Crystal Beads Murder

by Annie Haynes

  The inspector gave her time to pull herself together, then he asked gently:

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Mrs. Mayer?” He had always felt sorry for the poor woman.

  She turned a pair of frightened eyes towards him.

  “I didn’t mean any harm,” she said in a low voice. “I never thought as how it could matter. Believe me,” bending forward earnestly, “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known. I knew I didn’t ought – not to hide anything from the police – Bill he often said that in my hearing – ‘Don’t hide anything from the police,’ he said – and I never thinking – not knowing as how there’d ever be anything –”

  “I dare say it’s nothing very serious, Mrs. Mayer,” Stoddart said kindly. “You tell us what it is and don’t go making yourself unhappy about it before the time. Tell us all about it in your own way.”

  She sat straight up in the chair and placed the parcel on the table in front of her.

  “I’ve got to make a clean breast of it sooner or later, so I suppose I may as well do it straight off,” making a brave effort at self-control. “After all, I didn’t mean any harm, and you won’t forget that, inspector.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” he encouraged, “we shall be glad to hear anything you have to say.”

  “Well, it was like this. The day after my Bill was” – she hesitated for a word and her lip quivered – “shot, it came over me to go and see the spot – sort of sacred – you understand –”

  She paused again.

  Stoddart, who was hanging on her words, convinced somehow they were going to get the truth about Mayer’s death, nodded in silence.

  “So peaceful it looked,” she went on, her eyes becoming dreamy, “the tree trunks rising up out of the green moss; the ground strewn with red and yellow leaves – some of them fallen fresh in the night; there was a bird chirruping somewhere – you’d never have thought a man had been killed there. I just looked round, and wished the trees and the bushes could have spoken and told me the name of the coward who’d done it – killed a man doing his duty.”

  Again she paused, and neither of her hearers seemed inclined to break the silence. She sighed heavily and resumed:

  “My eyes fell on something glittering under a bush, and when I went to see what it was I found it was the shiny peak of a cap. I picked it up – my Bill’s cap – dropped there, I suppose, and overlooked when they took him away to the Cottage Hospital.”

  The inspector glanced at the parcel on the table.

  “The cap was missed when they went over his clothes, Mrs. Mayer, and a constable went back to look for it next day. Of course he didn’t find it.”

  “I’m sorry, inspector, I am indeed; but it was my Bill’s cap, which I’d brushed for him and watched him put on his head when he left me that morning. I just couldn’t give it up! I know I oughtn’t to have kept it – it belonged to the Government and all that – and I oughtn’t to hide anything from the police – and Bill a policeman so to speak himself – but there it was! I kept it and,” she added fiercely, “I meant to have kept it till my dying day in spite of all the police in the world!”

  Again there was silence.

  “And why didn’t you?” Stoddart asked gently.

  “Providence is inscrutable in His ways, and He made me do the right thing in spite of myself,” she said simply. “I took Bill’s cap home with me, hid under my jacket, and I went half-way round Medchester and in at the little garden gate at the back of the police station instead of by the front, fearful I’d meet a constable who’d ask me what I’d got hid. Then I wrapped it up in a bit of clean tissue paper what Betty’s – that’s my daughter – new black hat had come in, and put it away in the drawer of an old bit of furniture that was left to Bill by an old gentleman he’d done a good turn to when burglars got into his house. And I’d never have told anyone, not the police nor even my own daughter that I’d got it, if it hadn’t been for – for what I found out.”

  “What did you find out, Mrs. Mayer?” Stoddart urged, as patiently as he could. Perhaps it might amount to nothing after all.

  She hesitated and drawing the parcel towards her fidgeted with the string.

  “It was when I was packing up to come away to-day. I came to tell you at once when I knew,” she protested. “I opened the drawer and took out the cap from the back, and I sat down in a chair and held it in my hand and thought of how Bill had put it on that morning, and how glad I was I had got something he had worn the last thing before – before –”

  “I am sure you were,” the inspector said sympathetically, “and then –?”

