These Names Make Clues

by E. C. R. Lorac

  Bardon nodded and then looked somewhat perturbed. “Yes, I know the name all right. Don’t go telling me that story’s cropped up again. I thought it was just malice which started those rumours.”

  “Say if you tell me the story. I haven’t any notion at all what it is. If I told you the reasons which caused me to come down here at the end of a hard working day to see if I could get any news of a lady named Seer you’d suspect I had a tile loose.”

  “Well, you seem to have hit the nail on the head in guessing that there was a story to be told,” said Bardon, shaking his pipe out into the fire as the clock struck one. “In January of this year, an invalid lady, known as Miss Vera Wilton, moved into Bourne Cottage, on the outskirts of Market Wraden. A nurse-attendant came with her, as the poor lady’s health was so bad that she was always confined to the house. I learnt later that the legal name of Miss Wilton was Vera Wilton Seer, the Wilton which she used as a surname being part of her baptismal name. She died in February…”

  He broke off as Macdonald gave vent to an exclamation of surprise.

  “Not quite what you were expecting?”

  “No, not quite,” replied Macdonald. “Never mind though—go on.”

  “This Miss Seer—known as Miss Wilton hereabouts—died of heart failure,” went on Bardon. “Her heart was badly diseased, and Dr. Ingston, who attended her here, knew she might pass away at any time. She died in her sleep, and her nurse found her dead in bed. Just what Dr. Ingston knew might happen to her at any time. He signed the certificate without any hesitation. The dead woman’s sister—another Miss Seer, who was known hereabouts some years ago—came and took charge of the funeral arrangements and so forth, and the body was taken up north and interred near the parents, I understand. However, shortly afterwards, the village gossips got busy—no end of rumours and stories. Some man had been seen about Bourne Cottage, peering in at the windows, and he’d been seen on the very night that Miss Vera Wilton Seer died. You can never pin these stories down, but we got anonymous letters at last saying the poor soul had been murdered—you know the sort of thing. No solid evidence at all, just hearsay. No one had seen the man with their own eyes. All I could get was: ‘So-and-so says so-and-so told him,’ and you go chasing rumours round the country and never get forwarder. I tell you I’m heartily sick of the name of Seer. I don’t like rumours in my district.”

  “So I can imagine,” said Macdonald. “But tell me this: Was the dead woman’s sister named Elinor Seer—her baptismal name spelt E-L-I-N-O-R?”

  “That’s right. So you do know something about them?”

  “No, I don’t. All I’ve got to go on is guesswork of the most irrational kind. Can you tell me anything of the previous history of the Misses Seer? They weren’t strangers to the district previous to this January, I take it?”

  “No. From what I’ve gathered, they’d both lived in Bourne Cottage some years ago. The older one, Elinor, used to teach science at Wraden Hall School, a matter of seven or eight years ago. The school—it was a young ladies’ boarding school—closed down in 1932, but Miss Seer had left before that. The sister who died in January—call her Miss Wilton Seer to differentiate them—used to come to stay with Miss Elinor Seer at Bourne Cottage occasionally, but didn’t actually live there, I gather, and wasn’t much known in the village. There were a lot of stories—scandal, to put it plainly—mooted about the pair of them before they left, I’m told. From what I know of the gossip in these little villages, it was probably all pure malice. You know how conservative these country folk are. Elinor Seer offended the village ideas of decorum by living by herself, without a maid, being independent and a bad mixer. Wouldn’t join in the life of the village, and was accounted a snob and a high-brow.”

  Macdonald nodded. “Quite. I expect the rumours over Miss Wilton Seer’s death arose from a recollection of those old stories. Memory lives long in the country. What was actually said about them?”

  “The usual yarns you get when an independent-minded spinster elects to live by herself, and offends the village busybodies. Scandals about a man staying there. There may have been something in it. Miss Wilton Seer lived up north prior to this spring, and, as chance had it, one of the village dames had relations in North Yorkshire, too, and heard in a roundabout way that this Miss Wilton Seer had a child which died in infancy, about a year after the sisters left here in 1930. That’s as may be, but I’ve no grounds for supposing that her death was due to anything else but what Dr. Ingston certified. Of course, if you’ve got additional evidence, it’s a very different matter.”

