Hangman's Whip

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  Then Richard said quite easily and clearly, without the still note of horror that had been in his voice when he had talked of the finding of Eve’s body: “I cannot answer.”

  “Do you mean you refuse to answer?” said the coroner with an edge of triumph in his voice.

  “I mean,” said Richard abruptly and with an air of resolution, “that this is not a trial. It is a coroner’s inquest. I will answer anything that is asked me at a—a properly conducted trial. I refuse to be placed on trial without the right to defend myself.”

  For the first time a little buzz of something like approval ran over the courtroom. But it was Richard’s only score. For almost immediately thereafter the coroner’s inquest ended.

  Three points had been driven home to the jury with sufficient force of penetration.

  Richard wanted to marry another woman, and his wife had stood stubbornly between them; Richard had been in need of money, and his wife had a sum which to many of the jury seemed fairly substantial. Richard had been in the cottage where and at about the time his wife was murdered. And had come back with a story of suicide.

  The verdict was given almost at once; the jury did not even withdraw to consider it. Eve Bohan had been murdered, and the jury recommended that Richard Bohan be arrested, charged with murder and held pending the grand jury investigation.

  The sheriff rose and took Richard by the arm. People surged toward the door.

  Howland drifted away toward the door, but Search was not aware of it. Through a space she caught an instant’s glimpse of Richard’s face, white and set, the top of his dark head. Then someone moved and blocked off her view. She caught Calvin’s arm. “Calvin, help me get through to Richard. I must see him.” And Howland was beside them. He said quickly, his voice low:

  “Calvin—Search! Hurry! There’s been another murder! A man. Nobody knows who. They found him under the willows at your place when they went to get Richard, and they say he did it. We’d better get Ludmilla and the girls out of here.”

  “A—” Calvin’s face went gray. He turned sharply to Search. “You can’t see Richard now! Don’t be a fool. It would only make matters worse. Diana, Ludmilla—hurry!”

  Chapter 16

  SEARCH LET HERSELF BE hurried away; Calvin was right, of course, about Richard; Howland’s whispered news, incredible, ugly, horribly bewildering, seemed to wash over them all like a wave. Already the people moving along the hall and out of the courthouse into the bright glare of the sun knew it. Groups moved aside to let them pass, watching them. The car was at the door, and Calvin almost pushed them into it.

  And when they were once in motion and Diana, straightening her hat, was remonstrating, he told them.

  “Who was it?” cried Diana, her long face as sallow as a candle.

  He didn’t know. Howland didn’t know. Nobody knew. They’d found the body under the willows down by the pier. They said that Richard did it. They’d concluded the inquest hurriedly, determined to get a verdict so they could hold Richard under arrest while they investigated this new and dreadful development.

  “It’s the only thing they could do,” said Howland. “This will bring the district attorney’s office down on Donny like a ton of bricks. They’ve got to have somebody arrested.”

  “Well, it needn’t be Richard,” said Ludmilla sharply. With one of her unexpectedly composed reactions to emergency she seemed to take the news, on the whole, more coolly than any of them. And she was seething with anger, her blue eyes sparkling, her cheeks pink, wisps of hair sliding down the back of her plump neck. “Pete Donny is an old fool. He let Bea testify and never gave me a chance to tell them Richard didn’t do it. Diana, if you don’t fire her the instant we get home I’ll slap you, even if you are thirty years old!” She stopped and took a breath. Diana said “Twenty-nine” in an abstracted way, and Ludmilla went on quickly: “How was he killed? This man they found under the willows. When?”

  No one knew that either. And Calvin leaned over to the chauffeur and told him to hurry.

  The rest of the day was a nightmare through which Search moved like a sleepwalker. And through that day Richard—his face white and set as it had been when she saw it last—moved with her as constantly as if he were there in the flesh.

  Richard, who was actually then under arrest and charged with the murder of Eve Bohan. It was part of the nightmare.