  “Then I was just passing my fingers over it – loving-like – and I found, slipped into the lining that runs round inside, a bit of paper. I pulled it out and I saw it had something written on it, and in a minute I remembered all the talk and the questions about Bill having learnt something after he’d left me in the morning, and how the coroner and the police had thought that was what he’d been shot for, and how nobody had found out what it was, and there was I hiding the very thing that maybe they were all looking for. It gave me a shock, it did – and I came along here as quick as I could.”

  “The red-haired tramp! Lord, how the pieces begin to fit in!” Harbord muttered.

  With fingers that shook the poor woman unfastened the string, and from the tissue paper produced the peaked uniform cap that had belonged to her husband. She pushed it across the table to the inspector.

  “I never so much as looked at it – just let it be as it was,” she explained. “I knew it didn’t ought to be there, not in an ordinary way like – he never carried anything inside his cap. Didn’t I know, as gave it a brush up and put it on his head for him as often as not! So I’ve brought it along. I am sorry – and a woman can’t say more.”

  Stoddart took the folded slip of paper from the strip of lining and laid the cap back on the table. There was dead silence in the room as he read what was written in rather faded ink. When he had finished he turned to his colleague and for all the expression that appeared on his features they might have been carved in wood.

  “Ask Mrs. Marlow to give Mrs. Mayer a cup of tea before she starts back, Alfred,” he said.

  Harbord disappeared, and Stoddart looked at the woman seated opposite.

  “You shouldn’t have kept the cap back, you know, Mrs. Mayer. It’s Government property and it’s a criminal offence to hide anything from the police that may forward the ends of justice.”

  “I know that,” she admitted, “but when a woman has lost – the best man what ever was –”

  The words tailed off into a sob.

  The inspector gave the cap the slightest push in her direction.

  “It’s the paper that’s wanted,” he said with a gruffness assumed possibly to hide a different emotion; turning his back, he stared out of the window.

  Mrs. Mayer hesitated, put out a hand, and gathered the cap into the shelter of her coat, safe from prying eyes. Then with a grateful glance at the figure standing by the window she softly left the room.

  When Harbord returned his superior was scanning the slip of paper held up in front of him.

  “Well?” Harbord asked eagerly.

  The other looked up with a grim smile and handed him the slip of paper.

  “All we want,” he said tersely. “The one link that was missing – the motive!”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  Stoddart reached for his hat and coat.

  “I am going straight off to get a warrant,” he said, making for the door.

  CHAPTER 25

  “That’s the third car from the Hall you’ve opened the gate for, mother.”

  Miss Tottie Delauney flattened her nose against the casement window of the lodge and peered out into the fading light of the autumn afternoon.

  “What’s up at the Hall? And here’s another,” she added as a raucous hoot outside sent Mrs. Yates trotting through the front door. In a moment she was back again.


  “That was Mrs. Baily-Barton,” she informed her daughter, breathless from the effort of swinging the heavy gates to and fro. “Her chauffeur is a son of John Nomes’s that keeps the tobacco shop in Medchester High Street. Here’s another! Mirandy, go and open the gate, there’s a good girl. I can’t get me breath all in a minute.”

  “Not me!” was the casual retort. “Let ’em open it themselves. Don’t you put yourself out, mother. Chauffeur indeed! Fat and lazy! Why can’t he get out and open it himself? The machine won’t run away.”

  But Mrs. Yates was already bustling down the gravel path to the drive, and the creak of a ponderous hinge broke into the soft purr of the big car awaiting her kind offices inside the gates.

  “Who was that?”

  Mrs. Yates, returning, a hand clasped to her heart, made no reply.

  “Why don’t you prop it open? There’s no sense running in and out like that, and I don’t suppose any strays’ll get in from the road.”

  “Blest if I don’t next one as comes through. There’s bin a tea-party goin’ on at the Hall – so Mr. Wilton said when he passed through to the gardens this morning – in honour of young Lord Gorth – Mr. Harold that was – and his young lady.”

