Death Came Softly

by E. C. R. Lorac

  “How is your patient?”

  “Just the same. Pulse quickening a bit. It does, with concussion. I don’t think he’s in any danger; he’ll probably wake up tomorrow with a vile headache, having forgotten everything that happened before his accident. Of course, one never can tell with concussion. They’ll take an X-ray to make sure, but I don’t think he’s very bad.”

  “Not what you call interesting.”

  “Not a bit. Dull from my point of view. I’ve nothing to do except watch him.”

  “If I am very quiet, can I come into his room to look for something on the floor?”

  “If you’re perfectly quiet, yes. You can’t have a bright light or anything like that.”

  “A torch will do, and I’ll keep the beam on the floor.”

  The nurse nodded, and Macdonald followed her into the room. A shaded hand lamp stood on the table, leaving the bed in shadow. The nurse’s chair was by the bed. She whispered to Macdonald:

  “It’s a bore. I can’t read because the flex of the lamp is so short. I can’t keep an eye on him if I sit over there, and it’s easier to keep awake if you’ve got something to do.”

  “I’ll get you another lamp from downstairs,” said Macdonald.

  He slipped silently out of the room, ran downstairs and fetched a hand lamp with a long cord from the sitting room and carried it upstairs. Using his torch to help him, he disconnected the lamp of which the nurse complained, lifted the shaded silk from it onto the one he had brought up, and connected it. Then, with the same noiseless efficiency, he lifted a small table and set it within a few feet of the bed, and arranged the shaded light so that its beam did not reach the patient. The nurse smiled her thanks.

  “Thank you very much. I hate bothering people, and Mrs. Merrion is so worried,” she whispered.

  She sat down, and Macdonald crept softly over the floor, searching it with his flashlight. He found two more uncut diamonds under the wardrobe. He got up and lifted the disused hand lamp and moved with it toward the door. As he opened it he came face to face with Mrs. Merrion. She had a tea tray in her hands.

  “First rule for the entertainment of hospital nurses—tea every few hours,” she whispered. “Hard on the ration. What’s the matter with that lamp? Has it fused?”

  “No. The flex was too short. I found Nurse another.”

  “But all the flexes are the same—good long ones.”

  “Are they? Well, she seems better satisfied with the other.”

  “Just fussing. They do. So should I if I were a night nurse.”

  She took the tray into the bedroom, and Macdonald went to the farther corner of the great main landing, where the service bedrooms were located. Here he found Reeves, sitting on a chair in the dark. Macdonald beckoned to him, keeping his flashlight down, so that only its faint reflection showed himself and his colleague. Reeves came close and whispered:

  “Carter and his missis are still arguing. They’ve had a rare old set-to. Couldn’t hear much of it, except that she’s been crying a lot, and keeps on asking, ‘Why ever did you do it?’ He swears at intervals and tells her to shut up. Apart from the nurse coming out to the bathroom and Mrs. Merrion bringing the tea up, everything’s been quiet.”

  “Right. Carry on, and keep your ears open, though I don’t expect there’ll be anything to listen to. I don’t think Carter will try to bolt. He knows it isn’t easy these days. I’m going down into that telephone room. I ought to be able to get some reports by this time, and the line will be quiet. You know where the telephone is, just off the hall. I’ll leave the lights on downstairs, and if you come to the edge of the balustrade you can look over and see if anyone is trying to hear what’s going on.”

  Macdonald went downstairs and recovered his briefcase, and went into the small room where the telephone was installed. Closing the door, and making sure that the blackout was in place, he turned on a hand lamp and took the packet of Meta fuel out of his case, and an insufflator and fingerprint powder. He was an expert at reading prints. Having sprayed some powder over the box, he blew away the surplus powder and studied the results. There was a very clear set of fingerprints on the box—small fingers with clearly marked whorls, particularly on the thumb.

