Dead Man’s Quarry: A Golden Age Mystery

by Ianthe Jerrold

  “Well,” said John, casting around in his mind for a question that would assist and yet disguise his drift, “to begin with, Miss Letbe, did you know that there was a revolver in the drawer of the library at Rhyllan Hall?”

  Ellie’s china-blue eyes darkened and she looked helplessly round at her mother.

  “No, sir, I never—I never touched it!”

  John smiled reassuringly.

  “Of course you didn’t. But did you ever see it there?”

  She looked fearfully at him, and after a moment returned his smile, half coyly, half distrustfully.

  “Yes, I seen it,” she admitted. “When I was helping Mrs. Maur to clean out the libery. I seen it in the drawer, along of a box of bullets.” Her plump red fingers fidgeted with the table-cloth, and she looked up at John from under her eyelashes. “It frit me, for I can’t bear to think of killing, and that. And I gave a kind of a start, and Mrs. Maur, when she see what I was looking at, she said never to open drawers or cupboards in the libery. But I was cleaning the room out, I didn’t think no harm.”

  “Of course not. When was this?”

  Her round low brow puckered becomingly—rather more than was necessary, John thought. He could well believe that under Mrs. Maur’s stern regime the fair Ellie “would not answer” as a housemaid.

  “I can’t just remember. About a month ago, sir. Joe might remember, because—”

  “Joe?”

  “Mr. Waters, sir, who I’m engaged to.” The pucker gave place to an equally becoming dimple. “He might remember, for I told him about the turn I’d had, and he said he didn’t like to think of they guns where us girls might get fooling with them, and he’d take an opportunity of seeing as it wasn’t loaded, by mistake, like. Because he said there’s been dreadful accidents happen through guns being left loaded by mistake, and he didn’t like to think of me turning out the libery if there was a loaded gun, like, in a drawer.”

  “Very sensible of him. So you’re going to be married soon, are you?”

  “Yes, sir.” Mrs. Letbe spoke up for her daughter, who contented herself with looking at the table-cloth and smiling. “Next month, if all goes well. That’s why we haven’t put her out to service again, sir. It didn’t hardly seem worth it.”

  “You must have been sorry to leave Rhyllan, if your young man is working there,” observed John casually.

  “Oh, sir! But I couldn’t stop there, not after Sir Charles! My Joe wouldn’t never have allowed it.”

  “It were your father as wouldn’t allow it, my girl,” put in Mrs. Letbe with not unkindly tartness. “And it were your father as lost his job owing to your foolishness, not your Joe. ’Twould have been more seemly, to my way of thinking, if your Joe had stood by you and given up his place without staying on for his month’s wages. He hasn’t had it thirty years, like your poor Dad had! There, there, my girl! Don’t start oh-mothering me! I knows as ’tweren’t your fault! But I wish as we’d never thought of sending you out to service at Rhyllan! See what come of it!”

  The stout and pleasant Mrs. Letbe seemed for a moment near tears. It was plain that she was divided between sympathy for her daughter and a disposition to blame her for the trouble that had come upon the family. Ellie’s round pink and white face took on a sulky expression.

  “I couldn’t help it,” she muttered sullenly and gave her mother a look which said plainly that she could dispense with her chaperonage. “It wasn’t my fault, sir,” she added to John in a plaintive tone. “I never thought as a gentleman like Sir Charles would ever notice a girl like me, and—”

  “That’ll do, Ellie, for goodness’ sake!” said her mother more sharply than before.

  Ellie muttered something inaudible and became silent, with a fixed sullen look staring at the table-cloth. John suspected that she looked upon herself as a touching heroine of melodrama in real life, and that her mother did not quite see eye to eye with her. No doubt there’ had been many tears and recriminations in this pleasant little parlour since Charles Price’s bored glance had fallen upon the china-blue eyes of the second housemaid.

  “Of course,” said John tentatively, “you had left Rhyllan before the day of the murder?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” answered the girl’s mother, seeing that Ellie was not yet sufficiently recovered from the sulks to answer agreeably. “The girl left more’n a week before.”

