“That’s supposing,” said Inspector Lamb in a particularly stolid voice.
“I said so, didn’t I? More coming. Suppose she goes round the house the way she did when she saw Cathy O’Hara—she leaned in at the window and talked to her, you know. Well, we know that window was open on Monday evening. She looks in and sees that Dale is alone. She sees too that the glass door to the terrace is ajar, and she goes round there and walks in. After that—anything. Cora rather drunk and possibly quite abusive. Dale, who had just been touched for fifty pounds, certainly very angry. He may have got out the pistol to frighten her and have put it down on the table. She may have snatched it. He wouldn’t be really on his guard with a woman—and a woman who had been his wife. No one will ever know just the way it went—if it went that way. In the end he’s not taking any more. He goes to ring the bell, and she shoots him as he turns.”
Lamb pursed his lips.
“Too much imagination—that’s your trouble,” he said. “If she came here to get those fifty-pound notes, why did she go away without them?”
“Because she was scared out of her life. She’d lost control and killed him. The only thought she’d have in the world would be to get away before anyone came—get rid of the revolver and run. And if we find the nice young man who gave her that lift, I think we’ll find it was nearer seven than six when he picked her up. Meanwhile I’d like to know whether they’ve been able to dig up anything about her record at the Yard.”
Lamb nodded.
“There was a call just now.”
“Well, have they got anything?” A keen look had displaced Frank Abbott’s usual air of languor.
“Depends on what you call anything,” said Inspector Lamb.
“What was it?”
Lamb regarded him composedly.
“All worked up about this, aren’t you—set on making out it was this Cora de Lisle because young Carrick’s one of your own sort and you like his girl.”
Frank Abbott whitened.
“You haven’t got any right to say that, Inspector.”
Lamb sat back, filling his chair.
“Well, I’m saying it all the same, my lad—and something else that you can put to it and keep. You can’t go looking for a criminal and say, ‘This is a chap I like, so he didn’t do it and I’ve got to find someone else’, or. ‘This chap turns my insides, so he’ll do’. And no need to look at me like that, young Abbott. When I’ve got something to say I’m going to say it. See? What we’re looking for every time is facts—lots of potty little facts that you wouldn’t give a damn for if you took them one by one, but when you add them up they make something. You can’t shirk facts, and you can’t bend them. You’ve got to take ’em as they come and see what they add up to. Perhaps it’s the answer you’d like it to be, and perhaps it isn’t. That’s not my business nor yours. And here’s a little fact about Miss Cora de Lisle. She was in a bit of trouble two years ago over a shooting act at the Old George at Hoxton. There was another girl, and she got hurt. It wasn’t serious, and there wasn’t enough evidence to show that it wasn’t just the sort of accident that does happen once in a way in these turns, but it seems there had been a quarrel, and if Miss de Lisle wasn’t drunk she was as near it as makes no matter, and the girl who was hurt went about saying some pretty nasty things. There’s your fact, Frank, and you can put it away with the others.”
“Thank you, sir.” Face and voice were both respectfully non-committal.
Lamb looked at him pretty straight and said,
“I wonder. But you will some day, if you don’t now. Now here’s a job for you. Go down to the Little House and measure the women’s shoes. We haven’t fixed anyone up with that footprint yet. Pity you couldn’t get one of Cora de Lisle’s whilst you were about it.”
Frank Abbott half closed his eyes and called up the picture of an impatient foot in a shabby tinsel shoe.
“Long—narrow—a good deal arched—about nine inches—I’d say she took a five.”
“And what would you guess Miss Lenox?”
“Oh, hers will be a five. Foot a bit wider than the other, but of course she was wearing a country shoe, and Cora had on a gimcrack evening slipper.”
“When she came here on Thursday morning she had on a pair of old black strap shoes, a good deal trodden over—Miss O’Hara’s description, and she doesn’t miss much, I should say. Her own feet are too small,” he added hastily.
“Unless she was wearing Susan’s shoes.”
Lamb turned his shoulder.
“Get along down to it! And be on the look out for any sign of clay on a shoe. There’s clay where that puddle is—that’s why it holds the wet—and I haven’t noticed it anywhere else about the place. To my mind, whoever made the foot-mark had been into that puddle, so you keep a bright look out for traces of clay.”
CHAPTER XXIX
The bells of the Little House rang in the kitchen. Mrs. Green looked over her shoulder and saw that it was the front door bell which had just rung. She looked at Susan, who was mixing batter, and Susan nodded.
“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Green——”
Mrs. Green said, “Well, I’ve just about finished that floor,” and got up. She wiped her hands on her apron and walked through the dining-room and hall at a leisurely pace, humming Jerusalem the Golden as she went.
