‘The thing to do,’ Carstairs told himself glumly, ‘is to return to Chaynings and hunt about to find some clue to Mrs Bradley’s innocence which the police have overlooked.’
He arrived in the early afternoon to find Dorothy cutting roses and Garde seated on the verandah enjoying a cigarette.
‘Why on earth didn’t you let us know you were coming?’ cried Dorothy. ‘We could have met you with the car. What a long, dusty walk you must have had.’
‘Can I see Alastair?’ asked Carstairs.
‘That is just what you cannot do,’ said Garde, scowling. ‘The silly ass has gone to Tibet.’
‘Gone—where?’ cried Carstairs.
‘I don’t wonder you’re surprised,’ said Dorothy, laughing to see Carstairs’ look of bewilderment. ‘No, Garde is not pulling your leg. It’s the truth. He must have been quite prepared, and must have had all his arrangements cut and dried, because, the same day that the police arrested Mrs Bradley, off he went without a word to any of us. It was the inspector who found out where he was bound for, and the police are afraid they won’t get him back in time for the trial. You see, they only found out for certain where he was going the day before yesterday, so he’s had nearly a month’s start. Of course he isn’t an important witness, but still——’
Carstairs whistled softly.
‘But surely he knew he would be wanted as a witness,’ he said. ‘I can’t understand it.’
‘I can,’ said Garde. ‘Lazy old devil! Didn’t want to be bothered. Thought he’d get away before they could serve the papers on him. Well, I jolly well hope they catch him. And I jolly well hope the defending counsel makes it hot for him. Of course, Dorothy and I don’t mind. It’s quite jammy for us to have the house to ourselves.’
‘I suppose, then, I can ask the favour of you that I’d intended to obtain from Alastair,’ said Carstairs.
‘Rather,’ cried Dorothy. ‘What is it?’
‘Shut up, minx,’ observed her husband, pulling her down on to his knee. ‘No petticoat government here.’
‘I want you to let me search the house and grounds to try and find any clue which will help to clear Mrs Bradley,’ said Carstairs. ‘As things are at present, it’s a poor look-out for her, I’m afraid.’
‘Do what you like, sir, of course,’ said Garde warmly. ‘I’ll tell the servants to let you have keys and things, and, if we can do anything to help, you must be sure to let us know.’
‘Thanks very much, old man,’ replied Carstairs.
‘Oh, and by the way, you might like to have a go at interrogating Mabel Cobb,’ suggested Garde. ‘I have a kind of notion that she’s thought over what she said at the inquest, and has decided that she can add a bit to it. She’s tried to sound me about what happens if a person tells less than the whole truth in court. I didn’t see what she was driving at, and I’m afraid I frightened her a bit, so I haven’t been able to get any more out of her. So you have a go. It may be important, or it may not.’
‘And there’s Eleanor’s diary,’ chimed in Dorothy. ‘We can’t make anything out of it, but you may be able to put two and two together.’
‘This sounds too good to be true,’ cried Carstairs. ‘Mabel Cobb and Eleanor’s diary! I suppose the police have seen it?’
‘The diary? Yes. The Chief Constable and the inspector have both seen it, and have come to the conclusion that Eleanor certainly murdered Everard Mountjoy. But, as we had all come to that conclusion ages ago, it seemed a bit pointless to rake it all up again,’ said Garde. ‘However, the police haven’t done any more nosing round in the house since they arrested Mrs Bradley, so, unless we’ve inadvertently disturbed them, your clues are all ready and waiting for you.’
Carstairs smiled.
‘I don’t really expect to have any luck,’ he said. ‘But I feel I must do something.’
The first thing he did was to send for Mabel Cobb.
Without any preliminary questions, and as a shot in the dark, he said:
‘What did you do with the coffee cup on the morning of Miss Bing’s death?’
‘I picked it up and took it downstairs to be washed up,’ said Mabel sullenly, and obviously prepared for a trap.
‘Oh? And, look here, Mabel, who was it you saw on the landing in the morning on the day of Miss Bing’s death?’
