Death Came Softly

by E. C. R. Lorac

  Macdonald went down on his hands and knees again, and with his flashlight reexamined the floor of the cave. There was no white wood ash save that produced by his own twig fire. He collected samples carefully, and found that there was powdered ash such as charcoal might produce after ignition, but none of the ordinary wood ash which burning twigs left as a residue. It seemed to him to present an exceedingly interesting problem. A man had died in the hermit’s cave. Medical evidence gave the cause of his death as carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide was caused by glowing charcoal, and there was plenty of charcoal in the cave and a brazier in which it might have been ignited, but there was no evidence as to how the charcoal had been caused to glow.

  After some further consideration Macdonald went outside and looked around. He walked along the rock face and studied the ground carefully. It was quite easy to see where the ground had been walked on, for it was thickly covered with dog mercury and bluebell leaves. To walk on them was to leave a trail of trodden foliage. There was a distinct path from the drive to the cave’s entrance, and the ground within a few inches of the cave was bare of plants. Anyone could have walked to the extremity of the rock scarp, where the lancet was cut in its western face, without leaving any indication of their steps, but if they had strolled among the undergrowth, there would have been signs of their passage.

  He went on back to the drive and turned to look at the entrance to the drive. There was an ancient sandstone arch in the wall at the entrance. It was gateless and provided no barrier now, though Macdonald guessed that when the arch was built, probably in medieval times, it would have been fitted with heavy gates. He walked toward the arch, and as he approached it he saw his own car reappearing along the road leading to the Valehead drive. He stopped the driver when the car was just under the arch, and the driver looked out with regret on his face. “Home again?” he inquired.

  Macdonald shook his head. “Not yet, Reeves. I think we’ve got a case here.”

  Reeves grinned. “Suits me, sir. Never seen a bit of country I liked better. I could do with a week or so of this.”

  “So could I,” returned Macdonald. “Not sure I couldn’t do with a lifetime of it. I can’t imagine what perversity makes us live in towns. Keep the car where it is for a bit. I want to climb on the roof.”

  Detective Reeves never asked questions about his superior officer’s actions, but he was always interested in watching him. Macdonald climbed onto the roof of the car and inspected the under side of the arch. When he got down again, he said to Reeves:

  “If you were asked to describe that arch, what would you say about it?”

  Reeves replied promptly, “It’s an old structure, probably hundreds of years old, and built solid as a house. It’s just big enough to let a small pantechnicon through, now the gates have been taken off. The gates were taken away when Mrs. Merrion’s furniture arrived, the vans couldn’t get through unless.” He paused and then added, “There’s a fixture for electric lights at the top of the arch; I suppose they lighted the drive in the good old days before all this ballyhoo started.” After another moment he concluded, “That’s about all, though it seems silly to have that great hefty arch and no gates to it.”

  “It does, rather,” agreed Macdonald. “Now we’ll go on up to the house.”

  5

  “Chief Inspector Macdonald? How do you do?”

  Eve Merrion had been gardening when Carter had brought her Macdonald’s card, and her heart had sunk with an unhappy foreboding. She was sick of answering questions; sick, too, of the veiled suspicion which she had sensed behind the civil police interrogatory. Coming in from the garden, she had expected to find another edition of the local inspector, to whom she had taken an intense dislike.

  The tall, dark fellow standing by the window looked quite unlike what she had expected. He stood easily, with a natural poise, and somehow he seemed to fit into the setting of the Valehead morning room, as though he might have belonged there. Meeting his gray eyes, as he turned and bowed to her, Eve found herself addressing Macdonald “as a human being and not as a policeman,” as she phrased her own reaction.

  “How do you do,” he replied. “I am sorry to bring you in from your garden on a day like this; sorry, too, that I have to bother you again when you have been so much distressed.”

  The quiet voice, with its pleasant Scots timbre, gave Eve Merrion a deep sense of relief. She was sensitive to voices.

