by Bruce, Leo
“There! I told you,” said Mrs Jerrison in an awed voice.
“The murderer went down by the cliff path and retrieved the envelope from the dead body of Sonia, leaving the key of her room beside her. When Jerrison arrived, he saw the footmarks, but unfortunately had only a moment in which to observe them by the light of his torch, and could not be sure if they were of a man or a woman. They were ‘small’, but all the men of this household have small feet.
“It must have been a very terrible moment for the murderer when the contents of the envelope were seen to be blank. The real document now had double significance. It had its original meaning, which had been enough to cause one murder. But it now provided evidence, if not proof, of guilt in this second death. For it would show who needed it urgently enough to kill Sonia for it.
“That I saw very clearly, as soon as I came to make inquiries. The way to find out who had killed Sonia was to find out what was in that envelope. Unfortunately, when I found where the envelope was, in the Natterleys’ keeping, I learned that their mistaken idea of honour had caused them to keep it intact, unmentioned to the police. I persuaded them to hand it over, and Inspector Brizzard, quite rightly, according to police rules, refused to tell me its contents. But I knew these by now.”
Major Natterley interrupted. “It’s fairly obvious, isn’t it? The document showed that Lydia Mallister was murdered.”
“No,” said Carolus firmly. “Just the contrary. The danger of that document to the murderer of Sonia Reid was that it showed that Lydia Mallister was not murdered.”
There was an awkward silence broken by Brizzard. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said.
“Lydia Mallister was, at least during her last illness, an extremely malicious woman. She hated her sister for having married a rich man; she hated and despised her husband and resented his health while she was dying; she quarrelled with Mrs Derosse, a most difficult person to quarrel with. Her sister maintains that she was not sane at this time and that there is insanity in the family. Whether or not that is true, she had an obsessional hatred of her husband. She cut him out of her will, leaving her money—without it, it would seem, much pleasure—chiefly to Miss Grissell and the Jerrisons.
“But she could not prevent James Mallister from obtaining the large sum of her life insurance, and this worried her. When she knew finally that she had only a few days to live, she made a plan to deprive him of it. She would commit suicide, which would render the life insurance agreement void, for the life insurance was not payable in the case of suicide.
“Christine told me that Lydia ‘knew almost to the day’ when she would die, and she had bitterly told two people that night that they ‘would not have long to wait’.
“Whether she waited until she felt she was dying, or whether she so entirely believed in the certainty of her own death in a short time that she was prepared to forgo a few hours or days of life, we are not likely to know, for she had only one confidante—Sonia Reid.
“Their friendship sprang up in the last weeks of Lydia’s life and began, like many less fateful friendships, with a mutual interest in music. But soon, as Mrs Jerrison put it, Sonia was ‘up in her room at all hours’. I would guess that she had not told Sonia her plan when she asked her to obtain in London an extra supply of Dormatoze. Perhaps her plan was not then formed. But Sonia knew when the time came what Lydia intended to do and may have been with her when she wrote her suicide note. Lydia took her overdose of Dormatoze and, comfortably aware that she had found a way to deprive James Mallister of every benefit from her death, she no doubt peacefully died in the early hours of the morning. If she had felt the approach of the heart-attack which was supposed to kill her, she would surely have rung the bell which communicated with Mrs Derosse’s room.
“But Sonia, as she had told her foster-mother, was no fool and had already seen a way to turn this to advantage. She was seen ‘nipping back to her room’ by Mrs Derosse at about half past twelve, but she returned to Lydia’s room about three o’clock in the morning—as Miss Grey, a light sleeper, heard—and retrieved both the suicide note and the extra bottle of Dormatoze tablets. It was with this note that she set about blackmailing James Mallister. Unless he paid her half or most of the insurance money when he received it, she would show the insurance company that Lydia had not died naturally, but had committed suicide. Her resolve was strengthened by the fact that Steve Lawson, with whom she was living, was in desperate need of money and was urging her to come to an arrangement with Mallister.
“Mallister as a murderer interests me. He was apparently a rather dull little man who had at first loved his wife and even towards the end had suffered the onslaughts of her tongue with patience. He had been humiliated by Lydia and, when Sonia, too, treated him contemptuously, it was too much. He murdered her in a fit of temper, I think, rather than as part of a deep-laid scheme to get the money he felt rightfully his. I do not think that Esmée’s liverish sleepiness that night was more than a coincidence, though I may be wrong. When Mallister makes a full confession, as I feel sure he will, we shall know whether he made any plans at all. I think not. But he was cunning enough to hurry down the cliff path, obtain the envelope and return to his room in time to be awakened by the bishop and Christine after the Grimburns had given the alarm.
“Steve Lawson’s part in the affair is not a noble one. He may have been genuinely distressed by Sonia’s death, but he was quick to realize how and why it had come about, and to make up his mind to get what Sonia had failed to get. He saw Mallister’s footmarks in the sand and, by pretending to be raving, tried to obliterate them before Jerrison could see them. But fortunately for the Natterleys he did not know to whom Sonia had given the real envelope.”
“All very nice, Mr Deene,” said Brizzard, “and I don’t mind telling you now that the envelope contained Mrs Mallister’s suicide note. But what made Mallister try to kill Miss Derosse tonight?”
“He has been in his room all day,” said Carolus. “Between his room and Miss Godwin’s and Miss Grey’s is a wall so thick that two cupboards could be made in its thickness, one with doors in Miss Godwin’s room and one with doors in his. When we found that the two old ladies could overhear conversations in the Mallisters’ room from their cupboard, it was not unreasonable to suppose that he could do the same. Christine only had to go up there and knock and call loudly before entering to be fairly sure that Mallister would listen to what she had to tell the ladies during such an unusual visit. What she told them, of course, was that they need not worry any more, as everything would be cleared up by the police tomorrow. She said that Sonia had given her the sealed envelope and she was going to hand it to the police in the morning.
“She perhaps overdid it by pretending to quarrel with me at dinner and repeat that she knew the police would act tomorrow.Then she went up to her room and waited. Mallister was desperate by this time. It was no longer a matter of the money—he was trying to save his life. He walked into the trap. Christine insisted on his leaving the door open and, with the big table and table-cloth in the way, the bishop, looking up the staircase, saw only her fall. I tried to reach the room in time to find Mallister at least leaving it, but he was too quick for me, regaining his own room before I reached the landing.”
Brizzard nodded. “Such larks are all very well for you,” he said, “but I’d like to know what would happen if we were to do anything like that. Suppose Miss Derosse had been hurt? Or even missed the net?”
Christine smiled. “I take that chance every night of my professional life,” she said, “but it’s one in a million.”
“Still, we couldn’t have let you take it. You know that.”
“You have other advantages,” pointed out Carolus. “You’ve got the crucial document. I don’t think you’ll have much trouble,” he added. “I think you’ll get a full confession.”
“So do I. But we’d have got that, anyway, without all this performance.”
“It was a star performance,” sa
id Carolus, and it was his last comment on the affair.