, and Mr. Craddock, he was in a proper shouting rage, and you’ll excuse me repeating his language, which wasn’t fit for a lady to hear let alone to repeat. He says as loud as a bull, ‘You’ve been mucking up my papers!’ he says. And Rush, he answers him back as bold as brass. ‘And what would I want with your papers, Mr. Ross?’ he says. And Mr. Craddock says, ‘How do I know what you want? Blackmail, I shouldn’t wonder!’ And Rush ups and says, ‘You did ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Ross, talking to me like that!’ And Mr. Craddock says, ‘Get to hell out of here!’ And Rush come out, and when he see me, if ever there was a man that looked like murder, it was him, and he went down the stairs swearing to himself all the way.”

  The Inspector said, “H’m! Mr. Craddock had missed some of his papers. Is that what you made of it?”

  Mrs. Green sniffed.

  “I couldn’t say, sir. That’s what I heard. I can’t say more and I can’t say less. What I hears I remembers. And there’s more things than that I could tell you if I thought it my duty like you said.”

  “It is undoubtedly your duty,” said the Inspector in a most encouraging voice.

  Mrs. Green sniffed again.

  “I’m not one to listen, nor yet to poke my nose into other people’s business, but I’ve got my work to do, and if a lady leaves her door open and talks into her telephone that’s just inside, well, it’s not my business to put cotton wool in my ears. And no later than the very evening before poor Mr. Craddock was murdered what did I hear but Miss Lucy Craddock say-”

  “Wait a minute, Mrs. Green. When you say the evening before Mr. Craddock was murdered, do you mean the Tuesday evening? He was murdered some time after midnight of that night.”

  “Yes, sir-the Tuesday evening. It would be about a quarter to half past six, and a shocking long day I’d had on account of cleaning up after Mr. and Mrs. Connell.”

  “You were on the landing, and Miss Craddock’s door was open?”

  “Half open, sir. She was all ready to start-going abroad she was-and Rush had just been up for the luggage, when the telephone bell went, and there she was, talking, and never give a thought to the door.”

  “Well now, what did she say?”

  “You could have knocked me down with a feather,” said Mrs. Green. “Dusting the banisters I was, and I heard her say quite plain, ‘Oh, my dear, you know Ross is turning me out.’ And then something about there being nothing in the will to stop him, and he wouldn’t turn Miss Mary out on account of her being an invalids-that’s the one that died-but as for Miss Lucy, he said she’d got to go. Getting on thirty years she’s been there, and I don’t wonder she was put about. She said as how he’d written her a horrible cruel letter, and it was all about Miss Mavis Grey that he didn’t mean no good to. Ever so worked up she sounded. And, ‘I’ve got quite a desperate feeling,’ she says. It was Miss Fenton she was talking to, and there was a lot about her wanting to come here while Miss Lucy was away. I’d my dusting to do and I didn’t trouble to listen, but I heard Miss Craddock say as how she was feeling desperate, and desperate she sounded-I’ll swear to that. And now they’re saying she never went off to the Continent at all. Looks as meek as a mouse she does, but there-it’s often the quiet ones that’s the worst when they’re roused.”

  The Inspector let her go after that.

  “Every blessed one of ’em might have done it as far as I can see,” he said in a disgusted tone as Detective Abbott came back after making sure that both doors were shut. “Talented lot of eavesdroppers they’ve got in this house too!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Inspector took a decision, a very minor decision, but one that was to have an unforeseen result. Getting out of his chair, he said,

  “I’ll go down and have a word with Rush. Perhaps he’ll be easier to handle in his own quarters. And I’d rather like to see that wife of his. I suppose she is bedridden.”

  “Haven’t you got enough suspects without her, sir?” said Detective Abbott.

  Chapter XXIII

  The Rushes’ basement room had a fair sized window through the top of which Mrs. Rush could see the railings which guard
ed the area and the legs and feet of the passers-by. She didn’t complain, but she sometimes felt that it would be pleasant to see a whole person for a change. For one thing, she never knew what sort of hats were being worn, and she took a particular interest in hats. It was no good asking Rush, because the vain adornment of their heads by young females was one of the subjects upon which it was better not to set him off.

  Everything in the room was as bright and neat and clean as a new pin. Mrs. Rush wore a white flannelette nightgown, and her bed had a brightly printed coverlet. She had finished her baby socks and was starting a little vest for Ellen’s baby. On the newly distempered wall opposite her bed hung photographic enlargements of her five children, all taken at about the same age, so that a stranger might have been misled into thinking her the mother of quintuplets. There was Stanley who had been killed on the Somme; Ethel, dead thirty years ago come Michaelmas; Ernie that was in Australia and only wrote at Christmas; Daisy-well Daisy didn’t bear thinking about; and Ellen, her youngest and her darling. There they hung, the little boys in sailor suits and the little girls in starched white muslin dresses, and Mrs. Rush looked at them all day long. She had fought the one terrible battle of her married life when Rush wanted to take Daisy’s picture down, and she had fought it to a finish and won. “She hadn’t done nothing wrong when that was took. That’s how I see her, and that’s how I’m a-going to see her, and you can’t get me from it.”

  Rush looked surprised and not at all pleased when he saw the Inspector. Mrs. Rush on the other hand was pleasurably excited. It was pain and grief to her to be out of things, and here after all was Inspector Lamb and a pleasanter spoken man you couldn’t hope to find. Asking how long she’d been ill, when most people had forgotten that there had ever been a time when she was up and about. Quite a little colour came into her cheeks as she talked to him. And he noticed the children’s pictures too, and said he was a family man himself. And no manner of good for Rush to stand there grumbling to himself. Right down bad manners, and he needn’t think he wouldn’t hear about it when the Inspector was gone.