Puzzle of the Silver Persian

by Stuart Palmer

  “Nobly done,” the chief inspector said to her. He seemed unusually gentle with the captive. “That is just what we figured at the Yard, and we acted accordingly. We too were waiting for the murderer to strike.” Cannon beckoned to one of the constables. “Get some water, man.” He looked up at Miss Withers. “All the same, I’m afraid we were both wrong.”

  “Wrong? Why—I tell you this man was creeping up on Hammond.”

  “I know,” said Cannon wearily. He tugged at the limp body and splashed the face with water provided by the constable from the nearest house. He tore away the dirty white scarf and the cap—and Miss Withers looked down on the peaceful, pale face of Sergeant John Secker of the C.I.D. A fine big lump, of the general dimensions of an egg, was rising on his forehead.

  Secker opened his eyes dreamily. He stared at Cannon, Miss Withers, and then back at the umbrella with its heavy curved handle.

  “Well batted,” he said encouragingly. “Saw you an hour ago, but didn’t dare warn you off. Hoped you’d get tired.”

  “Good heavens,” said Miss Withers. “I’m so sorry! Not for the world—”

  “I know,” said the sergeant. “Best of motives. All the same, I feel terrible. Anybody got a drink?”

  Tom Hammond produced a pint flask. “Bootleg, but it didn’t kill me,” he said, somewhat thickly.

  “Thanks, old man. But won’t you need it?”

  Hammond shook his head. He looked white and almost sober. “Didn’t know I was making a horse—a fool of myself and playing bait for you fellows,” he said. “I think I’d better go on the wagon for a while.”

  “Wait,” protested the sergeant feebly, struggling to his feet and avoiding the proffered help of his fellows. “The idea is still a good one. Won’t you be sporting and go on—I mean, won’t you play the drunk and let us lurk about waiting for the murderer to strike?”

  Tom Hammond was completely sober now. “No,” he said. “Nein, non, nix, no. What do you take me for? The only pleasure I have left is a good howling binge, and you have to spoil that for me.”

  He refused Cannon’s offer of transportation home, and departed in search of a taxicab and in the keeping of two constables.

  Miss Withers held out her hand to the sergeant. “Sorry,” she said. “I wish I’d known what you were up to, and I wouldn’t have interfered.”

  “Quite all right,” said Secker, rubbing the lump on his forehead. “I’ll take it in the spirit in which it was sent, as the vicar said to the old lady who gave him brandied peaches for Christmas.”

  “Well,” observed Miss Withers, who was given an undeserved ride back to her hotel in the commandeered taxi-cab of the police, “thus endeth that lesson. The next step is up to Monsieur—or Madame—X.”

  “I have a few steps in mind myself,” grunted Chief Inspector Cannon. She was deposited at the door of the Alexandria, and the taxi rolled away. She went wearily inside, feeling that she had done much tonight to destroy any feeling of comradeship that Cannon and the sergeant had been beginning to feel toward herself.

  But she forgot all that when she passed the desk, for the night clerk who lounged there produced a telegram.

  It was from Penzance, bearing the signature of Emily Pendavid.

  HAVE JUST RECEIVED WARNING LETTER FROM LONDON. COME DOWN AT ONCE. TAKE CASE EITHER AS OPERATIVE OR AS FRIEND. WILL GLADLY GUARANTEE MODERATE EXPENSES URGENT WIRE COLLECT DECISION.

  Miss Withers did not even smile at the addition of the cautious word “moderate.” She turned to the clerk.

  “Have you a time-table for the Great Western?” she demanded. “I am checking out in the morning, or sooner…”

  “Ah, a trip to the wonderful Cornish Riviera,” said the man heartily. “Madame will find it the garden spot of England.”

  But, Miss Withers told herself, there was a flower growing in that garden which badly needed plucking—a poisonous, luxuriant mandragore or nightshade. The seed of murder had taken root there… and threatened to bloom.

  “Leaves Paddington 5 A.M.—arrives Penzance 12:45 P.M.” she read. “I’ll do it. Heaven knows there’s nothing happening in London.”