  Diana made Ludmilla go to her room and rest, which infuriated Ludmilla; but once there she collapsed, cried a little, said she hadn’t brought any of them up right, choked over the brandy Calvin brought and then lapsed into silence and lay there watching the door, listening, her china-blue eyes deeply thoughtful.

  The sheriff followed them an hour or so later.

  Howland and Calvin between them managed, before the sheriff arrived, to get together a few facts. Richard had been discovered because somebody had tipped off one of the deputies, waiting in the sheriff’s office merely to answer the telephone while the sheriff attended the inquest.

  They had had so many false leads and false alarms that when a voice over the telephone told them that Richard Bohan was hiding in the barn of the Abbott place the deputy did not believe it.

  So, with another deputy, and without notifying the sheriff, he drove out to the Abbott place, confident that they would not find Richard. And they didn’t. Not at first.

  He was not in the loft room over the garage, but there were newspapers and cigarettes and the army cot. So they set out to search the grounds.

  And found almost at once, down near the pier, the body of a man. His skull had been fractured, apparently, with a heavy instrument, and his body had been half submerged in the water at the edge of the willows for many hours.

  The servants remaining in the house—Cook and Carter—knew that much. They had not seen the body. They only knew that the two men had returned to the garage and, this time, caught Richard. They had promptly arrested him, had left the milkman, who happened to arrive at that point (all the other available men being at the inquest), to guard the body and had taken Richard hurriedly to town and to the courthouse.

  Apparently the sheriff had given orders; probably before the inquest presumed men were on their way to the Abbott place to relieve the obliging but rather frightened milkman and take over. They did nothing, however, except keep off any chance passers-by along the lake path.

  Calvin and Howland went down to the pier almost immediately when they arrived, but returned after a while with no more information than the bare facts of the discovery. They had not seen the murdered man. The body had been covered with a sheet, brought from the house, and no one was permitted to come near until the sheriff arrived.

  So it was three o’clock before the murdered man was identified, and then it was only a partial identification.

  They were all—except Ludmilla—taken to view the body. That was shortly after the sheriff and the coroner arrived.

  It was very hot by then, with the sun beating down upon the lake and reflecting itself glassily. They made a silent, reluctant little procession down the winding steps to the pier, between the heavy shrubs growing along each side and shutting off any possible current of air. Calvin went first and Howland; Search and Diana and the servants followed, with the sheriff’s assistant, Al, bringing up the rear.

  Ludmilla was left alone in the house. But it was in broad daylight. And the sheriff was convinced, apparently, that Richard was the murderer.

  They were waiting for them in the path. It was hot there, too, because of the heavy willow thickets. The low bank of the lake, going down to the rocks, was trodden down. The sheriff was fanning himself with his hat; the coroner, looking very hot and tired, was sitting on a boulder near by with his bag on his knees. One of the deputies lifted the sheet.

  It was a gruesome few moments. One by one they were obliged to approach the sodden huddle under the sheet and look at the blue-white face—eyes half open, jaw fallen, thin brown hair dried now on the bluish forehead.

  Cook
crossed herself and said her lips and voice trembling, that she’d never seen him before. Diana looked, eyes and face concentrated, but shrinking from the sight. Calvin looked and shook his head, and Howland looked and said definitely that he had never seen the man before. Search had to force herself to step forward.

  The wound was on one side of the head, behind and above the ear, and it had been caused by a horrible crushing blow. The clothes were nondescript, gray, shabby; the cheap tie was twisted and soiled with water and blood. The face was that of a man of about forty-five or fifty—a thin face, but so departed from what would have been its natural living look that it was impossible to catch even a glimpse of what it might have been. But the features were completely unknown to Search, and she said so quickly, moving back into the path as far as she could get from the body.

  Carter was next; Search saw her go forward in her neat, thin black uniform and crisp white apron. She stopped and looked earnestly at the face, shadowed a little now with the sheet.