The sight of the elegant young man on the doorstep gave her what she afterwards described to Lily as a turn. “‘Is Miss Lenox at home?’ that’s what he said, and, ‘Can I see her? I’m Detective Sergeant Abbott’. As if I didn’t know that, with you describing him to me, let alone me seeing him with my own eyes coming out of the Crown and Magpie after he’d been talking to Mr. Pipe. So I left him in the hall, which is good enough for detectives whether they’re got up to look like gentry or not, and went and told Miss Susan. And she put her batter to the one side, which if it was me I wouldn’t have minded keeping him waiting a bit, and washed her hands under the tap and out she went to him. And what do you suppose he wanted? Well there, I’d better tell you, for you’d never guess—every blessed pair of shoes in the house. And the way he looked them over, if he’d taken a magnifying glass to them I wouldn’t have been surprised.”
Susan, accompanying Frank Abbott on his round of inspection, began by wondering what he could possibly want with their shoes, and ended with the conviction that the answer was a very frightening one. She met his first demand with incredulity.
“You want to see our shoes?”
“If you don’t mind, Miss Lenox.”
Of course this was the merest form, because, however much she minded, it would make no difference to this polite and inexorable young man.
She took him upstairs to Cathy’s room first. Cathy had gone down to the village, so there would be one pair of shoes unaccounted for, but when he had looked at the others, from the little silver slippers to the brogues which looked as if they had been made for a child, Detective Sergeant Abbott didn’t seem to think it mattered about the missing pair.
“Your cousin has a very small foot. I suppose she takes a four.”
“A small four. These”—Susan touched the silver slippers—“these are only three and a half.”
He appeared to lose interest after that, and she took him along the passage to Mrs. O’Hara’s door, where she knocked.
Mrs. O’Hara said “Come in” in her plaintive voice, and Susan opened the door.
Frank Abbott, not at all embarrassed, entered a bedroom which contained more furniture than he could have believed possible. The room was of a fair size, running through the house from front to back, but the suite of mahogany furniture imported from King’s Bourne stood around the walls in gloomy, towering masses and reduced the floor space to a minimum. There was a four-poster bed with a canopy. There was a vast wardrobe. There were chests of drawers, a double wash-stand with a marble top, two bedside tables, a large dressing-table, a pier glass, and various chairs. An elderly but still handsome carpet covered the floor and
disappeared beneath the furniture. There was no colour-scheme. The curtains, of a nondescript brocade, were quite unrelated to the bed furnishings, which were of an uninteresting blue, or to the carpet, which was passing from its original crimson and green to a dull rose and grey.
Mrs. O’Hara, in a mauve dressing-gown, occupied a massive easy chair upholstered in one of those Victorian tapestries which were designed not to show the dirt. After some forty years of wear the stuff was still intact, but all traces of pattern were now submerged in a general olive gloom. It had not occurred to the generation which had evolved all this solid, deep-toned mahogany, or to Mrs. O’Hara who had inherited it, that its warm red-brown might be repeated, heightened, illustrated by a whole range of beautiful shades from chestnut and terra cotta through rosy gold to golden rose.
Mrs. O’Hara smiled graciously upon Frank Abbott, and appeared to find nothing unusual in his request to be allowed to see her shoes.
“Really, it is quite like Cinderella,” she remarked. She looked complacently at the toe of her small black velvet slipper “Do you want me to take this pair off? Susan my dear——”
“They look very nice where they are,” said Frank Abbott, gravely.
His eye glanced along the row of shoes which Susan had produced from the wardrobe—brocade, glacé, suede, satin, all with an arched instep, a high heel, and an appearance of extreme fragility. Size four again, and not one that could possibly have made that footprint on the study carpet. He looked up quickly at Susan and said,
“What about outdoor shoes?”
She detached the thin pair of glace kid and pushed them forward an inch, kneeling on the faded carpet and not looking at him.
“I’m afraid she hasn’t got any.”
Mrs. O’Hara allowed the smile of a brave invalid to relax her pretty, pale lips.
“You see, I never go out—at least not during the winter—and not in the summer unless it is quite warm and dry, and that is so very seldom. And I hardly walk at all. My health is not what I should like it to be, I am sorry to say.”
Frank Abbott had seen all he wanted to, but he lingered for some social minutes, making sympathetic conversation, agreeing that the season was a mild one compared with last year, and picking up and restoring a ball of wool, a spare knitting-needle, and a small embroidered handkerchief. After which he made his farewells with address and followed Susan back along the passage to her own room.
She stopped in the doorway and said with sudden energy,
“What are you looking for, Mr. Abbott?”
His face remained expressionless even when he smiled. It was a smile that said nothing, and his eyes were cold. He murmured, “Sergeant”, and left the question unanswered.
She repeated it.
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t quite know. I’m looking at shoes under orders from my superior officer. May I look at yours?”
She set them out as she had done the others—two pairs of brown walking-shoes, one a little heavier than the other, a pair of dark blue house shoes, an old brown pair, some evening slippers.
