by Annie Haynes
Stoddart paused on the threshold, taking stock of the slender lines of Anne’s girlish figure, the small, piquant features, the little hands, fingers entwining themselves nervously with one another as he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. With a natural habit of appraising character and weighing the value of evidence, a vision of Miss Delauney rose in his mind, powdered, bedizened, all agog for the enforcement of her rights. If evidence were to be produced wholly dependent on the statement of either of these two women, whose word would he most readily take?
He had no doubt of the answer in his own mind. Moreover, he flattered himself that after vast experience he knew a criminal type when he met it. There would have to be considerably more evidence forthcoming before he believed Anne Burford to be a murderess on the word of the so-called Tottie Delauney.
But inquiry along the line her accusation suggested might yield fruit. In spite of the number of possible suspects, he and Harbord did not seem to be getting any nearer the solution. It might almost be said they couldn’t see the wood for the trees. There would be trouble with headquarters if they did not get on a line of some sort soon, and there would be no harm in pressing Anne for a more detailed account of her relations with Saunderson. That in turn might yield something suggestive with regard to Lord Gorth, whose account of himself on the fatal evening left much to be desired – with his acknowledged proximity to the scene of action and an alibi whose armour was full of joints.
At Anne’s invitation the inspector sat down.
“There is nothing to be alarmed about, Mrs. Burford,” he began. “I have really come to ask you to do me a slight service. But first as a mere matter of form I should like to know where you were on the afternoon of Superintendent Mayer’s death. Between eleven and twelve o’clock in the morning?”
Anne’s fingers relaxed their nervous grip and she raised her eyes frankly.
“I was here, inspector, here in my own house. I remember it, because my husband brought me the news of the police superintendent’s murder just before dinner that evening; he heard it from one of the stable-men, and I hadn’t been out of the house all day. If you want corroboration,” she added, smiling wanly – here at all events she was on safe ground – “I had a friend with me and she didn’t leave until nearly half-past twelve. If you want her name and address –”
But the inspector put up his hand.
“Time enough for that,” he smiled, mentally adding another mark in Anne’s favour; he felt so sure one and the same hand had been guilty of both murders, and if Anne could establish this alibi she was at all events not guilty of Mayer’s. “Am I right in thinking Mr. Robert Saunderson was not a favourite of yours?”
“You are quite right,” was the emphatic answer.
“Why – particularly?”
“Not particularly at all, I just didn’t like him.” The blood rushed to Anne’s face as she felt herself again on thin ice. “I don’t like – that sort of man.”
“Nothing against him personally?”
Anne gulped down her scruples and shook her head. Frankness would involve her brother; she lied bravely.
“And you are sure you neither heard nor saw anything suspicious while you were taking that walk in the garden?” Then, going off apparently at a tangent, “Were you wearing your crystal beads that night?”
Anne looked puzzled.
“No,” she said slowly. “I thought you knew –”
“I knew the broken string found on the scene of the murder didn’t belong to you, but you might have been wearing your own.”
“I wasn’t,” she replied, still wondering what the question had to do with the matter, “and I have never worn them since. I hate the sight of them: they remind me – of all I want to forget.”
“I can quite understand that,” the inspector agreed in his matter-of-fact voice. “But I am going to ask you to wear them again. This is what I want you to do.” And drawing his chair closer to Anne’s he dropped his voice.
For a quarter of an hour or more the murmur of voices might have been heard in that pleasant room looking out on the emerald downs, across which Anne’s husband at that moment was walking briskly towards the house.
He entered the house a few minutes after Inspector Stoddart had left and opened the door of the room where Anne was still standing, staring thoughtfully through the window in an effort to follow the inner working of the inspector’s brain.
“That police chap has been here again, hasn’t he? I saw him crossing the hill towards Medchester. Hasn’t been bullying you, has he? What did he want?” her husband asked.
“What a lot of questions! I can’t answer them all at once. He certainly hasn’t been bullying me,” she replied, making light of the visit. “He only wanted to know where I was the morning the police superintendent – Mayer his name was, wasn’t it? – was shot; said he had to ask everybody as a matter of form.”
