The Ginger Cat Mystery (29 page)

“When I first guessed the nature of Miss Cornell's trouble, I nearly swung off the track by considering Carstairs a likely,” said Heather. “His motive was a strong one, for a man, madly in love with a girl— but there, it's no use discussing the matter farther. It's all over now.”

“I'm rather glad it ended as it has. As soon as the inquests are over and the whole business finished with, I'm going back to London to get my painting gear and then return to Marston-le-Willows. This country appeals to me; there's magic in it.”

“Yes,” agreed Heather, “there are worse places in the world. When I retire I wouldn't mind settling down here. Then I could get down to chicken farming seriously. Murders distract a man when he's busy with an incubator in the spring. But it's getting late and there's a lot to be done. I'm going to the bungalow and then on to Marston Manor. Perhaps you'd like to come with me?”

“Right ho!” said Vereker. “I may as well see the business through to the bitter end. Besides, I can keep you from wandering into things and places that don't concern you.”

“What about a pint before we start?” asked Heather brightly, as if the idea was a flash of inspiration.

“We'll have that when we come back. We'll possibly need it after what we've got to go through,” replied Vereker firmly and together the two men left the “Dog and Partridge” and walked briskly up the main road.

It was a lovely morning in May of the following year. Anthony Vereker had walked down Bond Street into Piccadilly and had turned into the Green Park. London under the magical, generative touch of early summer was to him the most beautiful and romantic place in the world. As he had gazed at the sumptuous shops in Bond Street and noted the flicker and dazzle and colour of the tarmac in the brilliant sunshine, he had wished that he could see a historical panorama of that street going back year by year into the past on such an enchanting morning. He was feeling in a mood of strange exaltation, a mood which London never failed to rouse in him at this season. This sense of being thrilled was not altogether caused by its beauty but by a thousand resplendent associations—the glamour of its wealth, its social functions and cosmopolitan society, its importance as the centre of all that was worth while in the history of his own race. This sense was sharpened, too, by a strange acknowledgment of the city's actual unimportance when viewed in the light of even terrestrial vastness and the seething millions of humanity that lived and strove and laughed and wept, were pompously magnificent or meanly ludicrous in a thousand other cities on the earth's surface. How small was the scope of vision of one human mind! It was an exasperation to be able to grasp so little at one moment when one longed to visualize comprehensively and understand all! In the Green Park the foliage was fluttering lightly in the breeze as if symbolizing the joyous frivolity of existence and the futility of taking anything too seriously. Vereker's step unconsciously quickened to his light-hearted mood and the freedom of the Park. Lost in his own thoughts, he did not observe the approach of a man who, on coming closer to him, almost halted and then hurried eagerly forward to greet him.

“By Jove, Vereker, what a pleasure to meet you!” said Roland Carstairs as he held out a hand and shook Vereker's in a hearty grasp. “I thought you'd turn up at my place long ago and was beginning to think you'd forgotten all about me.”

“No, Carstairs,” said Vereker looking as if he had been suddenly wakened from a dream, “I hadn't forgotten my promise to look you up. I've just returned to London from a long stay in the country, and as soon as I'd settled down in my flat in Fenton Street, I was going to dig you out. Ah, well, here we are. If you're at a loose end, why not lunch with me somewhere. There's a whole lot of things I want to talk to you about.”

“Can you spare the time?”

“My time's my own and I was just idling the morning away. You must come and lunch with me. I'll introduce you to my favourite restaurant—Jacques. Do you know it?”

“I can't say I do.”

“Then you must get to know the place. This lunch is on me, as they say in America.”

“We've got plenty of time,” remarked Carstairs glancing at his watch, “and if you don't mind we'll have a rest on one of the seats. It's pleasant to be out of doors on such a day as this and we can talk without the interruption of eating. I've got a lot to tell you and I'm dying to get it off my mind.”

Carstairs led the way to a neighbouring seat and sat down with an air of weariness. Vereker noted the expression of sadness and resignation on his sharp-featured face; he had the look of a man who had temporarily lost faith in himself and the world, whose courage to face adversity was at its lowest ebb and almost willing to let circumstances take their course and do their worst.

“You don't look any too well, Carstairs,” said Vereker sympathetically. “Have you been ill?”