  “Thank you so much for saying so,” she replied. “It’s true that I—we—have suffered distress. Not so much because of my father’s death, though we loved him dearly, but because of the beastliness of all this suspicion.”

  She broke off, ashamed of the manner in which her last phrase had burst out, but Macdonald replied:

  “I understand perfectly well what you mean. It seemed to you that the professor died peacefully in his sleep, in a strange and beautiful setting which he probably loved, and now you are being badgered with unlovely questions.”

  “That’s exactly it,” she replied impulsively, “and surely it’s all so unnecessary.”

  “I’m afraid that it isn’t,” answered Macdonald.

  Eve gave a sigh; she glanced once again out of the window at the sunlit lawns and the long shadows of the cypress trees, and then she turned to Macdonald.

  “Please sit down and tell me just what you mean,” she said.

  Macdonald took the chair she indicated and when she was seated, he said, “Forgive me if I go over points which are probably familiar ad nauseam, and I will try to tell you just what I do mean. First, did you know that your father was in the habit of lighting the brazier in the cave?”

  “No. I never heard him mention it.”

  “Was he a smoker?”

  Eve looked surprised. “No. He never smoked.”

  “When you emptied his pockets, did you find a box of matches in them?”

  “Not a box. A book of matches, almost new. He often carried them so that he could light a cigarette for me.”

  “There was no petrol lighter in his pockets?”

  “No. He didn’t possess one.”

  “Have you ever tried to light a lot of charcoal packed in a brazier?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Believe me, if you tried to do so with a match—or matches—from a book, you would hardly be likely to succeed.”

  Eve stared at him and then ran her fingers through her hair in perplexity. She answered at length. “How silly of me. Of course we thought of that. He would have lighted some wood first.”

  “So I imagined. You are a gardener, aren’t you? You know all about wood ash. How is it that there are no traces of wood ash on the floor of the cave?”

  Again she stared at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “Then how did he light the charcoal?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Macdonald quietly. “I don’t think somehow that he would have made a fire of twigs. Twigs flare, and make a good deal of light. No conscientious man breaks the blackout regulations these days, even to the extent of letting a light shine out from a cave. We all know too well what the consequences for other people may be. It is possible to light charcoal by putting a container of methylated spirit below it and lighting the spirit. The light from that is negligible. I should have expected your father to use a method like that, only there is no container in the cave.”

  “Oh, dear!” Her cry of distress was like a child’s. “You are trying to prove that he could not have lighted the charcoal, but any other theory is ridiculous. You can’t imagine that someone else went into the cave and lighted the charcoal without waking him. I know that couldn’t be true. Father was a sound sleeper—he could sleep through the London sirens—but he always woke up if anybody went into his room. Ask Brady. He knows that. I know it, too. I have nursed Father when he was ill, and though I didn’t make the tiniest sound he would wake up if I put my nose inside the door of his room.”

  “That is an interesti
ng point,” said Macdonald. “I felt pretty certain myself that no one could have been inside the cave without waking the professor.”

  “Then how did it happen?” she cried. “Don’t imagine I haven’t tried to find an answer. I know that carbon monoxide is present in exhaust gas, and in coal gas. . . .”

  “Quite true, but the experts who performed the post-mortem are sure that exhaust gas does not supply the answer, nor yet coal gas. Both of these leave a characteristic odor which can always be recognized. I think the charcoal gives the answer. My problem—what I am here to discover—is how the charcoal was ignited. I want you to help me by answering questions as accurately as you can, even though I know you are weary of answering questions.”

  “I’ll honestly do my best,” she replied, “but there is so little to tell. Would you like me to tell you what I remember in my own words, and you can stop me and ask anything you like.”

  “By all means,” replied Macdonald. “Will you start the previous evening, when your father arrived? Tell me exactly who was in the house, and what you were all doing, just as though you were narrating it for the first time.”

  She sat back in her chair and thought for a moment before she began.