  Macdonald had made it his business to collect fingerprints from all members of the Valehead household, and he knew their peculiarities. The prints on the box of Meta fuel were Mrs. Merrion’s, and no other prints at all appeared on it. There were certainly none of the professor’s.

  * * *

  Macdonald spent a full hour at the telephone. He talked to the night operator to begin with, saying who he was, and asking for his calls to be given priority. He also said that he wanted to find out if any call had been put through from Valehead House between six and seven o’clock that evening. The operator said that he would look in the records and see if he could trace anything—he himself had not been on duty at that time. Macdonald’s calls included cables to Professor Evans’ club in New York, and to the police authorities in that city, asking for an appointment to be made so that the professor could be spoken to on the transatlantic service. Macdonald also spoke to the man on duty in his own department, and inquired if the photographs he had asked for were ready. On hearing that the prints were now ready, Macdonald put through yet another call and woke the long-suffering Jenkins.

  “Sorry to wake you, Jenkins, but you’re darned lucky to be in bed at all. Any luck with the Missions to Seamen or any of your Rotherhithe toughs?”

  “I think I’m on the track. It’ll mean a visit to Bristol tomorrow.”

  “Oh, will it. Very convenient of Bristol to be on the G.W.R. I’ve a job in Reading for you tomorrow. You’ve got my report and you know what I’m after. Take those photographs with you to Reading and see if you have any luck with porters or ticket inspectors or platform men. Worry the lot of them. The trains in question are the ten-thirty from Enster to Paddington, which stops at Reading at one-ten, the ten-forty and eleven-thirty, Paddington to Reading, and the one-thirty, Paddington to Enster, due at Reading at two-twenty. You can try the Paddington men, too.”

  “Right. Kind of you to let me know in good time, chief. I’ll do my best.”

  Macdonald laughed. “You sleep-loving old blackguard! It’s now half past three, and I’ve been telephoning for over an hour while you have been snoring. You can have another three hours in bed. By that time you can get up and start pestering the railway authorities. If you give them time, they will probably produce the men you want from the different ends of their system.”

  Jenkins’ cheerful chuckle sounded over the wire. “All right, all right. I know the up line from the down line, chief, even though I do love my bed when I’ve a chance to sleep in it, which isn’t often when I’m on the trail with you. How’s things your end? Anything to justify your hunch?”

  “Oh, a spot of alarm and battery, and few more pebbles on the bedroom floor, if you take me. I think the thing’s sorting itself out. It’s always useful when a fellow gets annoyed and takes to his fists. Incidentally, I think that the adjourned inquest may be called again for the day after tomorrow.”

  “Good work. I’d better exert my best powers of persuasion at Reading tomorrow. I take it that’s more important than Bristol?”

  “You take it right. Well, pleasant dreams. Tell your missis I’m sorry if the phone woke her up, but she shouldn’t have married a policeman.”

  * * *

  When he finally left the telephone, Macdonald stood in the hall of the house and listened for a moment. Everything was very still, only the inevitable grandfather clock ticking the minutes away solemnly, tick-tack, tick-tack, grunt . . . as the old mechanism wound on and the weights descended, millimeter by millimeter. Macdonald stretched himself and indulged in the luxury of a prolonged yawn. He was sleepy, and he would have been glad of a brew of tea or coffee to clear his head, but he had respect for other people’s rations. Tea was tea, these days, a commodity to be treated with respect. He went into the ki
tchen and got a glass of cold water, smoked a cigarette while he sat on the kitchen table and swung his legs idly, forgetting his case for a moment while he wished that he were twenty again and back in the London Scottish as he had been in 1914. The marmalade-colored cat came out of his corner and purred around Macdonald’s feet, and the homely, shining kitchen seemed ridiculously far away from the general routine of criminal detection.

