‘Ay, ay, sir; and may the best girl win.’
‘We will now,’ said Roger firmly, ‘discuss the case once more in all its bearings. We can’t do that too much, so don’t leave all the talking to me this time.’
‘Roger doesn’t like talking too much, you know,’ Alec confided behind his hand to Sheila.
‘Wait a minute, Roger. I’ll get on the telephone to the Saunderson first and ask her if she’s going to be in this afternoon. Don’t start till I come back.’
The discussion lasted them without difficulty till lunch time, and though no new fact or theory of any importance emerged in the course of it, all three felt by the time Mrs Purefoy interrupted them an hour later, that their grasp of essential dates and facts was a good deal clearer. Roger had made careful newspaper cuttings of the case, and these were brought down and studied. Mrs Saunderson was out, but Sheila rang her up again shortly before lunch and returned with the information that she would be delighted to make Mr Sheringham’s acquaintance.
‘It’s a pity I haven’t got time to stick a few hundred drawing-pins on your suit for you,’ observed Miss Purefoy as she delivered this message. ‘I’m afraid you’ll find her a bit of a human burr.’
‘Please don’t bother,’ Roger returned politely. Roger was beginning rather to look forward to his interview with the human burr.
Lunch passed off to a pleasant running accompaniment of badinage between father and daughter (gentle) and cousin and cousin (extremely violent), with Mrs Purefoy smiling gently on all of them and Roger talking volubly upon any subject on which he could find anyone to listen to him. After lunch, when her father had set out once more on the never-ending business of a general practitioner, Sheila took matters into her own extremely capable small hands.
‘I’m taking the two children out this afternoon, mum,’ she announced. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll be back for tea.’
‘I say, you don’t mind us running off like this, Mrs Purefoy, do you?’ Roger asked, feeling that this treatment of their hostess was really a little cavalier.
‘Good gracious, no! I want you to do just whatever you like, both of you. But are you sure Sheila won’t be in your way?’
‘Really, mum!’ protested that indignant young lady.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, Molly, she will,’ Alec explained earnestly; ‘but we feel we owe you something for asking us here, so we’re going to—’
‘Alec, stop trying to be funny; it doesn’t suit you. I’m going up to get ready now, Roger. Won’t be five minutes.’
One of the most surprising things about the young woman of today is her sense of time. With a previous generation a feminine five minutes, where the question of putting on a hat was concerned, was an invariable euphemism for fifteen or twenty, and in those days, it might be noted, neither lipstick nor powder was an essential part of one’s attire. Yet in only a second or two over her stipulated time behold Sheila running downstairs, powdered, lipsticked, gloved, coated and with a little grey felt hat pulled well down over her dark shingled hair. The fact of the matter, as any of the penny Sunday papers will tell you, is that the young woman of today has no reverence—not even for the most important things of life.
‘Afraid we shall have to trudge it,’ Sheila remarked, as they turned into the street and headed up past the pond. ‘Father’s rather busy just now, so no hope of the car.’
‘Now, I want you to come in and introduce me to the lady,’ Roger said, ‘stay about three minutes talking about the weather, and then buzz off and leave the heavy work to me. Is that clear?’
‘Perfectly, thank you, sir. And what shall I do with my poodle while I’m inside?’
‘Better tie him up to the front gate, I should say. Is he safe with strangers?’
‘With strangers, yes. It’s me that he’s not safe with. Oh, dear, and I never brought his muzzle!’
‘You could fasten his jaws together with a bit of string if he begins to snap,’ Roger suggested.
‘So I could,’ Sheila agreed gratefully. ‘Oh, and here’s a golf-ball in my pocket. I could throw that along the road for him, couldn’t I? He’s very playful, you know. I often—’
‘You are funny, you two, aren’t you?’ said Alec wearily. ‘Sheila, stop trying to be; it doesn’t suit you. Anyhow, if you yap any more I’ll drop you in this pond. I’m about ready for another scrap with you.’
Miss Purefoy prudently hastened to interpose Roger between herself and the object of her playful humour.
