Death, My Darling Daughters

by Jonathan Stagge

  I could be angry too. “Any cheap sensationalism in this case came from your poor old servant herself, Dr. Hilton. I might as well tell you frankly that I do think it quite possible that Nanny was murdered, and I think so simply because she herself warned me yesterday that she was afraid a murder might be committed here this week end.”

  “She—what?”

  I told him exactly what the old nurse had said, including her dark reference to Dr. Hilton himself going down in a “swelter and welter of bluid.” For a moment he seemed considerably shaken, but he managed to reassume some semblance of his former conciliatory manner.

  “I—ah—understand your suspicions better now, Dr. Westlake, but I assure you that you are worrying yourself unnecessarily. If you had known Nanny, you would have been used to her dramatics. She was a dominating old woman. Felt she possessed my sisters and me body and soul. Felt that—well, she imagined the rest of the world was our enemy and that, without her to take care of us, danger confronted us around every corner.”

  “As specific a danger as a threat of murder to you?”

  “Why, yes, yes, certainly.” He gave a rather sickly laugh. “Why, last month, for example, I had a bout of ptomaine, and Nanny immediately got it into her head that someone was trying to poison me. In fact, she was so impossible that I induced Emily to bring her down here where there would be less friction. You see, I had been a widower a long time, and Nanny wasn’t used to the idea of—” He was floundering badly now. “So you see, if she could invent a murder attempt out of an attack of ptomaine—The truth is, disaster was like tea to Nanny. She throve on it, and when there was no more she brewed herself another dish.”

  With a return to irritability, he added: “I cannot assure you too strongly that there is nothing to worry about. So please put all foolish fancies out of your mind.”

  We stared at each other uncomfortably. We had reached an awkward conversational hump and were destined never to get over it, for suddenly the door was thrown open and Belle Kenton-Oakes swept in, followed by Mrs. Lanchester.

  “Really the picnic became impossible. The mosquitoes were foul. I told Richard they would be.” Belle Kenton-Oakes barged up to her brother. Her large face was red beneath its thick English coating of powder, and her eyes under their startled albino brows were bulging with curiosity. “Well, George, how’s Nanny? Better, I trust.”

  Mrs. Lanchester, trailing charm and a faint odor of lavender, drifted to my side, laying her sensitive hand on my arm. She smiled up at me almost caressingly. “Yes, Dr. Westlake, I’m sure that was all a mistake. Poor Bertha, such an alarmist.”

  George Hilton said crossly: “Alarmist nothing. Nanny is dead.”

  “No!” exclaimed Belle Kenton-Oakes more from disapproval than incredulity. “George, it can’t be.”

  “I’m afraid it is,” I put in. “Nanny is dead. Her tea was poisoned with cyanide. I am going to call the police if you’d be kind enough to tell me where the telephone is.”

  “The police! Cyanide.” Mrs. Kenton-Oakes’s mouth popped open and stayed open.

  Emily Lanchester received the news with a little decorative grimace which would have been more appropriate to register regret at refusing a pleasant social engagement. “Oh dear, how sad. Poor Nanny. No chamber music tonight then. No. Of course not. Oh, how very sad.” Her voice drifted into: “You want the telephone, Dr. Westlake? You will find it in the little closet on the way to the kitchen. Dear Father believed that the telephone was merely an aid to the servants in marketing. We have not altered its position.”

  Mrs. Lanchester’s determination to keep the mood fragrantly nostalgic regardless of her old nurse’s death genuinely shocked me. I left Dr. Hilton to cope with his sisters in his own fashion and went in search of the little closet on the way to the kitchen.

  The Hilton house, like many New England farmhouses that have been added to by succeeding generations, got rather complicated in its rear quarters. I threaded my way down a passage behind the dining room in what seemed to be the general direction of the kitchen. I was approaching a bend in the corridor when the sound of voices ahead made me pause.

  It was the passion in the voices that checked me. One, a woman’s, was speaking in a low, ferocious whisper.

  “Don’t worry. You won’t be bothered any more.”

  “Fine.” It was a man’s voice, equally angry. “That suits me fine.”

