by Roy Vickers
She began to wonder why the dawn was so long in coming. With summer-time, you ought to be able to see it at about three, in June. Again and again her eyes travelled to the window. Then the clock in the hall struck one.
I’ve been here less than an hour, she told herself with the first twinge of anxiety. She had no idea that time could drag like that. Sitting alone and quiet in the dark, suppose she were to fall asleep in that chair? The danger was too real to be ignored. She adjusted the window blinds, then turned on the light, determined to do something that would occupy her mind.
To occupy her mind was no easy task, even when others were co-operating. She looked round the room. There were plenty of Jeremy’s books, but these, she knew by experience, positively induced sleep. Finally she hit on an intelligent compromise. You never dropped off to sleep when you were writing. And there was the Report Book for the committee which Jeremy had asked her to work on during the day.
She was soon immersed in the work. There were the names, numbers, of everybody who had taken part in last year’s Fair—local notabilities, local nobodies and stall and booth holders. Page after page contained blanks for figures and comments to be filled in from the secretary’s notes. She had done all the filing herself under Jeremy’s direction. Millard’s name occurred among the locals, with a suggestion that he should be invited to join the committee. She looked at Jeremy’s note. There were two notes, one of which had been struck out. This she promptly deciphered—four lines to the effect that Millard was a man of substance and a good mixer. The later note, dated ten days previously, was in different vein: ‘Objection: Financially v. insecure.’
She bore Millard no malice for calling her a hair shirt. That very morning she had let him linger at her coffee-table for a couple of minutes: he had stuck to the safe topic of the next Fair. To bar him because, one day, he might be hard up seemed a very mean sort of reason. Against Millard’s name she wrote ‘Recommended.’
Dawn broke unnoticed by Elsie. By twenty past six she had finished the whole job. Illogically, she felt pleased, because Jeremy had thought it would take both of them longer than five hours.
Presently she went upstairs. Damp towels, she suspected, would be useless against gas. She must hold her breath, or she would be killed herself. With one hand on the door knob, she took three slow, deep breaths.
Then she opened the door, shut it, went to the gas stove, removed her undergarment from the flue, and was back on the landing with the door shut, without having drawn breath.
After a brief rest, she again breathed deeply, then repeated her performance, except that this time she opened the window. She had not looked at Jeremy’s bed, but she knew that he was not breathing.
She waited on the landing, listening for the servants’ alarm clock. The moment she heard it begin to ring she slipped back into the bedroom and into bed, with her back to Jeremy’s bed. The room smelt horribly of gas, and she kept her head under the bedclothes. She knew that she was risking her own life. The gas was still flowing into the stove. If it was going up the flue, she would live. If it was coming into the room she might die. There would be a full hour before Mildred came with the tea.
Her calculations were wrong on two points. First, that she underestimated the effect of the remaining gas which produced first nausea and then unconsciousness. Secondly she ignored the escape of gas when she had opened the door. The staff smelt it on the way downstairs. But it was twenty-five minutes to eight before they located the escape.
Elsie came to consciousness in the bed in the spare room with a doctor in attendance—which is to say that, at this stage, she was remarkably lucky.
Chapter Five
The preliminary questioning by the police had been simple enough. Elsie was saved from nervous anxiety by her profound ignorance of the resources of the law. Her defence rested, as it were, on a simple formula: “I shall tell everything, except that I left the room—and let ’em get on with it.”
Nevertheless, the formula did not save her from a grilling in the coroner’s court. She recognised the Coroner as one of Jeremy’s friends, first seen at an early dinner party, who had ‘dropped off.’ He asked her one or two unimportant questions, rather starchily, she thought. But it was the police solicitor who questioned her for nearly an hour, coming uncomfortably near the truth.
He had been instructed that there were no fingerprints of any kind on the main tap in the kitchen quarters: on the tap of the stove was a single impression made by the housemaid who had turned it off when she entered the bedroom, at seven thirty-five. There were other, unwritten instructions, delivered with a nod if not a wink, inspired by local gossip.
The solicitor puzzled Elsie by taking her through her own movements for the whole of the day preceding the discovery of Grantham’s death.
“After breakfast, my husband left for the office as usual. I read the papers a bit, and then went shopping.”
Details were demanded of the shops visited and even of her purchases. Elsie was irritated but not in the least alarmed.
“This shopping expedition took two hours and ten minutes. Did you require all that time to purchase a few groceries and three pairs of stockings?”
“I don’t know—I don’t look at my watch that often!” She raised her wrist, glanced at her jewelled watch, shook it and began to wind it. “Besides, I did have morning coffee at Gentall’s, and I don’t suppose I hurried over it.”
“Quite so! You took coffee with a friend, perhaps?”
“No!” She hesitated. “Wait a minute—now I come to think of it, a friend did sit at my table for a few minutes before I left.”
“Now that you—come to think of it, Mrs. Grantham, can you tell us whether the friend was a woman—or a man?”
“It was a man, as a matter o’ fact. But I don’t see why we should drag his name into all this, especially as it will be in the papers, I daresay.”