Beyond the pond the High Street ended in crossroads. Sheila led the way straight ahead, down a road which still bore traces of having once been open country, for nearly half a mile; then took a turning to the right. Before a large house, comparatively new like all the others in the neighbourhood and standing in its own grounds of perhaps two acres, she came to a halt.
‘This is the Bentley’s place,’ she explained. ‘The next one is Mrs Saunderson’s, and the Allens live about a hundred yards down on the other side.’
Roger and Alec scrutinised the house with interest. It looked exactly the same as any other important house in a quiet road; there was nothing to distinguish it from the hundreds and thousands of others of exactly the same appearance. Yet about it there hung, in the imagination of all three of them, an air of sinister mystery; indefinable enough in all conscience, yet so real as to cause three perfectly respectable citizens to glue their eyes on it in mildly horrified fascination as if they could hope to read in its bricks and tiles the riddle of the secret that it shrouded.
What is this attraction which invests a house in which a particularly horrible crime has been committed—an attraction that induces even the least imaginative or morbid of us to go a few yards out of our way in order to stare in passing at its unresponsive front? Is it simply, as we tell ourselves with an uneasy little smile, that we just wish to see for ourselves the exact circumstances in which they lived, these unfortunate people whose names have become so ominously familiar to us, and the most intimate details of whose lives have been quiveringly exposed to our avid gaze by the ruthless knife of the law? Is it that we feel we know them so well that we want to see with our own eyes the sort of place they lived in, the sort of front gate they pushed open every morning, the sort of people they looked like and the sort of neighbours they had? Is it just that, or does there really brood over the place, as the spiritualists would have us believe, some dark uneasy cloud born of violent human emotions, the fringes of which touch our spirit with some of that same horror which brought it into being?
‘To the Saunderson, then!’ said Roger, turning away with a little shiver.
CHAPTER IX
INTERVIEW WITH A HUMAN BURR
MRS SAUNDERSON proved to be a fragile, tiny little person, twenty-six-or-seven years old, with black hair and huge brown eyes and a general air of helplessness and appeal. Roger recognised her type the instant she opened her drawing-room door and came forward to greet them, and his soul rejoiced; he was quite sure that he knew the way to go about charming out of Mrs Saunderson any information which she might have to impart.
‘Miss Purefoy,’ she said in a soft little voice. ‘How do you do? So good of you to come round.’
‘Awfully kind of you to let us, Mrs Saunderson,’ Sheila said briskly. ‘May I introduce Mr Sheringham?’
‘Mr Roger Sheringham!’ murmured the lady, fixing her big eyes on Roger’s face with a rapt expression. ‘This is an unexpected treat.’
‘Very kind of you to say so, Mrs Saunderson,’ returned Roger cheerfully, as he shook hands. Very, very gently he pressed the small fingers; very, very gently the pressure was returned. Roger smiled to himself; he was certain of his ground now.
‘Do please sit down, won’t you?’ Mrs Saunderson implored.
‘Well, I’ve got to be pushing along, unfortunately,’ Sheila explained. ‘Mr Sheringham wants to stay and have a chat with you, if you’ll let him, so I won’t interrupt.’
‘If you would be so exceedingly kind�
�!’ Roger murmured, fixing a look of admiration on the little lady almost indecent in its sheer blatancy.
‘Kind?’ she said softly, dropping her eyes modestly beneath Roger’s ardent gaze. ‘The kindness is all on your side, Mr Sheringham.’
‘Then I’ll be getting along,’ said Sheila, who had been watching this exchange with the liveliest interest; she spoke with some reluctance.
Roger gave her no encouragement to stay. ‘Very well, Sheila!’ he said, and held open the door for her. As she passed he favoured her with a slight wink. The wink was intended to say, ‘How about this for a bit of acting?’
Sheila returned the wink, but it is doubtful whether she quite understood its purport. Her first words to Alec when she met him outside were blank enough. ‘Well, what’s going to happen in there God alone knows,’ said Miss Purefoy with startling frankness. ‘The ghastly woman’s started holding hands with him already, and Roger’s sitting there with a face like a sick cat about to produce kittens!’ A remarkable tribute to Roger’s powers of dissimulation, no doubt, but one that it would certainly have filled him with pain and sorrow to overhear.
