by E.
“Wasn’t it round here that Jack the Ripper made his favourite hunting-ground?”
“Oh, I see. Yes, I think that a scientist in the Yard might have solved Jack the Ripper. I’m not sure that we could not name Jack the Ripper even now, Jim,” he concluded. The scientist fell into silence again. He took his seat in an empty first-class carriage of the Cornish train, with Merry beside him. The sergeant eyed his chief curiously from time to time. The train was tearing through Clapham Junction, however, before he spoke.
“Something worrying you, Harry?” he asked.
“Yes, Jim . . . a curious problem.”
He paused, and then suddenly demanded of his Sergeant:
“What happened in the Tremarden Arms, on July 15th, to make Colonel Donoughmore write for those cuttings?”
CHAPTER XIX
THE ALIBI
Sergeant MacRobbie was a small man, lithe with the muscular suppleness of the Scot; and small boned, which was a peculiar circumstance in men of his clan. How he came to be a member of the Cornish Criminal Investigation Force was something that even he could not really answer. He had the reputation of being the only Scotsman ever to last in the Cornish police, with whom he had now been for some seven years. The explanation was said by his colleagues to be (and it might well be true) that while he could not understand what the Cornish dialect was saying about him, the Cornishmen, on the other hand, were totally unable to comprehend what the Scottish brogue was saying about them! They kept, therefore, good friends!
Habitually, MacRobbie wore Harris tweeds, and red hair; at the moment he was overdressed, since he was wearing, in addition, a worried expression; the task of finding traces of Mrs. Devereux was proving harder than finding a way through a Scotch mist in his native Lossiemouth.
He had decided, after a talk with Inspector Penryn, that his inquiries should begin with an attempt to trace the movements of Mrs. Devereux from the time she left the Devonshire Tea Rooms at 12.45 p.m., leaving the scarf to greet her return at such time as she occupied the table again at 4.45.
He was equipped for his search—mainly through the good offices of the lady’s chambermaid—with a detailed description, in some degrees an embarrassing one, of the clothes which Mrs. Devereux had been wearing on that day. A piece of unexpected luck had provided him also, with a photograph of her actually in the clothes. An itinerant movie-camera man wending through Tremarden on his way to the coast, had sought to make a pound or two by snapping pictures of promising passers-by in the street of the town, afterwards handing them a card giving the number of the exposure made, and the information that prints would be obtainable next day, at the price of a shilling each, by calling at the Swan Inn.
Mrs. Devereux had, it seems, complained to the chambermaid of the man’s importunings. The chambermaid had passed the information on to Inspector Penryn, when he had interviewed the girl in confidence (engendered by a vivid word picture of police cells if she didn’t talk!) to obtain a description of the articles of adornment which the guest had worn that day. The photographer was rounded up, his films examined, and enlargements made of the promenading fisherwoman. It was half a dozen of these prints which the sergeant and his three constables were carrying for identification purposes.
MacRobbie had tackled the search, after some deep thinking, by visiting Mrs. MacRobbie.
“Maggie,” he said. “If you, bein’ an ordinary kind of woman, had three ’oors tae spend in Tavistock betwixt denner-time an’ tea-time, hoo wid ye spend it? What wid a woman dae tae wile awa’ a’ that time?”
Mrs. MacRobbie had considered the question, slowly and dourly. “She wad be a body wi’ nae responsibeelitees to be hevin’ a’ that time tae waste?” she suggested.
“Aye, an’ wi’ plenty o’ bawbees tae spen’.”
“Ah!” Mrs. MacRobbie surveyed her braw figure in the glass over the mantelpiece. “Well, Jamie, if I hed the bawbees tae throw awa on sich flippances, I’d hae ma’ hair deen in the London wye. An’ I might, ye ken, go buying knick-knacks in the stores. There are ane or twa I could dee wi’,” she added, hopefully, an eye on her husband.
Jimmy shook his head. “A’m nae promissin’ onythin’, ye onderstan’. It’s a’ in the way o’ bisiness. An’ whit wid ye be daein’ when ye’s haen yer hair deen up and bought a few wee knick-knacks?”