  In spite of his interest in the other man’s narrative, Macdonald yawned. He had been up most of the previous night, and sleep was creeping insidiously across his faculties.

  “Sorry,” he said, apologising for the yawn. “I’m addlepated with sleepiness. I’m desperately interested in your story, especially in the rumours which you say have been piling up. The facts will probably prove to be as follows: The man who was seen in the Miss Seer’s cottage in 1930 was seen in the district again before her death. Some one—who prefers to remain anonymous—recognised him and said, ‘Ah, I always told you there was something in it. Mark my words, that man killed the poor thing,’ and without any evidence at all which we should call evidence, the story’s been growing and growing.”

  Bardon looked uncomfortable. “They say there’s no smoke without fire,” he said. “It’ll be a nasty pill for me and Dr. Ingston if the village rumours prove to be reliable. What do you suggest? An autopsy?”

  Macdonald shook his head. “If you like old saws, try this one. Let the dead bury their dead. You say that Dr. Ingston signed the certificate without hesitation. You haven’t arrived at any substance in the cloud of rumour and you’ve got nothing to go on.”

  “Quite true, but I don’t like to think that an evildoer’s got away unpunished.”

  Macdonald got up and stretched himself, and then stood looking down at the fire.

  “So far as I can see, no one is going to get away unpunished. I’m not going to tell you my story to-night. It’s still incomplete, based on surmise, and I should only confuse you—and myself—by outlining a complex case when I’m half-witted with sleepiness. As a matter of fact, I’ve put the major part of the evidence before you already. I’ll tell you my reading of it when I’ve done a little more research into the lives of the inhabitants of Bourne Cottage.”

  Bardon got up in his turn. “I’m no good at guesswork,” he said. “Give me facts every time. You’ve told me that a man named Andrew Gardien was killed, and you’ve given me a list of names, including two that are well known hereabouts. Added to this you’ve identified Mardon-Elliott as a man named Mavory, wanted by the police of this county. Obviously the whole story is connected with this locality.”

  “And the connecting link—as the pointer to the locality—was Andrew Gardien,” said Macdonald. “As Miss Woodstock said, some have the cross-word mind and some haven’t.”

  “Confound it!” groaned Bardon. “Who was Andrew Gardien?”

  “I don’t know,” said Macdonald, “probably a member of the local literary society to which Mavory belonged. I expect the Misses Seer belonged to it, too. That reminds me. I wish you’d look in at Bourne Cottage first thing in the morning. If any one is in residence, say that I shall be obliged if they will wait in during the morning, as I hope to call on them before noon.”

  “Right. I’ll do that,” said Bardon. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing, thanks very much.”

  “Then I’ll bid you good-night.” Bardon sounded a little tetchy. “Your room’s above this one. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”

  “Again thanks. I’ll see you to-morrow some time. Good-night.”

  When Bardon had left, Macdonald seemed to forget that he was sleepy. He stood and looked down at the dying fire and visualised Valerie Woodstock’s charming, intelligent face as he had seen it before the lights went out at Coombe’s party, and then remembered a rather tense, ner
vous voice saying abruptly, “Don’t they keep candles in this house?” Followed the recollection of Graham Coombe peering at men’s hats in the cloak-room.

  “I wish I hadn’t gone to his party,” said Macdonald regretfully as he went up to bed.

  XVI

  The sun was shining and the sky was dappled with white mackerel clouds as Macdonald drove slowly along the country roads which led him to Bourne Cottage. Willows shone golden, their flowers heavy with yellow pollen, and hazel and elm were brilliant green. Even the tardy ash shoots in the hedgerows were opening their black buds to disclose the foliage within, and the ditches were runnels of clear water beneath the greenery of wild arums and jack-by-the-hedge.

  A good morning, thought Macdonald, in his uneffusive Scottish way. He loved the country, and the clear, bracing quality of this brilliant April morning awoke the countryman in him, so that he would gladly have left his car and gone afoot over the wet meadows. Hedging and ditching seemed a more desirable job than his own in Bishop’s Wraden that morning.

