The Hangman's Whip (16 page)

“I’ve told the sheriff everything I know,” said Search. “Who do you think murdered Eve?”

Diana’s eyes became a blank. “I don’t know. Except I don’t think it was Richard.” She hesitated. “Are you sure there was someone last night, Search?”

“Yes. Besides, there was the chloroform.”

“Y-yes,” said Diana doubtfully. “But that—well, that could mean anything. Couldn’t it, dear? I mean—oh, a false scent. A red herring. Anything. I don’t know who murdered her. But there’s one thing. When they do find Richard and charge him with murder I can supply the best lawyers available. Thank heaven I have plenty of money. I’ll put it all at Richard’s disposal,” she said and looked at Search, and the faintest glimmer of a satisfied smile touched her lips.

“Yes,” said Search steadily, “you can do that.”

“Richard will be grateful,” said Diana. “I—I’ve not said any more to you, Search—about Richard. I mean I wanted to give you time to realize that I always mean what I—”

Her eyes shifted. Someone was coming up the steps behind Search. Diana said quickly: “Oh, Calvin—Search didn’t see him. The man who asked for Eve, I mean.”

Calvin crossed the porch toward them.

“I wish to God we knew who he was,” he said worriedly. “Well, maybe he’ll come back. We’ll be on the lookout for him. Diana, I’ve been talking to Howland about the inquest. He’ll go with us.”

Search left them talking and went into the house.

Jonas was not in the kitchen or anywhere about; she told Cook that when Jonas came to the house she wanted to see him. Cook nodded.

“I’m sorry I told them about the kitten, Miss Search,” she said, her fresh face looking troubled. “I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.”

Carter was there, too, and the waitress, Bea. They looked excited and watched her with speculative eyes.

She thanked the cook wearily and went away.

On the way to her room, thinking of the mysterious caller of the afternoon, she thought, too, of Eve’s last few days of life. She’d gone, they all thought and said, to make arrangements for a divorce from Richard. To Reno, hadn’t someone said or implied? But Eve had told Diana that she’d gone somewhere else. Search thought back in her mind for a name only half noted and remembered it. Avion, Eve had said.

Was that a “little town. Upstate”? Was that why Richard had gone there?

But what, then, if anything, had it to do with Eve’s murder?

Diana, later at dinner, was still concerned about the afternoon’s caller. “Whoever it was that was here this afternoon hasn’t come back yet,” she said. “Funny.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” said Calvin. “If it was anything important he’ll be back.”

Halfway through dinner the waitress, Bea, came in and stopped at Search’s elbow and said in a conspiratorial voice that Jonas was in the kitchen. She was conscious of Diana’s and Calvin’s curious gaze as she murmured an excuse and left the dining room.

Jonas was waiting on the little back porch—twisting his hat, watching her from the shadow.

But Richard already knew that Howland knew of his presence.

“How did he know? Did you—”

He nodded, “Saw him stop you,” said Jonas. “Heard most of what he said. Not much around here misses me. Mr Dick told me to tell you not to worry about anything. Good night, miss.”

He went away at once, abruptly, leaving an aura of disapproval of herself, of Richard’s message, of everything in general.

She returned to the dining room; there was a kind of inquiring silence on Diana’s part, and Calvin lifted his eyebrows to give her an inquisitive look, but neither asked her questions.

Ludmilla had dinner on a tray in her own room and sent word by Carter that she was resting. Again they went to bed early, by tacit consent, dreading the next day. Calvin, however, locked and bolted the doors and even went around and looked after window fastenings.

“Better lock your door tonight, Search,” he said as they separated. “And call out if anything frightens you. I’ll hear it.”

She locked her door.

But so far as anyone knew then, the night was quiet, except that again Search dreamed of the cottage. This time, though, the dream was not so real as it was perplexing. For in her dream there was something wrong with the cottage; some object she was searching for and could not find. She awoke, troubled and uneasy—and after a while slept again.

Sometime toward dawn a little wind sprang up and the clouds cleared away. So it was sunny the next morning, with the sky blue and the lake dappled and sparkling with sunlight, when the big limousine swept up to the front steps with the chauffeur at the wheel.