“No, not physically ill. I've passed through a bad mental crisis and I daresay it has left its mark on me. Still, I'm on the up-grade again and will soon be my old self,” he replied.

Vereker saw that the man had something on his mind, something that he was eager to confide in a friend, and let him talk without interruption.

“Of course you know all about the end of the Marston Manor affair, Vereker, and I won't waste time going over all that again. Inspector Heather and you settled that to your own satisfaction and there was an end to it.”

“I don't know about the satisfaction,” remarked Vereker. “I've always felt that it was one of my most unsatisfactory cases. There were so many incongruous pieces in the puzzle that I never quite fitted in to please my sense of finality. On the quiet, I believe Heather felt the same but wouldn't admit it. Detection's his trade and he looks at things from a slightly different point of view to mine. However, I won't interrupt you. I see you've got something you want to talk about and it'll do you good to let yourself go.”

“As you know, towards the close of your investigation, Miss Stella Cornell disappeared. You doubtless also knew the cause of her disappearance. It all came out subsequently. She went to the south of France to some friends of hers in whom she'd confided her trouble. They asked her to come and stay with them until she'd given birth to her child and made some definite arrangements for her future. She afterwards wrote to me and gave me her address and I immediately crossed to France. She was staying with some very charming people in a little village near Pau. I made one last bid to save the situation and begged her to let me marry her and legitimize the child. Of course it wasn't mine, but I loved her and would have done anything in the world to save her pain and humiliation.”

“It was very fine of you, Carstairs, and you have my sincere admiration,” said Vereker feelingly.

“She absolutely refused though she said she appreciated what she called ‘my heroic spirit' in making such an offer. However, it wasn't to be, and in the end it didn't really matter. She became very ill prior to the crisis and both she and the infant died. I was with her to the last. But this is not the point I wish to tell you about. After her death, among her papers was found a letter addressed to me. She had left that letter in case anything happened to her, and she evidently had some premonition she wouldn't get over her trouble. In it, strangely enough, she mentioned your name and said it was one of the regrets of her life that she was unable to know you better. She said that in her brief meeting with you she instinctively felt that if circumstances had been different she could have found a friend whom she could implicitly trust. I read the letter on my way home from France and it gave me a terrible shock, for in it she confessed that she had shot her cousin Frank in a moment of anger akin to madness.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Vereker with genuine consternation.

“You may well say so,” said Carstairs quietly. “It was the last thing in the world that I thought she would have done. Of course she had sufficient reason for terrible anger, and in a way there was a lot to excuse her for having lost her head and given way to a desire for revenge. But her father's bogus confession took me in completely. I knew the old man pretty well, and such an act as shooting the betrayer of his daughter was more consonant with his fiery nature. She admits that when she knew Frank Cornell had left her for Valerie Mayo, though terribly hurt, she almost resigned herself to the inevitable. It was a cruel humiliation, but such things occur in life and one has to meet them with as much courage as one can summon. Later she made the terrible discovery that she was going to become a mother. On that fatal night, Doctor Redgrave had confirmed her in her fears. She had made a secret appointment to meet Frank in their old trysting place and discuss the new trend affairs had taken. In an insane moment, for sometimes women in such a state are quite abnormal, she decided, if he refused to break off his engagement with Valerie Mayo and marry her, she would commit suicide. She went armed with an automatic pistol that had been for years in the bungalow. Her father had bought it for her at a time when there was a minor Ripper scare in the Marston district. Frank Cornell kept the appointment and definitely refused to fall in with her suggestion about marriage. She pleaded with him, pointed out the terrible trouble she was in, but he was adamant. In a cynical mood he asked her how could he be certain he was the father of the child. This was the last straw and, as she confesses, she lost all sense of proportion and was temporarily insane. She then told him if he refused to comply with her request she'd immediately commit suicide. He thought this was only bluff on her part and decided to call her bluff. Without further discussion he bade her good night and, leaving the music room, closed the door behind him. For some moments she stood hesitant with the muzzle of the pistol pressed against her temple. She knew Frank was on the other side of the door and hadn't gone up the stairs to his room. She instinctively guessed that he had his eye to the keyhole to see if she would leave the music room by the door into the garden. Against the light of the far window, even at night, it's easy to see what's going on in the music room.

