“I realised how your mind was working,” she replied. “Treasure hunting, oh dear—”
Her sigh was an unhappy one, and Macdonald replied, “Why not? Death means release from trouble—perhaps that was the treasure she found. You must go now—tell Mr. Strafford that he and Vernon needn’t play boy scouts any longer.”
The abrupt change of topic in the last sentence brought a half-smile to the girl’s face. She held out her hand to him and Macdonald shook it before he walked up the path again.
As he turned the corner again he seemed to hear the assistant commissioner’s voice saying:
“This is all very irregular, Macdonald, very irregular indeed.”
“Human behaviour is irregular,” thought the chief inspector. “In this case irregularity was the rule. Material clues provided by kittens, intangible ones by anagrams—popular views on policemen—flat feet and well-cropped heads. A one-time pupil murmuring ‘Archimedes’ to her science mistress, and the principles of electricity and magnetism—as propounded to the fifth form—utilised to make a complete circuit with the handles of a writing bureau—only the fuse put things out and confused the issue in “a darkness that may be felt.”
Re-entering the sitting-room by the window which Valerie Woodstock had broken to obtain admittance, Macdonald went to the desk. There was a letter lying on it, addressed to himself, which he had seen when he first entered. Once he had realised that the woman at the table was indeed dead, Macdonald had been concerned to get Valerie Woodstock away from that grim sight. He was too humane a man to wish to investigate the problems of death with a girl standing by.
Going to the window, he opened the letter and read:
“Dear Chief Inspector,—Before I die I want to make clear the problem you are investigating. I killed Andrew Gardien by electrocution. He behaved very vilely to me and mine in past years and recently he had attempted to blackmail my sister and myself. Her death was hastened by the shock of seeing him again and realising his motive in searching her out.
“When I learnt that Gardien was going to be present at Mr. Coombe’s party, I called at the latter’s house and learnt enough to enable me to make a plan. I told Gardien that I would pay him what he asked if he met me in the telephone-room at nine twenty-five. I went in there myself earlier in the evening and connected up the handles of the bureau with the electric power. I joined Gardien there at nine twenty-five, and he opened the bureau at my request. The fuse which followed the interference with the current upset my plans, and I realised almost at once that you were suspicious. I think you have guessed what followed, and I am too weary to describe it. I killed him. That is enough. I ought to add that the grey-haired man seen by Miss Delareign and myself was imagination on her part, inspired by suggestion on mine. She really saw Gardien going into the room. I heard of Mardon-Elliott’s death last night. I don’t know anything about it. When one is very near to death one can’t bother to puzzle things out. I am very tired, but I don’t regret the thing I did. I write this to ensure that no one else shall be pursued for my crime.
Ronile Rees.”
Macdonald folded the letter and put it in his pocket. The superintendent would be coming to Bourne Cottage directly and arrangements would be made for the removal of that still body.
Looking at that shrouded head, Macdonald was glad that Ronile Rees had solved her own problem in death.
It was at lunchtime the same day that Ashton Vale saw Peter Vernon again. After a busy morning, in which Vernon had collected a lot of exceedingly puzzling stories, the journalist had returned to The White Dog for lunch, and he saw Vale looking at him with a subdued smile. Mrs. Etherton looked up at him quizzically and said:
“Have you run the great pacifist plot to earth yet, Mr. Vernon?”
With a rather shamefaced grin the journalist replied:
“That was only a try-on. I’ve often found that if you put up some tall story, the chap you tell it to reacts by telling you something that’s very near the truth, just to prove what a mutt you are. The sillier I look, the more I learn.”
“Sorry I didn’t react in the proper way,” said Vale. “I’ll make you an offer. If I tell you the truth about the part of the story that Mrs. Etherton and I know, will you undertake not to print it? Some of it may become public later, but it’s up to you as a decent-minded person not to make copy out of the story as a whole.”
“All right. I’ll meet you there, and you can censor my copy,” said Vernon. “Fact is, I feel a spot cheap over it.”
