Gerry was impressed. “By Jove, Mrs. Daymer! It’s a rum go! But what are you going to do about it? What do the others think?”
“The others haven’t had any opportunity to exercise their thinking powers upon it,” Mrs. Daymer told him in a tone that implied that those powers were, in any case, of little value. “Mr. Blend has shown the cutting only to me, and I warned him to say nothing about it to anyone else for the present. He himself is not the practical type; he is only interested in this cutting as a specimen to be arranged in his scrap-book. He would not dream of taking any action. What I feel about it is this: it is too uncertain a clue to put in the hands of the police at present. It needs some subtlety of mind to grasp its significance. And then, of course, one cannot be sure, and one hesitates to make such an accusation against anyone without further grounds.”
“Yes, naturally. It’s not a pleasant implication. And even if the identity is established, I can’t see where we are. It wouldn’t be evidence of guilt in this crime—what? There seems nothing whatever to connect him with it.”
“We cannot tell as yet. I have always suspected that there might be secrets in Miss Pongleton’s past, and this may have some obscure connection with something of the kind. The very absence of obvious motive would give the murderer an assurance of safety in his horrible designs.”
“But what sort of motive?” enquired Gerry.
“Who knows? Blackmail, perhaps. But we shall see.”
“Her money goes to Basil—but of course there may be a later will which hasn’t been found yet. By Jove, there probably is. Nellie says she and her young man witnessed one last Wednesday.”
“Ah! You see!” triumphed Mrs. Daymer. “That as yet undiscovered will may reveal the motive.”
“Beryl—Miss Sanders—didn’t seem to think it really existed. But she’s not keen on it being found. She thinks—we all think—that the money should go to Basil, but she was afraid her aunt might leave it to her—Beryl—if Basil annoyed the old lady.”
At any other time Gerry Plasher would hardly have spoken his thoughts on the private affairs of the Pongleton and Sanders families in this unreticent way to a slight acquaintance. But the extraordinary circumstances which had deposited the gaunt Mrs. Daymer in the snug little seat of the Alvis which was generally occupied by Beryl made him forget all caution and babble on as if it were really Beryl at his side.
“This encourages me enormously,” declared Mrs. Daymer. “Now this is what I propose to do. The clue must be followed up and I mean to follow it up myself.”
“Mayn’t that get you into difficulties with the police—if you go following up clues instead of handing them over for the police to deal with?”
“We’ll not call it a clue—merely a curious coincidence which interests me as a student of human nature. If it becomes definite enough to provide a clue, then of course I shall inform the police at once. I propose to go to Coventry to-morrow, telling the people at the Frampton that I have to visit the Midlands for local colour in connection with my next book. You know, perhaps, Mr. Plasher, that I write?”
“Oh, rather! Jolly good story, that last one.…”
Mr. Plasher was saved from what might have been an embarrassing lack of detailed knowledge of Mrs. Daymer’s last book by her eagerness to explain her plan.
“Now, I don’t quite like to go alone. The murderer must be a dangerous man. Doubtless he feels secure at the moment, but if he should happen to become suspicious he would stick at nothing. That is his type—ruthless and unhesitating.”
“I don’t quite see why his suspicions should be aroused, but certainly it might be nasty if they were—if he is the murderer. Perhaps you’d better drop it, Mrs. Daymer—at least, not drop it entirely, but put it in the hands of the police.”
“No, Mr. Plasher; I cannot do that at this stage. But I must have a companion on my visit to Coventry. Someone reliable and with plenty of sense. That is why I have confided in you.”
Mr. Plasher was so astonished when the significance of this remark dawned on him that he made the car swerve alarmingly.
“You mean t’say—me?” he enquired.
“I do,” Mrs. Daymer told him decisively. “Will you come?”
“But, y’know, I don’t belong to what they call the ‘leisured classes’. Come to think of it, I don’t know who does. I’m junior partner in a firm of stockbrokers—Oundle, Gumble, and Oundle”—Mr. Plasher had not been long in this dignified position and was still proud of it. “And then there’s Beryl—Miss Sanders. Couldn’t very well pop off to Coventry—”
“The Midlands, please,” Mrs. Daymer corrected him.