“‘I know you're looking at me, Frank,' she said to make sure of his action. His only reply was to laugh and in a paroxysm of rage she put the muzzle of the pistol to the keyhole and fired. The whole thing was done on the spur of the moment, and even then she had some kind of conviction that the lock would prevent the shot proving fatal if Frank was actually looking through the aperture. On learning what had happened, she at once recovered her senses and seeing that she would be arrested for murder, tried to cover up her tracks. She searched and found the empty cartridge case, locked up the music room, and pulling off Frank's shoes tried to drag the body up to his bedroom. She was going to leave it there, wipe the pistol to remove finger-prints and place it in his hand. It was the hasty improvisation of the moment and was, of course, hopelessly weak, for she had overlooked all idea of bloodstains on the staircase. Anyhow, after managing to drag the body very silently to the corridor landing, she heard movements in Mrs. Cornell's bedroom and leaving everything to take its course slipped into Frank's bedroom and dropped from the open window into the garden. In doing so, her right heel caught one of the jambs of the window and she fell headlong to the ground. To her astonishment she found she was unhurt and, picking herself up, fled through the garden to the bungalow.”

“I had a suspicion that the person who had fired the shot had made his or her escape through that bedroom window,” remarked Vereker reflectively. “I found three tiny scratches on the jamb of the window and was sure they had been made by the small nails in the sole or heel of a shoe. As they might have been done by one of the maids in cleaning the window, I didn't follow up the clue in my subsequent investigation. But go on, Carstairs.”

“On returning to the bungalow, Stella at once went to her father and told him everything that had occurred. He quietened her down at length and told her not to worry. He assured her that if she left the matter in his hands he'd do his best to cover up her deed. He cautioned her to say nothing that could possibly lead the investigators to suspect that hers was the hand that had fired the fatal shot. I think she succeeded in this to a surprising degree. She had a tremendous faith in her father's astuteness, and he took charge of the whole affair. He concealed the pistol on his own person for the time being and gradually formed his plans to save his daughter's life at any cost. On the day of his own suicide he wrote to her telling her that he had gradually led the detectives round to suspecting him of Frank Cornell's murder. He had planted a note making a bogus appointment with the dead man among Cornell's correspondence, which he had learned from his sister-in-law Miss Mayo was destroying. This note, he felt sure, she would hand over to the police. He then secreted the pistol in the music room and flung a secret set of keys into the lily pool. This was done on the spur of the moment and was a bright inspiration, for he knew that Mr. Vereker was standing at the door of the music room. He had heard him coming upstairs and distinctly heard him come to a halt on the half-landing. He declares he felt an impish sense of delight in thoroughly deceiving the detectives into the idea that they were making startling discoveries. You see from all this, Vereker, that David Cornell, on first learning that his daughter had shot Frank Cornell, must have decided at once on sacrificing his own life to save his daughter's. He concludes his letter to Stella by saying so and urging her not to let the past trouble her in making the best of the future. He, himself, he admits rather pathetically, had been a failure in life. Even his terrible affliction of blindness, he confesses, had hardly contributed to his failure in the one thing in which he had desired success above all things, namely his music. He had lost all hope of getting known in that sphere and winning the recognition he thought earlier he might have won. He digresses in his letter into a long disquisition on the art of composition and feels that his whole attitude to it was utterly divorced from modern conceptions as shown in the works of the present-day composers. Poor fellow, in spite of his extraordinary courage and resolution, he was extremely sensitive and was subject to fits of intense depression. In those moments of dejection he would complain that he was out of date, an anachronism in art and outlook, and would be better out of the hurly-burly. Then he would recover and commence work with renewed ardour and none of us thought he would ever take his own life. If this tragedy of his daughter's hadn't occurred, he'd probably have lived to a ripe old age and died peacefully, but it came as the fatal urge to carry out an idea that had always lurked in his mind. Not only that, but it lent the act the colour of a heroic sacrifice. To me it was heroic. Other people may think it was the act of a lunatic, but I cannot agree. I had a great admiration for David Cornell and his last deed on earth, to my mind, touches the borders of the sublime. ‘Greater love hath no man,' says the Bible, and I shall always think of David Cornell with great respect. Other men in other and better causes have done the same and we call them heroes. David Cornell will only be called a suicide! But that's the end of my story, Vereker. Let's go.”