The Ginger Cat Mystery (2 page)

The cause of the trouble that burst so unexpectedly on Marston-le-Willows had its source in Marston Manor. Some years previously, old Squire Chevington had died. His estate, which had been held by the Chevington family for centuries, had been broken up and sold and the family seat of Marston Manor had been bought by a Mr. John Cornell. John Cornell, though a Suffolk-born man, had gone up to London in his teens to fill a very minor post in the offices of the well-known firm of Ince and Colt, general merchants, merchant bankers and bill discounters of Mincing Lane. Slowly but steadily he worked his way up to the position of senior partner and at the age of sixty retired with a considerable fortune to spend the remainder of his days in the peace and seclusion of his own county. His rise to affluence had been the outcome rather of bucolic shrewdness, unwavering pertinacity and relentless thrift than of any gift of financial brilliance, and perhaps this is an indirect compliment in days when financial brilliance frequently connotes a questionable rapidity in the acquisition of wealth. Those who knew him and liked his rather simple and frank nature, wondered at times how he had attained his fortune and position and generally agreed that his success was in a great measure due to the tact, lively wit and business acumen of his wife, Clara. Three years prior to her husband's retirement Clara Cornell died, leaving her own modest fortune to her son Frank, the sole offspring of her marriage, who was then twenty-one years old and intended for the Bar. On the death of his wife an extraordinary change came over John Cornell. He appeared all at once to renew his youth and pass once more through a romantic phase characteristic of adolescence. Formerly very austere and old-fashioned in his garb, wearing clothes almost as a uniform emphasizing the seriousness, the conservatism, the stability of his business, he now began to indulge in brighter materials and a livelier cut. His sombre neckwear burst into striped and chromatic gaiety; his gloves tripped lightly from brown or dark grey to chamois; his prim white handkerchiefs lapsed into the voluptuousness of spotted foulards. Even when playing his very occasional game of golf he had always worn grey flannels and a Harris jacket of particularly subdued colour. These he now discarded for snuff-coloured plus-fours, a jumper of conspicuous design and vivid hue and startled his older friends by wearing a yellow beret cocked at a ludicrously pert angle on his large and shining bald head. Previously always parsimonious, he now began to spend almost lavishly. Though he had seldom frequented places of amusement and then only with an air of boredom, as if he were fulfilling a necessary but uncongenial social duty to please his wife, he now appeared regularly at the opera in spite of the fact that he secretly thought most operas artificial foreign rubbish. He became a stalwart first-nighter at theatres and was frequently seen at a fashionable night club dancing and deporting himself with the zest and agility of a man of half his age. When he travelled he now travelled by air; he rented a costly villa on the Riviera during the season, bought a sumptuous houseboat on the upper reaches of the Thames and, having sold his old moderate-priced saloon car, acquired a luxury liner of the road. The houseboat, the name of which he had altered from “Mayfly” to “Mayfly But Can't,” soon became the week-end resort of a crowd of young and fashionable people, friends of his son, who all treated him with that affectionate tolerance which youth now grants to moneyed age and experience. John Cornell soon became generally popular and, though he made his son Frank the excuse for this bright rejuvenescence (the jolly-pal rather than pompous-father attitude), it was abundantly clear to all that the hearty old man was thoroughly enjoying himself and having what is colloquially termed “a high old time.” His frozen sedateness seemed to have thawed miraculously in the autumn sunshine of his years and with the sudden realization that he was no longer attached to the dominant personality of his shrewish wife. There was nothing vicious about this late burgeoning of John Cornell; it was the expression of a healthy virility still capable of a whole-hearted pleasure in living. Its true significance, however, was disclosed by its culmination in a second marriage.

Among his son's many friends, for Frank Cornell had a genius for collecting friends of the most diverse temperaments, was a beautiful, sophisticated, at times rather wistful, young woman, Josephine Rivron, who became a regular guest at all John Cornell's week-end houseboat parties during the summer following his wife's death. It was at first thought by everyone that she was to be Frank Cornell's wife and some averred that he actually proposed to her but was refused. The news that she was engaged to the father therefore came as something startling and eruptive to all the family's relatives, friends and acquaintances. The engagement was the source of considerable malicious gossip and to the cynical it seemed clear that the young lady was in an unseemly hurry to lay hands on the loaded Cornell coffers. To marry the son was, so to speak, merely marrying a reversion. Josephine Rivron was naturally told by a candid friend all that was being said about her, but it failed to disturb her remarkable equanimity and exactly a year after their first meeting she became John Cornell's wife. Shortly afterwards John Cornell retired from business, bought Marston Manor and began to live the life of a country gentleman. The marriage was to all outward appearances eminently happy. John Cornell's effulgence dimmed to a natural glow and he settled down to enjoy his leisure, his wife's charming company and his country mansion.