  The cottage he was seeking was off the main road, down a muddy byway whose rutted unmetalled surface made him decide to leave his car and to walk the last hundred yards which separated him—so he believed—from the final unravelling of Andrew Gardien’s death.

  With lark song above him and the sun warming his back, Macdonald wished once again that he could turn hedger and ditcher and forget Scotland Yard, the law of the land and the whole unsavoury business of Andrew Gardien.

  As he strode reluctantly towards the gate in the old thorn hedge, he heard a bell ringing close at hand—a noisy, clanging, uneven beat.

  “Who’ll toll the bell?” flashed incongruously through the chief inspector’s mind as he reached the gate.

  Bourne Cottage was a pleasant old house, squat and comfortable, rose red in the sunshine. Daffodils bordered the path which led to a porch at the side of the house, and rambler roses were showing energetic green buds on the strong branches which were trained around the porch. There was no sign of any one about the place, but the old-fashioned bell which hung from the beam of the porch was still shaking, settling down to rest again after the summons which Macdonald had just heard. He put out his hand to the chain which hung beside it, and then hesitated. Some one had rung the bell and gone away. There were marks of wet shoes on the tiles of the porch, but none on the wide flagstone before the door. The visitor had rung, but received no answer. His hand still stretched out to the bell-pull, Macdonald heard a sound at the farther side of the cottage—the crash and tinkle of falling glass.

  In a trice he had left the porch and was striding round to the rear of the little building. The sun shone in his eyes as he turned the angle of the walls and blurred his vision as he saw a woman’s figure enter the cottage by a French window a few yards from him.

  A few seconds later Macdonald stood in a sunny little sitting-room, his quiet voice saying:

  “Don’t touch anything, Miss Woodstock. This is my job. You oughtn’t to be here.”

  Valerie Woodstock was standing by the writing-table, her hand resting on the shoulder of a woman whose body had fallen forward over the table with the face hidden as it lay on the bent arms. The sun striking athwart the room danced on the reddish hair of the bowed head, and showed up the lines of silver in it. An empty glass stood beside the still head, and there was a bowl of violets and primroses at one corner of the table. As though sleeping in the sweetness of a spring morning, Ronile Rees lay still and placid, about her the mingled scent of sweet violets and the queer almondy smell of potassium cyanide.

  Valerie Woodstock turned on Macdonald with bitterness in her face and voice.

  “Are you satisfied?” she asked. “She’s dead—because you used your wits so well!”

  Ignoring the accusing voice in which the girl spoke, Macdonald took her arm and pushed her into a chair by the open window, as he might have dealt with a child. It took only a touch on the hand which was clenched on the desk to assure him that the woman who lay there was indeed dead, and something in his heart was thankful that death had filled in the final word of the puzzle.

  There was a fine piece of embroidered lawn lying on the work-basket beside the desk, and he picked it up and spread it over the bent head of the dead woman—a delicate pall of wrought needlework to cover the grizzled gold of that once troubled head.

  Turning to the white-faced girl again, he said:

  “Come outside. It’s better to be in the open air. I’m sorry that you came here, for this is a thing which you won’t easily forget; but, believe me, it is better so. Come.”

  Looking up into the lean, kindly face of Macdonald, the girl obeyed his words and the gesture of his hand, and walked stumblingly out into the fresh air of the garden.

  “I don’t care what you think, or what you’ll say or do,” she said passionately. “I’d have helped her to get away if I could.”

  “I know you would, but from some acts there is no escape,” replied Macdonald. “If you take another person’s life, for no matter what reason of private anger or vengeance, your own is surely forfeit. You may escape punishment by the law, but your own awareness you never escape.”

  “She killed Gardien, I know. But didn’t he deserve to be killed?”

  “Perhaps—and the debt is paid,” replied Macdonald. “Isn’t it a good thing that we needn’t argue the rights and wrongs of it any more? Gardien—whoever he was—was a blackmailer. He probably wrecked the lives of both that poor soul in there and of her sister. But murder never can be judged as a good method of righting other wrongs. I believe that,” he added very simply and earnestly, “otherwise my job would be an intolerable one.”

