Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery

by Anthony Berkeley

  The doctor’s house was over half a mile distant, and with the help of an intermittent jogtrot Roger managed to cover the ground to it in less than five minutes. As the inspector had predicted, the doctor had not yet started out on his rounds and, his surgery being just over, Roger was able to see him at once. Somewhat breathlessly he stated his business; the doctor, a tall, angular man with pince-nez on a pointed nose, asked a few pertinent questions and hastily stuffed some things into a small leather bag, and they set off together on foot, Dr Young apologising briefly for not being able to offer a seat in his car, which was not yet ready for its morning’s work.

  They walked briskly, in spite of the growing heat of the day, but not too briskly for Roger to volunteer the answers to various questions which the doctor might have asked but didn’t.

  Fortunately their route took them past the house of the local constable, which Dr Young was able to point out, and the latter waited while Roger routed out its occupant and told him to get into tunic and helmet and follow on as quickly as he could. The constable’s large red jaw dropped ludicrously as he assimilated Roger’s terse communication.

  Let into the house by the now white-faced and speechless landlady, they hurried down the passage and into the sitting-room. With a nod to the inspector the doctor stood for a moment, allowing his trained eye to take in and photograph on his brain every detail of the dead man’s attitude. Then he approached to make a closer and more detailed examination, scrutinising the surface of the skin and tilting back the head to obtain a clear view of the face.

  “No distortion,” he murmured, half to himself and half to the inspector. “No convulsions before death.” He lifted an eyelid with his thumb and peered into the eye. “Pupils not contracted,” he announced, and went on with methodical care to examine the dead man’s tongue.

  Roger watched the rather gruesome business with profound interest. He had already formed a tentative theory to account for the man’s death, and was anxiously awaiting some confirmation of it from the doctor’s lips. In the passage outside the constable signalled his arrival by blowing his nose importantly.

  The doctor straightened up and adjusted his pince-nez, turning to the inspector. “You’ve got the case in hand?” he remarked. “Inspector Moresby, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, sir,” said the inspector, economically answering both questions at once.

  “Yes, I’ve heard about you, of course. Gossip soon travels in a place like this, and the doctor’s always one of the first to hear it. Well, it seems you’re going to have a second case to look after, Inspector.”

  “Ah!” said the inspector.

  The doctor indicated the body with a careless gesture. “Know anything about him?”

  “Very little,” the inspector replied untruthfully. “I’d got my eye on him, though,” he admitted.

  “Any reason to suspect suicide?” asked the doctor curtly.

  “Well – no reason to expect it, doctor,” returned the inspector with some care. “No, certainly not.”

  “Um!” The doctor removed his pince-nez and began to polish them with his handkerchief. “You were on your way to arrest him, I understand?”

  “Somebody seems to have been talking,” the inspector observed, and grinned openly at Roger’s guilty blush.

  “I mean,” amplified the doctor, “there may be some connection.”

  “You think it’s poison, then?” enquired the inspector genially.

  The doctor frowned. “I can’t possibly say that yet, till I’ve examined the body. At present I see no marks of violence. I’d like to get him onto his bed; will you give me a hand?”

  Between them they carried the slight figure without difficulty upstairs and into a room which the stout landlady, fluttering round them like a corpulent hen on the landing, indicated as the dead man’s bedroom. The doctor began to undress the body, the inspector helping him, and Roger, for once feeling himself in the way, retired to the sitting-room downstairs to await their verdict.

  On the floor by the chair in which the dead man had been sitting lay his pipe, fallen no doubt from his nerveless hand. Roger was about to pick it up with aimless curiosity, when he remembered that nothing should be handled except by the official police. He sat down on a hard horsehair sofa of uninviting aspect and began to think furiously.

  At the first shock this unexpected death had seemed completely to upset his carefully worked out theory, the success of which had seemed last night to be a foregone conclusion; but during his hurried mission to the doctor even this had fallen into its place in the scheme. Long before the word suicide had been mentioned at all Roger had arrived at the same conclusion. This explanation, he had realised, so far from upsetting the theory, comfortably confirmed it. Meadows must have got wind of the fact that the net was being drawn round him, and had taken in desperation the only way out. And how had he thus got wind? Even though he was alone, Roger wriggled a trifle guiltily.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that Roger had betrayed the inspector’s confidence. It would be no exaggeration at all to say, putting it on its mildest possible terms, that he had been indiscreet. Actually in touch over the telephone with the editor of the Courier (that great man) himself, he had let slip something more than the demure “important developments are expected at any minute” of his official report; he had, in fact, so far given way to his temperamental volubility as to hint that the important developments were due entirely to the Courier’s own special correspondent and his remarkable acumen, the said correspondent having unearthed in the neighbourhood, by a cunning and perspicacity far exceeding that of his official colleague and rival, the presence of a notorious criminal whose life had been discovered to be bound up with that of the deceased, who had ample motive for compassing her death, and who was actually going to be arrested, though not ostensibly on this account, the very next day – all of which had duly appeared, in a little laudatory article upon the special correspondent, as a preface to his own article that morning. It is true that Roger had imagined himself to be speaking in the strictest confidence, but he had certainly erred in overestimating a newsman’s sense of personal honour where his paper’s interests are concerned.

