Crystal Beads Murder

by Annie Haynes

  The inspector, ignoring the rejoinder, paused in his interrogation and glanced at a page in his case-book. Then he said suddenly, looking Anne full in the face:

  “Did you know Robert Saunderson was a married man, Mrs. Burford?”

  The shaft drawn at a venture told. Anne flushed and caught her breath.

  “I didn’t know it – till last night,” she replied haltingly, “when my brother told me. It came out at the inquest, he said.” Then, pulling herself together, “I had never been sufficiently interested in Mr. Saunderson to ask if he were married or not.”

  “H’m! that may be,” her interrogator remarked doubtfully; then as Anne’s eyes met his he added more kindly, “Believe me, Mrs. Burford, there is nothing like frankness on these occasions. The police are here not only to find the guilty but to help the innocent, and they can’t do that unless the latter make a clean breast of it. Otherwise the sheep and the goats are liable to be rounded up together.”

  But Anne shook her head. “I can tell you nothing more,” she said stubbornly.

  With a shrug of his shoulders the inspector turned away. There was nothing to be gained by divulging Miss Delauney’s accusation till they had something more substantial to go on than her bare word.

  “What’s up, Anne?” Michael Burford asked when he came in to luncheon later on. “Anyone been bullying you again? I won’t have it.” He slipped an arm round her and drew her to the window overlooking a square-paved garden on one side of the house.

  “The inspector has been here – questioning me again,” she said wearily.

  “Damn him!” was the frank rejoinder. “Send him to me next time, Anne.”

  “But he knows that you – I mean, he thinks that I – Oh,” she wailed, “he tries to trap me into saying something about Harold –” Fearful of saying too much, even to the man who still held her close to him, she stopped in confusion, and as the bell summoned them to luncheon said no more.

  At Holford Hall the midday meal was also in progress, and Lord Medchester, perceptibly chafing under conditions that were as unwelcome as they were inexplicable, was answering in curt monosyllables Sybil Stainer’s lively efforts at conversation.

  From his point of view the situation was becoming unbearable. The Stainer woman, as he called her behind her back – referring to her in his own mind in even less complimentary terms – was getting on his nerves; it seemed they were never to be rid of her! Her brother, undesirable as he might be, had sufficient decency not to appear at the Hall unless specially invited to do so by Lord Medchester himself on such occasions as made an invitation inevitable. But his sister had planted herself on them for days, showed no signs of going away, and was making herself at home in a fashion that made her unwilling host wonder how on earth his wife could stand it.

  He had complained to her only that morning. “I found her in the library alone. She’d had the cheek to ring the bell – ring the bell, if you please! – and tell George when he answered it to bring her a cocktail. I don’t mind my guests having cocktails, but I object to a woman like that ringing the bell as if the place belonged to her and ordering the servants about. I turned my back on her and went out of the room – damn it all! – you can’t be rude to anyone under your own roof, and in another minute I should have said something I should have been sorry for.”

  “Well, she’ll be married soon and that’ll be the end of it,” Lady Medchester had answered, “and in the meantime I can’t have her feelings hurt.”

  “Feelings!” was the contemptuous retort. “Feelings be blowed! That sort has got no more feelings than –” His stock of similes failing to stand the strain of the sudden call upon it, he stopped and began again. “I can’t understand you, Minnie. I may not always have seen eye to eye with you as regards your friends, but when it comes to a rank outsider like Sybil Stainer it’s a bit too thick!”

  “She is going to be your cousin by marriage, so you’d better make the best of her.” Lady Medchester sighed.

  “I don’t believe it. Harold isn’t such a fool – got into some entanglement with the woman and now is too much of a gentleman to sheer off. I’ll see to it – a word in season and soon. Something’s got to be done.”

  Lady Medchester, on the point of leaving the room, looked back quickly.

