Puzzle of the Silver Persian (31 page)

“I suppose that this wouldn’t be any help to you?” Miss Withers asked hesitantly. From her handbag she took a single sheet of notepaper covered with fine writing and signed with Candida Noring’s name. “I forced her to write it, for fear some innocent person might later be charged with the crimes. It was the price of my silence.”

The chief inspector, wonder growing on his face, read a terse and brutal confession of the murders of Peter Noel and Andy Todd. “Good Lord,” he cried. “Why, this will hang her!”

Miss Withers winced a little at that. “I thought that confessions were no use in court.”

Cannon carefully put the paper into his notecase. “Not in American courts,” he said. “Over here, where people have confidence in their bobbies, the juries know that we never use third-degree methods to extract confessions. This is all that we need.”

“Well, then!” Miss Withers rose wearily to her feet.

“But the Hammonds—” began Cannon.

“Them? Why, that was simple. Their child saw an opportunity to get back at his father for punishing him over some trivial misdeed. He told his mother that Tom Hammond was the man with Rosemary in the blanket locker. It was a barefaced lie, but the foolish young woman believed it, as people always believe unpleasant things they hear. She walked out—first throwing away her engagement ring. When I heard that the child was playing with it, I knew what must have separated the Hammonds, that it was something very personal and delicate. But she didn’t suspect him of the murders, or she would never have stood by him until the inquest for appearance’s sake.

“She never gave Tom Hammond a chance to explain, and the child was too much afraid of punishment to admit his lie. Things in that household, I gather, hadn’t been running too smoothly for some time. It must have been largely due to the child, who seems to have a propensity for doing harm. He nearly caused a complete break between his father and mother.”

“Nearly?” said Cannon.

Miss Withers nodded. “There’s still a chance,” she said. “I must try to play goddess from the machine again and see what I can do.” She stopped short. “I hope you won’t blame the sergeant for any of this,” she said. “He did take me into his confidence, which was, I suppose, against the rules. But he is very young…”

“Secker? Why, his opening up to you was the smartest thing he ever did. I know now that I could have talked to you without any harm being done. But as for the sergeant, don’t forget that he’s solved his first case nobly. He was assigned to the disappearance of Rosemary Fraser, you know. It was fine work on his part to identify the mangled body in the Thames. We don’t expect miracles in the Yard, and I shall see that a crown is sewed above his chevrons as soon as he comes up to London. And I’ll recommend him for the inspectorship exams in March.”

“When he comes up to London?”

“Yes. Of course, I’m leaving him here at the castle for a few days—as soon as he gets back from depositing Candida in the Penzance station house. Just to keep an eye on things.”

Miss Withers was relieved to think that Leslie Reverson need not be alone immediately. This was hardest on him. She rose and held out her hand. “We said good-bye some hours ago,” she pointed out.

“Hands across the sea,” quoted the chief inspector almost gaily, as they shook. “And if ever you feel like a job in London, remember that we have recently admitted several ladies to the C.I.D.”

Miss Withers shook her head. “I know,” she said. “Policewoman giving good advice to erring girls. Not for me, thank you. And I still have a job to do right here, if the Hammonds haven’t gone.”

The Hammonds had not gone. Perhaps it was because the tide still covered the causeway and they did not know how to signal for the skiff. At any rate, the school teacher gave Loulu Hammond what is usually known as a piece of her mind.

The young woman took it like a lamb. “The little beast!” she cried. Then she turned to her husband. “Oh, Tom! How could I have believed it for a moment?” She stood with her arms outstretched, like somebody in a Victorian novel. “Tom, can you ever forgive me?”

“No, damn you,” said Tom Hammond. “You gave me a spell of hell on earth. I have no intentions of forgiving you. But I’ll take you back, and I promise you that you’ll pay through the nose for this. If you had the brains that God is supposed to have given geese…”

“Tom!” cried Loulu, her voice trembling.