  And it was Carter who gave that perplexing partial identification. For the man who lay there dead beneath the willows was the man who had called at the Abbott house late the previous afternoon and asked for Eve and then for Richard. She said it positively, distaste but utter truth and conviction upon her clean pleasant English face. The sheriff questioned her abruptly, eagerly. But that was all she knew.

  Presently they were permitted to return to the house, climbing those hot, exposed cement steps to the porch. Soon after that the body was taken away—brought up the steps, too, in a stretcher and so to the car waiting for it at the steps of the porch. There was no road encircling Lake Kentigern nearer than the road which included the estates along the lake. The path close to the lake was only a footpath.

  After that, slowly and thoroughly, the sheriff again questioned them. But only Carter had seen the murdered man and only Carter knew what he had said and where he had gone, and her story left too much untold.

  She had told Diana of the caller; Diana had told Search and Calvin. Calvin thought he had mentioned it that night, or possibly the next morning, to Howland, but Howland said quickly and definitely that he had not done so.

  In any case the man in gray had, to all intents and purposes, walked down the steps to the pier and vanished—until the deputy looking for Richard had seen what looked like and was a man’s foot, the shoe wet and muddy, sticking out of the willows.

  He had been dead, however, anywhere from twelve to eighteen hours. He had been murdered, then, quietly, with simple efficacious brutality, sometime during the late afternoon or the quiet night just past. The coroner made that as a definite statement and went away.

  There began again the slow process of alibis, more than difficult since there was no way to fix the exact time of the murder. In the end none of them had alibis for the whole of the previous late afternoon and evening.

  Again, desperately trying to elicit any stray crumb of fact, the sheriff took each one alone, questioning at length. Search waited for her turn and, when it came, went with her knees shaking to where the sheriff waited—this time in the drawing room, formal, Victorian, with the picture of Ludmilla smiling placidly down at them from above Isabel Abbott’s harp. It was cool in that room; the lace curtains, the gilt table, the faded roses in the Brussels carpet, had a kind of untouched tranquillity, so the room itself seemed to forbid emotion with a gloved finger on its lips.

  The sheriff, slouching in an armchair that was as usual too small for him, looked up wearily. There was an ash tray at his elbow, and the smell of smoke in the room vied with the lingering traces of potpourri. Search came at once to the table, her hands clenched at her sides, one thought only in her mind.

  “He didn’t get a fair trial. You made them find him guilty. You didn’t let them have all the evidence. You gave them only the evidence that would go against him—”

  His eyebrows went up. “Oh, now, Miss Search,” he interrupted. “Come now! You’re upset.”

  “It wasn’t fair. It—it’s murder; the way you are doing it. That’s murder, too, to send an innocent man to—”

  “Sit down,” he said. She didn’t move, and he went on heavily, watching her: “I take it you mean Richard and the coroner’s jury. You think I railroaded him into jail.”

  “I know you did. I—”

  “Listen, Miss Search. Was there anything that was brought out in that inquest that wasn’t true?”

  “It wasn’t the whole truth.”

  “There’s a trial to come. He can give his side of it then. I had to—”

  She leaned across the table. “You had to get a verdict! You—”

  “Sit down!” he shouted and struggled upward out of his chair as if he intended forcibly to thrust her out of the way. They stood there for a moment, the sheriff breathing heavily, his big face flushed. Search slender and taut and blazing with anger. She cried unevenly: “He didn’t do it! I tell you he didn’t—” And stopped, biting back unexpected, furious tears.

  Perhaps he saw. He started to speak, stopped, straightened his massive shoulders and said in a different voice: “There now, Miss Search. He’s not been sentenced yet. I—that is, I didn’t mean to say that—”

  “It’s the truth. He will be—unless—”

  “Unless,” said the sheriff. “Listen, Miss Search. I only want the truth, and I only want to do my duty. I—” He hesitated. “Look here. I have listened to his story. I’m going to do everything in my power to prove it’s either true or false. I—I don’t want Dick Bohan to suffer for it if he didn’t kill her. But murder’s murder.”