  “I don’t see life in terms of black and white,” she protested. “I shall always be troubled with the thought that I gave her away. I helped you to guess.”

  Macdonald was walking with her very slowly along the garden path, between the daffodils. The sad offices of death could wait, for he felt unwilling to let the girl go away in her present bitterness of mind.

  “I don’t think that what you said made any difference, not eventually,” he said. “I did guess, from those guarded trivialities of yours at Graham Coombe’s, that you knew Miss Rees—as she called herself. When you spoke to her, you became the pupil, she the teacher—yet you denied later that you knew her at all. It was the names that made the clues. We were all cross-word minded that evening at Graham Coombe’s. Something in my mind made me spell ‘Ronile Rees’ backwards, and the name sprang out as Elinor Seer. Andrew Gardien was an anagram of Wraden—Reading. Nadia Delareign—who had no part in the story—also writes as Diana Geraldine, an anagram of her pseudonym.

  “I learnt that you—who, I was convinced, knew Miss Rees—had been at school at Wraden-by-Reading, but I also learnt that Gardien was overheard speaking the name of ‘Nell’ or ‘Ellie.’

  “Elinor Seer, once of Wraden School, fitted the cross-word I was making in my own mind. Clue one. A locality—Reading, turned into the anagram, Gardien. Clue two. A school, Wraden, turned into the anagram Andrew. When Gardien chose that pseudonym to cover his first novel, he must have been very attached to Wraden—Reading. Learning that Miss Seer had taught at Wraden, the connection seemed likely!”

  Valerie Woodstock pushed back her fair hair from her face in the gesture which Macdonald had observed before.

  “You’re clever,” she said; but this time there was no grudging in her voice. “I recognised that backward spelling of Elinor Seer when I first saw it on a book, but I’ve never known any one else comment on it. The anagram made by Andrew Gardien’s name didn’t jump out at me until after he was dead—and then I was frightened. I knew that Miss Seer had left this place under a cloud of trouble, some business about a man who had made love to herself and her sister. When Gardien was found dead, I guessed. Miss Seer taught physics; she would have found it easy enough to connect up the handles of that bureau. That man she saw going into the telephone-room—do you think he existed?”
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br />   “I think the man was Gardien himself,” said Macdonald. “Miss Delareign, who originally mentioned him, is short-sighted to the verge of myopia. Miss Seer palmed off that story on to Miss Delareign as a conjurer palms a card—the stronger personality suggested to the weaker that a grey-haired man had been seen. Miss Delareign swallowed the suggestion and produced it as her own. Sound psychology, that.”

  “Then it wasn’t Elliott?”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t. Nobody would have been more horrified than Miss Ronile Rees when she realised that her description of a bullet-headed man with flat feet was taken seriously to identify a real person. ‘I thought he was the detective,’ she said to me. Hence that inspired touch about the bullet head and flat feet. A policeman from a novelist’s angle of vision!”

  Suddenly Valerie Woodstock laughed, a weak little laugh, and Macdonald said:

  “That’s better. It’s no use being bitter and miserable over a tragedy which was based on human weaknesses which were no concern of yours. Death in this case is a solvent of old miseries. Don’t regret it.”

  “You’re a sane person,” replied the girl. “Perhaps as one grows older it’s easier to view things philosophically. Poor Miss Seer! I’ve been living in a sort of crazy nightmare since yesterday. I went to Elliott’s office to try to find out who Gardien was. Then Denzil and I thought that if we came down here we might find the poor thing, and get her away somewhere safe. Mrs. Etherton thought the same thing, and we all met at that inn—Mr. Vale coming chasing the Andrew Gardien anagram, as you did, and that fool of a journalist chasing Denzil because he ‘acted suspicious.’”

  Leaning against the gate-post, Valerie Woodstock looked at Macdonald with eyes that were wet, though rueful laughter curved her lips.

  “All tragedies have a touch of the ludicrous in them when viewed objectively. I suppose that from your point of view we were rather a farcical spectacle,” she added.

  Macdonald smiled at her. “Perhaps I was farcical myself, especially when I worked out the probabilities of your intentions in entertaining me in the little library at Graham Coombe’s.”