  Macdonald jumped off the table and started to explore the kitchen, opening doors and cupboards while the cat prowled purring around him in an ecstasy of expectation. He left the kitchen and continued to explore the vast stone-floored regions behind it. Scullery, pantry, butler’s pantry—boot cleaning, metal cleaning, log store, coal store, flagged passages without end; at last he found what he was looking for—where the tools were kept. Carter was a neat fellow; his tools and nails and screws were all tidily sorted and conveniently placed. Wire for fuses, adapters, two-way plugs, everything that could be needed for the handy man in the way of electricity, and some coils of flex, still on their drums. “That seems to settle that. Everything ready for use,” said Macdonald to himself.

  It was between four and five o’clock, British summer time, that Macdonald finished all he intended to do that night, and he decided to have a couple of hours’ sleep. Just then he heard the cock crow, and something made him go outside, into the cool, sweet air of the summer night. He stood on the terrace in front of the long house and turned toward the east. The great tree-crowned scarp above the Hermit’s Cave showed black, for the northeastern sky was paling to dawn—the first pallor which heralds a midsummer morn spreading behind the blackness of hill and forest. In the west a waning moon shone on the long white house, and silvered the little dome above the main hall. All about him was the scent of flowers, roses and honeysuckle, syringa and jasmine. Somewhere, down in the valley, a rabbit squealed, caught in a trap, and an owl hooted mournfully.

  Regretfully Macdonald turned back again and reentered the sleeping house.

  13

  As was only to be expected, the affairs of Valehead House had proved a rich topic of conversation at the inn. The licensee at the Valehead Arms found business was booming—he had not had such a busy time since the Jubilee, so he told his wife. Mrs. Yeo demurred at this.

  “Then there was the coronation, and there was September 3rd, 1939,” she said.

  “Aye, maybe, but we never ran out of cider neither of them times,” objected Ebenezer Yeo.

  “And cider wasn’t rationed neither,” retorted his better half.

  Despite the cider shortage—and for draught cider to run out in a Devonsire inn was an epoch-making event in itself—folk continued to crowd into the bar. The locals of Valehead were outnumbered by visitors from all the surrounding country, as far afield as Tawton and Starford Abbas. The story of the wealthy Mrs. Merrion, of her father, his secretary and the men who were guests at Valehead was told again and again. “They volks to Vale’ead” were discussed in detail by many who had never set eyes on the place, and it was fortunate for Eve Merrion that three miles of road and gasoline rationing were between Valehead House and the inquirers in the bar. Excited comment reached its climax when it was rumored that Carter had been arrested, and the general verdict was that a mistake had been made. Carter, alone of the residents at Valehead House, was known to the locals in the bar and to mine host. He had not infrequently trudged to the village for the pleasure of a game of darts and some genial conversation, and he was popular, for Carter was a good mixer and had a fund of stories to tell. “A proper man, he be,” was the general verdict. “Now if so be it had been that little varmint of an Irishman, I could have understood mun better,” put in one old gaffer, and old Timothy Hodge, the thatcher, gave it as his opinion that Scotland Yard was a “danged fule.” “Our Inspector Turner now, he’d never’ve made a mistake like that,” he affirmed. “These yere Londoners, they’re too full of themselves to see straight.”

  “Iss. Mun’s right,” agreed the bar.

  The fact that Brady had never come near the village was regarded as suspect. “Man must have had summat to hide,” was the opinion.

  The most popular informants were those members of the village who, “on their lawful occasions,” had been up to Valehead House, and had opportunity to observe the residents there at first hand. Among these fortunate persons was Tom Briggs, the forester who had helped Carter to carry the professor back to the house. While the cider had lasted Tom Briggs had been sure of as many pints as he could lower in return for his narrative. He upheld Carter very strongly.

  “Mun was fair cut to the ’eart,” he declared.

  The other first hand informants were the van drivers of the local tradesmen who had delivered goods at the back door, and the village postman, who had delivered letters at the front door. The latter was quite a crony of Carter’s and spoke up strongly for him. He was also attached to Mrs. Merrion, whom he regarded as “a proper lady,” but he shook his head over Keston, “summat queer about him, talked like as he was on stilts,” averred the postman.