The shot told. Mabel gulped, turned red and then pale, and clutched the table as though she had received a blow and wanted to steady herself.
‘I—I—I—never saw nobody!’ she faltered at last.
Carstairs glared at her ferociously. ‘That won’t do!’ he barked. ‘Come, now!’
But Mabel had got over her momentary terror. Her foolish face was set like stone, and so had lost its foolish expression. Her hands were clenched, and she no longer held the table for support. Her voice was little more than a whisper, but what she said was short and to the point.
‘You can go to Jericho wi’ your old questions,’ said Mabel, ‘for I shan’t answer any of ’em! Who be you?’
With which Parthian shot she moved with dignity from the library.
Carstairs bit his lip, choked back burning words, and finally laughed.
‘I shall have to talk it over with Garde,’ he thought. ‘But it can wait. Let’s see what we have here.’
He picked up Eleanor’s diary and opened it at the first page.
A good deal of the diary referred to household matters. It appeared that Eleanor used it as a memorandum for shopping, special cleaning, servants’ holidays, their hours off, their illnesses, and the like; Carstairs skipped the first half of the little book, which held nothing to interest him.
At the end of May, however, the tone of the entries changed. The references to household matters were as frequent, but were jotted down in a very brief form, shorthand signs being used here and there, obviously to leave room for other and, it appeared, more pressing matters.
There was a reference under the date of May 28th which ran: ‘Hodges. Windows. Din: 7. H. home wk-end. Father behaved scandalously. Cannot think what to do. Mabel notice. Could not sleep for thinking. Snake in the grass.’
‘I wonder what Alastair’s unfortunate lapse could have been, and what could have been its consequences,’ mused Carstairs, smiling.
Other references were made (on several subsequent dates) to the same occurrence, and the writer stressed the necessity for ‘getting rid of the dreadful girl at once.’
Farther on, Mabel was referred to as ‘that brazen hussy,’ and Alastair Bing as ‘my father, a monster of iniquity.’
‘She certainly seems to have taken something to heart all right,’ thought Carstairs, turning to the next entry with interest.
It read, under the date of June 17th: ‘Father refuses to “shirk his responsibilities” as he (nobly!) calls them. The atrocity Mabel is to stay. Garde supports Father. I feel that it is pollution to be in the same house with them.’
‘Fancy anyone being so stirred up,’ thought Carstairs. ‘Poor Eleanor! She seems to have taken things to heart far more than any of them gave her credit for.’
He read on, under the date of June 24th:
‘Either that hideous snake or I must leave this house. I cannot and I will not remain under the same roof with her.’
At last there came the reference which Carstairs had been hoping to find. It appeared under the date of June 30th.
‘Father has had the audacity to invite guests as though nothing had happened. For the credit of the family I cannot go away until their visit is over. Garde has invited a woman, a Mrs Lestrange Bradley. I remember her.’
This entry continued straight on through the next day’s portion of this page.
‘She is that horrid little woman who inspected us in France. She got Garde out of some scrape—an Unpleasant Episode, I expect, if the truth were known,’ wrote the puritanical Eleanor, in highly suggestive capital letters.
Further on came the reference to Mountjoy.
‘One younger man is here
to whom I feel curiously attracted. Everard Mountjoy is his name.’
Here the diarist had scribbled the name ‘Everard’ several times at the bottom of the page, and in one place had followed it with the surname ‘Mountjoy,’ and then, very faintly, but perfectly plain to be seen, the word ‘Mrs’ had been insinuated in front of the whole name.
Carstairs sighed.
‘It is easy to see who desired that tragically terminated engagement,’ he said to himself.
The announcement of the engagement itself followed in due course, and was recorded with a sober, and, as it seemed to Carstairs, a reverent pen. It was followed by these words: ‘This solves all my difficulties.’
This seemed nothing less than the truth, for the next few entries were again devoted to details of the house-keeping.
From the date August 2nd onwards (the last entry, significantly enough, being under August 12th, the day preceding Mountjoy’s death) the diarist seemed to have lost her calmed outlook, and to have been plunged into doubt and suspicion.