Roger was a cunning man. He knew that it would not be the least use with a lady of Mrs Saunderson’s brand to approach his objective with any degree of directness. The most important thing in Mrs Saunderson’s life was clearly Mrs Saunderson; anything else was only of purely relative interest in so far as it reacted upon the main theme. If Mrs Saunderson was required to divulge her knowledge of the inner history of the Bentley case, then the first requisite was to suggest delicately that the one and only real interest in that case, as far as Roger was concerned, was the part which she herself had played in it, the feelings it had caused her to experience and the way in which her personality had influenced the whole course of events. And to work up to that state of things a good deal of preliminary ground-work was necessary. If you’re going to do a thing at all do it heartily, was Roger’s motto.
He proceeded to manœuvre himself and his temporary hostess on to the same deep couch which stood out from the wall on one side of the fireplace. Not very much manœuvring was required.
‘It’s extraordinarily good of you to let me come and see you, Mrs Saunderson,’ Roger opened the ball.
The lady’s eyes swam at him. She was wearing a soft clinging frock of black georgette, and she certainly did look undeniably attractive. It was equally certain that she had had every intention of looking attractive.
‘Oh, Mr Sheringham!’ she said. ‘If you only knew how I adore your books!’
Good, thought Roger to himself. Wonder if she’s ever read any of ’em! Aloud he replied earnestly, ‘Do you really like them? I am so glad.’ His tone conveyed the impression that, whatever he might have thought before, now at any rate he knew that his books had not been written in vain.
‘Pamela, in your new one—I thought that was a wonderful character. How miraculously you understand women, Mr Sheringham! You seem to see right into our very souls!’
I do, Roger agreed complacently; and nasty, shallow, smudgy little souls some of ’em are. He said, ‘What a delightfully appreciative reader you are. Yes, I must admit that women do have a very strong attraction for me—some women.’ And his expression added clearly, ‘Of which number you, madam, are most indubitably one.’
‘And how beautifully you write about love!’ continued the lady in a rapt voice. ‘Really, the love passages in your books make me simply thrill. I seem actually to be living them with the girl herself. You must have been a very great lover, Mr Sheringham!’
Good Lord, ran Roger’s thoughts, she’s making the pace all right. Well, it’s no good me being slow on my cues. ‘At any rate I always know at very first sight whether a woman is going to attract me or not,’ he replied softly.
Mrs Saunderson dropped her eyes. ‘Always?’
‘Always!’ said Roger firmly. And that was the first round.
‘Of course you’ve heard about our terrible affair in Wychford, Mr Sheringham?’ said the lady, changing the subject with a little flutter of discretion.
Roger had been waiting for this. ‘Yes, I have; and that’s why I’m here, Mrs Saunderson—not only in Wychford, but in your drawing-room. I’ve read, of course, of the exceedingly plucky way in which you did your duty about—about those fly-papers after the servant had told you of them.’
‘I only did what I thought to be right,’ murmured the lady modestly.
‘Exactly!’ cried Roger with much warmth. ‘But how extraordinarily difficult it is at times to do what is right. And nobody could have been in a more awkward predicament than you. With remarkable intuition you realised even then (correct me if I’m wrong) that all was not as it should be; but instead of sitting on your suspicion, as an ordinary person might have done, you acted with energy and initiative. In fact one would hardly be wrong in saying that the whole subsequent course of events was entirely due to your care and foresight on that occasion. It was admirable—really admirable.’ For I judge, Roger thought to himself, that this small person prefers it on a trowel; on a trowel, therefore, she shall certainly have it.
Mrs Saunderson bridled charmingly. ‘Oh, Mr Sheringham, I think you—surely you exaggerate just a little bit, don’t you?’
‘Not the tiniest bit in the world!’ Roger assured her untruthfully. ‘It was a most remarkable piece of work. And the fact of the matter is,’ he added with calculated candour, ‘that I felt I simply couldn’t rest until I’d made your acquaintance and seen for myself what sort of a woman we all have to thank for having brought this dreadful crime to light.’ For, if a trowel, why not a shovel? A shovel, after all, is the more capacious instrument.