  “She’s older than him, I guess, and she’s older than that Mrs. Stuck-up Burford with her nose in the air for all that I could tell –” Miss Delauney stopped abruptly.

  “You hold your tongue, Mary Ann,” her mother interposed hurriedly, “especially when it comes to talking about yer betters. They are going to be married to-morrow, quiet-like in Holford Church. I do hold with going to church – seems kinder asking a blessing – and you want all the help you can get when it comes to husbands. That’s what I say. That husband o’ yours, Mary Ann –”

  “Oh, leave him alone, mother!” was the sharp retort. “What’s the good of raking up things best forgot? Let sleeping dogs lie. The less the police mess round the better. I gave ’em a hint and they didn’t take it – if they can’t see through a stone wall I’m not the one to make a hole in it for them. There’s another car! I wouldn’t demean myself running out after them,” Miss Delauney added as her mother scrambled to her feet, “not if I was you.”

  “What do you suppose his lordship gives me my house for, rent free?” Mrs Yates threw back at her from the door. “And what do you suppose I should do without it?”

  “You wait till I come into me own,” Miss Delauney muttered. “I suppose a wife has got her rights.”

  Having sped the parting guest, Mrs Yates returned to her chair.

  “That was Lady Darman, high and haughty she is. I wonder her ladyship asked her. I hear his lordship’s going to town and won’t be home till the end of the week. Don’t hold with the marriage he don’t – so Mr. Wilton says – but her ladyship’s fair set on it.”

  It had, however, been by no wish of Lady Medchester’s that the neighbourhood had been enjoying the hospitality of Holford Hall that afternoon. Ostensibly with the object of introducing her own acquaintances to the future Lady Gorth, invitations had been sent out; but Lord Medchester had refused to lend his countenance to the entertainment. He had taken himself off to London until it and the subsequent marriage ceremony at the village church should be over. Reluctantly admitting his jurisdiction did not extend to Church matters, and that Miss Stainer was entitled to be married in any church she chose, he could only express his disapproval publicly by absenting himself and advertising the fact to all and sundry who might be interested.

  The party brought together with so depressing an atmosphere inspiring it had not been a success. Those among Lady Medchester’s neighbours who had accepted the invitation had done so mainly out of curiosity, and finding themselves entertained perfunctorily by an apparently apathetic hostess, and treated with a sort of hostile insolence by the woman who proposed to settle down among them, had departed as quickly as bare politeness permitted, leaving behind them in the large drawing-room used only for receptions of a more or less formal nature, and insisted upon by Miss Stainer on this special occasion, four people in varying degrees of bad temper.

  Lady Medchester made no effort to hide her annoyance and humiliation at the performance she had just gone through. She was not accustomed to giving parties that were failures, and she turned to Anne Burford, present more or less under compulsion, with an unspoken appeal for sympathy that was very unusual in her attitude towards her cousin.

  Harold sat in a corner frankly in the sulks, and Miss Stainer, the fourth occupant of the room, was trying to put a good face on the situation by humming a tune and standing with assumed nonchalance on the hearth-rug, warming a foot at the fire.

  Destiny as often as not seems to set the stage for life’s most poignant dramas with a careless hand. No studied grouping of principal actors, no background of significant details, nor play of limelight on the stars of the piece. The scene as the act opens may be commonplace and undistinguished, the position of the players apparently haphazard, until the red light of tragedy transforms the common setting of everyday life into an indelible picture.

  Lady Medchester, at the end of her patience, looked irritably across the room at her guest.

  “I wish you would stop humming that thing, Sybil,” she protested, “it gets on my nerves. You were at it all the afternoon – and out of tune at that!”

  Miss Stainer turned sharply, a reply on her lips; but before she could speak the door opened and before anyone realized what was happening, unannounced, Inspector Stoddart and Harbord were standing inside the room.