“The Midlands, without telling her what I was up to— what?”
“No. I thought of that, and naturally I can’t suggest how you will explain matters to her, but I should think that would not be difficult. Mutual trust between two young people in your position …” Mrs. Daymer waved a wool-gloved hand airily.
“Of course Beryl would trust me, even if I had to say that I was off on important business and couldn’t explain it at the moment.”
The idea of the expedition was obviously taking root in Mr. Plasher’s mind.
“But what about the inquest to-morrow?” he asked. “I have to give evidence, y’know, about seeing the old lady on the stairs. They might arrest me after that, too! That’s torn it!”
“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Daymer firmly. “The inquest will only take a few minutes; probably they’ll adjourn it for further enquiries—including yours and mine in Coventry.”
“The Midlands!” Mr. Plasher reminded her. “But then there’s the firm. Well, I s’pose I could take a spot more time; have to be away in the morning for the inquest anyway. Dealing with some business affairs for Miss Sanders, perhaps. The boss has met her and Basil and he knows that Basil’s pretty—er—well, not exactly a business man, and that she has no father or brother. It might be managed. I say, Mrs. Daymer, it’s awfully decent of you to let me in on this. I mean, it’s a regular wow, doing a bit of detecting on our own—what?”
Gerry had really decided that he would go on this wild expedition, but he was a little startled to find himself arranging a rendezvous with Mrs. Daymer. A glance at the clock on the dashboard showed him that he would be due in ten minutes at the Sanders’ for tea. They were on the North Circular Road, and he drew in to the kerb and halted the car whilst they settled the final details and both noted them in their engagement diaries. Mrs. Daymer had looked up the trains to Coventry before she came out.
“Good idea!” he agreed, perhaps with too much enthusiasm, to her suggestion that they should travel by different trains—she by the nine o’clock, he at eleven-thirty. She delighted in making the affair as mysterious as possible.
“And we may be able to return the same evening,” she told him.
“May be!” exclaimed Gerry in alarm. “You don’t mean to say that I may have to spend a night—er…” He just stopped himself from saying “with you”, and finished instead with “away from Town”.
“I don’t think you need worry about that possibility,” Mrs. Daymer assured him. “Though I shall probably take some things, just in case—”
“Surely we can do it all in a day,” Gerry insisted. “I really don’t think I can stay longer. Might upset the police! Must think of their tender feelings, y’know!”
“If the police are watching you it might be risky,” Mrs. Daymer agreed, but with reluctance. “We don’t want them tracking us. You might observe some caution in going to the station.”
“It’ll be all right as long as I get back soon enough,” Gerry declared.
It was arranged, and Gerry dropped Mrs. Daymer at the top of FitzJohn’s Avenue and went on to Beverley House wondering just what he was to tell Beryl.
Chapter XII
Hunt The Pearls!
On Sunday morning Basil delayed hi
s start for Hampstead as long as he dared, hoping for a telephone call from Betty. True, he had told her that he would be setting off early, but, he thought to himself, Betty knows what my “early” is. At last a telephone call from his mother, to ask if he were “all right” and wasn’t he coming soon, made him decide that he could wait no longer.
He arrived at Beverley House, where Beryl Sanders lived with her mother, in an irritable and dissatisfied state, and the sight of Tuppy nosing restlessly round the sitting-room did nothing to soothe him. Quite unreasonably he felt as though the stout terrier were responsible for his own unsatisfactory position.
There was a good deal of talk about “poor Phemia’s things”, and decisions were made as to the disposal of them.
“I’m only thankful Phemia didn’t keep a cat; though it would have been just like her!” declared Mrs. Pongleton ambiguously. “The dog is quite enough; and why in the name of goodness did Phemia give him such a ridiculous name—Tuppy!”
Tuppy pricked his ears hopefully, but neither caresses nor biscuits followed.