  “Suits you, does it?” The woman laughed. “We’ll see whether it suits you. You just wait. That’s all. You just wait.”

  Before I had time to move, a man swung around the bend in the passage. It was, as I had guessed, Vic Roberts. His magnificent face was rough with fury. He hurried past me with loping, athlete’s strides. If he saw me, he showed no signs of it.

  Because I had to go somewhere I went on around the corner. Helena Hilton was standing with her back pressed against the wall and her heavy arms hanging at her sides. The bosom of her white cotton frock was swelling up and down, and her blond face was distorted with a peevish ferocity which made her look positively ugly.

  It was one of those moments. There she was. There I was. We stared at each other. I came out with the ultimate in inanities. I grinned feebly and said:

  “I’m just going to use the telephone.”

  VI

  I did telephone Inspector Cobb, and not long afterwards he arrived. I deliberately kept my vague suspicions from him. I wanted him to draw his own conclusions. I took him up to Nanny’s room, merely giving him the actual medical details of the death. He did all that had to be done there and suggested a formal interview with Dr. Hilton as head of the family. Having extracted a promise from him to stop at my house on his way back to town, I left him in the living room conversing respectfully with George Hilton.

  Mrs. Lanchester intercepted me in the hall. There was something unnerving about the sneakeredness of the whole family. Suddenly, without any warning, she was at my side.

  “Oh, Dr. Westlake, I suppose that is the police officer?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He looks most dependable, rather like one of dear Mr. Conrad’s sea captains.” She gave me a slanting glance which was pretty as a girl’s but whose keenness was not completely camouflaged. “George has told you, I feel certain, how eager he is to keep this sad thing—well, unsensational?”

  I assured her that he had.

  “I am glad. We have so recently returned to Kenmore, and the Hiltons have so much to live up to. I am most anxious not to give the neighbors a wrong impression.”

  “That’s the trouble with neighbors,” I said. “When one’s servants start dying of cyanide poisoning, they start getting the wrong impression.”

  Mrs. Lanchester chose to ignore this rather disrespectful remark and, either realizing that I was about to leave or dismissing me, she held out her beautiful hand. “I am desolated that the picnic had such a distressing end. Poor old Nanny. You must come again soon and we will make up for it. For we are going to be friends. Oh yes, your little daughter. I sent the girls off to the music room to play. I felt it was better to occupy them, to keep them away from all this sordid business.”

  As I turned from her, she went to the living-room door. With a great show of absent-mindedness she pushed it open and moved inside as if she had completely forgotten that her brother and Cobb were in private conference.

  In spite of her desire to shield the dear girls, Mrs. Lanchester, it seemed, was as ready as anyone to share the sordid business herself.

  Although I had never been inside the Lanchesters’ music room, I knew where it was. It was an old tobacco barn at one side of the house which had been made over into a Temple to the Muses. I started toward it to pick up Dawn, and once again I was intercepted. This time in the shabby sun porch and by Dr. Kenton-Oakes.

  The British physician had clearly been lying in wait for me. With an anxiety he tried to hide, he asked:

  “Dr. Westlake, you will think this a rather childish question, but George was ab
le to make you realize the need for great discretion, wasn’t he?”

  I gave him what had become almost a form answer.

  “I am so relieved.” His little eyes crinkled behind the spectacles. “George insisted on speaking to you himself, and his talent for alienating people amounts almost to genius. Since you are obviously an independent young man, I was afraid he might have antagonized you.” He paused. “It really is most important to keep any news of my esters from leaking out. You do understand?”

  I told him I understood, although I could not help noticing that those miraculous esters which Dr. Hilton had first tried to claim for himself and had then grudgingly conceded to Vic were now Dr. Kenton-Oakes’s esters. I was beginning to suspect that the coming international conference was going to be a stormy one.

  Dr. Kenton-Oakes opened his mouth to speak again, but at that moment his wife’s voice sounded from the room beyond:

  “Richard, where are you?”

  She appeared almost immediately, massive in the doorway.

