The Silk Stocking Murders
Page 24
“Putting myself in his place, then, I asked myself how I could cause that girl to die exactly three-quarters of an hour after I was safely out of the way. That puzzled me for some time, till I began to wonder—wasn’t there some method by which, having made her unconscious, I could place her in such a physical position that the very act of regaining consciousness would make her bring about her own death? To have thought of that question was the great step; the answer soon came. Yes, by stunning her with some yielding instrument on the principle of the sandbag by means of a blow hard enough to keep her unconscious for an hour or so without cracking her skull. That would leave no bruise, you see, and would be quite undiscoverable at a post-mortem unless the actual brain were examined, which would be highly unlikely. I needn’t explain to you experts, of course, that a blow with an instrument of that nature stuns by bruising the brain which, being a little loose inside the skull, is thrown violently against the bone on the farther side. I didn’t actually hit on the idea of hard rubber as the material then, but of course when Miss Manners explained to me later the short glimpse she had caught of the weapon which stunned her, I realised what it must be.
“Well, having stunned her in that way, with a blow sufficiently forcible to keep her unconscious for about an hour, the next thing he would do, I imagined, would be to prop her on the back of a chair, leaning back and balanced against an open door, with the stocking already in position round her neck and fastened to the hook, and the chair tilted in such a way that the slightest movement would destroy the balance of the whole erection. The door would then swing to, you see, the chair on whose back she was half-sitting, half-lying, would follow it, sinking gradually to the floor as the door closed, and the girl would be left hanging. And the particular beauty of the plan is that the first movement made by a person who has been knocked out is a rolling of the head, which would effect nothing, but the second is a sort of stretching movement of the legs and the body. I’ve been knocked out myself more than once, and I know. The latter movement, of course, would cause her feet to press on the seat of the chair, which would at once push herself, and the door, away from it. The next impulse, by the way, is to be sick, but the immediate strangulation would prevent that.”
“And you worked all that out just from those dints in her legs, Mr. Sheringham?” asked Superintendent Green, with real respect at last.
“More or less,” said Roger proudly. “Together with the particular chair he used, with a very high back, and the fact that she was not wearing her wrapper; if he had gone to the trouble of removing that from her it must have been with some particular reason, and the only reason I could see was that it was getting in the way of whatever he wanted to do with her. And what is more, Superintendent and Chief Inspector both, having worked it out I went round to the flat to examine the door for the two tiny dints which the knobs on either side of the chair-back should have made in the paint-work, and the infinitesimal scratches they ought to have left as they slithered down to the floor. And there I found them.”
“Well,” said the Superintendent, nobly burning all his boats, “that’s as clever a piece of reasoning as ever I heard.”
“Thank you,” said Roger. “And all by the inductive method, which you people don’t use. By the way, one other thing had occurred to me. A limp body is a difficult thing to balance like that, and I thought he would anticipate some difficulty in preventing the door from shutting prematurely. What, in that case, would be better than a nut, wedged in between the frame and the door? It would hold the balance, you see, and yet crack when the extra pressure was applied. And there, in the dust at the bottom, I found the fragments of a walnut-shell.”
“Well, I’ll be blowed!” quoth Chief Inspector Moresby.
Expanding like a flower before the warmth of these official compliments, Roger continued. “And it was the wrapper, I should add, which told me that Pleydell’s first action on getting inside the flat was to tell her the exciting news connected with Newsome, and that he struck her down as soon as she’d hung up the telephone receiver. That was a simple deduction from what Miss Deeping had to say about the habits of her friend concerning visitors and wrappers.
“Well, that was that. All the murderer had to do then was to put on his disguise again and walk out, and his alibi was established by the porter. At first, when I began to realise that the solicitor was our man, I had thought that, knowing the habits of the porter, he had sneaked back as soon as the latter had gone to lunch, but I was right in thinking I had made a mistake there and the man wanted not only the porter’s negative evidence, but somebody else’s positive testimony as well. I provided the latter for him, by paying for his lunch. And when Newsome rang the bell later, according to plan, the girl was still alive inside. Could anything have been neater? And the case against Newsome after that was nothing less than glaring, as Pleydell knew it would be.
“And that brings us to the attack on Miss Manners yesterday. Pleydell would have been better advised to forgo that; it gave him away at last. And the curious thing is that, lost to everything else as the girl lay helplessly at his mercy, he not only forgot to give the ten-minute signal himself, as of course he intended, but actually stepped on his own alarm-bell! Could anything be more ironical? What a perfect mixture of superhuman cunning and complete idiocy. Yes, that last attempt was a real madman’s effort. He realised, of course, as soon as he’d done it, and darted out to hide on the lower landing till I had fled past; but by that time he’d spoilt his own game.
“At first I was hopelessly at sea. I’d never expected for a moment to get any results with such a poor little trap for such a very clever spider. I began by thinking that it must be one of our five suspects, and wondered if it really could be Beverley, as Miss Manners had told me the same morning.