  “On the eighteenth of August,” muttered Ellie broodingly, scowling at her heartless parent.

  “Were you at home, here, at the time the murder was committed?”

  Ellie stared at him with widened eyes.

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with it!” she uttered thinly.

  John perceived that his question had been tactlessly put.

  “No, no, of course not,” he assured her, thinking what a silly little creature the girl was. “Nobody for a moment imagines that you had. Don’t be silly. I asked because I wondered whether you might have seen any strangers about here on that day.” John wished for a moment that the mantle of Superintendent Lovell could fall on his shoulders, so that he could ask the question he desired to ask straight out, without all this circumlocution. Strangers, indeed! The sensation-loving chit would probably invent dozens of them and waste no end of time describing their suspicious characteristics.

  But, fortunately, Miss Lethe’s inventive talent fell short of her desires.

  “Oh, strangers—” she faltered, and was for a moment lost in eager introspection. “There was a man —no, that was Wednesday. We don’t get many strangers come through here, sir. ’Tisn’t on the high road, you see. But, Mother, wasn’t there a man—”

  “No, my girl, I didn’t see one you could call a stranger not on Monday nor any other day of the week. The gentleman don’t mean folk from other villages, but foreigners, like, tramps and that. And there weren’t none, not to my knowledge, nor to yours, I’ll be bound.”

  Ellie tried to protest, but could not.

  “No,” she said at last in a disappointed tone. “I didn’t see no one. And if there had been anyone, in the evening at least, I should have seen him, for I was in the front garden tidying up the dahlias and keeping a look out for Joe. He comes to see me Monday evening, when he has his night out.” A simper restored good humour to her face. “And I gen’lly looks out for him or goes to meet him. He was a bit late on Monday, owing to Mrs. Maur having been out and him waiting for her to come in, so I was in the front garden from about a quarter to seven till quarter to eight.”

  “Long way for him to come, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, he don’t think nothing of that, sir! It’s pretty near seven miles, but he has his bicycle.”

  “Seven miles! I should have thought it was much farther than that! Why, it’s eight miles or so from Penlow to the cross-roads, and Rhyllan is four miles from Penlow!”

  “Bless us, sir!” said Mrs. Letbe with a laugh. “You doesn’t go to Rhyllan by the main road!’Twould be pretty near twenty miles! No, no, go straight over the bridge and you come to Rhyllan the first village. ’Tis a poor road, but handy. My Lord, the pies is burning! Ellie, go you quick and take them out!”

  Ellie rose slowly, looking exceedingly unwilling, and departed. There was a momentary silence.

  “My Lord!” sighed Mrs. Letbe at last, rising heavily to fetch a bottle of ginger wine from the corner cupboard. “Daughters is a trouble, to be sure, when they’re handsome and think themselves handsomer still! I’ll be glad when Ellie is wed, though I wishes I could like the chap better nor what I do. Will you take a glass of wine, sir? It’s home-made.”

  “Thank you very much. He isn’t a local man, Waters, is he?”

  “Dear knows where he comes from,” said Mrs. Letbe, with knitted brows, pouring out a glass of wine. “He’s been here, there and everywhere, it seems. But ’tisn’t that. ’Tis these stories of him going with other girls I don’t like. This is a terrible place for stories, we all know. Seems like people has nothing to talk of but their neighbours. But there
’s no smoke wi’out fire, and I seen the chap myself leaning on Lloyd of Linger-hatch’s gate, talking to his granddaughter more pleasant like nor I cared for. There’s some chaps must make theirselves pleasant to all the girls they meets, we know, but I doubt a chap like that’s not the sort for our Ellie.” She broke off sharply as her daughter appeared in the doorway, flushed with the heat of the oven. “Must you be going now? I’m afraid we wasn’t able to tell you much, sir. I only wishes we could do more.” She hesitated, looking at John with kind, worried eyes. “Could you? But no! ’Twouldn’t do.”

  “What? I’ll do anything I can for you,” replied John, noting with amusement that the shy Ellie looked extremely disappointed to discover that the questions which had so perturbed her were at an end.

