Speedy Death (26 page)

‘Yes, Boring, that’s exactly what I’m trying to get at,’ said Sir Joseph patiently. ‘Mabel Cobb couldn’t have heard Eleanor’s voice, because Eleanor was dead. Therefore, whose voice did she hear? I’ll tell you. She heard the voice of the murderer.’

‘But, look here, sir——’ Boring began, feeling utterly unconvinced by the Chief Constable’s hypothesis.

‘Just a minute. I’ll give you the gist of what I gleaned from my interview with Miss Pamela Storbin, and then you’ll see my point, perhaps. Briefly I elicited the following facts: First, that Mrs Bradley took Pamela Storbin to sleep in her room. She made an excuse which must have been a lie, because Pamela had to promise not to mention the change of room to Eleanor. Well, we know all about the reasons for the change. Pamela had to be protected from Eleanor.

‘Secondly, I learned that Mrs Bradley did not retire to bed that night, but that, on confused sounds being heard in another part of the house not far removed from her own bedroom, Mrs Bradley slipped out of the room and was absent some
minutes. The sounds woke Pamela, apparently, and, being frightened, she did not fall asleep again for about an hour and a half.

‘Thirdly, I obtained the information that Mrs Bradley re-entered her bedroom after a few minutes’ absence, sat down in the same chair she had occupied before and picked up a book, but that about five minutes later, further noise and a confused shouting caused her to depart once more. Very shortly afterwards she re-entered the bedroom again, picked up her thermos flask, and departed. She did not return to the room any more that night, neither was she there when Pamela awoke in the morning.’

‘That’s interesting, sir. May I ask a question or two?’ said Boring, who had drawn out his friend the note-book and was engaged in scribbling down what Sir Joseph had related.

‘By all means. One or two suggested themselves to me when I heard Pamela’s story, and I put them to her. I expect yours will be much the same questions, so carry on.’

‘Well, sir, how long did it take Mrs Bradley to get the thermos flask and go out again?’

‘I asked that, and Pamela was certain that Mrs Bradley came in so hastily that she knocked her arm against the wardrobe, snatched up the flask, which was on a small occasional table near her chair, and was off again immediately.’

‘Hum!’ said the inspector, in a disappointed tone. ‘I was hoping Miss Storbin might have seen her tampering with the flask in some way.’

‘I pressed the point,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘but the girl remained firm.’

‘How was it she could see all this in the bedroom?’ was the inspector’s next question.

‘Mrs Bradley was using an electric reading-lamp,’ replied Sir Joseph. ‘It did not shine on Pamela’s face so as to interfere with her slumber, but its light was sufficiently diffused for her to see Mrs Bradley and observe her actions.’

‘And—most important, sir—how can Miss Storbin be sure that Mrs Bradley did not return to the bedroom after getting the flask?’

‘I asked her that, and she said she was feeling frightened, and, as Mrs Bradley had not returned after what seemed to her a long time, she got out of bed and put a chair against the door. The chair was still there in the morning, and she was still alone in the bedroom.’

‘Hum! Seems conclusive to me, sir. I don’t know what you think.’

The Chief Constable shook his head sadly. He had detested Eleanor Bing.

‘I certainly will question Mabel Cobb about the voice that answered her, sir,’ said Boring, after a short pause. ‘If she really did hear it, it’s a fairly valuable bit of circumstantial evidence. It eliminates all the men, I suppose, and that leaves Mrs Bradley, Miss Storbin and Mrs Garde Bing. Well, we can eliminate Miss Storbin. It’s hardly probable that it was Mrs Garde Bing, as she slept with her husband for the first time that night, and so, I suppose, was hardly likely to leave him and climb into Eleanor’s
bed before six-thirty in the morning; and that leaves us with Mrs Bradley again.’

‘It seems so,’ the Chief Constable assented, without noticeable enthusiasm. ‘Well, we’d better drive on. I expect I’ve missed the resumed inquest proceedings altogether. With luck we might be there in time to hear the verdict.’

‘They won’t start without me, sir,’ grinned the inspector as he started up the car. ‘I’m one of their chief witnesses.’