One entry read:
‘We are engaged, but Everard has made no reference to marriage ever since. Perhaps he thought me bold in forcing him to speak.’
‘That’s illuminating,’ thought Carstairs. ‘She “forced him to speak.” In other words, she proposed to Mountjoy rather than the other way about.’
‘It is torture,’ another entry read, ‘to be with my dear Everard as much as I am, and to know that he has no desire to caress me. One should be content, I suppose’ (this entry took the whole of the next day’s space as well as its own) ‘with his beautiful platonic love, but sometimes strange desires come into my mind. I scarcely like to confess them, even to myself. I said to him something about leaving his tennis-shirt open at the neck as Garde and Bertie do, but he mumbled something, and kept it fast buttoned. He looked like that stupid curate we had three years ago. I want Everard to be manly and sunburnt.’
‘Deuced awkward for Everard. I wonder why on earth she ever consented to become engaged to Eleanor,’ mused Carstairs.
At the last entry he blinked, and closed the book with a snap. There was a fire burning in the room. He walked over to it, and consigned Eleanor’s diary to the flames.
‘The freedom of the modern girl,’ said Carstairs, ‘has its good points. I should say that poor Eleanor was making up for the self-imposed repressions of twenty-odd years when she wrote that last entry.’ He blushed as he recalled it.
‘Settles the Mountjoy murder right enough,’ he muttered. ‘After all that, to find that Mountjoy was a woman simply turned the poor girl’s brain. Mrs Bradley was right—Eleanor killed Mountjoy—but who the devil killed Eleanor? Well, let’s start a systematic search, and see what we can find.’
He determined to inspect first the bedroom that Mrs Bradley had occupied during her visit, and then the room which had belonged to Eleanor.
Careful and methodical was the search, disappointing the result. At last, however, his eyes brightened.
He was exploring the recesses of the small medicine cupboard in Eleanor’s room, and near the back of the bottom shelf, which was about on a level with his shoulder, he dis covered a medicine-glass. Curiously enough, for Eleanor was a careful person, it contained a drop or two of liquid.
‘Suicide?’ said Carstairs, scarcely daring to breathe the word.
Without touching the glass, he went in search of Garde.
‘Phone the inspector, and ask him to see about getting the contents analysed,’ said Garde. ‘Of course, it will turn out to be ammoniated tincture of quinine, or something, but, still, anything is worth trying.’
The inspector himself came over. He grinned with humorous resignation at Carstairs.
‘What’s this, sir? The usual red herring?’ he said.
Carstairs smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
‘I’ve a friend in durance vile, inspector,’ he said, ‘and I’m not missing any chances. I suppose you’ll test this glass for finger-prints?’
‘You suppose right, sir,’ replied the inspector, ‘and I’ll promise to let you know the result. Good day.’
‘And suppose the stuff in the glass is hyoscin, and the finger-prints are those of Mrs Bradley, how do we go then?’ asked Garde.
‘I have more faith in Mrs Bradley’s common sense than to suppose anything of the kind,’ grinned Carstairs.
Chapter Twenty
The Case for the Crown
MRS BRADLEY WAS enjoying herself. She had enjoyed being arrested. It was a new experience, and she had made special note of her psychological reactions to it, and had planned to incorporate them in her next book. She had enjoyed the talks she had had with her lawyer about the conducting of her defence, and she had enjoyed his intense exasperation when she resolutely declined, in spite of all his arguments and pleadings, to make a statement before the trial.
‘I am reserving my defence,’ she would tell the perplexed man, and, expostulate as he might, she would expose her teeth in a cat-like grin, and refuse to budge from what he called her ‘criminally foolish attitude.’
‘It looks so bad,’ he explained to her more than once. ‘I know it used to be considered the right thing to do, but it has gone out of fashion nowadays. The jury are certain to be influenced by it, either unconsciously or under instruction from the Crown counsel. You see if I am not right. It is certain to go against you at the trial.’
‘Perhaps I want it to go against me,’ was Mrs Bradley’s cryptic answer.