“Gae and hae ma tea,” his spouse said quickly.
“Ye dinna wint tae hae tea until a quarter tae five, ye onderstan’. An’ ye’ve an oor an’ a half tae a quarter tae five.”
“A’d gae tae pictures, then.”
“Ay. A hadna thoucht o’ that. Mebbe she did ane or a’ o’ them,” he added, after a pause.
“She? And wha wid she be?”
“The lassie ah’m trying to find.” He caught the look in his wife’s eye. “It’s a’ in the matter of the law a’m tellin’ ye,” he added hastily.
The sergeant sent his men on a round of the hairdressing salons and beauty parlours of Tavistock. He had himself taken the nearest establishment to the tea rooms. The manageress, looking round a corner at the opening of the door, hastily pulled the curtain across a cubicle and stepped out.
“Wid ye be knowin’ a Mistress Devereux?” the sergeant demanded. “It’s a matter o’ law, ye ken,” he added, showing his warrant card.
The woman denied any knowledge of a customer of that name. “What would she come here for?” she demanded.
“Mebbe tae hae her hair din up,” the sergeant suggested. “It wid be four days agone at ane o’clock.”
The manageress examined her book. “No,” she announced. “We have had nobody of that name in the place.”
The sergeant produced his photograph. “This wid be the leddy,” he said. “Wid ye hae seen her at all?”
A shake of the head was the answer. “We’ve never had her in here, Sergeant.”
“Ah, weel, it mun hae bin somewheres else she wint, then,” he added. “Guid day tae ye.”
The same tale was told by the three constables under the sergeant’s orders. They had, they reported, visited every salon in the town, large and small. Neither had dressed hair, lifted the face or manicured the nails of a Mrs. Devereux; and none could identify the photograph, or recognise the description of the clothes which they were given. Wherever Mrs. Devereux had spent her time in Tavistock, it was certainly not in a beauty salon.
“Verra guid, then,” said the sergeant. “Och aye, it luiks like the leddy wint tae the shops or, mebbe, tae the peectures. Ye maun tak a’ the leddies shops. Ah’l be gaun aboot the peectures.”
The party set off again on a tour of the shops. The second task was not so simple as the investigation of the beauty salons. There are three Department Stores in Tavistock, and each department, and nearly every assistant, had to be interviewed, and give an opinion on whether the woman in the photograph had been served by her on the day in question.
The smaller shops retailing women’s garments and fancy goods then had to be similarly visited. Once or twice the sergeant thought the quest had been ended. At one fashionable establishment the woman looking carefully at the picture said that she thought she had served the lady with a crêpe de chine garment.
“Did ye now?” said the sergeant, who had been fetched to see the assistant.
“Yes, I’m almost certain it was her,” the girl replied.
“Wid ye be able, now, to say whit the leddy was wearin’?”
“Yes, Sergeant. She was wearing a tweed coat and skirt and she had a yellow scarf round her neck with dogs on. That is, if it is the lady you mean.”
The sergeant jumped. “Oo aye,” he said. “That wid be her, nae doot.” He stopped suddenly, as if at a thought. “She was wearin’ a scar-r-f, ye say? Ah! Wid ye remember whit time it was when ye saw her?”
“Quite well. It would be half-past five. We were just about to close.”
The confident statement came as a blow to the sergeant. During the hours for which he was searching for Mrs. Devereux, the scarf with
the dogs was reclining in the tea rooms waiting her return. He turned again to the girl. “Ah’l no say ye’re no richt,” he said regretfully. “Ye did’nae chance tae see the leddy wi’oot the scarf, aboot ane or twa o’clock?”
“No. I’m afraid not,” was the reply.
“Och! It’s a peety, a verra great peety.”
With this the sergeant decided that he had reached the end of the first stage of his inquiry. It seemed to him that he might now conclude that Mrs. Devereux had not spent the four hours between 12.45 and 4.45 in Tavistock. Where, then, HAD she spent them? He decided that his next move must be to discover how she had left the town, and where she had travelled. He started on this new hunt in equally methodical form. Tavistock detective officers made a tour of taxicab drivers, armed with a description of Mrs. Devereux. “Had his cab,” each taxi-man was asked, “taken a fare to any spot between Tavistock and Tremarden, between the hours of one o’clock and two o’clock?” The latter had been agreed upon as the latest time at which any journey could have been made by Mrs. Devereux if she had, indeed, gone to the riverside.