‘By the way,’ said Sir Joseph, as they drove along, ‘the fact that the key did not fit the bedroom door is in Alastair Bing’s favour, isn’t it? A guilty man wouldn’t have thrown the wrong key away. He’d have kept it, to show that he couldn’t get into Eleanor’s room with it. By the way, did you notice anything about the key of the bathroom door when they forced it open?’

‘When I arrived, sir, there was no key in the bathroom door on either side,’ said Boring, consulting his note-book, for the Chief Constable had again taken the wheel.

The car turned in at the gates of Chayning Place.

‘And yet the bathroom door was locked, and they had to break it down to get in,’ said Sir Joseph pensively.

‘Yes, sir, and the key that won’t fit Eleanor Bing’s room fits the bathroom door,’ said the inspector, with sly triumph.

‘And the locks of the upper and the lower bathrooms are identical,’ concluded Sir Joseph.

Boring’s face fell, for a moment, to think that he had overlooked this interesting fact, but soon brightened again.

‘Then Mrs Bradley could have handed Alastair Bing one bathroom key, and used the other herself, while still keeping possession of Eleanor’s bedroom door key!’ he cried exultantly.

Upon the inspector’s arrival, the adjourned proceedings took their course. Carstairs, who had given what further evidence was required of him, and then gone out into the garden, now re-entered the house, and walked into the morning-room just as the jury filed out. The coroner scowled at him, and Carstairs sat down as unobtrusively as possible. Mrs Bradley leaned across to him and whispered loudly enough for everybody in the room to hear:

‘That silly little man thinks I did it.’

Carstairs fought down an overmastering impulse to giggle like a schoolgirl, and glanced involuntarily at the coroner, who, of course, had heard the remark, and, scowling more fiercely than ever, tapped irascibly on the table and said irritably:

‘Silence, please, silence.’

In the midst of the silence that followed, in trooped the jury, after an absence of two minutes. The foreman, who, under ordinary circumstances, was the local butcher, rendered the verdict in the voice he usually kept for advertising the more luscious portions of his stock. ‘Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown.’

Carstairs drew a deep breath. ‘And death was
due to poisoning, not drowning,’ he said to himself. ‘Hum! Doesn’t sound very nice. I wonder why they found for murder, though? It could just as easily have been suicide, according to the evidence—or lack of it!’

With her uncanny trick of reading minds, Mrs Bradley, having drawn him into the garden, began to talk about the very point that was puzzling him.

‘Of course, that horrid little coroner told them to say it was murder,’ she stated. ‘Otherwise, I am certain they would have said suicide.’

‘Told them?’ questioned Carstairs, with an amused twinkle in his eyes.

‘Well, it amounted to that. His whole attitude was a disgrace. We all know the ordinary law courts are not impartial, but a coroner’s court ought to be. Those poor idiots would just as easily have said suicide if he had encouraged them. But no! He intended to have it murder, and brought in as murder it is! It makes matters so very awkward for me, you see, now that coffee cup has been washed up. Of course the horrid little fellow fastened on that, and there you are!’

Carstairs gave a long whistle. ‘No wonder you are perturbed,’ he said. ‘Good Lord! Yes, it’s a pity Mabel Cobb couldn’t leave well alone!’

‘Good Lord indeed!’ said Mrs Bradley, with spirit. ‘I shall find myself in the dock before many weeks are out. You mark my words!’

Carstairs made sympathetic noises, but, as usual, could think of no adequate reply.

‘I shall plead not guilty,’ said Mrs Bradley firmly,
‘and I shall get Ferdinand Lestrange to conduct my case.’

‘He is a very young man, isn’t he?’ said Carstairs doubtfully.

‘He is thirty-nine, and was born on my eighteenth birthday,’ Mrs Bradley promptly replied. ‘Oxford 1908 to 1911, called to the bar in 1914, Great War 1914 to 1917. Invalided out in June, 1917. Now a K.C.’

‘You seem to have followed his career with some minuteness,’ said Carstairs, amused.

‘Well, he is my son,’ was Mrs Bradley’s somewhat startling reply. ‘By my first husband,’ she added. ‘A clever boy, Ferdinand. Besides, it will make an immediate appeal to the jury—the dutiful and anxiety-racked son defending his poor old mother against the monstrous, foul, and calumnious charge of being concerned in a murder!’