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort, Dick. How can you put your oar into other people’s business in that fashion! Harold is his own master – and I have told Sybil she can be married from here in a couple of months’ time. I don’t ask you to give her away; you can go up to London and be out of it all if you want to, but I’m not going back on my promise. If the thing has got to be why not make the best of it?”

  “But why the devil should it be? That’s what I want to know!” Lord Medchester asked.

  But his wife had already left the room and closed the door behind her.

  So when a few hours later they and the unwanted guest met at the luncheon-table he was not in the best of humours. He was not accustomed to being flouted in his own house, and he rather resented – would not have stood it had life been running a normal course. Easy-going up to a point, hail-fellow-well-met with all and sundry as he might be, he had his reservations, and he was inclined to draw the line at the Stainers.

  And here was Lady Medchester encouraging the woman as though to see her the wife of his cousin, the new Lord Gorth, was all that could be desired.

  Eating the food placed before him almost automatically while he ruminated over the crisscrossness of life – and life had hitherto run in even and undisturbing lines – he suddenly became aware of the fact that his wife and Sybil Stainer were discussing the arrangements for the latter’s wedding from his house as though that event were a settled proposition.

  “Two months is quite long enough to wait,” Sybil remarked complacently. “A long engagement is always a mistake, and Harold and I have known one another for quite a long time now. So if that will suit you, Minnie, we can get on with it.”

  Lord Medchester looked across the table at his wife, who avoided his eyes.

  “Get on with what?” he asked sharply.

  “Sybil means the arrangements for her wedding,” Lady Medchester replied. “I am sure you will agree with her. I have often heard you say there is no sense in long engagements.”

  “Miss Stainer’s affairs are no concern of mine,” he replied formally, as the butler poured out his customary glass of port before leaving the dining-room. “I was speaking on general principles.”

  “But Minnie is making my affairs your concern, Lord Medchester,” Sybil said with an arch smile. “It can hardly be otherwise when I am to be married from under your own roof.”

  There was an awkward pause. Lady Medchester flushed violently and kept her eyes on her plate. Lord Medchester glared from one to the other, evidently trying to keep himself in hand. Miss Stainer was the only one of the trio who appeared entirely unconcerned and mistress of the situation.

  Her host finished his port and pushed his chair back.

  “’Pon my soul, Minnie,” he said at last, red in the face, “it’s too bad to have made these arrangements without consulting me, and, what’s more, with all due respect to Miss Stainer, who is a guest in my house, I won’t have it. I don’t like weddings; ’pon my soul I don’t – tomfool affairs at the best – and Harold’s too young; doesn’t know his own mind; hasn’t got accustomed to being a man of affairs.” He moved towards the door, still keeping his eyes fixed on Lady Medchester, whose nervous fingers were drawing patterns with a fork on the table-cloth. “Also,” he went on, a hand on the door-handle, “until this business is cleared up there aren’t going to be any festivities at Holford. See what I mean? Rotten bad taste. First a man murdered in the garden, then poor old Mayer – known him ever so long – shot within a few yards of my own drive! And you talk of wedding marches, eating and drinking and what not on the place. I won’t have it, ’pon my soul I won’t, and that’s that!” He opened the door, turned on the threshold and repea
ted emphatically, “Jolly well that, and don’t you forget it!” And, having finished what for him was a very long speech, he passed out and shut the door behind him.

  Lady Medchester turned a pair of distressed eyes to her guest. “He means it, Sybil. I always know when it’s no use saying any more. He seems easy-going, but once he has really made up his mind he sticks to it – like a mule,” she added after a moment’s consideration.

  “He will have to alter it this time,” Miss Stainer rejoined calmly. “I intend to be married from here. Maurice can give me away if you like; after all, perhaps it will look better as he’s my brother. I don’t object to that. But I intend the future Lady Gorth to make a good start on her married career and” – she looked at the other with a meaning smile – “you, my dear Minnie, are going to do your best towards that desirable end,” and, rising, she too left the room.

  Lady Medchester watched her go with miserable eyes.