‘Oh, Mr Sheringham! This is really quite overwhelming. And—and now you have seen her, is it permitted to ask what you think of her?’
‘That reality for once actually surpasses anticipation,’ Roger replied promptly, discarding the shovel and employing a pail. And that was Round Two.
Once again the lady led off. ‘Are you—oh, are you going to put us all into a book, Mr Sheringham?’ she asked ecstatically. ‘Is that why you’ve come to see me?’
‘I’m certainly going to put you into a book, Mrs Saunderson, if you’ll let me. Or should I say, write a book round you!—May I?’
‘Do you really find me as—as interesting as all that?’ Mrs Saunderson turned her head modestly away but allowed her hand to drop from her lap on to the couch between them. Roger promptly closed his own over it.
‘It isn’t so much what I find you; it’s what you are. Do you mean to say you don’t know how interesting you are? Yes, and fascinating too! Do you mind if I put you into a book?’
‘N-no,’ faltered the little lady artistically. ‘If—if you really want to.’ And again her slender fingers tightened in an almost imperceptible squeeze.
Roger thanked her with gratitude; he had every intention of putting her into a book. End of Round Three.
It was Roger’s turn to open the sparring. ‘I wonder if you’d do me a very great favour, Mrs Saunderson—tell me the whole story in your own words. Would you?’
‘Certainly,’ purred his victim, gently withdrawing her hand. ‘Right from the very beginning?’
‘From the time that you came into it,’ Roger amended gallantly. He knew the beginning.
By no means loath, Mrs Saunderson complied. She told him how her hair stood on end, how the marrow froze in her bones, how she could hardly bring herself to believe the conclusions she had leaped to, how she never got a wink of sleep for three whole nights, how she had cried and cried when she thought of that poor Mrs Allen (of course she is a lot older than her husband, one must admit that; and not very good-looking now; and her temper isn’t all that it might be—one must be fair; but that’s no excuse for a man, is it? But then, Mrs Bentley was French, you see), and how she had known—oh, ages ago that Jacqueline had something queer about her—a sort of look, you know, when she didn’t know anybody was watching her; oh, it was difficul
t to describe, but Mrs Saunderson had felt right from the beginning that she wasn’t the sort of person you could, well, trust exactly. All these things she told him, and many, many more; but now and then, by accident, a fact did manage to leak out as well. Roger let her talk, listening with an expression of almost painful sympathy and looking (had he but known it—that is, if we are to take Sheila’s word for it) like a sick cat in an interesting condition.
‘How extraordinarily vivid you make it all!’ he declared when the lady had killed off Mr Bentley, post-mortemed him, arrested his wife and shed tears into his grave. ‘I almost feel that I’ve actually lived through the scenes you’ve been describing. What an extraordinary character Mrs Bentley must be!’
‘Oh, she’s a monster, Mr Sheringham! There’s simply no other word for it, I’m afraid. A monster!’
‘A monster!’ Roger repeated with admiration. ‘Absolutely le mot juste. But tell me, Mrs Saunderson, what is her explanation of all these things? She must have had some excuses for them, surely. She doesn’t sound to me as if she were a stupid woman.’
‘Stupid? No, indeed she isn’t. Anything but! She’s full of most dreadful deceit and cunning.’
‘Yes, that’s just what I should have said. But these things she did—they don’t sound cunning at all; they sound really stupid. So I suppose she must have some very clever explanation up her sleeve?’
‘Oh, she’s got plenty of explanations, no doubt,’ Mrs Saunderson sniffed. ‘Jacqueline would have. But you can take it from me that there’s nothing in them, Mr Sheringham. They’re just lies. Silly, stupid, vulgar lies.’
‘Oh, quite,’ Roger said soothingly. ‘They—they must be, mustn’t they? But do you happen to know what they are? It would be so interesting to me, as a student of psychology, to know what a person like that would say to try and explain away the inexplicable. Did you ever hear her make any attempt to do so?’
The Wychford Poisoning Case Page 8