  “You mean—”

  “Murders murder,” he repeated. “You don’t know the pressure that’s been put on me.” He got out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead and said peaceably: “All right, now. You knew Dick Bohan was hiding in the barn, didn’t you?”

  She sat down then. “Yes.”

  “What about this man that was killed last night? You say you didn’t know him. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The hammer was found, you know.”

  Something caught in Search’s throat. “Hammer!”

  “The hammer that killed him. It was thrown into the water; we found it. Washed, but enough blood and hair clinging to it, Doctor Jerym thinks, to get an analysis under a microscope.”

  After a moment she whispered: “Have you traced—”

  He nodded. “Hammer is missing from the tool shed. So you see, everything hooks it up with—with somebody here. Dick was here last night. He was here the night before last. I suppose what the girl, Bea Walthers, told at the inquest was true?” There was a tentative lift of his eyebrows.

  “Richard didn’t murder Eve; I didn’t,” said Search steadily. “You can’t possibly expect me to admit anything so damaging. If there’s to be a trial we’ll have lawyers. I’m not going to answer any questions until—until I’ve seen a lawyer.”

  “You’ve seen Howland Stacy,” said the sheriff quietly, his eyes observant. And added: “Miss Search, who was the man you saw at the cottage the night Eve Bohan was murdered?”

  “If I knew,” she said bitterly, “don’t you see that I would tell you? To help Richard.”

  “But it might not help him,” said the sheriff slowly. “Not if whoever it was saw—too much.”

  “In that case,” she said, “wouldn’t he have come forward before now?”

  The sheriff examined a leather-bound and gilt-lettered volume of Tennyson’s poems on the table beside him, examined it slowly and said, still eying it: “Perhaps. Perhaps not. If—” He stopped, rubbed his nose and said: “You see, don’t you, that since this man last night inquired for Dick it looks very much as if he had information that was dangerous to Dick and Dick killed him. I—” He stopped and glanced, frowning, at the closed door. “I thought I heard—”

  A small, rather timid knock came again. The sheriff rose heavily and went to the door and slid it back. “Well?”

  The
waitress, Bea Walthers, slid into the room. Her eyes were red and she looked frightened. She said nothing, and the sheriff closed the door again behind her. “Well?” he repeated. “You’ve come to tell me something else?”

  She had. She stammered; she wouldn’t look at Search. She lowered her voice to a thin whisper.

  “I thought I ought to tell you. I’ve—I’ve kept it to myself. But it—it seems only fair—after you made me tell about Miss Search and Mrs Bohan——”

  “What have you got to say?”

  She was reluctant. She twisted her fingers in her apron. But she got out her incredible little story.

  It had happened the night of Eve’s murder. Just before dinner, for it was dusk and she had finished laying the table and had gone out the back door for a breath of air before serving dinner. And she had seen a man come out of the tool shed with a coil of rope and a raincoat over his arm.

  She had been behind the lilacs; he hadn’t seen her. He’d closed the door of the tool shed and gone around to the other side of it. She’d come back into the house.

  “Who was the man? Could you see him clearly?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, stammering. She could see clearly enough to recognize him. He was wearing a dinner jacket and it was Calvin Peale.

  Chapter 17

  “WHOEVER TOLD YOU THAT lies,” said Calvin. “You’ve got to tell me who it was. So I can defend myself.”

  He was a bright, furious pink.

  The sheriff walked heavily around the table and sat down again.

  He had let the waitress go; before she left she begged him not to tell who had given the information she had brought. She was afraid, she told him and meant it; there was terror in her eyes and in her voice.

  Search remained in the room when the sheriff sent for Calvin; perhaps he forgot her, perhaps he wanted her to be present when he taxed Calvin with Bea’s unexpected story.