Vale gave a terse summary of the facts of Gardien’s death, mentioning the reversal of Elinor Seer’s name as a pseudonym and the anagram of Andrew Gardien’s.
“Thickhead that I was! I might have seen that bit for myself,” groaned Vernon, and Vale went on: “Miss Woodstock guessed enough to make her apprehensive for Miss Seer, and decided to come down to Wraden to see if she could get any news of her or of Gardien.
“She phoned to Strafford to come to Reading to help her. You followed him. At the station Strafford undertook to try to lose you, as they did not want you spying on them.”
Vernon flushed, and Vale added quietly, “I don’t mean that offensively. If I’d been in your shoes I should probably have done what you did, only there are always two points of view. I, following up the Andrew Gardien clue, got ditched as you know. You picked me up and agreed to come on here with me for the night. All very exasperating from the point of view of the other two. Miss Woodstock was genuinely upset, and tried to make you see her point of view. Strafford was furious with you, and I, thinking that you had a bee in your bonnet, played up in my own way. That’s an analysis of your dramatic evening.”
“You were rather a trial,” put in Mrs. Etherton thoughtfully. “I had seen Miss Seer twice yesterday, once at Belinda, once at Susan Coombe’s. I realised that I had unintentionally done her a disservice in telling her to go and call on Mardon-Elliott. When I heard that he too was dead, I was horrified. I came down here to try to help Miss Seer, having guessed from something she said at Miss Coombe’s that she would come here. I was honestly trying to tell her—indirectly—that I would help her if I could. The sight of your brightly-intelligent face and the knowledge that you were ‘on the trail’ seemed the last straw at the end of a wearing day.”
“I’m sorry,” said Vernon contritely, and Mrs. Etherton said abruptly:
“I believe you are—and you’ve a perfectly good way of showing it. If you have to write up this story, don’t bring Miss Woodstock and myself into it. Leave yesterday evening out of the story.”
“I will,” replied Vernon. “Honestly I will.”
“He’s all right,” said Vale a little later, when Vernon had left. “It was much better policy to tell him everything straight out and ask him not to print it. If he’d been left to guess, he’d have got there sooner or later—and his paper would have got there, too.”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Etherton. “Honesty is always the best policy—within reason. I didn’t tell him that I went to call on Elinor Seer at Belinda, did my best to warn her that guessing was in the air, told her she could rely on me, and offered her a perfectly good alibi, saying I’d seen her sitting on the sofa half-way upstairs at Graham Coombe’s. Poor thing! She looked so bewildered. I’m glad I didn’t have to swear to that alibi, though.”
“Quite,” murmured Vale. “Perjury’s an awkward business.”
“My own conscience is quite capable of dealing with its own burdens,” replied Mrs. Etherton in her deepest bass. “It wasn’t that, only the poor thing slipped her pliers into my evening bag, mistaking it for her own. They were rather alike—only Macdonald found mine because I left it at Coombe’s and it might have been awkward.” Looking up at him with her inquiring gaze, she asked abruptly, “But who killed Elliott, Ashton?”
With a shrug and a gesture of his hands he replied:
“God alone knows! I didn’t. I can assure you of that.”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” said Mrs. E
therton. “I’m tired of trying to help people out of holes, and crime isn’t my natural subject matter.”
XVII
“It all seems very irregular, Macdonald, very irregular indeed,” complained Colonel Wragley.
The assistant commissioner sat with Ronile Rees’ letter in his hand. “You are sure that your explanation—and this letter—cover the facts?”
“I think that there is no reasonable ground for doubt, so far as Gardien’s death is concerned,” replied Macdonald. “You have motive, opportunity and confession. Gardien was a bad lot from his youth upwards. I don’t often feel that murder is justified, but I think in this case it was comprehensible.”
Wragley frowned. “We need not discuss that,” he said firmly, and a smile glimmered in his very blue eyes. “I believe they have Elders in your national establishment, Macdonald. If the opinion of an Anglican is of any value, I should be glad to recommend you for the position. Talking of comprehensibility, it will be interesting to learn what the jury make of your theory about Elliott’s death. It is more subtle than substantial.”