“Didn’t you ever hear the reason, Aunt Susan?” cried Beryl. “Aunt Phemia believed that Tuppy was very valuable. I think she had him from someone in settlement of a small debt—and they bamboozled her, I expect. Anyway, she was afraid dog-thieves might be after him, so she called him Tuppence—Tuppy for short—to indicate that he wasn’t worth much and so deceive them. Poor Aunt Phemia!”
“Childish!” snorted Uncle James. “Poor Phemia never was any judge of dogs; she could always have had a good puppy from me for the asking.”
“I am so glad that Euphemia has left her pearls to you, Beryl dear,” Mrs. Pongleton remarked. “They will suit your fair skin. It’s not everyone who can wear pearls successfully—and I never had any to wear.”
“Quite ridiculous of my mother to leave those pearls to Phemia,” proclaimed Mr. Pongleton. “Of course she wouldn’t wear them, and they wouldn’t have suited her if she had done. They’d have looked better on you, my dear,” he suggested to his wife—“though doubtless you’d have been spilling them all over the place.”
“But then Beryl wouldn’t have had them now,” Mrs. Pongleton pointed out, ignoring the last part of her husband’s remarks, as she often found it better to do. “I daresay it’s all for the best—about the pearls, I mean.”
“And do you know,” enquired Mrs. Sanders—“they don’t know where those pearls are, so Mr. Stoggins says!”
Basil eyed his relatives anxiously. If only Betty had hurried up and telephoned to him before this!
“What exactly did Stoggins imply?” asked Mr. Pongleton dryly.
“I don’t suppose he meant that they are missing, did he, Mother?” said Beryl soothingly. She knew that Mrs. Sanders was fond of dramatizing a situation.
“They’re not found, so they must be missing!” Mrs. Sanders declared. “The police turned all her things upside down, you know, looking for wills. They had been told how she hid things all over the place.”
“Wouldn’t it be most natural not to find the pearls in any of the obvious places?” suggested Beryl. “Aunt Phemia’s things seldom were where you would expect them to be, and, after all, they haven’t really looked for the pearls, have they?” She looked enquiringly at Basil, but he avoided her eyes.
“Why yes, of course,” said his mother. “That will—in a drawer beneath her underclothes …well, really! And the police finding it there too!”
“That reminds me,” said Beryl. “When we fetched Tuppy and his basket just now we heard about the possibility of another will. The maid at the Frampton said that she and her young man, Bob Thurlow, witnessed one for Aunt Phemia on Wednesday.”
“That young man!” Mrs. Pongleton was shocked, as if the fact that Bob Thurlow had performed this service for Miss Pongleton increased the heinousness of the crime of which the good lady felt sure he was guilty. “But isn’t that the one they found?”
“Mr. Stoggins told me that the will found so strangely in Phemia’s drawer was made last April,” Mrs. Sanders exclaimed. “And besides, it was witnessed by two people who were then staying at the Frampton and have since left—quite a nice couple called Briggs.”
“What I think is that Aunt Phemia made one on Wednesday and tore it up the next day, having thought better of it,” said Beryl firmly.
“That’s very likely,” Basil suggested eagerly. “She did that once in the summer. I saw her tear it up.”
“But why should Phemia keep making wills in that undisciplined way?” enquired Mr. Pongleton severely.
“I s’pose she’d have a bright idea about some little detail,” said Basil vaguely. “But next day it wouldn’t seem so bright. Haven’t you found that ideas are like that, Aunt Adela?”
Mrs. Sanders seemed uncertain that her ideas were so apt to lose brilliance in a night.
“The two wills which Mr. Stoggins has now are practically the same, aren’t they?” asked Mrs. Pongleton.
“Oh yes, except for details,” agreed Mrs. Sanders. She would not have been so indelicate as to point out that the main difference was the provision made for Tuppy in the later will, which provision, she suspected shrewdly, was not without its bearing on Mr. Pongleton’s decision to take charge of the dog.
“I don’t think we need worry about the possibility of a later will,” said Beryl. “I’m not sure whether Nellie—the maid—has said anything about it to the police, but she sounded as if she hadn’t thought of it until the moment when she mentioned it to Mrs. Bliss and me at the Frampton just now. If it doesn’t turn up there’s no need to search for it, because it probably doesn’t exist now.”