  “I’ll start from the time my sister—Mrs. Stamford—arrived. She came on Tuesday evening, June twenty-fifth. I had two guests staying here at the time, Mr. Rhodian and Mr. Lockersley. They are both fairly well known writers and you may have heard of them. I knew that my father wanted to meet Mr. Rhodian, and I asked David Lockersley here at the same time thinking that they might amuse one another.” She paused here, and then added, “The reason that I start with the Tuesday evening is that it was the last time everything seemed settled and commonplace. I can’t quite tell you why, but after that evening everything seemed to go wrong a bit.” Her eyes sought Macdonald’s almost apologetically and she added, “I’m probably putting things rather stupidly, exaggerating, but when I think back I seem to snatch at that Tuesday evening as the last time when Valehead seemed the utterly peaceful place it had been when I first came to it. It’s probably imagination on my part, because I’ve been worrying over things so much since.”

  Macdonald nodded. “I know quite well what you mean. In any time of stress one has a tendency to look back and say, ‘At such and such a time everything was all right.’ Now you can tell me just what you mean by saying things became unsettled.”

  “I was expecting my father to come on Thursday evening. He phoned through late on Tuesday to say that he was coming a day earlier—on Wednesday. Then Mr. Rhodian had a phone call from town which made it necessary for him to go up to London unexpectedly. Those were both trivial things, of course, but they seemed to upset the evenness of things. The next day, Wednesday, after Mr. Rhodian had left, I took my sister out in the car and we picnicked in the woods. Mr. Lockersley went for a tramp over Maldon Moor by himself. A mist came down in the afternoon, and by the evening it was very thick. Father arrived all right, and we had been meaning to have dinner all together—Father, and Mr. Keston, his secretary, my sister, Mr. Lockersley and myself. However, we had to dine without Mr. Lockersley because he hadn’t come back, and I was worried about him. Later, when he didn’t come in, Mr. Keston went out to look for him. They were both still out when I went to bed, about midnight. However, when Mrs. Carter called me in the morning she told me they had both come in, and I felt enormously relieved, and then, when I came downstairs, Mr. Keston was just coming in at the front door, and told me about having found Father in the Hermit’s Cave.”

  She broke off abruptly and then added:

  “I don’t know why I have told you all that long rigmarole. None of it has anything to do with—your problem. I suppose I have been muddled and confused and wanted to talk things out to unburden my own mind.”

  “That’s just what I want you to do,” replied Macdonald. “Part of my problem is to get an understanding of conditions here. Now I wonder if you can tell me anything about the attitude, each to each, of the people you have been mentioning—the three men, for instance, Keston, Lockersley and Rhodian.”

  She looked at him in a puzzled way, her hand again running through her thick hair in a nervous gesture. “They hardly knew one another,” she replied. “They only met a few days before. Mr. Keston has been Father’s secretary for years, and I seem to know him so well that I just take him for granted. I like him, and trust him, as my father did, but he’s not at all an attractive person at first sight. Very few people like him at first, because he’s gauche and pedantic and rather tiresome. David Lockersley can’t stand him, though he tries to be polite to him on my account. I think Mr. Rhodian thought Keston was merely funny, with that pedantic manner of speech and ultra Oxford accent.”

  “And Lockersley and Rhodian, how did they hit it off?”

  Eve laughed rather ruefully. “Oh, not too well. I hoped they would entertain each other and enjoy being here together. Actually they looked at one another as suspiciously as two strange dogs, but their antipathies were only on the surface, just the silly casual dislike clever men often take to one another. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s only that I’m trying to sense the atmosphere of this house, to get to know something of the people who made up this small world, and so get a background against which to envisage events. Detection can’t be carried out by merely considering what can be called the mechanics of a case. It’s the human factor which counts, and it’s that which you can supply.”

  Her face shadowed and grew brooding and unhappy as she protested. “But all these trivial things I’ve been telling you, they have no bearing on what actually happened. They can’t have. If you’d asked me how those three men stood with regard to my father, that would be more understandable.”