“It fits the facts, sir, and London juries have tidy minds,” replied Macdonald.
Colonel Wragley, muttering the word “Irregular,” dismissed the chief inspector, and the latter made his way westwards to Caroline House. He had promised to call on Graham Coombe and tell him the upshot of the inquiry.
Coombe and his sister were talking to Ashton Vale and Digby Bourne when Macdonald arrived, with Geoffrey Manton in attendance, and Macdonald sat down by the library fire to begin his narrative as soon as Miss Coombe had greeted him.
“So far as Gardien’s death is concerned, the facts seem clear,” said Macdonald. “Miss Rees, to use the name she was so well known by—thought out a very neat scheme which you have already heard. She arranged her flex when Gardien had agreed to meet her in the telephone-room at 9.25. When the lights fused her nerve failed her a little. She dragged the flex away from the nuts fastening the handles in the bureau and cut off the plug with her pliers. The flex she put in the lost property box. She then ran to the back of the lounge upsetting Miss Delareign in the darkness.”
Susan Coombe put a word in here. “I knew Miss Delareign’s evidence was unreliable. She said that it was a man who knocked her down.”
“Typical,” murmured the publisher. “Dramatising the situation needed a man for the aggressive act.”
Susan frowned at her brother, and Macdonald went on hastily:
“That collision accounted for the dropping of the power plug by the service stairway. There was no time to look for it. Miss Rees ran up the service stairs and came out on the second floor landing. From there she descended by the main stairway coming down to meet me and to say a few words by way of alibi, proving that she had been on the upper floor when the fuse occurred. She then went to the piano, the pliers still concealed in her handkerchief, I expect. Playing the piano saved her from joining in the general conversation. Later she put the pliers in a bag which she probably thought was her own. It wasn’t hers, but she was too rattled by that time to think clearly.”
“Poor thing,” murmured Susan. “I would have helped her if I had known.”
“Really Susan,” expostulated Graham, but Macdonald put in:
“This is a privileged conversation, and an unofficial one. A good many people were anxious to help Miss Rees, notably Miss Woodstock and Mrs. Etherton, who had known her years ago. Mrs. Etherton told me that she did not know Miss Rees, although they were both staying at Belinda Place. I’m afraid the fact that those who appeared to me to have known Miss Rees, denied all knowledge of her, rather put me on the right track, until the Elliott business muddled things up.”
“And that is the part of the story I want to hear,” said Ashton Vale. “Is it a logical corollary, as my mother used to say?”
“No. It’s a quite illogical one,” said Macdonald. “In my opinion the two cases are quite distinct, though I know that my superior officers don’t like my explanation. Perhaps you would like to pick holes in it. These are the facts.”
He gave them a terse description of the scene in Mardon-Elliott’s study and then continued:
“Here is my explanation. Gardien had blackmailed Elliott, and acquired such large sums from him that the latter was within sight of bankruptcy. Elliott also had been ill with influenza. He was utterly depressed and desperate. He shot himself, having first written Gardien’s name on his blotting paper and having fixed up the contraption with the grandfather clock—a typical ‘Gardien-ish’ piece of mechanics. Elliott hoped that Gardien would hang for his death.”
There was a moment of surprised silence, then Ashton Vale said:
“Steady on a bit here, I don’t quite get you,” he said. “You found Elliott dead in his chair and the gun in the grandfather clock…”
“Yes,” said Macdonald. “Consider the facts as I have described them to you, remembering that Elliott was depressed and at the end of his tether owing to Gardien’s blackmailing. The shot which killed him could have been self-inflicted. He wore a glove on his right hand, and there were no fingerprints on the pistol. The bottom panel of the grandfather clock was removed, and the legs of the clock were high enough to give a clearance of four inches between its case and the floor. Elliott sat in his chair, having arranged the mechanism of the clock and having wound it up so that it had started coiling up the slack of the line attached to the pistol. He then shot himself. The pistol dropped to the floor, and the clock hurried on, the big wheel revolving and winding up the line until the pistol was drawn into the works and stopped them.”