  Lady Medchester, with a suppressed cry of terror, pressed a hand to her heart and fell back in her chair. Anne, suddenly faced with possible danger, crept instinctively to her brother’s side; he slipped a protective arm round her and murmured something in her ear.

  But Stoddart, his face cold and impassive as Anne had never seen it, took no notice of them. He crossed to the fireplace where Miss Stainer stood, staring at him, eyes wide and desperate, and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “Sybil Stainer, I arrest you in the name of the law for the murder of Robert Saunderson on the twenty-ninth of August last – and I warn you anything you say now may be used in evidence against you!”

  There was a moment of tense silence; the movement of a hand as if in search of a handkerchief; a sharp report – and Sybil Stainer dropped limply at Stoddart’s feet.

  CHAPTER 26

  Two days later, each with a bit of the story to tell, Inspector Stoddart and his companion were ushered into the library at Holford Hall, where Lord Medchester awaited them.

  “I shall be interested to hear how you arrived at your conclusions, inspector,” he remarked, motioning them to be seated. “To be quite frank, I never liked the woman – couldn’t imagine what the devil my wife saw in her. But it’s a bit of a shake-up to have a thing of that sort happen under your own roof – a damn sight worse than the murder, being a woman and all that,” he finished vaguely.

  “No need for you to go over the threads that led us nowhere,” Stoddart began. “We’ll follow up the main line of it. It seemed such a precious tangle when we began, bringing us up against a blank wall time and again. Where there was motive we were confronted with a watertight alibi; and where opportunity could be proved the motive was wanting – and murder without motive is a senseless sort of proposition.”

  Lord Medchester acquiesced. “Give me the salient facts. What put you on to the line eventually?”

  “As often as not it’s one part grey matter to two parts chance that does the trick; though I will say that if the grey matter were to be entirely absent perhaps the so-called chances wouldn’t turn up. Anyway, the first definite pointer we got was because my colleague” – he jerked his head in Harbord’s direction – “couldn’t sleep one night on account of toothache. And even then there didn’t seem to be any motive.”

  He pulled his chair a few inches nearer to his listeners, and carefully deposited his hat underneath.

  “No need to repeat what you know
already,” he went on, “but I’d better tell you straight away there’s one bit of the story will have to come out before the evidence can be pieced together. I’m sorry, Lord Medchester.”

  And, as considerately as the circumstances permitted, he repeated all that Lady Medchester had told him of her part in the affair, and her presence in the garden that night, while his hearer sat as though turned to stone, unable to refute and loyally reluctant to accept the statement.

  “The difficulty all through with which we were faced,” the inspector went on hurriedly, glad to get on less delicate ground, “was the ownership of the crystal beads. They were peculiar beads, cut in a peculiar way, not outstandingly unique, but I had noticed that in the broken necklace picked up in the shrubbery one of them was missing, leaving a gap in the chain, and the bead next to the gap was broken. A bit of a signpost that. Miss Stainer never entered into my calculations, and I don’t mind confessing now I was taking an interest in Miss Tottie Delauney, Mrs. Yates’s daughter, who had kept her presence at the lodge so quiet and was so ready to try and put the crime on some one else’s shoulders. But there wasn’t enough to go on.”

  “There would have been opportunity there, with her headquarters at the lodge,” Lord Medchester muttered, “and, if she gets his money, motive.”

  “True enough, especially in poor Mayer’s case – to keep his mouth shut. But nobody was forthcoming to testify to her having been near the Hall or in the gardens that night and – well, I’ve had a good bit of experience, and Miss Delauney wasn’t the type that goes so far as a murder – much less two of them. She’s more the kind that’s nervous of firearms because she doesn’t know which end they’ll go off at. The motive wasn’t so very plain, either. She didn’t care for her husband nor his goings-on with other women, and couldn’t be sure whether he’d made a Will or not. She confessed as much. She had persuaded him into making her an allowance, and if he had made a Will it was quite possible she might have found herself better off with him alive than dead. That seemed to put her out of court.”