The solicitor smiled at the jury with some eloquence. At an inquest there are few rules of evidence beyond those imposed by the sitting coroner—a legal anomaly which is sometimes exploited by the police, in the interests of justice.
“I will not press you for the name of your—er—friend, Mrs. Grantham. I will ask you only one question about him. Is he an expert—or rather, was he at one time an acknowledged expert—in poison gases?”
There was a rustling sound in the court. About a third of those present knew that Millard had been a senior gas officer.
“You are going too far, Mr. Tranter,” growled the Coroner. “Mrs. Grantham, you need not answer that question.”
“I couldn’t even if I had to, because I don’t know. And anyway, what we talked about was the Fair, which was all he wanted to see me about, knowing I helped my husband with the organisation work.”
The solicitor harked back to the time schedule, making her account for every moment of her day.
“On returning from the film theatre—at what time did you reach your home?”
“I can tell you exactly. As we came into the hall, my husband said it was too late for us to start doing anything. ‘It’s ten thirty-one, to be exact,’ he said, and suggested we should go straight to bed.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. That is, I went straight upstairs and he followed a minute or two later.”
“That point has already been established,” interposed the Coroner. “The housemaid testified that she was awake and heard them both go up, as witness describes.”
“True, sir. That witness also told us that deceased was in the habit of turning off the gas at the main before going to bed.” He spoke directly to Elsie. “Before following you upstairs, did your husband turn off the gas at the main?”
“As I was upstairs at the time, I don’t know what he did.”
“By ten thirty-five you were both in your bedroom?” As Elsie assented: “Between ten thirty-five that night and seven thirty-five the following morning, when you were found in a state of light coma—did you leave that bedroom, M
rs. Grantham?—for any purpose whatever?”
“No,” said Elsie, in satisfaction of the formula.
“If you did not leave that room for any purpose whatever, does it not strike you as remarkable that you yourself have survived to—er—tell the tale?”
Elsie looked at the Coroner.
“I don’t understand what he’s asking me.”
“I will simplify my question. Here are two persons lying within a few feet of each other in a gas-filled room. Medical evidence establishes that one of them is killed by the gas approximately three hours before seven-thirty-five. The other person—yourself, Mrs. Grantham—is only slight affected and recovers in a few minutes. Can you offer any explanation of that quite astounding circumstance?”
“No, I can’t!” said Elsie and—with a wisdom which we must assume to have been intuitive—left it at that.
“I have only one more question, Mrs. Grantham. Did your husband ever speak to you of—the possibility of suicide?”
The Coroner disallowed the question. But everyone in court understood that the solicitor was groping for a suicide pact in which Elsie was the lucky survivor. After Elsie had returned to London the theory was a popular one in Benchester.
The police, on the whole, preferred the theory that an obstruction had been placed in the flue of the gas stove and removed in time. They did not know that Elsie was prudently wearing the ‘obstruction,’ while she was giving evidence, but they did know that they had not discovered a tittle of evidence against her.
Notwithstanding the verdict of death by misadventure, Benchester, of course, became too hot to hold Elsie, so she lost no time in returning to London.
Chapter Six
In a comfortable little flat in Bloomsbury, she was able to face the future without misgiving. The experiment to which she had been subjected, cruel though it might have been, was at least thorough and, by its own standard, sincere. She was sole beneficiary, except for small legacies to the servants. When probate was granted she would step into an income, from a trust fund, of some twelve hundred pounds. In the meantime, her solicitors had provided her with cash in anticipation of the sale of the house, which was also an item of her inheritance.
In short, the life of well-fed indolence was assured. There was no hitch anywhere. In time, the first half-yearly instalment of her annuity was paid, and there was still some loose change from the sale of the house. She was not even debarred from a second marriage. Not that matrimony now had any charm for her. For many years—she was not yet thirty—she would be able to pick and choose at whim.
Two happy years passed, undisturbed, when Benchester crept into her favourite paper. ‘Benchester Fair Scandals,’ she read, ‘Millard Files Petition: S. Yard Represented.’ She skimmed a few lines, with little understanding. She remembered Jeremy’s note: ‘Financially v. insecure!’ Oh, well, it couldn’t matter now. The picture of a bathing belle diverted her attention.
In fact, she was forgetting and erroneously supposed that Benchester was forgetting her. She had given the quiet little town the only sensation it had enjoyed for a couple of generations. The suicide pact theory, based on the incalculable effects of draught, still held pride of place; next to it in popularity was the suspicion that Elsie might have hit on some slick little cockney trick for outmanoeuvring the police. True, too, that her name was often coupled with that of Millard, though no one suggested that he had been privy to the murder, if murder there had been. That he had once been a gas officer was dismissed as irrelevant.
Such seeming irrelevancies, however, were the stock-in-trade of the Department of Dead Ends. To Detective Inspector Rason had drifted the papers resulting from an unsuccessful attempts to uncover a series of small illicit transactions in Bearer Bonds. The name of Millard had appeared frequently but always at a safe distance.
In the dossier was a letter, dated 25th May, 1934, from a fellow townsman of Millard’s—one Jeremy Grantham—enclosing a correspondence with Millard to which the writer invited the attention of the Yard. The evidence, however, had proved insufficient.