During all the years of his unbending attachment to business, in moments of idle rumination John Cornell had looked forward to this time of retirement. At the core of his dreaming was a garden and flowers and an ineffable peace: it was a secret passion of which he was almost ashamed. He would have a magnificent garden and magnificent flowers, stupendous blooms like those he saw exhibited by commercial horticulturists at flower shows. The time had come to make his dream come true and he was daily to be seen in consultation with Braber, his gardener, planning the accomplishment of that dream. Josephine his wife was equally absorbed in Marston Manor for she had discovered an outlet for her domestic activities in the general adaptation of the old house to modern requirements, a moulding of a mediaeval skeleton to what she called “the amenities of up-to-date living.” With the help of the local doctor, Stanley Redgrave, who was versed in the lore of the English manor, she was accomplishing this task with a fine regard for its ancient beauty and in the process had become very friendly with her “medical adviser.” Then some years after their arrival at Marston, John Cornell suddenly fell ill. He had apparently been in robust health and there had been no warning symptoms of disease to herald the approach of a swift departure from life. His illness began with a violent headache, persistent vomiting and repeated convulsions. A period of wild delirium was swiftly followed by profound coma and within a week he was dead. Doctor Redgrave, who attended him throughout his brief illness, certified that death was due to pneumonia, and John Cornell was buried in the churchyard of All Saints', Marston-le-Willows. Josephine, his wife, was for a time prostrate with grief, and Marston-le-Willows sincerely mourned his loss for more material reasons.

A short obituary notice in a few of the London papers and half a column of kindly eulogy in the
West Suffolk Post
was all the publicity that was granted to the passing of John Cornell for the time being. It was as much as any man of his status could expect from a world mechanically industrial, not given overmuch to sentiment, and too preoccupied with the strenuousness of living to be arrested by any perplexing meditation on the mystery of death. But the passing of John Cornell was not going to be such an ordinary occurrence as it had first appeared. Six months after his burial something mysterious occurred in Marston-le-Willows, something that might be called in an increasingly trite phrase “a major phenomenon.” It was the first of the chain of startling events that made the name of Marston-le-Willows as well-known as that of Brighton. Perhaps an excerpt from the
West Suffolk Post
of the 15th of August will give an adequate description of the occurrence. It ran:

In spite of the great secrecy referred to by the
West Suffolk Post
, before nightfall on that memorable Sunday in August all Marston-le-Willows knew that the body of John Cornell had been exhumed, that the representations had been made to the Home Office by David Cornell, his blind brother who lived in a bungalow in the Manor grounds, and that it was suspected that the deceased had been poisoned. The days that intervened between the exhumation and the resumed inquest were days of intense, suppressed excitement. The outward calm of the village and its inhabitants seemed unreal, almost ominous, in conjunction with their inward and hidden tension. There was only one topic of conversation, but that topic was discussed in guarded whispers by one intimate friend with another. Even in the tap-room of “The Dog and Partridge” the subject was generally avoided by the handful of regular customers and if it happened to be touched on by some rash spirit, the landlord, Abner Borham, would display a childlike ignorance of the whole business. The only villager who blurted out what he thought was old Harry Weddup, the thatcher, but he was the licensed
enfant terrible
of Marston. He openly declared it was his opinion that the young wife had got rid of her aged husband by poison so that she could marry someone young and lusty like herself and enjoy the old man's money. Putting the matter in terms of horseflesh, he thought it was perfectly natural for a fresh young mare to get tired of a worn-out old hack who hadn't as much as a whinny left in him. He would say that on her behalf but it was all he could say. It was a damnable thing to poison the old man and she would certainly be found out, like Mrs. Maybrick, and pay “the dire penalty.” Serve her right, too. At this point, Harry Weddup (he had drawn his old age pension and drunk an extra pint or two) delivered a long lecture on the evil of old men hankering after and marrying young women. “Noo wine bust old bottles,” he declared, and if those gents got poisoned in the end it served them right, too. After this impartial dispensation of justice he fell into silence so that his words of wisdom might sink into the understanding of his somewhat facetious listeners.

The day of the resumed inquest, though opening with tremendous excitement, may be said to have ended in a weak anti-climax. The squib had hissed itself out instead of detonating. The
West Suffolk Post
's report was as follows:

No poison! So this was the mild sequel to a week of the tensest expectancy. Though the inhabitants of Marston-le-Willows said they were glad for the young lady's sake that such had been the verdict, they were really secretly disappointed. Their disappointment was an impersonal affair and had nothing to do with the protagonists in the drama. In their annoyance they thoroughly agreed that Mr. Godbold was perfectly justified in making his protest against the exhumation and some very unpleasant things were said about Mr. David Cornell, John Cornell's blind brother, who had been the prime mover in the whole unsavoury business. Prior to the verdict of the coroner's jury they had said that David Cornell was perfectly justified in seeing that the mystery of his brother's sudden death should be thoroughly investigated. Harry Weddup firmly declared his belief that the old man was poisoned by a “secret pisin” and that the doctor from London hadn't been able to detect the method. All Londoners were fools more or less but it was hardly fair to blame him. How could anyone be expected to detect a “secret pisin”? There the matter ended and Marston-le-Willows was lapsing into its normal quietude once more when another and more startling event occurred.