Three of the cabs had, it appeared, gone in that direction with a woman fare. One had known his customer, and was able to give the destination. A telephone call to the address elicited the information that she had, indeed, travelled home by taxi at the time stated. That, the Tavistock officer, agreed, disposed of her. Only circumstantial evidence of the other two could be obtained, but there seemed little reason to doubt that they had no connection with Mrs. Devereux. The taxi-men stated that they had driven only a short distance from the middle of the town.
Sergeant MacRobbie’s tour of car hire firms produced no more satisfactory results. It was Constable Treherne who suddenly thought of another form of locomotion. “Perhaps she hired a bicycle,” he suggested.
“Mon, ye’re a wonder,” the sergeant said; and off on the trail went the party again. It was dark before this new line of investigation had concluded, and the sergeant and his men returned to Tremarden.
Doctor Manson and Sergeant Merry were in the inspector’s room when the sergeant made his report next morning.
“The leddy, Inspector, seems juist tae hae vanished intae the air,” he said. “I could na’ find her in the toon, and I could na’ find her oot o’ the toon. I’ll tak ma aith she didnae gae oot in a motor-car, nor on a bicycle, nor on the railway, ’cept, forbye, the 6.30 train frae Tavistock tae Tremarden.”
“Who recognised her on that train, Sergeant?” Manson asked.
“A porter on the local platform the same, ye ken, whae saw her come i’ the mor-r-n.”
“And he’s certain that she did not leave earlier?”
“Ay. An’ for why? The man was on duty on t’ platform all the day. It was too dark to proceed wi’ the last wee chance,” the sergeant continued. “But I’ll be a’ taekin’ of it, the noo.”
“And what chance would that be, Sergeant?” asked Manson.
The sergeant answered the question with another. “Wid she hae gone doon tae the river by bus?” he asked. “Ye ken I had thoucht o’ that. But wid a body weeshin’ tae avoid bein’ traced travel to Tremarden on a public bus?”
Manson nodded his head. “Good for you, Sergeant,” he said. “There is much to be said for both arguments. It depends on the person concerned. He or she may think that there is less chance of being remembered in a crowd than travelling alone in a vehicle, the driver of which may the more easily recollect the circumstances and identity of his fare. How do the buses run from Tavistock?”
“Every three quarters of an hour,” Penryn answered for the sergeant.
“There is ane leaving at five meenites tae ane o’ clock,” the sergeant pointed out.
“Making the next one twenty to two,” said Manson. “If I were you, Penryn, I should ring the company and find out who was the conductor on those two buses on the day, and where we can get hold of them. Perhaps a chat with them might bring some result.”
“I’ll do that now,” the inspector said, and rising, he left the room.
He returned with the answer in five minutes’ time. “The conductor of the five minutes to one bus was a man named Robson,” he announced. “He is now on the bus which will be passing the Tremarden Arms in half an hour’s time and the bus leaves on the return journey through here from Tavistock at 12.55.”
“The same bus, then?”
“Exactly, Doctor. The same bus.”
The chief claims to fame of Tavistock are, firstly, that Sir Francis Drake, that piratical old filibuster, was born there in 1540; and, secondly, that there is usually enough arsenic in the place to kill off the entire population of the British Isles—one of its industries, and a little known one, is the extraction of arsenic!
The road to it from Tremarden is a switchback track of leafy lanes. Leaving the market place the bus slid steeply down the road and into the valley in the trough of which runs the river in its rocky bed. The road crosses the river by an ages-old bridge of granite rough-hewn stones, and then begins to climb again between granite-stone walls. Then, once more, it rolls along lanes until, approaching the Devonshire town, there comes into view in the distance, the rugged, terrible moors that are called Dartmoor.