The gong sounded for lunch, and to Basil’s relief the conversation turned to such matters as the price of chickens in London and the excellence of Yorkshire home-baked bread.
It was not until the arrival of Gerry Plasher for tea that Betty’s note was discovered in the letter-box, where it had been resting all this time unnoticed.
Basil snatched it a little too eagerly from the maid—though this was not noticed by anyone except his mother, Beryl having for a moment relaxed the careful watch she was keeping on her cousin, in order to greet Gerry. Basil read the letter quickly and frowned over it. He read it again, more slowly, and it began to acquire significance. Inevitably he looked round the room for Tuppy’s basket, and his mother caught his eye.
“I hope it’s no bad news, Basil?” This, she thought, was a tactful way of asking what was in the letter and who wrote it. Her remark attracted the attention of the others, who had been engaged in conversation with Gerry.
“No, no,” muttered Basil with some annoyance. “Only about”—he turned to the opening paragraphs; there had been some quite innocuous remark there—“about a meeting with a friend. All my arrangements have been upset, of course, and I can’t plan anything properly.”
“You never were very good at plans, Basil dear,” his mother pointed out. “But now it seems to me quite simple. Of course all your engagements must be cancelled for the next week or two. All your friends will understand.”
“But business engagements can’t be cancelled like that, Mother. You don’t realize—”
“I always have thought that these artistic people that you go about with so much are a little lacking in understanding of what is suitable,” his mother complained. “That man you brought up to Steyton once—his shirts so open at the neck…I couldn’t get used to it at all.”
Basil put the letter away…What puzzled him was why Betty should, as it were, send the pearls back to him. Was she playing a mean trick on him? Surely not! But what did she mean him to do? It might look queer if he showed now that he knew the pearls were there. Why couldn’t she have let him know sooner?
Tea provided a diversion. Mrs. Sanders had felt that elaborate cakes were somehow not quite suitable for a family reunion in such tragic circumstances; a good fruit ca
ke and some savoury sandwiches had been provided as more fitting. Gerry Plasher turned the conversation to the portrait which Peter Kutuzov was to paint.
“Beryl will wear her aunt’s pearls,” Mrs. Pongleton suggested. “And white, I think, Beryl? You look well in white. I hope this Russian artist is really competent. One never can tell with the Russians. Now, if Sir John Lavery could have done it…You mustn’t have Beryl made to look a fright, Basil dear.”
“Not even Peter could manage that,” Gerry assured them cheerfully. “But seriously, Mrs. Pongleton, Peter’s very good—not one of those chaps who puts your eyes in one corner of the picture and your ears in the opposite one. He’s got a good idea for Beryl’s picture—all in pale tones with a very pale blue sky behind, not so blue as her eyes.”
“I should have thought a nice rich blue velvet curtain…” put in Mrs. Pongleton.
“I know you’ll like it when it’s done,” Gerry assured her.
“And do you know, Gerry, the pearls are missing?” said Mrs. Sanders dramatically.
“Oh, Mother, don’t exaggerate,” Beryl protested. “They’re not really missing. It’s only that Mr. Stoggins doesn’t know where they are. They are sure to turn up to-morrow when you go through Aunt Phemia’s things—don’t you think so, Basil?” Beryl’s blue eyes gazed straight into Basil’s grey ones, and there seemed to be some special significance in her words.
“Rather!” Basil agreed. “Now I wonder where she would have put them? Under the carpet was a favourite hiding-place for her things, but that would hardly do for pearls.” He looked round the room, and his eyes lighted on Tuppy, now snugly settled in his basket at one side of the fireplace.
“Didn’t she sometimes hang things up behind the pictures?” Beryl asked.
Basil shot an anxious glance at her and intercepted a look which seemed to imply: I know something, and I’m puzzled, but of course I won’t give you away. To hide his embarrassment he whistled to Tuppy, who stirred sluggishly and then picked up the little blue cushion in his mouth, carried it to Basil’s feet, and deposited it there.
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