  That night Miss Hildegarde Withers went speeding westward out of the city aboard the Great Western’s second-best train, just as the moon was setting. It was also then that the body of Rosemary Fraser came floating up the Thames with the tide.

  Chapter XII

  As the Tide Turns

  THAT DAY WAS DISMAL and gray, with low-hanging clouds shutting away the sun even at noon. Miss Hildegarde Withers, who had managed to sleep very little on the train which bore her down to this farthest corner of England, stood alone upon an ancient stone quay, shortly after one.

  “Tide’s ebbing fast,” the Cornish taxi man had told her. “Half an hour or so and you’ll be able to walk across to the island.”

  The half hour had gone, but still great rolling swells swept in from Mount’s Bay to splash across the black causeway. From where she stood, the gaunt castle-fortress of Dinsul appeared unreal and forbidding, reminding her of Arnold Böcklin’s unforgettable masterpiece at the Metropolitan back in her own New York: Totinsel—The Isle of the Dead, he had called it. In that picture there had been great granite cliffs plunging down to the sea, against a sky of drifting dark clouds…

  She supposed that, if she only had taken the trouble to find out, there were means of communicating with Dinsul from the mainland. A telephone, perhaps—or some system of signals. Certainly she could have sent a message announcing her arrival, and there would have been someone to meet her. But she preferred arriving unannounced and unheralded, and thus receiving her impressions naturally.

  Finally the slackening waters drew back from the causeway, and she gingerly set out across the wet passage, carrying her overnight case. It was not as long a journey as she had feared, and within a few minutes she had marched across (feeling somewhat like the children of Israel) and was mounting the interminable steps, cut in the solid rock, which led to the great door of Dinsul.

  There was no bell and no knocker. She beat with the handle of her umbrella until Treves, the red-faced butler, appeared.

  He took one look. “This is not a visiting day,” he said shortly. “Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday only…”

  He prepared to close the door, but Miss Hildegarde Withers put her foot in it. “I don’t care what day it is,” she told him. “Take my name to your mistress. Say that Miss Withers is here.”

  He stood back, murmuring polite apologies, and she entered the hall. She shivered—not because the place, like all English homes, was several degrees colder than a tomb, but because there was an unmistakable atmosphere, an aura, so to speak, of things ancient and done and forgotten. It was the feeling, she thought, that she might have received at Stonehenge on a March day.

  The warmth of the Honorable Emily’s greeting did much to dispel her first impression. “Good of you to come,” said the Englishwoman. “And damned silly of me to ask you. I mean—to think it necessary, you understand. I’m not the nervous type, usually, but that message rather gave me the muley-grubs for a time.”

  “Oh, yes, the message,” said Miss Withers. “I’d like to see it.”

  “Afraid you mayn’t,” said the Honorable Emily. “I sent it off to Scotland Yard when I telegraphed you. But there was nothing much to see. Just a letter with a black border marked on it. Came yesterday afternoon, with the late mail. Postmarked London—and a very cruel and unkind message. Something about what a horrible laugh I have, and how the writer hoped I would laugh through hell… you can imagine.”

  “I can indeed,” said Miss Withers dryly. “Let me see—yesterday, if I am not mistaken, was Saturday, the seventh of October. I don’t suppose that you happened to notice the postmark date on that letter?”

  “I noticed it most particularly,” the Honorable Emily assured her. “It was dated two days after we left London to come down here—the fifth, to be exact. In case it makes any difference.”

  I
t made a tremendous amount of difference to Miss Withers, but she nodded slowly. “Then it must have arrived about the same time you received my letter?”

  “Yours came in the morning mail, the black-bordered one in the afternoon,” she was told. “But don’t let’s talk about it any more now. We have lunch in about an hour. Treves will show you to your room…”

  Miss Withers noticed that her hostess was clad in a lounging robe which appeared to have been hastily slipped on. “Never mind about me,” she said. “Let your man take my bag upstairs, and I’ll wander around and absorb the atmosphere of your charming old place while you dress. After lunch will be time enough to talk about things.”

  “Righto.” The Honorable Emily gestured widely. “Make yourself at home, my dear. It’s an old place, and the conveniences aren’t what they might be, but I love it. My family has owned Dinsul for heaven knows how many years.”

