"Yes, I will. But do you know it's only eight minutes since you called me up on the roof?" said Ronald, glancing at his wrist watch. "So we can't be said to have lost any time. In the meantime, take David upstairs and give him a stiff drink, will you?" he added in an undertone. Roger nodded.
David Stratton could hardly have had much affection left for his wife, and when the sudden shock of her death was over he could hardly have any regrets; but at the moment he seemed quite dazed. "Coming upstairs, Stratton?" Roger said to him. David did not answer.
Ronald, passing him in the doorway, gave his arm a brotherly squeeze. "Buck up, David, old lad. Come upstairs and let me get you a drink," Roger repeated.
David looked at him. "Yes, I could do with a drink," he said, in a perfectly normal voice.
He followed Roger upstairs like a child.
"And so," said Roger thoughtfully, "she really did do it, after all."
"Why 'after all'?" asked Mrs. Lefroy. They were standing, alone in the barroom, in front of the fire. After breaking the news to the women, Ronald had telephoned to the two doctors and the police and was now downstairs, changing his clothes. Celia Stratton had taken charge of her younger brother, whom even the stiff drink administered by Roger did not seem to have shaken quite out of his trance of amazement, or incredulity, or concealed relief, or whatever it was that had temporarily numbed him. Colin Nicolson and the Williamsons were in the ballroom, debating whether Lilian Williamson should change out of her husband's trousers or whether this action would look suspicious to the local police force.
"Why 'after all'?" Roger repeated. "Because she was telling me herself earlier in the evening how much she would have liked to commit suicide, if only she could find 'an easy way out.'"
"I believe she said as much to Osbert, too," nodded Mrs. Lefroy.
"She did. He told me so."
There was a little pause. "That," said Mrs. Lefroy, as if speaking rather carefully, "will be a useful piece of information for the police."
"Yes. And yet," Roger meditated, with a vivid remembrance of that distorted face, "I shouldn't have said that hanging was a very easy way out, would you?"
"I suppose it depends," said Mrs. Lefroy vaguely. Her hands smoothed over the white satin on her waist in a series of nervous little jerks. Roger noticed that she had very pretty hands, white and small.
"As a matter of fact," he pursued, "I never thought for a single moment that she meant a word of what she was saying. Of course I didn't. I imagined she was just talking for silly effect, as usual. Well, that seems to dispose of the good old cliche, doesn't it?"
"What good old cliche?"
"That people who talk about committing suicide never do it. And yet," Roger ruminated, "I could have sworn that it applied in her case more forcibly than it could in any other. The more I think of it, the more certain I'd have been that she was just talking poppycock. I suppose it couldn't possibly have been an accident?"
"Is this the celebrated detective's brain working for our benefit?" asked Mrs. Lefroy, with a laugh that sounded a little forced.
"Hardly," Roger smiled. "But if you'd like to hear the celebrated novelist's opinion, it is that such a situation simply couldn't be entrusted to fiction. One has to go to real life for such boldness."
"What do you mean?"
"The coincidence of it all. Here is a woman whose existence is a source of annoyance, and perhaps a good deal more than annoyance, to several different people, and that for several different reasons. And just at the moment when those people are resenting it perhaps more intensely than ever before, she very obligingly, and most unexpectedly, kills herself. You must admit that the coincidence is far too violent to be stomached in fiction."
"Is it?" Mrs. Lefroy asked reluctantly. "I don't think really it's as strong as all that."
"Don't you?"
"Well - it is just a coincidence, of course, and nothing else."
"Oh, of course," said Roger.
They looked into the fire for a few moments. Mrs. Lefroy leaned her bare arm on the beam that formed the rough mantelpiece and fidgeted with the toe of her white satin slipper among the dead ashes on the edge of the fire.
"I wish the police would hurry up and come," she burst out suddenly.
"I thought you said just now you were dreading them?"
"Did I? How foolish of me. Of course I'm not," said Mrs. Lefroy, with an unnatural little laugh.