“And where were you?”
“I was here – Rosie Meekins motored over, but wouldn’t stay to lunch, so I had my alibi pat. To find oneself in such a horrible world of suspicion! It takes all the joy out of everything.” She flung herself into a chair and hid her face in her hands.
Michael Burford dropped on to the arm of it and drew her to him.
“Don’t worry, darling,” he comforted. “Harold will come through all right. The police can’t take him upon suspicion alone. So far as we know, nothing has been definitely proved against him yet. The only thing that worries me,” he added, as Anne, yielding to the sense of security the touch of the man she loved gave her, dried her tears, “is, why Harold is going to marry that awful woman. It almost looks as if –” – he hesitated – “as if she knew something he didn’t want other people to know.”
“Blackmail,” Anne said tersely.
Burford nodded gloomily.
“Well, as long as she hopes to marry him, she’ll keep it to herself,” his wife rejoined, and finished sadly, “poor old Harold! Do you know,” she went on, sitting up and leaning her head on the shoulder so near her own, “whatever it is, I believe Cousin Minnie must be in it too. Minnie has her faults – lots of them, and she hates me for some reason, and always has – but she wouldn’t put up with a woman like Sybil Stainer unless she was obliged to!”
Two days later in their comfortable sitting-room at the “Medchester Arms” Inspector Stoddart and Harbord were coming to the same conclusion. They were quite conscious that a woman of Miss Stainer’s type would not have been tolerated unless some very good reason lay behind.
“Since Garwood told his story we know Lady Medchester has something to hide. When she said she had not been outside that evening she lied, and people don’t lie unless they have something to lie about, and Miss Stainer may have tumbled to what it is. I’m not quite ready to face Lady Medchester with Garwood’s statement yet, but I have found out something and it was no more than I expected.”
Harbord looked at him inquiringly. “What was it? Got a line on Mayer’s source of information?”
The other shook his head. “No; I wish I had. But I got an idea Lady Medchester knew more about those crystal beads than she let on, and I laid a trap for her. It turned out I was right – and I was wrong.”
“That doesn’t seem to get us on much,” Harbord said with a laugh, as he lighted up. “May one ask, sir, exactly what you mean?”
“What I found out was that she doesn’t know as much about those beads as she thought she did. And, as you say, it doesn’t seem to help us on overmuch. What I did was this,” he went on as the other looked at him expectantly. “I asked for another interview with Lady Medchester, having first enlisted Mrs. Burford’s help to carry out my notion. It was arranged for this afternoon in the library at Holford. I put a few questions to her more to mark time than for any result I hoped to get from them, and I confess I was a bit tempted to spring Garwood’s tale on her and see how she took it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because so far it�
�s a case of hard swearing between the two of them. Garwood says she was out in the garden, she says she wasn’t, and there you are. I believe his story all right, but we’ve got to get a bit more to go on.”
“Well, what was the idea?”
“I had stationed Mrs. Burford outside the library door, and at a given signal – a loud cough from me – she was to walk into the room as if by accident, which she did – with her own string of crystal beads hanging conspicuously round her neck.” He laughed reminiscently and lit a cigarette. “Mrs. Burford stood in the doorway as if taken aback at finding her cousin engaged; did it to the life, and I never took my eyes off Lady Medchester’s face.
“When she saw Mrs. Burford standing there, the beads gleaming on her neck, she went white as a sheet, caught her breath, and stared till I thought her eyes would have dropped out. ‘Why, Anne,’ she cried, pointed a hand at the necklace and dropped it at her side, ‘where did that – Why, I thought –’ and stopped short, fearful no doubt of saying too much. ‘Why, Cousin Minnie, what’s the matter?’ Mrs. Burford asked, genuinely astonished, for I hadn’t told her just what I was after.
“Lady Medchester pulled herself together. ‘The matter,’ she repeated angrily and evasively, ‘when you come into the room like a Jack-in-the-box! It’s enough to startle anybody!’ ‘Whom do those beads belong to, Lady Medchester?’ I asked sternly. ‘And why were you taken aback at the sight of them?’