  She dashed off, and, handing her bag to Treves, Miss Withers walked slowly down the great hall.

  Room after room opened off it, each furnished with ancient and blackened pieces of oak and decorated with family portraits which stared down in unison and with a dignified disapproval upon the Yankee school teacher.

  “Never mind,” she told herself after a time. “You have just as many ancestors as anybody else, and what’s more, I’ll wager that they were a more prepossessing lot than these besotted Cavaliers.”

  She came past window after window, each of which looked out upon the sea. By craning her neck she could see the almost perpendicular cliffs beneath, and here and there a few trees clinging precariously to the slope, still green in this southerly latitude.

  Then, at the end of the hall, she entered through wide double doors into what she knew must be a banquet hall. A refectory table at least thirty feet in length ran down the center. At one end was a raised balcony, doubtless for musicians, and around the walls was a painted hunting scene, still bright and cheerful, in which mounted lords and ladies chased deer, boar, stag, fox, rabbit, badger, and heaven knew what else, in a bewildering complexity.

  Beneath the mural painting was a modest placard—“Please do not add your initials to the wall decorations”—which puzzled her a good deal.

  She started suddenly as a cheerful young voice spoke up behind her. “Jolly, eh what?”

  It was Leslie Reverson, in plus-fours. “Aunt said you were here,” he went on. “Shall I escort you round?”

  She could only say yes. “What a delightful old place,” she told him.

  “Think so? Seems a bit grim to me. I sometimes shiver at the thought of spending the rest of my life here, but you know the Honorable Emily. She’s all for the moated grange stuff, you know. And while I’m a Pendavid only on the distaff side, I’m the heir, you know.”

  He led the way, chatting merrily, back down the hall, and then to a wide stone staircase. Halfway up he paused at a window and pointed upwards and out.

  “St. Augustine’s Chair,” he informed her. “The legend is that the man or girl who sits there first will be top-dog in their married life.”

  Miss Withers peered out and saw a niche in the granite cliff at the end of a narrow and steep pathway. “He’d deserve to be,” she commented. “If he lived.”

  Leslie laughed. “Right you are. It is a giddy thing, isn’t it? That’s why we tell the tourists that the famous chair is a crotch in the stone down by the pier. They fight to sit in it, and go away as happy as if they’d found the real one.”

  “Tourists?” said Miss Withers.

  “Oh, didn’t you know? Only way we can keep the old place going, you know. Three days a week we have open house, and the family retires into seclusion while the public tramps through—at half a crown a head.”

  “I see,” said Miss Withers.

  “Of course, there’s been a lot of remodeling done in the place,” Leslie went on. “We’re coming into what used to be the chapel of the old castle. It was a monastery after the kings of Cornwall died out, you know. Aunt had it rebuilt into her private apartment, some years back. But she couldn’t make it livable.”

  Miss Withers shared his viewpoint, but for different reasons. This hulk of stone was not livable simply because it had been lived in too long.

  Leslie led her aside, down a smaller hall. “This wing opens off the hall where your room is—and mine and all the guest rooms, for that matter. Aunt has it for her very own, you know. That’s the door of her sitting room, and there’s her bedroom.” He pointed to a door just beyond. “That little room was my own discovery,” he announced proudly. “When I came home from school I was full of romance and all that sort of rot. Hidden treasure and so forth. I paced off the hall and found that it was a good ten feet longer than the rooms opening off it. We had builders tear into the wall, and they found a secret room. It was all written up in The Times—the only occasion in my life when I got into the papers.”

  Miss Withers admitted that she had not read of it. Leslie looked disappointed. “Oh, well, in the States, I suppose… but it was a great furor for a time, and it still brings the tourists. You see, the builders found a dried-up skeleton in the room, all covered with armor and gold lace and whatnot. There was an old story that in 14-something John of Pomeroy, a local baron, filched this place in the absence of Richard the First. When he heard that the King had returned to England, he knew that he’d be hanged for high treason, so he was supposed to have opened his veins and bled to death. Must have been true, for the armor and trappings bore the Pomeroy insignia. We gave the bones decent burial on the shore—but the real joke was discovering that Aunt had slept all her life next door to a walled-up skeleton in a secret room.”