Roger said nothing. Apparently Mrs. Lefroy read into his silence a mild expostulation, for she added: "Yes, you're quite right. I am dreading them. It was ridiculous to pretend that I'm not."
"Why are you dreading them?"
Mrs. Lefroy looked at him bravely. "Because there isn't a single person connected with this family who won't be absolutely delighted to hear that Ena's dead. It's no good beating about the bush: there won't be. And I'm so afraid that the police may guess it."
"Is there any particular reason why they shouldn't guess it? I mean, as you say, Mrs. Stratton wasn't a very pleasant person: and not to beat about the bush myself, I should say that she's a lot more use to the community dead than alive. But does it matter that the police should know that too?"
"Well, it's not very - nice, is it?" Mrs. Lefroy hedged.
"Sudden death never is very nice," Roger said solemnly.
Mrs. Lefroy moved impatiently. "Oh, don't talk platitudes."
"Weren't you rather talking platitudes yourself, Mrs. Lefroy?"
"Well, you know perfectly well what's in my mind. It's in your own, too. If you want me to put it into plain words, I'm terribly afraid that if the police do guess that, they may suspect something absolutely preposterous."
"Yes," Roger agreed, with a little sigh, "you're right; that was in my own mind, too."
Dr. Chalmers arrived before the police. He came up the stairs alone. Roger looked round from where he was standing by the fireplace and saw him ascending the last short flight of the well staircase. "Ah, Chalmers. You've been very quick."
"I hadn't got to bed. This is a terrible business, Sheringham."
"Yes. Have you seen Ronald?"
"No, I came straight in; the front door's still unlocked. Where is he?"
"In his bathroom, I think, changing."
"And - Mrs. Stratton?"
"On Ronald's bed. Shall I tell him you've come?"
"Oh, it's all right, thanks. I'll find him myself."
Dr. Chalmers turned and went down the stairs again.
"Did you notice?" Roger said conversationally to Mrs. Lefroy. "Did you notice how his manner had changed? Meeting him before, one couldn't possibly have told that he was a doctor, except for the very faint smell of ether that always hangs about a doctor. But just then he couldn't have been anything else. Even his voice was a bedside voice."
"Yes," said Mrs. Lefroy.
Colin Nicolson appeared in the ballroom door. "Was that the police?" he asked.
"No, Chalmers."
"Lilian's decided to change at last. Cut along, Lilian. It wasn't the police. Agatha, you haven't forgotten who you are now, have you?"
Mrs. Lefroy looked at him vacantly for a moment before her face resumed its normal expression. "Oh! Yes, of course, Henrietta of France, wasn't it? I don't think it matters much, in any case."
Lilian Williamson hurried off to change, and her husband followed her out of the ballroom to join the group in the other room. Nicolson began to forecast the questions which the police would probably ask.
Roger stood for a moment uncertainly among them. Then he edged towards the stairs. A sudden wish had come to him to have another and closer look at the roof before the police arrived.
And yet there seemed very little to be seen on the roof. Literally very little. The heavy beams of the gallows, a chair or two here and there for those willing to brave the temperature of an April night, and a little arbour of trelliswork set in wooden troughs of earth, with the bare stems of Virginia creeper and polygonum baldschuanicum writhing in and out of it - th
ere was nothing else at all.
Yet Roger felt that there ought to be something else. He did not know what, but he was not satisfied. It was too neat, too tidy altogether, too convenient that Ena Stratton should have committed suicide just at this juncture, when so many people desired it. Did Mrs. Lefroy suspect that perhaps her future sister - in - law had not committed suicide? Mrs. Lefroy was a shrewd woman as well as an intelligent one. She was worried about something. Was it only what she had voiced, or had she a deeper, untellable fear?
Yet of course Ena Stratton must have committed suicide. There was absolutely no evidence of anything else, not the smallest sign of it. And Roger very sincerely hoped that she had committed suicide. He would have been extremely sorry to see a decent person hang for such a worthless excrescence on humanity's surface.