She enjoyed the first day of the trial more than she had ever enjoyed anything. Her interests were mainly intellectual, and, although she was in danger of being hanged for wilful murder on the verdict of twelve ‘good men and true,’ she was able to set aside that aspect of the matter, and devote herself to a serious study of the psychology of the leading counsel for the Crown and his witnesses.
The court was crowded with people, and, as she let her eyes roam casually over the assembly, she picked out mechanically a dipsomaniac and two drug fiends, and was proceeding to classify the first two rows of spectators in greater detail when she was aware that the jury were being sworn in.
The leading counsel for the Crown was fat. She disliked fat men. Fat women were normal, healthy, good-tempered, well-balanced people, but fat men were an offence against nature. She hoped he would lose his case.
She glanced round the court again. She was pleased to see a full house!
Ferdinand Lestrange, her son, the leading counsel for the defence, looked distinguished, she thought. Nobody there knew she was his mother. Ferdinand wouldn’t care a hang whether she were convicted or not, except in so far as his professional reputation was concerned, but he would take care not to let that suffer!
She looked at the fat prosecuting counsel and again at her son.
‘Ferdinand will get me off,’ she thought comfortably. ‘Clever boy!’
She had thought of asking if she might take written notes during the trial, but decided that it might not be quite in order. Anyway, her memory, she thought, would serve her.
The voice of the clerk of the court, addressing her, once again cut short her musings.
‘Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, you are indicted and also charged with the wilful murder of Eleanor Millicent Bing on the eighteenth August last. Are you guilty or not guilty?’
Mrs Bradley gazed at him benignly.
‘Not guilty, my lord,’ she answered, transferring her glance to the judge.
His lordship was a good chap. She had met him at Cowes one year, she recollected. The wig and robes suited him. She was glad she had made Ferdinand choose the bar. He would probably be a judge some day, too.
The leading counsel for the Crown, in a booming, plum-like voice which associated well with his girth, commenced his opening speech. It dealt chiefly with Mrs Bradley’s past life, and she learned some things which surprised her.
‘This man will make me blush in a minute,’ she thought, as the learned counsel referred to her for the fourth time
as this ‘deservedly famous woman.’
‘I suppose psycho-analysis is still new to some of these people,’ she thought. Her attention wandered to the jury. There was one, she felt certain, who possessed all the mental characteristics of the Emperor Caligula. The man fourth from the end was a neurotic type, with sadistic traits, perhaps. She wondered if it would be in order to object to his being on the jury.
‘Still, if the other eleven want to let me off, he isn’t the type to stick it out, that’s one comfort,’ she told herself.
She looked again at the crowded court. That woman at the end was Cora Mason, the society medium. A clever woman in her own line, Mrs Bradley reflected. Must have amassed a considerable fortune, too.
A rustle of interest betrayed the fact that the prosecuting counsel was coming to what Garde Bing would term the ‘meat in the sandwich.’ Might as well listen to what the little tub was saying, she decided. Interesting to see how he got his shots home with the jury.
‘This woman, then,’ the learned counsel asserted heavily, ‘well educated, gifted beyond the majority of her sex, planned a dark and awful deed.’
Mrs Bradley nodded imperceptibly. This was undoubtedly a master. He had the correct cinematograph style of diction! It suited his audience. ‘Dark and awful deed’ was good!
‘In spite of the fat,’ she said to herself, ‘I recognize in this man a psychologist and a brother. Carry on, friend!’
With increasing amusement she listened to a masterly libelling of her own character, which reached its climax when the learned counsel accused her before the jury of plotting to remove Eleanor Bing from this world so that she might usurp her place as mistress of Chaynings. Eleanor, the loving daughter, having been removed from the scene of operations, the coast was clear for Mrs Bradley to become Alastair’s wife.
‘At this point,’ said the next day’s newspapers, in heavy type, ‘the prisoner astonished the whole court by laughing loudly and with obvious enjoyment.’
Ferdinand Lestrange took advantage of the stir caused by his mother’s unseemly laughter to whisper to his junior:
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