He took her in his arms. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! All right, baby, all right!”

There was a long silence, during which Miss Withers beamed proudly. Then: “I suppose that you two will take your little boy and go back home where you belong?”

“I suppose so,” said Loulu slowly.

“You’re crazy if you do,” Miss Withers snapped. “Leave him where he is. You’ve done a bad enough job of it, what with farming him out to indulgent grandmothers. Who can tell? A few years in a strict school may do wonders. As for you two—” her voice softened—“why not try it again? You might have a human one this time. Try using common sense instead of the newfangled books on child personality and developing the ego.” She bustled toward the doorway. “Understand?”

Tom and Loulu Hammond understood. But they were speedily forgetting her existence again.

Miss Withers took her bag and umbrella and prepared to depart. Leslie Reverson, wearing new lines in his young and vacant face, met her in the hall. Tobermory was gayly rubbing against his new master’s ankles.

“This is hardest on you,” said the school teacher to Leslie. “But it had to come. Just think, you can leave Dinsul and live in London or wherever you want, now.”

Leslie smiled, and the school teacher saw that from beneath his smooth exterior something rugged was coming to the surface—something with breeding and backbone.

“Thank you,” he said. “It has been a bit filthy. But of course I’ll stay on here. To you from failing hands we throw the torch, and all that sort of rot. Aunt wanted me to, you know. Dinsul muddles on…”

She wished him good luck. “Cheerio!” he called after her.

Miss Withers passed under the jaws of the portcullis and went down the interminable steps. At the landing a skiff waited, and the last rays of the afternoon sun flickered on the water. “Thank God it’s over,” she breathed.

But it was not quite over. In the fading light of the autumn day, just outside the open windows of the Honorable Emily’s sitting room, a fat and pessimistic robin clung to the rock. He was minus most of his tail feathers, but otherwise quite unharmed. The crash of the cage had opened its door, and Tobermory had missed his spring.

The red-breasted bird ventured a hop or two. For the first time since his captivity he managed a feeble song. “Chirrup-eether!” he warbled.

From the twisted trees at the edge of the cliff came an answering call, familiar yet strange. “Chirrup-eyether, chirrup-eyether,” sang the sober English robins—his kinfolk, though a bit redder of the breast and duller of the coat.

Dicon, the American robin, felt somehow abashed. He fluttered along the rock, and by a miracle discovered a worm moving on a bit of muddy turf. It was a good fat worm, as good as any worm the robin had ever tasted on the other side of the Atlantic. It gave him a different point of view.

Dicon fluttered toward the twisted trees. “Chirrup-eyether,” he practised softly. Like most of his countrymen abroad for the first time, he had set about acquiring an English accent.

From a narrow window in the ancient castle of Dinsul, a silver-gray cat watched with implacable amber eyes. Not yesterday, not today, but some day he would get more than feathers from that fat robin.

Tobermory knew.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Hildegarde Withers Mysteries

I
F THERE ARE GHOSTS
on the island of Manhattan they walk not in its garish midnights but in the long hour before sunrise. That is the time when life’s tide is said to ebb, so that strong men weaken and sick men die—the hour of the false dawn when Hamlet’s restless father returned to gibber on the battlements of Elsinore.

Manhattan slept, with no dead kings to haunt her turrets and no cheerful cockcrow to send them scurrying. Business had been so bad that night that Mr. Solomon Rosen slept also, his head pillowed on his arms across the wheel of his taxicab, lulled by the diminishing patter of rain on the roof.

He awoke with a start to find an apparition beside him—a remarkably solid apparition that weighed upon his running board. A low harsh voice spoke in his ear—“Follow that hack!”

Sol Rosen peered sleepily at a man in a badly fitting blue overcoat, a harried-looking young man whose breath was heavy with stale tobacco and whose eyes were weary and bloodshot. Sol had never won any silver cups for quickness of thought and at five o’clock of à wet morning he was slower than usual. He blinked and asked, “Why?”