Since Millard had been elected to the committee of the Benchester Fair, he had broadened his operations. He was doing nicely with one or two land investment schemes of his own when a bungled attempt to extract a profit from the Fair brought down his house of cards. Rason began by turning up his personal record, where he learnt that Millard had served in the Army as a senior gas officer.
Millard—Benchester—Grantham. Presently, he remembered the Grantham case, which he knew from the newspaper accounts only, as Scotland Yard had never been called in. The memory betrayed Rason into perpetrating one of his over-facile juxtapositions.
“Grantham warns us that Millard is a crook. Grantham dies of gas poisoning. Millard was a poison gas expert.”
Rason cheered himself up. If it so happened that Millard had gassed Grantham, all that headachey stuff about Bonds and company flotations could be by-passed.
In Benchester, he soon picked up the main lines of local gossip. The suggestion that Millard and Mrs. Grantham had been lovers he dismissed as wishful thinking. On the third day, a passing remark by the potman of the hotel set him galloping.
“Millard ought never to have got on to the Fair committee,” said the potman. “That was poor old Jeremy Grantham’s fault, for supporting him. Thought Millard was one o’ the best, did Grantham.”
But Grantham, Rason knew, had not thought Millard one of the best. Grantham would certainly not have supported the candidature. He went in search of the secretary of the Fair, who was not at home. While he was waiting, he took shelter from the rain in the public library, where he entertained himself by studying the file of the local paper—in particular, the inquest on Jeremy Grantham. It was sufficiently clear from the account that it was Millard who had sat at Mrs. Grantham’s table for morning coffee.
‘… we talked about the Fair, which was all he wanted to see me about, knowing I helped my husband with the organisation work.’
Rason put two and two together, producing, as not infrequently happened, a total running into three figures.
“So she was his girl-friend after all! He talks to her about the Fair—gives her some expert counter-dope to protect her against the gas—and she helps with the organisation so’s he’ll be on the committee. I’m going to sit on that secretary’s doorstep even if it is raining.”
“And if the girl says her boy friend did not happen to turn on the gas as far as she knows,” said Chief Inspector Karslake on the way to Elsie’s flat, “we say we’re sorry and it’s only red tape. And if she says he wasn’t her boy friend, and she never wangled him on the committee—”
“But she did!” cut in Rason. “We can prove her handwriting in that Report Book. ‘Recommended’ she wrote. And if you remember—sir—I told you this was only a try-out—”
“Try-on, more like!” snorted Karslake. “That’s what the girl will say when she kicks us out.”
But Elsie did not say anything so rude. She was amiable and communicative, because she was indifferent to Millard’s misfortunes, wishing him neither good nor ill.
“It seems Millard wasn’t content with taking a hand-out for special pitches at the Fair,” explained Rason. “He used his standing as a committee man to influence investment—where it oughtn’t to be given any influence, if you understand me. And my superior officer wants to know why you, Mrs. Grantham, wangled him on to the committee.”
“Me!” echoed Elsie in genuine forgetfulness, “How could I wangle anybody anywhere in that little hole of a town!”
Rason produced the Report Book, turned the pages, then set it before her.
“That word ‘recommended’—alongside Millard’s name, there—it’s your handwriting, isn’t it?—same as a lot of other entries?”
“Oh, so there’s going to be bother about that, is there?” pouted Elsie.
“Did you make that entry on your husband’s instructions?”
Elsie spotted it as one of those sneaky
questions to which the questioner knows the answer.
“No, I did it on my own!” she said resignedly. “Now I’ve started, I’d better go on. That book used to come to us once a year to be filled in from the notes and correspondence which was kept in our morning room—took up the whole desk. It was a long job, and I used to make the entries, only bothering my husband when I got stuck. He had made a note earlier in the year approving of Millard for the committee. That note was struck out and my husband had put in another: ‘Objection: financially very insecure.’ I didn’t know it meant Millard was going to turn out to be a crook, and I thought it mean to blot him out because he might be hard up later on, so I wrote ‘recommended.’ And Millard didn’t know what I’d done. He wasn’t a special friend of mine, even if you think he was.”
Karslake stood up and cleared his throat.
“That was a very wrong action of yours, Mrs. Grantham.” He glared at Rason and moved towards the door. “But it is a satisfactory answer to our question.”
“Yeh!” ejaculated Rason. “And let’s have a satisfactory answer to this one, too! Putting a man on the committee when your husband had turned him down! How could you hope to get away with that—if your husband had lived another month?”
“I didn’t look at it like that!” Elsie for the first time scented the danger which, in two years, she had almost forgotten.
“When did you make that entry—and all the other entries—in this book?”
“I don’t remember the exact date—”
“Nor do I!” confessed Rason. He opened his attache case and began to fumble. “Ah, here we are! Statement by Bewley, salaried clerk to the committee. ‘I delivered the Report Book at Mr. Graham’s house at eight fifteen, pip emma, on the night of June the first.’ That was when you were at the cinema with your husband, if I’ve got it right. And when you came in, you both went straight up to bed and you didn’t leave the bedroom until you were carried out next morning.”