  “What am I to do?” she muttered. “I can’t go on with it, I can’t!” Her eyes filled slowly with tears. “I didn’t know there could be such hell upon earth!” She stared unseeingly across the deserted table. “If it goes on much longer I shall – shall face the music and make a clean breast of it. If I only knew how much she knows!”

  CHAPTER 17

  It was a fine, bright morning after a wet night. The sun was forcing its way audaciously through the lattice-windows of the lodge, touching with gold everything within its reach, and Miss Tottie Delauney, responding to the call of nature, was inclined to be loquacious. Breakfast was in progress.

  “It isn’t so much what they say, mother,” she began, spreading a piece of fresh bread left by the baker in the early hours with butter, “it’s how they say it. Asks one all sorts of questions about little things that don’t matter, and when one has got something to say worth listening to shuts one up with, ‘If you take my advice, you’ll hold your tongue. There’s such a thing as the law of libel!’ Sickenin’ I call it. What do they want?”

  “Well,” Mrs. Yates replied slowly from behind a heavy electro-plate teapot that was the pride of her life, and only used on occasions such as this – a visit from the daughter who had done so well for herself – “maybe they know as much as you do, and don’t want it talked about till they’re ready. The police know more than they let on sometimes.”

  “They didn’t know I was Bob Saunderson’s lawful wife, anyway.”

  “You are not quite sure about it yourself, are you?” her mother asked anxiously.

  Miss Delauney tossed her head.

  “Bob was lying when he said we weren’t married. I am pretty well sure of it, and anyway I am going to pay a visit to that Register Office –”

  “Which the police is likely to have done already,” Mrs. Yates interpolated.

  “And make sure,” her daughter finished, ignoring the interruption. “As long as Bob gave me an allowance and did the right thing by me ’twas as much to my advantage as his to be single, and I didn’t care. But I bet he’s left a tidy bit, and, if he’d died without a Will, who has so much right to it as his lawful wife? And anyway,” she added, “I’m not sure I’d have let him marry this Anne Courtenay – ’twould have been a shame on any girl.” A furtive slyness crept into her eyes as she added hastily, “Though if I’d known she was going to murder him she could have taken her chance. He was my own husband when all’s said and done.”

  Mrs. Yates looked round nervously.

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, Mirandy,” she urged. “You never know who’s listening, and with the police here, there and everywhere it isn’t safe, I tell you.”

  “Who cares? I’m not ashamed of being Bob Saunderson’s wife.”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking about – though there’s something to be said about that too. But if you go talking about Miss Anne Courtenay that was – Mrs. Burford that is – having done the murder, you’ll find yourself in trouble. A little delicate thing like her! Besides –”

  “Well?”

  “The police say whoever it was killed Mr. Saunderson did poor Bill Mayer in too, and if you knew Mrs. Burford as well as I do you’d know she couldn’t ha’ done one murder much less two. An’ it’s only guess-work you’re goin’ on at that. You better be careful, my girl.”

  Mrs. Yates finished her tea and, pushing her chair back, reached for a tray propped against the wall behind her and began to clear away the breakfast things. Her daughter looked on, making no attempt to help her mother, and lit a cigarette.

  She then rose, strolled to the window and looked out, indifferent to the fact that the sunshine was playing havoc with shingled hair that was in debt rather to art than nature for its sheen, and a complexion that had seen better days. It was early for the visits of neighbours, and a mother was hardly worth “doing up” for.

  “Bill Mayer’s death upset my plans more than a bit,” she remarked without turning round, “and if it hadn’t been for you I shouldn’t have spoken out so soon about being at the lodge. I meant to lie low till I found out how the land lay – about me being Bob Saunderson’s wife, I mean. It was you brought me into it by calling me out when there was no need for it to speak to Bill Mayer. I didn’t want to come, for all you told the jury I did. I could have been here on the Q.T. and let things take their course till the right moment arrived for me to step forward. Who knows what it was Bill Mayer had found out?” She paused thoughtfully, then added with a slight irritation, “You forced my hand, mother.”