He ran his eye down the line and picked up the heavy walking-shoes. These were the right size, the right shape. He turned them about and about. They were clean and polished. There was no clay on them, no sign that the left foot—the print was a left-foot print—had trodden in a puddle of clay on Monday night. He wondered if it had.
“When did you wear these last, Miss Lenox?”
“Yesterday. I’ve been wearing them every day.”
He put them down and picked up the lighter pair.
“And when did you last wear these?”
Susan said, “I don’t know.”
He was turning them in his hand.
“Have you had them on today?”
“Oh, no.”
“Yesterday?”
She shook her head.
“No—I’ve been wearing the others. They’re thicker.”
“Did you wear this pair on Monday?”
Monday was so far away that she had to force her thoughts back to it. She had not been out all day on Monday until she ran out through the scullery to follow Bill up the garden way to King’s Bourne. She touched the old brown house shoes.
“No—these are what I was wearing on Monday.”
“All day?”
“All day.”
“You didn’t stop to change them before following Mr. Carrick up the garden?”
The thought of her agony of haste left her dumb. She shook her head.
“You were in too great a hurry?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She was silent.
“You were afraid of what Mr. Carrick might do?”
She lifted her eyes to his and said,
“He didn’t shoot him—he really didn’t.”
Frank Abbott was inclined to believe her. Old Lamb would say that it was because the dark blue eyes which were looking straight into his were quite unreasonably easy to look at. But it wasn’t that at all. She might have had the handsomest eyes in the world and he could still have believed her to have a guilty knowledge. No, it was something else—a kind of simplicity.
He withdrew an appraising gaze, diverting it to the pair of shoes in his hand. They had not the polish of the thicker pair. He discarded the right shoe and turned the other one over. It had been worn and wiped, not cleaned or polished. Rather roughly wiped too, for where the upper joined the sole there was a muddy smear and a caking of what looked uncommonly like clay. He frowned at it and said,
“I am afraid I must ask you to let me take this pair.”
Susan frowned too.
“What do you mean? Why should you take them? What do you want them for?”
“You can’t make a guess?”
“Of course I can’t.”
He said, looking past her,
“This shoe stepped in a puddle. I think it was that puddle half way up the hill. It stepped in it, and it came out sticky with clay, and after that—after that, Miss Lenox, it stepped on the study floor up at King’s Bourne and left a print there.”
It was at this moment that Mrs. Green, unable to bear the dull solitude of the kitchen any longer, looked round the open door and saw, as she told Lily afterwards, “every drip and drab of colour go clean out of Miss Susan’s face”.
CHAPTER XXX
Mr. Montague Phipson walked down the garden in the direction of the Little House. He wore a worried and preoccupied air. Everything was really very difficult, very difficult indeed. The atmosphere of gloom and officialdom pervading the house—the impending inquest—the impending funeral—the extreme uncertainty of his own position—and nothing, literally nothing, sacred from the prying activities of the police. He had reason to believe that even the fragments of his torn-up letter to Evangeline Bates had been abstracted from the waste-paper basket in his room and carefully pieced together. In the circumstances he could not be too thankful that he had not in any way committed himself. It was just a warm letter of friendship, no more, but that correspondence even of a platonic nature should be subjected to the scrutiny of the police was a most disturbing occurrence. And as if all this were not enough, there was the continued presence in the house of Mr. Vincent Bell, a person so uncongenial that prolonged association with him would at any time have been a trial. In the present delicate situation Mr. Bell’s jaunty air, his cheerful voice, his frank admission that he considered Mr. Dale no particular loss to a world which he had very successfully exploited, was extremely distasteful.
Mr. Phipson had ventured to express this view to Inspector Lamb that very morning. He had seen his opportunity and had nerved himself to take it. The Inspector, a stolid person, had gazed at him with eyes which really had a most extraordinary resemblance to bull’s-eyes—the round, old-fashioned, peppermint-flavoured kind—and said,
“Well, I expect you’ll be getting rid of him as soon as the inquest is over, Mr. Phipson. Moving on yourself too, I dare
say?”
Not a very helpful way of putting it—not tactful. But of course one didn’t expect tact from the police. He had responded with dignity that he really could not say what his plans might be, but that if, as he understood, Mr. Duckett the solicitor and Miss Lenox were the executors under Mr. Dale’s will, they would probably be glad of his assistance in settling up the estate.
He thought the Inspector’s manner rather off-hand as he inquired how he knew that Mr. Duckett and Miss Lenox were the executors, and he was rather pleased with the dignity of his own reply.
“In my capacity as Mr. Dale’s confidential secretary, would you consider it strange that I should have prepared a rough draft embodying the points which Mr. Dale desired should be incorporated in the will?”
Who Pays the Piper? Page 15