  The older habitues in the bar talked with the rich Devon accent and the age-old idioms which their forefathers had used in Tudor times; the younger men scorned the local dialect and interlarded their speech with words and phrases culled from the talkies.

  On the same evening that Macdonald had traveled back from London to Enster, Inspector Turner had come into the bar, but his unaccustomed presence had chilled conversation. He had not been able to break down the polite reserve which afflicted even the most garrulous. Turner had always held himself rather aloof from the village gossips and, though they respected him, they were a little in awe of him. Perhaps he made it a little too obvious that he had questions to ask, and the village folk were cautious in his presence.

  On the following evening, Turner being absent, talk flowed again fast and furious. There were several strangers in the bar, among whom was an alert looking dark fellow, obviously a townsman from his complexion and clothes, who followed the conversation with intense interest. One or two of the village lads had been airing their opinions, and at last the townsman spoke up, his Cockney voice sounding thin in contrast to the Devon voices, which Lockersley had once described as “rich with cow dung.”

  “You know, you’re all very ready to give an opinion, and it’s not for me to say you’re wrong,” he put in, “but it’s not much use talking about people you don’t know, who you’ve never seen.”

  “That’s all fine and large, mate,” put in one of the hands from the local garage. “Ever seen ’em yourself, by any chance? Perhaps you can put us all right.”

  There was a murmur of assent from the company, and one or two derisive snorts. The Cockney was not at all put out of countenance. He lighted another cigarette, saying:

  “Well, it so happens I have seen them. I’m a mechanic from Quex radio, and a very pretty line it is. Nothing to equal it, but it wants a spot of care and attention, being a sensitive set.” He paused, evidently enjoying the fact that he had gained the ear of the bar. “Know what sort of radio Mrs. Merrion’s got at Valehead, mate?” he inquired of the garage mechanic. No answer was forthcoming, and there was a rhetorical pause before the radio mechanic continued, “Well, she’s got a Super Quex, and a lovely set it is, and she had a spot of bother with it after she moved it from town. Now Mrs. Merrion’s one of those topnotchers who likes things just so, and to cut a long story short, she wrote to the firm asking for an expert to come down at her own expense—fares paid, stay the night and all that. See?”

  “And you were the expert,” agreed the garage man, with the air of a man who has solved a knotty problem. “Nice little holiday, eh, mate?”

  “Okay by me. I enjoyed it. Not half,” said the Cockney cheerfully. “The firm’s kept me down here, traveling on business. Wish it might last, but it won’t. So, you see, as it happens, I have been in Valehead House. Spent the night there, too, and saw the two blokes who were staying there, and that chap Keston. Like an owl, he is.
Now, you were saying,” and the speaker turned to the garage man, “the London cops have hit on Carter, and why Carter? Why shouldn’t it have been one of the nobs? I always see red a bit when the cops go for a working man rather than the kippered aristocracy.”

  “That’s as may be. Don’t hold with all this Jack’s as good as his master talk we get these days,” put in one of the farmers, but another young man chipped in eagerly:

  “That’s what I been saying all along. Take those two chaps who was out all night when the old gentleman was done in—Keston and Lockersley, wasn’t it?”

  “Now, then, Jem, you got that wrong. You wasn’t at the inquest,” corrected the thatcher. “They wasn’t out all night.”

  “Well, most of it, anyway,” protested Jem.

  The Quex radio man turned to him. “Pity you missed the inquest, mate, and you so interested,” he said sympathetically.

  “ ’E was up in Lunnon town, seeing ’is brother in hospital,” explained another voice.

  “Well, if so be ’e ’adn’t been in London, ’e couldn’t have been gallivanting to no inquests,” said the thatcher. “Driving Beer’s van he is.” He turned good-humoredly toward Jem. “Been fancying yourself as a detective, young fellow. You’d better go to that London policeman and ask him to take you back to Scotland Yard. I’ll speak for you, Jem. I’ll speak for you,” he said.