  “Well—I was thinking, if you could slip in a word for poor James with Mr. Felix or Miss Blodwen? He’s eating his heart out in they dratted nurseries. But there! ’Tis too soon, I know, and ’twouldn’t be seemly to speak until—” She paused and finished uncertainly: “Until Sir Morris is about again. Ah, dear! First one thing, then another! Seems like the end of everything to James and me!”

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Letbe, I hope not. Sir Morris will be back at Rhyllan in a month or two. And so will your husband, soon after, I expect.”

  John drove away, leaving her standing square and pensive in the doorway, and Ellie posed picturesquely over the rose-tree, a virgin making much of time. He took the short road to Rhyllan which Mrs. Letbe had pointed out to him, and pondered his afternoon’s work as he went. He felt that he had not done so badly. He had as good as established the fact that Clytie Meadows and the mysterious Mrs. Field were one and the same person. He had discovered that Waters the footman knew of the whereabouts of the revolver long before the crime was committed; and that Waters’s alibi was, to say the least of it, shaky. It remained to be seen whether he had been speaking the truth when he told Ellie that he had been kept late at Rhyllan Hall. Then there was the discovery of Charles’s coat on the Forest. And there was the egg-shell he had found in an obvious rabbit-hole in the Tram Inn orchard. John drew up to the side of the road and cautiously withdrew his handkerchief with its fragile contents from his pocket. Yes, he had thought so. The shell was punctured at each end with a tiny hole such as might have been made by the point of a penknife; and though crumpled it was not actually broken apart. The inner skin, in fact, seemed to be almost untorn.

  John put the shell carefully away and shook his head.

  “Do rats understand the art of sucking eggs? I should say not. But, oh, me! What human being would suck seven eggs at a sitting?”

  John, who disliked raw eggs, shuddered slightly and let in his clutch.

  “Yes,” he said to himself, as the little car took the rough road again, “we’ve found out quite a lot of interesting and curious facts to-day. But do any of them fit together to make anything like sense? Oh, Lord! They do not.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  REFLECTIONS

  “And so,” said John, balancing the cracked egg-shell on his forefinger, “we deduce that the man must have been starving.”

  “Or,” amended Rampson the pedantic, “that he had an uncontrollable appetite for raw eggs.”

  “But I don’t see,” said Nora gently, voicing the common thought, “what all this has to do with the murder.”

  There was a pause in the cool summer-house.

  “I mean,” went on Nora, “there’s no connection between the person who stole the eggs and the person who murdered Charles, that I can see. I don’t see why we should bother ourselves about Miss Watt and her eggs. I really don’t.”

  “No—o,” agreed John, gazing pensively at the blanched shell. “Still the egg-shell, obviously emptied by human agency, does prove that there was a stranger about on the evening of the murder. Because none of the local cottagers would have been in such a state of starvation as to eat seven eggs right off. A local person might have stolen the eggs. But, as mine host pointed out, he would have taken them home and boiled them like a Christian. The eating of them raw seems to suggest a tramp. And the fact that nobody noticed a tramp at the inn or on the road nearby suggests that if there were such a person he didn’t want to be noticed.”

  “But,” exclaimed Nora, “there were so many people coming and going round the Tram that he might easily not have been noticed.”

  “And,” said Rampson, “the fact that he had designs on the poultry-yard would be quite enough to explain his invisibility without bringing murder into it.”

  “You’re both perfectly right and reasonable,” said John with a gentle sigh. “I count myself fortunate in being surrounded by such keen and critical intellects. But, all the same—forgive my obstinacy—there was a stranger at the Tram Inn last Monday evening. And there was a murder near the Tram Inn last Monday evening.”

  “Surely, my dear John,” said Rampson peacefully, “you’ve got enough to do following up more promising clues, without bringing this egg-sucking stranger into it.”

  “I don’t propose to bring him into it. I only propose to keep him pigeon-holed, in case circumstances should bring him into it. What is it, Nora?”

  Nora, who had suddenly uttered an exclamation, was gazing out through the arched and pillared doorway of the summer-house with introspective eyes. She turned them half-doubtfully, half-excitedly on John.