“This attack cleared up certain points on which I had been still doubtful, and confirmed others. It definitely settled the question of the weapon, and explained the absence of any struggle, except in Lady Ursula’s case; it also showed that I had been wrong in my first reconstruction, regarding the scarf, but that did not help much. Then it occurred to me that there might be a double object in this case, not only to eliminate Miss Manners, but also to throw still further suspicion on Newsome; for I was convinced by this time that somebody was deliberately trying to do just that thing, and with a malicious vindictiveness that argued a substantial motive. Did that give me a pointer? Who had anything against Newsome? So far as I could see, only Pleydell; and as I told you, I laughed at myself.
“Then I thought: why should anyone want to eliminate Miss Manners? Even if the existence of our trio of inquiry were known, she was the least important member of it. Why not eliminate Pleydell or myself? Could there possibly be any reason for her elimination beyond her membership of our trio? Because it was clear that this was not a haphazard attack (or so I thought); there was some hidden reason for it. And at once I remembered a conversation she had had with me that same morning.
“Briefly, she had suggested then a new line of inquiry: to put out feelers as to whether a man, not answering to Newsome’s description but wearing a beard and gold-rimmed glasses, had been seen in the neighbourhood of Miss Mack-lane’s studio after the crime. That was significant, you see; and she had already arrived at the independent conclusion that the bearded man at Pelham Mansions was the real murderer, though she thought he was Arnold Beverley and I had an open mind. But what now occurred to me as in the highest degree interesting was that she had mentioned this to Pleydell earlier in the morning and he had as good as asked her not to say anything about it to me, and had got her to agree that it would be fun to follow it up behind my back. You see? There was evidently something in it, and he didn’t want it investigated. Moreover, he had heard her say the day before that she had a new idea and that we had been blind, and she had promised to tell me after tea the next day. If Pleydell were the murderer, I thought, that would give him a real motive for getting rid of her before she had told me anything.
“And there were hundreds of other little things of the same kind, not only in that case, but in all the others. In fact, once I had begun to see seriously whether Pleydell wouldn’t fit, he fitted everywhere. I spent an interesting ten minutes soothing him by pretending to agree about Newsome and doing my utmost to get the girls out of his clutches. I told him I was going to take them to the Piccadilly Palace (where doubtless he would have followed and attacked Miss Manners again in the middle of the night), but when we got there I told the others to wait in the taxi while I booked their rooms; then I ran inside, waited a minute, and ran out to tell them that the place was full. I didn’t want them to suspect Pleydell, you see, because I wasn’t sure; but I did want to get those two safe inside the Albany for the night.
“Well, if I wasn’t sure before dinner, I was after. Apart from the few but very significant things I found out from Newsome and on the telephone, I got a report I’d asked for about the other inhabitants of Pelham Mansions. One of the girls there was reputed to be kept by Pleydell. That, to my mind, clinched it.
“Then I was up against the problem of proving it. And there was no real proof. At least, none that could not quite easily be explained away. I was morally convinced, but what, as Moresby says, is the good of that? And as for attempting to assemble any convincing proofs within eighteen hours, to prevent you people from arresting Newsome—well, I ask you! So I thought of the usual French method of reconstructing the crime and testing the suspect’s reactions, and wondered whether anything could be done in that line. And the more I thought of it the more I was sure not only that it was the only possible way but that some sort of reaction might be confidently expected—if we made the scene convincing and horrible enough.
“So I hit on that quite impossible plan, enlisted plucky little Miss Manners (to whom, and that undeserving Jerry Newsome who’s going to get her, I drain this tankard), cajoled Scotland Yard into sitting through the performance, forced myself through quite the most unpleasant ten minutes of my life—and there we are. Oh, and of course I couldn’t warn Pleydell, even by innuendo, what the real object of the mummery was, and so I had to spin that yarn about a representative gathering of citizens, and all that nonsense. That’s all.
“But I do wish Pleydell hadn’t gone quite mad at the end. I should like to have had a chance to probe into his mind a little further first. His psychology, of course, is absorbing. I don’t suppose for a moment that he considered, himself a murderer, you know. He killed, but he didn’t murder; his mind, when the action was applied to himself, is sure to have conceived some subtle differentiation. And he really had rather a nice sense of humour, you know, with it all. He must have been hugging himself all this time, not only looking on at the futile hunt for himself; but even assisting in it. How his tongue must have been in his cheek, when I think of some of the things he’d said to me. Well, well, it’s a pity that quite the most interesting brain that any of us is likely to meet has turned out to be a mad one; but I suppose one can’t have everything. And that really does appear to be all.” The remaining contents of the tankard descended the way of all good beer. “Facilis descensus taverni,” said Roger, smacking his lips.
He looked round at the three thoughtful faces and grinned widely. He was feeling rather more pleased with Roger Sheringham than ever before, and he wanted a victim. Moresby was the selection. Roger felt he owed Moresby just what that Chief Inspector was going to get.
He rose and clapped him happily on the shoulder. “Do you know what’s the matter with you real detectives at Scotland Yard, Moresby?” he asked kindly. “You don’t read enough of those detective stories.”
THE END