Nothing grander, or more varied in scenery, can be found in the south-west of England; but it was not with the scenery that Manson, Burns and Merry were concerned. They boarded the bus in the market place; it was not until some little time that they made their first move. Inspector Penryn, seeing the conductor free, for the time being, of duties, produced a photograph from his pocket, and drawing the ticket-puncher’s attention to it, asked a question.
Robson eyed the photograph held out by Inspector Penryn. “Well, sir, I couldn’t properly say if she was on the bus that day,” he announced. “I mean to say, it’s four days ago, you know, and the bus is mostly full. I don’t have much time, you see, to go about inspecting the faces of the passengers.”
“This lady, Robson, would have been dressed a little differently from your usual fares,” Doctor Manson suggested. “She is an uncommonly good-looking woman. She speaks in a superior voice—if I may describe it that way—and she wore a tweed suit. Also, she had tiger-red coloured finger-nails, though she might, of course, have been wearing gloves,” he added as an afterthought.
The conductor considered this new aid to identification, without satisfactory results. “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t remember—”
He stopped suddenly, and Manson glancing up, saw him looking out of the window as though puzzled. The bus was passing the lane along which Manson and Merry had walked to the river after their cup of tea in Joe Smirthwaite’s café. Suddenly, Robson turned to the scientist. “Now, I wonder, sir. Would the lady have left the bus by this farm lane here?”
Manson experienced that thrill of satisfaction which comes from the success of a perfectly prepared set of circumstances. He had carefully timed the talk with the conductor to ensure that the vital question should be asked when the bus was actually passing the spot where a person, wanting to reach the river, would naturally have alighted, and when, therefore, the conductor would be most likely to have such a person in his memory. From the conductor’s manner he had been prepared for the question, which he now answered in a voice suddenly gone hard and menacing.
“I should think it most probable that she did,” he said.
“Then I think I know the woman you want, sir. She did ride down on the bus from Tavistock and I remember that a woman did leave the bus here. His face brightened. “Now I come to think of it, sir, I sort of wondered at the time what she would be wanting to get off at a place so far from the town, like. She was wearing one of them beret hats with a feather in, I remember now.”
Manson looked an inquiry at Penryn, and received an answering nod. “Good, Robson,” he said to the conductor. “That sounds like the woman we want. You observe things very well when your mind is prompted. I suppose you did not see what happened to her after she had left the bus? Whic
h way she went, for instance?”
“No, sir. Afraid I didn’t.”
“Well, we’ll have to guess that, now.”
“Do I understand that you come back along this way to-day at the same time you did on the day that this woman travelled?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the journey and circumstances will be exactly the same?”
“Barring accidents, yes.”
“Very good. Now, we shall be coming back with you. Oh! There’s one thing more. Do you know whether the rota of conductors in all the buses is the same as on that day?”
“Yes, sir. So far as I know. The drivers and conductors ought to be the same unless any one of them has been moved on to a special.” The remainder of the journey the three men devoted to arranging a programme which, in Manson’s opinion, might correspond with the theoretical movements of Mrs. Devereux on the day of the colonel’s death. The programme was carried out with studied exactness. At five minutes past midday the three entered the Devonshire Tea Rooms in Tavistock, ordering lunch. By a piece of good fortune they were able to sit at the same table which had, on the earlier occasion, been occupied by Mrs. Devereux. At twenty minutes to one they paid their bill and rose. “I think your walking-stick, Inspector,” said Manson; and Penryn hung his stick by the handle over the back of the chair on which he had been sitting. At 12.45 they left the tea rooms.
Walking quickly along the street they reached the bus station and climbed into the vehicle. Robson greeted them with a nod of recognition. Manson consulted his watch. “Five minutes to spare,” he announced, “but we walked very quickly. She would not have made the distance in so quick a time.”
When it started its journey, punctual to the minute, the bus was not more than half full. As it pursued a winding and roundabout way through the country lanes, however, it quickly picked up passengers, and throughout the journey there was a continual changing personnel with almost every stop. It was half an hour when Manson. who had been watching the passing countryside, gave a signal, and the three rose to their feet. Pressing a button in the roof of the bus, he walked to the doorway and as the bus stopped, descended to the road. It was 1.25 o’clock.