  “Do you know—” she began abruptly, and stopped.

  “I feel sure I don’t. Do tell me.”

  “Well, I’ve just remembered. There was a reflection in the looking-glass—”

  “That,” observed Rampson, idly ironical, “is remarkable.”

  “No, but there was. On Monday, just before we had tea in the Tram. Did you notice that old green mirror at the end of the passage, and how it reflects the front door? I was looking at myself in it, and I could see the opening of the front door over my shoulder. And a man came and looked in and went away.”

  “Well?”

  “That’s all, I’m afraid. He was standing against the light and some way off, and I didn’t get a clear reflection of him.”

  “But, Nora, then he may have been anybody.”

  “Yes,” admitted Nora. She was silent a moment. “But there was something in the way he looked in—something queer and furtive. And in the way he moved off when I looked round—so quickly and yet—furtively, as if he were used to moving like that. I couldn’t really see him. I should never be able to describe him. I couldn’t even tell what age he seemed to be. But I can see again quite plainly that furtive, embarrassed movement. One gets impressions like that much more from people’s attitudes and movements than from their faces, you know.”

  “My dear Nora, you quite make my flesh creep,” said Felix, who so far had been a silent member of the council of four. “Are you sure he didn’t move off quickly just because he was embarrassed at seeing you there?”

  He may have been,” replied Nora slowly. “Especially—” She laughed a little and coloured. “Especially as I was amusing myself by making a face at myself in the glass. He may have seen my reflection and thought I was an escaped lunatic. You’d better not make too much of him, John. But there he was, and you can pigeon-hole him along with your stray starving tramp, if you think he’s worth it.”

  “Thank you. I certainly will. Are you sure you can’t describe him at all? His height or build or—”

  Nora shook her head.

  “I think I’d better not. I didn’t see him full-length, except just for a second as he moved away. And one’s so easily led into imagining things. I think he was fairly tall—at least he wasn’t short. That’s all. I’m afraid you’ll have to do with that, John. And don’t attach too much importance to him.”

  Felix murmured thoughtfully:

  “Didn’t that queer girl at the inn say something about seeing a stranger in the yard? Surely she did. Don’t you remember, Nora? When she apologized for the hard-boiled eggs? She said—”

  “Yes, she did! She said she�
�d seen a man in the yard who looked as if he didn’t ought to be there. And she went out to see who it was, and that was how our eggs were hard-boiled. I remember now! But—”

  She hesitated, looking rather disappointed. “Of course it doesn’t help us much. It only goes to prove what we knew already, that there was a suspicious character at the Tram Inn that evening, helping himself to eggs and apples. It doesn’t get us any nearer to the murderer.”

  “What should get us nearer to the murderer,” observed Rampson, “is that coat we found on the Forest yesterday. I take it that it’s absolutely known to be Charles’s?”

  “Absolutely,” replied Nora.

  Felix stirred his long limbs uneasily. He did not like to dwell upon that clue. Like Mr. Clino, he saw it as a weapon in the hands of his father’s accusers.

  “Well,” went on Rampson, fondling one of Blodwen’s spaniels which had entered the summer-house in search of its mistress, “that coat was obviously left on the Forest either by the murderer or by an accomplice. And if it-was not actually left there on the night of the murder, it was left soon after. It had been lying in that patch of bracken for some days. That was plain from the distorted shapes and pale colour of the young shoots trying to grow under it. So its discovery should narrow down your field of inquiry. It adds a further necessary qualification to the list we were making yesterday: the murderer must either have had an accomplice, or he must have had the opportunity of visiting the Forest within a day or two of the murder.”

  “True,” assented John dreamily, and suddenly in his mind’s ear a light, gay voice chattered like a stream of clear water: “Have you been up on the Forest yet? I went yesterday. You can’t think how lovely it is.”

  “Heavens, John,” said Nora, breaking the silence. “What a frown! What terrible idea has occurred to you?”

  “I was only thinking,” said John, coining to himself with a smile, “about murderers and accomplices. Especially accomplices.”