Her harsh cackle of eldritch laughter filled the summer air with hideous merriment.

Carstairs shivered in spite of the sun’s warmth. Extraordinary woman!

‘It seems to me that you are in an infernally awkward position,’ he said slowly. ‘If there is anything I can possibly do——’ He stopped short. ‘After all, you are not arrested yet,’ he said hopefully.

‘Am I not?’ said Mrs Bradley, with her mirthless chuckle. ‘Look!’

From the house two men were advancing. Both were clad in police uniform. At about twenty paces, the taller man halted. The other still advanced.

Carstairs and Mrs Bradley stood waiting, both outwardly calm, but Carstairs was conscious of the sickening thumping of his heart. It reminded him of his first tiger-hunt. He glanced at his companion. To his amazement he saw her dive into her capacious skirt-pocket and produce a small bottle and a large green-bordered handkerchief. Without, apparently, removing the cork, she tipped up the bottle on to the handkerchief and then handed the bottle gravely to him under the nose of the advancing policeman.

‘You might thank Dorothy very much and tell her my head is much better,’ she remarked quietly. Then, to the policeman, she said:

‘Well, my man?’

‘I arrest you for the wilful murder of Eleanor Millicent Bing,’ gabbled the officer, ‘and it is my duty to warn you that anything you say may be taken in evidence against you.’

‘Thank you for the kindly, timely, and exceedingly thoughtful warning,’ said Mrs Bradley, smiling. ‘Good-bye, Mr Carstairs. I perceive the gallant inspector’s hand in all this. That man has intelligence.’

‘I will do everything I can,’ said Carstairs, from the depths of his heart. ‘It will be quite all right, I am sure. You can’t possibly be convicted. I must get to work and find the real murderer. That will be the thing to do.’

He stood frowning thoughtfully, and gazing after the little procession. The police certainly had not wasted much time.

He became conscious that he was still holding the little bottle which Mrs Bradley had handed him. He looked at it curiously. It was a small, flat, dark-green bottle, with a famous perfume-maker’s name on the label, and was marked ‘Lavender Water.’

Carstairs slipped it into his coat-pocket.

AFTER THE ARREST
of Mrs Bradley, Carstairs returned to his bachelor flat, and set himself solidly to the task of finding out the facts regarding the death of Eleanor Bing.

Rack his brain as he might, he could think of no one who might be guilty of the crime.

‘After all,’ he said to himself, ‘it seems impossible to suspect Mrs Bradley, and yet, if she did not do it, who did? Young fellows like Garde and Philipson don’t go about poisoning people. I don’t pretend to know why it is so. They just don’t do such things. Dorothy Bing wouldn’t do a thing like that. Alastair? Well, he isn’t above committing a murder if he felt angry enough, but I don’t somehow see him poisoning anybody. It wouldn’t be sufficiently violent or picturesque for his liking. I myself didn’t do it. That brings us back to Mrs Bradley, unless it was a case of suicide after all. But there! I’ve thrashed that theory out in my own mind time and
again. If Eleanor Bing had wanted to make away with herself she would have drunk laudanum, or overdosed with aspirin, or put her head in the gas-oven, or shot herself with Alastair Bing’s revolver, or opened a vein with one of Garde’s surgical instruments, but she would never have gone to the lengths of obtaining a drug like hyoscin for her purpose. Why, I doubt whether she knew such a poison existed.’

He took up his note-book, and wrote, one on each page, the names of the fateful house-party, and against each name put down what he knew of the person, and any evidence for or against his having committed the murder.

1.
Alastair Bing.
—Possible, even though deceased was his daughter, but not probable.

2.
Garde Bing.
—A strong case could be made out against this boy. It seems fairly certain that Eleanor attempted the life of his sweetheart. He is a medical student, and so might have been able to obtain the drug which poisoned his sister.
N.B.
—This might prove a big point in Mrs Bradley’s favour. It looks as though Garde could have obtained the drug more easily than she could, although this requires proving. Moreover, there was ill-feeling between the brother and sister, although that would be scarcely strong enough to form a motive for murder. Against this must be set the important fact that G. is a normal, healthy, cheerful young Philistine; that is to say, not at all one’s conception of a poisoner; also, he has a strong alibi.