“Neat,” murmured Coombe reflectively. “Very neat. I bet that Gardien himself thought out that notion originally, and discussed it with Elliott.”
“Possibly,” replied Macdonald. “It’s interesting to reflect on what might have occurred if Gardien had not been killed that evening. With the evidence of Elliott’s writing on the blotting paper, and Gardien’s fingerprints on the tumbler (doubtless preserved from a previous occasion) I think a jury would probably have brought in a verdict against Gardien on the probabilities. That, I am certain, was Elliott’s reasoning.”
Coombe nodded, and Vale put in:
“That sounds a reasonable reading of the facts, which otherwise sound crazy, but it’s your own mental process that interests me. You had been given the impression that Elliott was seen in this house—”
“—And I couldn’t make sense of it,” replied Macdonald. “If Gardien had shot Elliott, the shooting must have occurred before Gardien came here to the party. Following that line of thought it was impossible for Elliott to have been seen entering the telephone-room here at 9 o’clock. Dismissing the idea that Gardien shot Elliott and assuming that Elliott was here about 9 o’clock to ensure Gardien’s death, one has the ludicrous conclusion that Elliott killed Gardien and then went back to his office to shoot himself and plant evidence that Gardien had killed him. The remaining supposition was that some other person killed both Gardien and Elliott. This idea was put out of court to my mind by the fact that Gardien’s murder was meant to have been accepted as natural death from heart failure. To plan Elliott’s death in such a manner as to ensure an inquiry into Gardien’s mode of life seemed all at odds with the careful arrangements for killing Gardien in a way which seemed to promise a verdict of death from natural causes. All these theories were contradictory. Incidentally, that statement of Miss Rees about seeing a man who resembled Elliott drew unnecessary attention to herself. Once I was convinced that Elliott’s presence here was so improbable as to be ridiculous, I naturally scrutinised the originator of the suggestion.”
“Strafford seemed to think you were hot on his trail at one time,” put in Manton, but Macdonald shook his head.
“No. I give Miss Woodstock and Mr. Strafford top marks for intelligence. If they had planned this Gardien murder, I am sure they would not have risked a contretemps with him earlier in the evening, or told me about it so frankly in their original stat
ements. Strafford had wanted to thrash Gardien, and told me so. If he had killed him he wouldn’t have given me a motive for his doing so.”
“All very subtle,” said Miss Coombe. “If I may put a spoke in, my question is this. Who was Andrew Gardien?”
“He started his career in a printer’s office in Reading,” said Macdonald. “His name was William Jones, and he became a reporter for a local paper, since defunct. We ran him down through looking up the old photographs of a Literary Society in which both Gardien and Elliott—under their original names—were shining lights. Gardien left Reading after the publication of his first novel. We have found out that he had a small house near Folkestone. We have not had time to clear up all the details of his career, but his blackmailing activities were widespread. He had taken the trouble to collect a lot of facts about the guests he was to meet at Mr. Coombe’s party.”
Miss Coombe looked startled. “Ourselves, for instance? How unpleasant! Really, Ronile Rees deserves recognition for her public spirit in removing such a menace!”
“You can’t expect the chief inspector to agree with you, my dear,” said Coombe. “The ethical standpoint…”
Vale intervened here. “For heaven’s sake don’t let’s argue ethics,” he said. “By the way, young Vernon seemed to think he had hit on a good thing when he found that Strafford wrote under the name of Simon Grand and that Elliott was his agent,” and Macdonald replied:
“Vernon once helped me very successfully in a case which he and I happened on together. Since then he has always hoped for a similar scoop. Elliott did act for Strafford under the Simon Grand pseudonym, but the whole association was a ‘correspondence course’ so to speak. Strafford was keen to preserve the anonymity of Simon Grand, and he never went near Elliott personally. Their business was conducted through the post, and Vernon’s great discovery was a damp squib.”
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