And yet . . .
He stood in the middle of the gallows triangle, peering up at the crossbeams. They were high. There were three good feet of cord showing above the heads of the two life - size figures that remained, and the toes of their shoes were at least eighteen inches off the ground. Those crossbeams were ten feet high and more.
But that did not appear to have the least significance.
Roger fetched a chair which was standing somewhere between the gallows and the door into the house, set it beside one of the dangling figures, and mounted upon it. His body stood almost level with that of the figure, neck and neck practically on the same plane. Standing there, he could have unfastened the noose from the figure's neck and draped it around his own. It would have sagged a little on his shoulders, but not much when the noose was enlarged. Unquestionably Ena Stratton could have stood there and done the same.
He jumped down onto the roof again. The chair, spurned by his retreating foot, tumbled over with a crash, and Roger cursed. His nerves were upset, and that added to his sense of frustration.
Yet he did not know why he should be feeling frustrated at all. If there was nothing there to discover, he could discover nothing. And he wanted nothing there to be discovered. Why then feel frustrated if nothing presented itself for discovery?
He walked down into the sun parlour, switched on the light, and looked moodily round, found nothing, and walked back to the roof again. A thought pulled him up with a jerk. Where, after all, was the third straw dummy?
It took him twenty - five seconds to find it, in the shadow of the little arbour. It lay there, huddled grotesquely. The path from it to the gallows was unobstructed, so that it might have been carelessly tossed or kicked there. Roger knelt down to examine it and found that it was headless. It was a minute or two before he found the ball of plaited straw which had served as the head, lying in a gully on the way down to the sun parlour. He wondered how it had got there.
But chiefly he was wondering whether the figure had fallen down or had been torn down. The answer to that question might be quite significant; but Roger did not see how an answer could possibly be obtained. The few wisps at the top of the trunk were no indication either way.
Well, what did it matter? He was only wasting time playing at being a detective till the real police should arrive, trying to be cleverer with the facts than the facts themselves would allow. Coincidences, and far worse coincidences too, had occurred in the history of crime before now. Undoubtedly Ena Stratton had committed suicide - and a very good thing for all concerned, that hagridden lady herself included. And that was that, and he would go downstairs again and behave like a reasonable being and have another tankard of beer before the police came.
He walked quickly over to the house door. Nevertheless something caused him to stop there and turn back for a last look across the roof: some remnant that had refused to be stifled of that extra sense of his which automatically rejected the improbable in human nature, however plausibly probable argument might make it. His hands in his pockets, he stood still and let his eyes move very slowly over the whole space before him, as if to give them one last chance to pick out any detail to which they had been blind before.
It was then that Roger decided, with an incredulous shock, that his powers were waning. For the detail on which his eyes alighted was no insignificant one, but a glaring, enormous, whitewashed elephant of a detail. It was no less than the fallen chair off which he himself had stepped.
Not till then did he realize that where that chair now was, no chair had been before. And quite certainly Mrs. Stratton had not taken a flying and accurate leap upwards, straight into the noose. To hang oneself, it is necessary first to adjust the noose about one's neck and then step off an eminence into vacancy: and there had been no eminence.
The phantom pricking of Roger's mental thumbs had been justified. Murder had been committed.
CHAPTER VII
FACTS AND FANCIES
RIGHT under the very nose of Roger Sheringham himself murder had been committed.
In spite of the tragedy, Roger could hardly suppress a smile at the audacity of it. He was not unaware of his reputation among the laity; at times indeed he was almost childishly pleased about it. Somebody evidently thought it undeserved - somebody, too, who could make such a colossal blunder of his own as to leave that hanging body without the overturned chair which should have been its natural corollary. And Roger had to admit that the unknown might not have made such a mistake in his estimate of Roger Sheringham's stupidity. It was only by the smallest chance that he had turned round, right in the doorway, for that last look.
Roger smiled again. Then he turned round, passed through the doorway, and walked downstairs. It was the murderer's own huge luck which had placed an overturned chair just where an overturned chair ought to be, and Roger was not going to interfere with it. Let the police make anything of it if they could.