“She looked from them to me as if she could have killed me. ‘I haven’t the least idea!’ she stammered, then realizing she was giving herself away, added, ‘At least, I suppose they belong to Mrs. Burford, as she is wearing them round her neck!’
“But my little trap had succeeded. I had found out what I wanted to know.”
“What was that?” Harbord asked curiously.
“Lady Medchester had imagined the beads found after the murder belonged to Anne Courtenay,” Stoddart replied slowly, “and when she saw that string hanging round Mrs. Burford’s neck she got the surprise of her life. What I should like to know is this – why did Lady Medchester get the shock of her life when she realized the beads found in Saunderson’s pocket did not belong to Anne Courtenay?”
CHAPTER 19
Mrs. Mayer was taking her trouble hardly. As she had passed out of the depressing, whitened walls of the Cottage Hospital where her husband had just gasped out the last words he would ever speak in this world, she felt the light had gone out of her life. Like other women of a certain type, she was inclined to give way to her feelings as long as there was some hope left; but, that once swept away, the calmness of a great despair had enveloped her, and she had arrived at her home feeling as though the bottom had fallen out of the world.
She and Bill Mayer had led such a happy life together. In that lay her one drop of comfort. She might be suffering at the moment more than many other wives bereft like herself, but whoever may be the presiding genius in charge of life’s scales sees to it that the balance is kept pretty even, and at least there was no touch of remorse in her grief.
She could look back over the years without any of the gnawing regret so many wives experience in the first flush of realizing the time has gone irrevocably for undoing any regrettable act in the past.
She and her husband had had the usual tiffs of married life, and had made them up; no one could nurse resentment long in face of her Bill’s good-humoured smile, backed as often as not by the remark that they wouldn’t be entering for the flitch of bacon that year. But she had been a good wife to him, borne him children, and made his home a comfortable haven to come back to after a day’s work. She had nothing to blame herself about in that way, and many a time he had looked at her, a twinkle in his eyes, and congratulated himself on knowing how to appreciate a good thing when he’d got it.
As a husband and father no one could have asked for better. Rising steadily in his profession step by step, he had reached the position of superintendent by a stolid devotion to duty and intelligence, not always apparent in country districts where experience is necessarily more limited than in large cities. He had won the respect of his superiors, and Stoddart had spoken no more than the truth when he said, “Those little pig’s eyes of his see more than you think.”
Mrs. Mayer was suffering from the greatest loss it is possible for a woman to suffer in this world – that of a good husband.
Betty Morgan, her daughter, married to a baker and living on the edge of the town, had been waiting for her mother when she returned from that sad visit to the hospital. She had been hastily summoned from her own home, and read all she needed to know in the stony despair of her mother’s eyes.
“He’s gone,” Mrs. Mayer said, dropping into a sleepless night, and insisted on doing her share towards getting the breakfast and putting the house straight.
Betty Morgan, having a husband and children to see to, caught the eleven o’clock bus from Medchester town hall, next door to the police station, leaving her mother with a promise to return early in the afternoon. Both her sisters were in service, and her brother, following in his father’s footsteps, had become a policeman; being stationed in a far-away Devonshire town, he could only hope for leave to come home in time for his father’s funeral. She felt therefore that the care of her mother devolved for the moment entirely upon herself, Mrs. Mayer shrinking from seeing any kindly-intentioned neighbours in the first flush of her grief.
By three o’clock Betty Morgan was back at the police station.
She found her mother sitting in the kitchen, hat and coat on, and concluded with slight surprise she had been to the only decent draper’s shop the town could boast to see about mourning.
But Mrs. Mayer fiercely repudiated any such suggestion.
“Not me!” she said, adding with a curious note of defiance, “I’ve been to see the place where your poor father was killed. That’s where I’ve been.”
“Whatever made you do that, mother?” Betty raised her eyebrows.