  Mrs. Yates, one folded comer of the blue check table-cloth between her teeth while she doubled the rest of it carefully along the crease, was necessarily speechless for the moment, and her daughter went on:

  “I grant you to have that coroner man shooting questions at you and the jury waiting with their mouths open for the answers is a bit rattling – more especially with that Mrs. Carthorn from Empton with legs like a pair of tongs sitting among ’em.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with it. The jury don’t listen to the evidence with their legs, Mary Ann,” her mother remonstrated without any idea of being funny. “And why shouldn’t I ha’ called you out to speak to a man you’d known all your life and hadn’t seen for a month o’ Sundays?”

  “Well, anyway you did it; and when it came out afterwards that Bill Mayer had got himself shot not more than a few hundred yards from this house I wasn’t fool enough not to speak up. They’d have found out sooner or later I was here – you’d never have been able to keep it to yourself, mother, when question-time began – so I went to the police and told ’em myself; and, what’s more, I told ’em Mrs. Michael Burford killed Bob Saunderson.”

  Mrs. Yates turned round from the dresser drawer in which she was carefully bestowing the folded cloth, dismay on her face.

  “You never told the police that! – then you’re a fool, Mary Ann! I wondered when the coroner asked me how they’d got to know about you bein’ here. Do you suppose Mrs. Burford’s ’usband is going to sit down and let you talk like that? His lordship’s cousin too! You’d ha’ been a sight wiser to ha’ held your tongue and let the police find out things for themselves!”

  Her daughter turned on her fiercely.

  “They’d never have found out what I knew – and that’s a motive for the crime. That’s what they look for first – the motive – and I got that out of Bob when I’d got a drop of drink into him. There was a girl who would have to marry him or he could send her brother to gaol. That was why he wanted to make out he wasn’t married to me. I know how to put two and two together, I do. Miss Tottie Delauney wasn’t born yesterday, I can tell you. There’s motive there right enough – and the police can get on with their business.”

  She paused, arms on hips, chin tilted, and as Mrs. Yates stared at her dumbly added sourly:

  “His lordship’s cousin indeed! That’ll not save her. Bob Saunderson was my husband, and I’ll see she gets her deserts.”

  Her mother, removing her gaze from the angry face confronting her,
glanced anxiously through the window beyond.

  “Hush, Mary Ann!” she urged, terror driving the colour from her face. “Don’t talk like that, somebody may be listening. If it’s motive they want – what about yourself? How can you prove you didn’t know he hadn’t made a Will – and who but his wife would benefit by his death? There’s motive there all right, and,” she added tearfully, “the police know already you heard Bill Mayer say he had got a clue to who killed Mr. Saunderson. There’s motive enough, Mary Ann! There’s motive enough for the two murders – and you’re a fool to talk so free!”

  Mrs. Yates would not have been reassured had she known that in their room at the “Medchester Arms” the two detectives had just arrived at the same conclusion.

  “That Delauney woman’s story wants looking into, in my opinion,” Harbord remarked as, having lit a cigarette, he wandered restlessly about the room.

  “There’s more than her story that wants looking into,” his superior agreed, “and one of the queer things about this case is the absence of alibis. I’ve established one or two myself, but no one seems anxious to do it on their own account. There’s Miss Courtenay, that was, for one” – he ticked them off on his fingers as he spoke – “and Lady Medchester, with what one might say worse than none, the two of them by their own admission absenting themselves from the rest of the party that night, but with no witnesses forthcoming to prove they were doing what they said they were, and one of them, again by her own admission, strolling about in the garden. In the light of Miss Delauney’s statement that wants a bit more looking into – and it’ll get it.”

  Stoddart leaned back in an arm-chair, covered in well-worn American cloth and slippery from the friction of more than one generation, and stared at the faded design of unbelievably impossible roses presented by the carpet.