At five minutes to ten exactly they arrived (herself, Ludmilla, Diana and Calvin) at the courthouse. The county courthouse it was, for Kentigern was the county seat. Sheriff Donny was waiting and cleared a path for them among reporters and cameras.

“It’s to be held in the coroner’s court,” he said. “This way.”

As they walked up the worn old stone steps—cameras clicking behind them, a crowd of loiterers watching with inquisitive but reserved eyes—Howland Stacy stepped forward from the dim recess of the hall and joined them. He tucked Search’s hand in the crook of his arm and smiled down at her.

“Remember?” he said softly. His eyes said: “Remember. A word from me will deliver Richard into the hands of these men.”

He walked beside her along the wide hall, smelling of sweeping compound, to a door with a frosted glass pane on which in black letters were the words Coroner’s Court.

T
HE INQUEST WAS CROWDED
, hot and mercifully brief. They sat together on a front rank of chairs and were all, probably, conscious of the faces behind them in the packed little room; villagers and summer residents, all with the same half-shrinking, half-avid look of curiosity.

On the table before the coroner was a gruesome little collection—the rope cut jaggedly into two and coiled like twin snakes around a large rusted iron hook, a faded lavender bathrobe cord, Calvin’s raincoat, an envelope which probably contained the scrap of Search’s dress. The sheriff sat near the coroner and leaned forward now and then to whisper to him.

It was obvious from the instant the court opened that the coroner and the sheriff knew exactly what they intended to do and proceeded from the first with expedition, holding strictly to the line of the inquiry, questioning their witnesses quickly and precisely and permitting no deviations.

The jury was chosen quickly—townspeople with one or two summer residents—and Dr Jerym himself told them briefly but exactly the findings of his post-mortem.

Eve Bohan had been overcome with chloroform; a postmortem showed it clearly on account of the effect of chloroform upon the blood vessels in the brain; she was then strangled by something thin and sharp, for there were marks on her neck. In his opinion she was already dead before she was hanged, apparently, to simulate suicide.

He then called the sheriff, who looked big and shambling and hot in the golden-oak armchair which was the witness stand, but who was, too, direct and precise.

He identified the raincoat and the two ends of rope and the iron hook; the bathrobe cord, he said, had been found under a shrub about fifty feet from the cottage. He told of the position of Eve’s body in the cottage when he first saw it: the rope had been cut just above her head and she was lying on the bed. He described the condition of the body and the circumstances, including a description of the cottage.

“Please tell the jury just how and where the rope was tied.”

“The other end of it was tied actually to a hook which was caught upon a rafter brace—not a rafter,” he said. “The brace at the point where the rope was tied measures exactly nine feet from the floor. The brace is horizontal between two opposite rafters. Thus the weight of the body wouldn’t have made the hook slip. Mrs Bohan’s height was five feet three inches. The length of the rope from the knot in the eye of the hook to the knot around her neck measures one foot nine inches. Therefore her feet must have been over two feet above the floor—two feet and about seven or eight inches. There was no chair, bench or footstool in the room. There was no article of furniture anywhere near her that she could have stood upon. It was physically impossible for her to have hanged herself.”

The jury looked impressed and sober. And the coroner proceeded quickly with the witnesses. Jonas was called and asked to identify the rope and hook, which he did after a fashion and sulkily, but in the end there was probably no doubt in anyone’s mind but that the rope that had hanged Eve Bohan and the hook had been removed from the Abbott tool shed.

Calvin was the first of the family to testify and he made a nervous and slightly belligerent witness, his sharp face a bright pink and his eyes snapping, but was forced to tell them first that the raincoat on the table was his property, second the length of time Eve and Richard together had been at the Abbott house that summer and the time of Eve’s departure and return, and third (after much maneuvering on his part and on the coroner’s) that Richard and his wife had not been on good terms.

It was shortly after that that an attempt was made to show that the chloroform, too, was linked with the Abbott house. For a young man, freckle-faced and a little apologetic, was called who proved to be the clerk in one of the town drugstores; he said, wriggling, that he had sold a can of chloroform early in the summer to Mrs Calvin Peale.

“Will you identify Mrs Peale?”