  He glanced across at the Courier which had been taken from the dead man’s knees and wriggled again. Reading that little paragraph, Meadows could hardly fail to realise that his game was up; nobody else perhaps could see the personal application, but to the man concerned it must have been as clear as daylight. Roger ruefully anticipated a bad quarter of an hour with the inspector. However leniently the latter might be disposed to treat the slip and however readily he might accept Roger’s own explanation, this must mean the end of even such meagre confidences as he had been cajoled into bestowing.

  Roger began to compose a letter to the editor of the Courier in which he purposed to acquaint that great man with the precise and unvarnished state of his feelings toward him.

  He was still in the middle of its vitriolic sentences when the inspector and the doctor reappeared.

  “Yes,” the former was saying, “I’ll arrange all that with the Coroner, doctor. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning, the inquest (I don’t see that we can put it much earlier than that) so you’ll be able to get going by eleven.”

  “Mr Simpson – the Coroner – I’m afraid you’ll find him rather a fussy little man,” said the doctor doubtfully. “Very full of his own dignity and importance.”

  “Oh, I won’t tread on his toes,” the inspector laughed. “I’m used to fussy coroners, I can tell you. I promise you he’ll call the inquest for ten all right, when I’ve done with him. And you’ll get in touch with the Sandsea man right away?”

  The doctor nodded. “Yes, but of course the Coroner will have to confirm it.”

  “I’ll see he does that,” returned the inspector confidently. “Dear me, look like having a busy day in front of me, don’t I? And then there’s all these things in here to seal up and send to Sir Henry Griffen for analysis. Bother the
Rev. Samuel Meadows! What did he want to go and give me all this trouble for?”

  “It is suicide, then?” eagerly put in Roger, who had been waiting with impatience during this exchange for an opportunity of learning what had been discovered. “He did take poison?”

  Dr Young looked disapproving before this leading question. “Really, it’s quite impossible to say yet; we must look to the post-mortem to establish the cause of death. There are no signs of apoplexy, it’s true, but he may have had a bad heart. It’s impossible to say anything definitely yet.”

  “You’ll have to wait for the adjourned inquest for all that, Mr Sheringham, sir,” said the inspector reprovingly, though his eyes twinkled. “Be careful what you say to this gentleman,” he added to the doctor. “He’s a pressman. They’re all unscrupulous, but he’s worse than most.”

  “Yes,” said Roger, considerably relieved to find that the other was disposed to treat his blunder so jocularly. “Yes, I’ve got to grovel to you, Inspector, I know. I’ve got a perfectly good explanation, but I know I don’t deserve to be forgiven. Say when you’ve got a spare quarter of an hour today, and I’ll come and grovel ad lib.” He turned to the doctor. “Then those are the only three possibilities – apoplexy, heart or poison?”

  “So far as one can say,” agreed the doctor guardedly.

  “And you’ve no idea at all what poison it is?”

  “I’ve no idea that it is even poison at all.”

  Roger eyed his interlocutor sadly. There was such a lot of possible information to be obtained, and apparently so little probability of obtaining it. For the life of him he did not know what to ask next.

  “Well, doctor, you’ll be wanting to get along now, I suppose,” the inspector broke in on this dilemma. “And Mr Sheringham, I’m afraid I shall have to turn you out of here. This room’s got to be kept locked from now on, and nobody allowed in except under orders from me.”

  “Right-ho, Inspector,” Roger acquiesced. “And of course all these breakfast things and so on will have to be analysed, if they do find poison in the body, won’t they? By the way, there’s his pipe on the floor there; he may have been smoking it just before he died. Well, doctor, if we’re to be turned out, I’ll stroll along part of the way with you.”

  The doctor managed to conceal his joy at the prospect.

  Inspector Moresby watched them go with his twinkle in full action. His obvious surmise was not amiss. Roger obtained some excellent exercise, but nothing else. For half a mile he walked by the doctor’s side, pumping busily; but either the well of his companion’s information had run dry or else the pumping machinery was out of gear. In either case, truth remained coyly in her fastness and none of Roger’s strenuous efforts succeeded in bringing her to the surface.

  Returning disconsolate to the inn, however, he had a pleasant surprise in finding Anthony unexpectedly in attendance. For the next hour or two he was able to discourse, on the farthest unsubmerged rock, to a thrilled audience of one to his heart’s content.

  chapter twenty

  Poisons and Pipes

  Roger did not see the inspector again that day till supper, when he was obviously tired out and disinclined to talk. He referred in terms of gentle sarcasm to Roger’s breach of trust, though quite without heat, his attitude being one rather of disillusionment than anger; one gathered that the person he really blamed for the business was himself, for being such a consummate idiot as to trust a journalist. He listened to Roger’s explanation and apologies and accepted the latter, but retaliated, as the culprit had foreseen, by refusing to utter a single word about the case.