  “How did they stand with regard to him?”

  “Roland Keston was devoted to him. He loved him dearly, in his own queer reserved way, and he was happy working with him. Keston feels utterly lost now. His world has just gone to pieces.”

  “And the other two?”

  “Bruce Rhodian didn’t even know Father. He wanted to meet him, because he knew Father’s work, but they had never seen one another. Lockersley knew Father slightly, and liked him in his rather shy way. I mean they were quite happy together, and enjoyed each other’s company, even though they didn’t talk very much. I remember my father saying one day about Lockersley, ‘That young man has the gift of courteous silence,’ and I knew what he meant.”

  Eve suddenly got up and moved across the room to the window and looked out at the sunlit garden.

  “I just can’t understand it,” she cried. “Somehow I’m convinced you must be wrong. You are telling me, as gently as you can, that Father was murdered, and I can’t believe it. Surely you must have overlooked something which gives the explanation—some small, trivial thing.” She stopped in her quick speech and flushed. “I’m sorry if I’m being rude, and rather stupid, but this place, Valehead, it’s a little world all by itself. It seems cut off from all the big world’s troubles. We were such a peaceful household, with Father and Roland Keston and the Bradys, who adored him, and Mr. and Mrs. Carter, both devoted to me, and Rhodian and Lockersley, both just courteous kindly visitors, and my sister and myself and old Bonner, the caretaker. No one ever comes near Valehead at night, it’s so isolated. If you believe that Father was murdered, you must think that someone who was in this house murdered him, and it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make sense. Not my sort of sense, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” replied Macdonald. “I can understand your point of view so well, and in what you have just said you have touched upon certain truth. Valehead is a little world of its own, isolated, as you say, approached by only the one road, and it seems very improbable that anyone traveled that road on Wednesday night. That’s why I have got to know all about those who were in the valley that night. Then you said that I must have missed some small, trivial thing. I think that’s true, too. It’s often the small trivial thing which gives the cl
ue to a problem.”

  “Then you do think that it might have been an accident, and that all this horrible suspicion about murder and murderers is just a ghastly mistake?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t think that,” replied Macdonald gently, “but I’ve got to go on asking questions until I prove to myself that I’m not mistaken.”

  As he spoke his last word the door opened and another woman looked in. Eve Merrion said quickly:

  “All right, Emma. Come in. This is Chief Inspector Macdonald of Scotland Yard. My sister—Mrs. Stamford.”

  Emmeline Stamford met Macdonald’s eyes with a glance such as she might have bestowed on an intelligent Hindu, remote, condescending and faintly tinged with dislike.

  “How do you do?” she said, her bow very formal and dignified. “I am afraid that you may not realize that my sister finds these endless questionnaires more than a little wearing.”

  “Oh, Emma, don’t be absurd. What does it matter if I find things wearing or not? I realize this has got to go on. It’s got to be settled, one way or the other.” She turned back to Macdonald. “Do you want to see everybody in the house, in the usual way? Mr. Lockersley is still here, and Mr. Keston is in my father’s study. The servants are in the kitchens. Shall I send for them for you?”

  “No, thanks very much. With your permission I’ll seek them in their own quarters, if you don’t mind my wandering round the house.”

  “Of course not. Go where you like. Do what you like.” Eve turned again to her sister. “Emma, you’d better know now what the chief inspector thinks. He believes that Father was murdered, that his death could not possibly have been accidental.”

  Macdonald watched Mrs. Stamford’s face and saw it whiten until the lipsticked mouth looked rather ghastly.

  “I don’t believe it,” she replied. “It’s absurd, melodramatic. Father hadn’t an enemy in the world; he was much too kindly to make enemies, besides—oh, it’s so utterly improbable! Nobody, except the members of this household, knew that he slept in the cave. Is the chief inspector assuming that one of us murdered him?”