“This is why!” The man in the overcoat displayed his cupped hand. It held a five-dollar bill, and not a silver badge as Sol had somehow guessed. The stranger was pointing across Broadway to the cab rank in front of the Hotel Harthorn. “Tail him—get going!”

He got inside and Sol kicked the starter. Then he noticed that not one but two taxicabs were pulling away from the canopy at the hotel entrance. “Which one,” Sol wanted to know, “the Yellow?”

“Never mind the yellow one,” his passenger ordered. “Tail the Checker, the one in front, and don’t lose him.”

Sol got his cold motor going, roared into an illegal U-turn and rolled southward on Broadway about half a block behind the two other taxis. The rain had stopped and the murkiness of the night had paled to the point where his headlamps were almost useless. The taxis ahead passed Seventy-second, where around the deserted subway entrance the wind whipped listlessly at scattered newspapers. There were no stop lights at this hour and they went steadily on. Sol Rosen was just beginning to hope that this was to be a long and lucrative haul when the two cars ahead swerved suddenly eastward toward the park on Sixty-fifth Street.

Sol followed, with a screech of tires on the wet pavement. He put on his brakes as he saw that the foremost driver was slowing down in the middle of the block.

“Go on to the corner and pull up!” instructed his passenger hoarsely. Sol swung past the other taxicabs and stopped on the corner of Central Park West. The man in the blue overcoat stepped quickly out, handed Sol a bill and moved leisurely away. As Sol Rosen started cruising again he was wide-awake enough to notice that his recent passenger walked as one who did not want to get anywhere. He was strolling aimlessly along, pausing to scratch a match on a convenient lamppost and making it very clear that the last thing in the world which could interest him would be the passengers who were now piling from the checkered taxicab.

As soon as the door was opened a young man in full evening dress had plunged sprawling out, to the detriment of his silk topper. A fat man and a girl followed, she wearing her evening wrap of red velvet hoodwise over her blonde curls and loudly chanting that she “yoost come over from old countree.”

There was loud laughter, but not from the tall young woman who now emerged from the crowded taxicab. She was incongruously dressed in a dark mannish riding coat and jodhpurs. Her auburn curls had been caught under a stiff derby and the silk stock at her throat was fastened by a gold pin in the shape of a polo mallet. She was thirtyish and pretty. She might have been more than pretty if she had taken time for a few hours’ sleep, or even had lingered long enough at her dressing table to remove the make-up which still smeared her mouth and eyelids.

She stood alone on the sidewalk as the others began laboriously to pack themselves back into the taxi. “Good night, Violet darling,” cried the blonde in the red wrap. “It was a lovely party!”

“Even if you did throw us out,” chorused a feminine voice from within the taxi.

“Violet likes horses better than she likes us,” cried a young man in a high tenor voice. “Violet’s queer for long horseback rides in the rain!”

“Good night all,” said Violet Feverel. She was sick unto death of her last evening’s guests and her voice was thin and tired. She waved mechanically as the carload of departing merrymakers rolled away and then turned to face the second taxi which was pulling up alongside the curb.

This vehicle, too, was packed to the running boards. “Change your mind and come with us!” sang out a young man with a very red face whose whim it had been to ride beside the driver. Somewhere he had lost his black tie and somewhere he had found a milk bottle with a dime in it which he jingled as he spoke.

“No thanks,” Violet told him. “Run along—the party ends right here as far as I’m concerned.”

“It’s our loss!” responded the red-faced youth gallantly.

“Good-bye, then—Come on, Eddie, say good-bye to Violet!” He leaned back and prodded at the protruding knee of a young man who was jammed in the corner of the taxi with a girl on his lap.

Eddie was softly singing a ballad of his own composition dealing with the further adventures of the notorious Miss Otis after she broke her luncheon engagement on account of being lynched.
¹