Roger was accustomed to look facts in the eye. It was a fact, if a regrettable one, that Mrs. Ena Stratton meant nothing at all to him as a person, dead or alive. It was no less a fact that as a human being she had herself thrown away any sympathy in her fate; more, she had pulled that fate upon her with both hands. Roger could not feel any drivings of conscience to help the police towards avenging her.
But he could, and did, feel that a challenge had been thrown down to him personally, and a rush of exhilaration drove the fatigue out of him. No, he would not take that chair away again, any more than he would tell the authorities exactly what he knew. Not yet. This was going to be played out first as a perfectly private battle of brains.
He hurried downstairs. In view of what he had learnt, he must have another look at the body, alone, before the police arrived.
Dr. Chalmers had not quite finished his examination. The stethoscope hanging round his neck, he was bending over the bed when Roger looked in at the doorway.
"No hope, I'm afraid?" Roger asked tentatively.
Dr. Chalmers glanced round and then straightened up. "None. A dreadful business. What can have possessed her to take her life like that?"
"You think it was suicide, then?"
Chalmers stared at him, his pleasant face showing his surprise. "Why, what else could it be?"
"Oh, nothing, I suppose," Roger said airily. "I just wondered if there was any possibility of accident that's all. I shouldn't have said she was a suicidal type at all, you see; at least, on the little I saw of her."
Dr. Chalmers drew the coverlet carefully over the body before he replied. "Wouldn't you?" he said slowly. "Well, of course that's more in your line than mine, but I should certainly have said that Ena's neurotic, egocentrical type has a predisposition to suicide. I may be wrong, of course. Morbid psychology doesn't enter very much into a general practitioner's work. But though I was very shocked when Ronald told me what had happened, I can't say I felt much surprise."
"You'll be prepared to give evidence at the inquest, then, that in your professional opinion Mrs. Stratton was a suicidal subject?" Roger asked, wishing that Chalmers would go.
"I think so. Unless," said Dr. Chalmers with interest, "you can convert me to the opposite view." He looked as if
he would like to embark upon such a discussion at once.
"Oh, no," Roger said firmly. "For all I know, you're right." The stage seemed to be setting itself without hesitation for a verdict of suicide, and Roger had no intention of interfering with it at this juncture. "Well," he added, "I expect you want to see Ronald. Is he still changing?"
"No, he looked in a minute ago to say he was going upstairs."
"I think someone ought to stay with the body," Roger said cunningly. "I'll take charge if you like, while you go upstairs."
Dr. Chalmers looked for a moment a little doubtful as to the propriety of this suggestion. Then he nodded. "Thanks. I don't suppose it will be for more than a minute or two in any case. The police ought to be here any minute now."
"You live nearer here than Dr. Mitchell does, I suppose?" Roger asked casually, as the other moved over to the doorway.
"Yes. We both live in Westerford, but Frank's at the farther end."
Roger waited until the door was safely closed. Then he hurried over to the bed. Turning back the coverlet, he stood for a moment looking down at Ena Stratton's body. She was still dressed exactly as she had been, even to the misshapen hat on her head, and Roger could not see that her dress had been torn or damaged in any way. If violence had been used, it must have been a tidy violence. He would have liked very much to know whether there were any marks or bruises on the trunk, but that was impossible; forcing himself to look calmly at her face, he could detect none there. With careful fingers he felt gingerly round the back of her head, sliding his hand underneath the hat, but no bump or swelling rewarded his search.
He lifted her hands and scrutinized in turn the space beneath each nail. So far as he could make out without a magnifying glass, nothing was to be seen there except a few tiny strands belonging obviously to the cord that had hanged her, and some fragments of skin. On either side of her neck, as Roger had expected, were a number of long, deep scratches. Before losing consciousness, Ena Stratton must have scrabbled desperately at the cord that was choking her. The palms of her hands, too, showed distinct signs of excoriation.
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