  The inquest was duly opened the following morning, but though Roger attended in a spirit of pious hope nothing of the least importance transpired. Twelve solemn rustics viewed the body and then sat perspiring in the village schoolroom, and that was practically all that happened. Almost the only witness was the stout landlady, who was able to give evidence of identity and who also had been the last person to see the deceased alive. She agreed, in the time-hallowed formula, that he had then seemed in his usual health and spirits, and added, with more originality, that had he been there when she heard of his death the Coroner could have knocked her down with a feather. She was going on to add a good deal more, but was held with a testy hand.

  Inspector Moresby deposed to finding the body, and Roger, somewhat to his surprise, was called to give corroborative evidence. As to who the dead man really was, the inspector preserved a strict silence; and whether the Coroner had been taken into the secret or not, the court was apparently content to accept the Rev. Meadows as a chance visitor to Ludmouth on a prolonged stay and made no inquiry into his antecedents. The whole proceedings had not lasted more than a quarter of an hour when, Dr Young being called and stating his inability to give the cause of death, the enquiry was adjourned for this to be ascertained and the Coroner formally ordered a post-mortem to be made.

  Naturally the news of this second death increased the public interest in the Ludmouth Mystery, as it was now generally called, and in spite of Inspector Moresby’s careful reticence popular imagination was not slow to link the two tragedies together. Newspapers which had hitherto paid little attention to the affair made haste to send down their own representatives, and Roger had cause half a dozen times a day to congratulate himself on his foresight in preventing all other intruders from finding foothold in the Crown. To all enquirers the landlord, that mountainous man, presented an oxlike front of stolid imperturbability: they couldn’t have a room, for why? there wasn’t one, that was why. Even offers of double or treble the market price failed to move him. He seemed to have conceived a bovine affection for Roger (opposites, it has already been said, do sometimes make for a male friendship), and followed out his guest’s wishes to the letter, bewildered but faithful. By way of some return Roger felt compelled to drink as much beer as he could possibly contain.

  Thereafter matters progressed for the next ten days or so, inasmuch as the actual case was concerned, not at all. Indeed so far as Roger could see the whole thing was over, bar the shouting. The finding of poison of some description in the body and the subsequent verdict (after Inspector Moresby had unfolded the real story) of suicide during temporary insanity was practically a foregone conclusion. Roger’s articles in the Courier grew shorter and shorter as he found it increasingly difficult to find anything new to say, and he would have given them up altogether had the editor not made it a personal favour that he should carry them up to the adjourned inquest in order to help the paper as much as possible over the slack season. And all the time Inspector Moresby gave a really first-class imitation of a sphinx, so far as any unusual happenings in Ludmouth were concerned.

  During these days Roger converted for the most part what had been chiefly a duet during the proceeding week, into a trio. The original members made no audible protest, but whatever their real feelings on the point Roger saw no reason why, having brought Anthony for the express purpose of keeping him company, he should be callously abandoned to loneliness just because his susceptible cousin’s fancy in companionship happened to have strayed temporarily elsewhere – or so at any rate he phrased it to himself; for after all, one could hardly expect Roger to admit, even privately, to jealousy of a young man nearly a dozen years his junior. At other times he told himself seriously that it was no less than his duty to break up his cousin’s tête-à-têtes with a young woman of (when all was said and done) distinctly doubtful origin and antecedents; it might be an awkward thing, Roger pointed out earnestly to himself, were Anthony to become in any way involved; his mother would have a good deal to say about it, and she would certainly say it, and forcibly, to him. Roger continued to martyr himself to duty.

  In the course of his devotion to this stern mistress, he observed Margaret closely. Now that she had been definitely cleared of the horrible suspicion of causing her cousin’s death, her demeanour had altered perceptibly. The iron self-control which she must have been exerting during that week was relaxed,
and signs of a corresponding reaction were not infrequent. At one moment she would be more self-reliant than she had appeared before, and less dependent upon their strength; at another she would laugh almost hysterically and propose the maddest escapades on the spur of the moment. Anthony she kept continually upon tenterhooks of bewilderment, treating him one day as if she were seriously in love with him and the next as if he bored her beyond words.

  Roger was convinced that there was really nothing of the coquette in her, that she was as straightforward and unguileful as he could wish a girl to be, so that he found himself at times seriously perturbed about her. The place, he felt sure, exercised a distressing effect upon her, and he continued to urge her to leave it, if only for a temporary holiday. Her manner of receiving these suggestions was on a par with the rest of her behaviour: one day she would say shortly that it was quite impossible for the moment, that she must stay and look after George till everything had quite blown over; on another she would jump eagerly at the idea and begin to discuss, quite seriously, the feasibility of flying over to Paris and embarking on a hectic European tour the very next day – yet when it came to the point of a final decision it was always the first mood which prevailed with her. In some vague way Roger felt a certain responsibility for her, and it worried him more than he would have cared to admit.

  Inspector Moresby evidently also felt that the case was only marking time during these days, pending definite confirmation of the existence of poison in the body from Sir Henry Griffen, the Home Office analyst, for he took the opportunity of going over to Sandsea for a couple of days to resume his interrupted holiday with his wife and family. It seemed as if he was anxious not to lose touch with Ludmouth, however, for he only took two days when he might have taken five, and was back again at the inn considerably before Roger expected him.