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s natural enough; and I had a feelin’ somehow” – she hesitated and pulled off her hat – “I don’t know why, but I just wanted to go and see it before every sightseer in the place went treadin’ about there. It’s sacred ground to me – can’t you understand?”
“Yes, perhaps I can,” the other said gently. “Not far from the lodge, wasn’t it?”
“Not more than a few hundred yards. I found the spot easy enough by the description, leastways thereabouts. I knew I was right because –”
“Because why?” her daughter asked, hanging her coat and hat on a peg in a corner.
But Mrs. Mayer shut her mouth with a snap and left the sentence unfinished.
“Susan Yates called to me as I came back through the lodge gates,” she went on, glancing furtively at Betty, “wants to come and see me. Very kind she was.”
Betty nodded.
“But I asked her to wait a day or so,” Mrs. Mayer continued. “I don’t feel up to it. She had somebody staying in the house with her; I don’t know who it was, but somebody pulled a blind down in one of the bedrooms while we were talkin’.”
At the inquest two days later Mrs. Mayer learnt the visitor at the lodge had been “that there Mary Ann Yates, or Saunderson, or Delauney, or whatever she calls herself.” Her own evidence, being practically nil, she was quickly through. After informing the court that the superintendent had left her in the morning as usual for Empton, and had never returned, that was all she had to tell, and when given she had been allowed to leave the court and go home.
Then had come a visit from the inspector. That was two days after the inquest, and the day before the funeral.
“I’ve come to tell you, Mrs. Mayer,” Stoddart said, removing his hat as she opened the door to him and following her into the little parlour, “that there isn’t a man in the Force who is not sympathizing with you in your trouble. It’s a bad job, that it is.”
Mrs. Mayer’s face hardened. She was too sore and her wound too fresh to be able to loo
k at things dispassionately, and in some unreasonable fashion she was inclined to hold Scotland Yard responsible for her husband’s death. What was the good of the police if they let honest members of their own force be murdered in broad daylight?
So she nodded her head and remained silent. Inspector Stoddart coughed and blew his nose; not because it required it, but merely to give him time. He was not sure of what to say on occasions such as this.
“I was thinking, Mrs. Mayer,” he began again, “now the inquest is over, and perhaps you may be settling down a bit, there might be some little thing you might remember – all you’ve had to go through is enough to upset anybody’s memory – that maybe might give us a line on what it was that came to the superintendent’s knowledge between his leaving you in the morning and his meeting with Mrs. Yates at the Holford lodge gates. A lot hangs on that; and you’ll be wanting to track the villain that murdered him as much or more than we do at the Yard. Was he to your knowledge expecting to hear of anything?”
Mrs. Mayer shook her head. Her eyes travelled uneasily round the room, and something in her manner urged him to press the point.
“No,” she said shortly, “there wasn’t anything; not that I knew of. But Bill kep’ his business affairs, as he called them, to himself sometimes. Not that he didn’t trust me,” she added fiercely, “but he liked to get away from them – forget he was a policeman, he used to say.”
“I can quite understand that, and I’m sure you would have no wish to hide anything from the Yard, Mrs. Mayer.”
The hearty assent expected by the inspector was not forthcoming. Mrs. Mayer dropped her eyes.
“Surely,” he went on, slightly puzzled by her manner, “you would keep nothing back that would help us to trace the criminal?”
This time the reply came eagerly enough; a look of relief lightened Mrs. Mayer’s pale blue eyes as she looked him straight in the face.
“I surely would not! I’d give years of my life to catch him! But I can’t help you; I can only say what I said at the inquest – I don’t believe Bill had a thing in his mind when he started off that morning for Empton. Mrs. Yates and that daughter of hers, besides his lordship, talked of his being in high spirits owing to his promotion being likely. Well, there was nothing o’ that when he left me, and if he talked like that to his lordship and sundry, ain’t it likely he’d ha’ said something of it to his lawful wife? No,” as her visitor rose, “if he heard anything, as you say, it was something he learnt that morning after he’d left and before he saw Mrs. Yates at the lodge. You can take it from me.”