The boy looked at Diana and nodded. “That’s her. She said she wanted it for a sick dog, but I had to sell her a large-size can because that’s all we had.”

He was dismissed, and Diana, looking very cool in a thin green cotton dress and small-brimmed hat but a little angry too, was called. She replied briefly to the coroner’s questions, telling what time Richard had come to the house the night Eve was murdered, what he had said, whether or not he had mentioned murder (as he had not) and whether he had told her it was suicide, as he had. She replied with equal brevity (but unfortunate if unavoidable truth) to questions designed to bring out the facts of Richard’s separation with Eve and Eve’s subsequent unexpected return.

She was asked, too, about the chloroform. “I bought it—I don’t remember the date. I bought it in order to give it to a—a sick puppy.”

“Did you use all the chloroform for the dog?”

“No. There was some left. I don’t know how much.”

“What did you do with the remainder?”

“I put it on a shelf in the kitchen store closet. I haven’t seen it since.”

“Was it available to anyone in the house?”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

Diana was dismissed, and the sheriff’s assistant, Al, was called to describe Richard’s escape. And after him the caretaker at the Stacy place (a stocky gray-haired Scotsman with little angry eyes), who said Richard had come to the Stacy place at about six-thirty the night of the murder, arriving with Howland Stacy, and had gone into the house with him and, presumably after dinner, he had seen him leave the place, taking the lake path at about eight-thirty. He was alone and had gone in the direction of the Abbott place toward the south.

Howland was not called. Because he had been Richard’s lawyer. Search began to see about then, too, that they were avoiding the subject of the arsenic and the attacks upon Ludmilla and that there was no mention of the intruder of the previous night.

She was thinking that, when the coroner said briskly: “Will Miss Beatrice Walthers testify, please?”

They didn’t need Howland’s testimony even if, legally, they could have demanded it. For amid a little hum and buzz in the packed hot room Beatrice Walthers came forward from somewhere at the other side of the room and proved to be the waitress. And twisting her fingers in the blue sports dress she had donned for the occasion, fastening her large light blue eyes upon the jury, she told them, almost word for word, of the talk between Eve and Search the morning before Eve was murdered.

Search heard it, frozen. The girl had been in the butler’s pantry, waiting to clear away breakfast. Miss Search Abbott had come into the breakfast room and then Miss Eve—that is, Mrs Bohan. And Mrs Bohan had told Miss Search she was not going to divorce Mr Bohan, although Mr Bohan had asked her to do so because he wanted to marry Miss Search.

Miss Search had defied Mrs Bohan; she had said she couldn’t keep them from marrying, that there were ways. And then Mrs Bohan had said—had said—the girl faltered then and dropped her head but finished. Mrs Bohan had said not so long as she lived.

She didn’t tell it that briefly but instead prolongedly, with an astonishingly good and clear memory, and it supplied motive and was unutterably damning.

When the girl was dismissed and Search at last heard her own name called she went quickly, scarcely aware of herself and of the whispers that accompanied her name. The other woman—well, she had been that. But it didn’t matter now; nothing mattered but Richard. She heard a click of a camera somewhere; and the arms of the chair were still warm from the pressure of Bea’s hot hands. She tightened her grip upon the chair arms; she must watch for traps; it would be a long bout of questioning.

It was not.

“Miss Abbott,” said Dr Jerym, “is it true that you went to the gardener’s cottage the night Mrs Bohan was murdered?”

“Yes. But she was already—”

“You went to keep an appointment with Richard Bohan?”

The sheriff knew the truth. “Yes,” she said, “but he didn’t murder her. There are other things—evidence that—”

The coroner leaned forward. “You have heard the testimony of the previous witness. Is it true that you and Richard Bohan intended to marry as soon as—or if—he could get a divorce from his wife, Eve Bohan?”

There was not a sound in the room.

She moistened her lips.

“That much is true, but it is not the whole truth. You have not heard all the evidence. Richard did not murder Eve. He—”

“That’s all, thank you. That’s all, Miss Abbott.”

It was not to check her testimony. For something was happening in the hall outside the door. She and everyone was aware of it. There was the buzz and murmur of voices and the sheriff was hurrying toward the door, thrusting his way through the cluster of reporters toward some nucleus of excitement in the hall.