  “I can imagine how she felt,” Miss Withers told him.

  “Of course. She was certainly delighted.”

  “Delighted?”

  “Yes, naturally. It’s hard enough to find a place to put bathrooms in a castle built with six-foot-thick walls, and here was one ready to hand.” He opened the door and displayed a neat and almost modern bath, complete even to a large gas heater near the tub. “Aunt does love to soak, you know.”

  The door leading to the bedroom opened, and the Honorable Emily, neatly dressed in her characteristic baggy tweeds, appeared.

  “Leslie, you may leave off the discussion of my personal habits and take our guest down to luncheon. And I suppose Treves is busy in the kitchen, so you’d better rap on Candida’s door.”

  Candida seemed surprised and relieved to see the new member of the party.

  They all of them went down together and, instead of losing themselves in the great dining hall, had a cosy and quite cheerful lunch in a little room which opened directly onto a balcony overlooking the sea.

  Any misgivings Miss Withers might have had regarding ceremony and state were speedily dispelled. The butler served and waited.

  “We have only Treves and his wife to cook,” the Honorable Emily informed her. “Women come up from the village once a week to clean, and we manage. Though it’s not easy in a place this size.”

  Miss Withers agreed. “It’s because of the fact that we have almost no land tax to pay,” her hostess went on, “that we can keep Dinsul at all. At that, every shilling has to be saved to pay the death duties, you know. One of these days this place will come to Leslie, and I don’t want it to be sold to pay duties, like so many of our old homes in this country;”

  “Now, Aunt!” said Leslie uncomfortably.

  “Well, we must look ahead,” said the Honorable Emily. “One of these days my erratic heart will stop for good and all. I’ve known that for a long time. And a Pendavid belongs in Dinsul. I’m leaving it to you, but I’m going to make a change in my will so that in order to get anything you have to live here nine months of the year.”

  The trend of the conversation was definitely gloomy, and Miss Withers aptly changed it by asking Candida how the golf game had come out.

  “I’m afraid I was lucky,” said that young lady.

  “She made a 76 to m
y 89,” Leslie cut in proudly. “And the Penzance course is no slouch, either.”

  Candida gave him a motherly smiled. “It’s your wrist,” she pointed out. “You’re too nervous.”

  The conversation lapsed, while Miss Withers picked at an excellent Cornish pasty composed of meat, onions, apples, potatoes, and she did not dare to guess what else.

  Then Candida spoke. “You’re not down here for the trip,” she said. “We may as well break the ice. Do you think the police are any closer to an explanation of the things that happened on the boat and in London?”

  “I do not,” said Miss Withers. “They’re trying the process of elimination.”

  “What about yourself?” asked Leslie. “Getting warmer?”

  “Do you know,” said Miss Withers solemnly, “I’ve made up my mind to one thing. The mystery has been enclosed by a great deal of fuss and feathers. But I think it is as solved as it ever needs to be. The murder cycle seems to be at an end, and those who have been killed seem very easily spared…”

  Candida spoke quickly. “But Rosemary—?”

  “Rosemary Fraser was not murdered,” said the school teacher shortly.

  Candida gasped, and Leslie Reverson’s hand reached for hers under the table. He found it cold as ice and rubbed it.

  “Cold hands—warm heart,” he whispered solemnly, and she laughed.

  At that moment Treves arrived, announcing that Mr. Starling was on the telephone for his mistress. The Honorable Emily rose hastily.

  “That Hammond child has no doubt set fire to Tenton Hall,” she observed.

  But it was not as serious as all that. Starling’s voice was its usual crisp self.

  “Excuse me, my lady, for troubling you. But there is a gentleman here in my library, a Mr. Hammond. He is very excited and seems a few sheets in the wind, if you’ll forgive the expression. He says he is the father of the pupil you brought me last Tuesday and insists upon taking him away. I’m not sure just what I ought to do.”

  “Hm,” said the Honorable Emily. “I’m not sure either, Starling. What do you wish to do?”