Dead Man's Quarry (23 page)

“My daughter'd still be housemaid at Rhyllan if it weren't for the behaviour of one as is best not spoken of, being dead, poor soul! 'Twere no fault of hers she had to leave, and no fault of my master's as he were turned off after thirty years! A man must look to his girl's character, sir, in whatever walk of life. And if it's about that you've come, I'd liefer you spoke to me and not to Ellie, for there's been too much talk already and the girl's shy of it.”

“No, no,” John assured her. “It isn't about that. A few questions about some other matters which she may know something of.”

Mrs. Letbe still looked dubious.

“Are you from the police, sir?”

“No. I'm a friend of Sir Morris's, and I'm trying to clear him.”

“Ah, sir, if you only could! But I fear for ye. I fear for Mr. Morris. A kind gentleman and a fine one, he were, but a haughty temper that'd never brook thwarting! I fear for him. Still, if that's your wish, I can't refuse you a talk with Ellie, for there's nobody that wouldn't be glad to see Mr. Morris back at Rhyllan Hall, whatever the way of it. Please to step in, sir, I won't keep ye long. Just to put my pies in the oven and then I'll be with ye, and Ellie too.”

Stepping through the front door, John stepped straight into the living-room, a low-pitched, pleasant parlour kitchen with an oven grate, a linoleumed floor and pots of geraniums lining two small windows. His hostess went into the scullery or bakehouse to finish her work and left him to talk to the canary and to observe the family gallery of photographs which adorned the mantelshelf.

In a few moments Ellie came in, following her stout, protective mother: a pretty young woman with infantile soft features, large blue eyes and a row of blue china beads around a white neck. The belle of a countryside which did not run to feminine beauty. She looked timidly at John, moistened her indeterminate lips and edged nearer to her mother.

“Now, Ellie,” said that matron in kind, sharp tones, “the gentleman wants to ask you a question or two about Rhyllan Hall. And you must answer sensible and not be shy, because it's for Mr. Morris's sake. Please to take a chair, sir. And Ellie, you'd better sit down too and not fidget.”

“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.”

“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.”