  “Here you are. Oh, do come on. I’ve got the backgammon board all set up, and Nanny dying like that upset me. You know how I hate to be kept waiting when I’m upset.”

  Dr. Kenton-Oakes’s mouth twisted in a wry grimace. “You must excuse me, Dr. Westlake, but I have learned that, if it was folly in the first place to marry Belle, it is an even greater folly to disobey her.” He moved to his wife and, slipping his arm around her shapeless waist with unmistakable affection, peered at me. “Someone—I believe it was Mr. Bernard Shaw—once asked me why I married Belle.”

  His wife exclaimed: “Richard!” but he continued with a great show of solemnity:

  “I explained to him, Dr. Westlake, that all busy men need relaxation. Some read detective stories; some collect beetles; others, in this country, I believe, have even done intensive research into the architecture of rural privies. Belle is my relaxation. After twenty years of close conjugal study, she remains perpetually fascinating, for I have yet to find in her a single redeeming feature. That is what I told Mr. Shaw. And I must say he found it a satisfactory explanation.”

  Belle Kenton-Oakes’s florid cheeks quivered. “Really, Richard, you should be careful with your jokes. This young man is apt to believe you mean it.”

  “But I do mean it, my dear,” murmured Dr. Kenton-Oakes, and with a final deprecatory grin he permitted himself to be dragged away to the backgammon board.

  I moved out of the porch door and over the dark Lanchester lawns to the music room, where I found my daughter, Rosalind, and Perdita dutifully scraping out a tinkly-sounding trio while Janie Hilton listened, curled up like a pretty kitten on an uncomfortable wicker davenport. Holding up my hand to indicate I did not wish to interrupt the music, I joined Janie. Little Mrs. Hilton, George’s “mistake in Miami,” glanced up at me with a faint grimace.

  “This is fwightfully highbwow, isn’t it?” And then, her blue myopic eyes dilating: “What about poor Nanny? Is it—is it weally twue?”

  The movement or whatever it was ended there, and the three other girls came hurrying toward me and began to ask the same question. Rosalind seemed keyed up, unnaturally excited. And I sensed a similar though more controlled strain in Perdita. I felt I could understand something of what was passing through their minds. To them, Nanny had been the symbol of regimentation and talebearing to their mother. Her death could not have been altogether a tragedy for the dear girls.

  Because I was eager to be home when Cobb arrived, I gathered up Dawn and her violin and extracted myself as soon as possible from the others.

  My daughter was abnormally quiet on the walk home. Suddenly she asked:

  “Nanny was terribly old, wasn’t she?”

  “Fairly terribly old.”

  “Then she was old enough to die without you having to be sorry,” remarked my daughter callously. “I’m so glad. I hate having to be sorry.” With Nanny thus dismissed, she said: “Isn’t Lizzle wonderful? Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “Like a rat,” I said.

  “Yes.” Dawn sighed with ecstasy. “Just like a rat.”

  I expected some more matrimonial propaganda, but none came. My daughter was lost in contemplation of the inexpressible delights of Dr. Stahl.

  Soon after we arrived home Cobb came. Dawn let him in, brought drinks, and retired with surprising meekness to bed.

  There is something comfortable about Inspector Cobb. With his weather-beaten face and straight, china-blue eyes, he represents to me all that is most admirable in the Massachusetts character. He has the shrewdness, the kindness, and none of the dour regional narrowness of mind. I had known him for many years, during the course of which I had brought most of his many children into the world. Our work together in solving several local mysteries had only reinforced a friendship already built on solid foundations.

  With typical caginess, he opened the conversation with a matter-of-fact discussion of inspector-coroner detail. He had arranged for immediate autopsy and laboratory analysis of the teacup and the teapot and the can of polish. The inquest could be held either the next day or the day following.

  It was only after these points had been settled that the inspector took the ancient pipe from his pocket and stuck it between his teeth. This pipe, which I had almost never seen him light, was a kind of symbol with him. Its presence in his mouth indicated that the time had come for serious reflection.

  “Well, Westlake.” The blue eyes, so much less complex than the blue eyes of Mrs. Lanchester, fixed my face. “I understand you’re being difficult. I understand you think maybe we’ve got a murder on our hands.”

  I stared. “How do you know that?”

  He smiled around the pipe. “It’s not second sight, Westlake. It’s Dr. Hilton. He told me. He was kind of annoyed about it. Called you a couple of rude names.” He leaned forward. “What’s on your mind? What’s bothering you?”

  I told him everything I had learned about the Hilton household. I told him of Nanny’s ominous hints and Dr. Hilton’s suspicious eagerness to brush them off as irrelevant. Although I went into no detail, I mentioned the importance of the forthcoming medical conference and the various antagonisms which I felt were going to complicate it. I even told him about the violent scene between Vic and Helena Hilton.

  “None of this adds up to anything like murder,” I concluded. “I realize that. And none of it has much direct bearing on Nanny. But the point about Nanny was that she was nosy. She had her finger in everybody’s pie. There’s a lot of strong feeling bottled up in that house, and if some of the feeling burst out in murder, Nanny’s the logical one to go up in the explosion.”

  Cobb had been listening in attentive silence. Most policemen would have shown contemptuous indifference to such nebulous theorizing, but Cobb isn’t that way.

  “Well, Westlake,” he said, “I guess that’s pretty slim. But you’ve been right before with less to go on.” He paused. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. Unless the autopsy or the analyses come up with something real fancy, there’s going to be no official investigation.”

  “Hilton?” I asked grimly.

  Cobb nodded. “He called the D.A. when I was there. Told him it was an open-and-shut case of accident. Told him it was vitally important to keep all publicity of any sort from the house at the present time. Rolled off a list of big names in Washington and Boston that had the D.A. shivering in his boots. When he was through, I talked to the D.A. Or rather, the D.A. talked to me. He was like a hen in a duckpond, and there was just one thing he was saying over and over. Lay off. Lay off. Lay off.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. The current D.A. was a weak sister at the best of times, and this, being his re-election year, was not the best of times.

  For a moment we sat contemplating the D.A. in moody silence.

  At length Cobb stirred. “So, Westlake. It’s fifty to one you’re not right. But if you are, I guess there’s going to be one murderer who gets away with murder unless—” He looked down at hi
s square, work-rough hands. When he glanced up again, a sly smile spread around the pipe. “Seems this Mrs. Lanchester’s taken a fancy to you, Westlake. Likes having a young fellow on a string, don’t she?”

  I saw at once what he was driving at. “You mean—?”

  “Why not? It’s the perfect setup until we get something better. Eat her picnics, listen to her pretty music, and—see what you can see.” The smile was a grin now. “You never know, either. Playing around with a bunch of famous doctors may be good for your business.”

  It was most unorthodox to use my position as Mrs. Lanchester’s tame man for a little undercover detective work, but I did not need a great deal of persuasion to give my consent. For one thing I was riled by Dr. Hilton’s grandiose attempt to take the law into his own hands. For another, I was genuinely fascinated at the prospect of a discreet investigation into the Hilton arcana.

  “But for Pete’s sake,” warned Cobb, “watch your step. Give Hilton his head. Direct the jury at the inquest to a verdict of accidental death. Let him think everything’s being run his way or all hell will break loose from Boston.” For a moment he seemed lost in reflection. “By the way, this silver polish,” he said at length. “I’m no doctor, but it strikes me odd, a silver polish poisonous enough to kill an old lady like that—so quick.”

  “There’s a lot of evidence to prove it’s happened before.”

  “Could be,” murmured Cobb. “And could be there’s something else back of it. Anyhow the lab reports will be in tomorrow, and we’ll know just what is and what isn’t in that polish.” He paused once again, and once again introduced a new subject. “This Dr. Stahl, she works on some kind of fumigation, doesn’t she? Killing rats. Is it possible she might have some of this cyanide around?”

  “Almost certainly, I’d say. Hydrocyanic acid is the basis of most good vermin exterminants.”

  Cobb took the unlit pipe out of his mouth and knocked it unnecessarily against the mantel. “Well, if there isn’t any cyanide in the can of polish, I guess we know where any one of them could have picked up enough to kill Nanny.”