Black Widow

by S. Fowler Wright

  The disinclination to hear Tommy’s further evidence was unanimous, unless among the jury themselves, who were not consulted, and too overawed by the solemnity of the tribunal to express any individual inclinations that they might feel. They soon found themselves listening to the Coroner’s summing-up which he gave them in an easy, competent, conversational manner, with no more than an occasional reference to the notes of the previous hearing, and in such a way that, while he explained that the responsibility of the verdict was theirs, he made equally clear, as his custom was, what he expected that verdict to be, and he would have been surprised indeed if a jury of Beacon’s Cross had been sufficiently disrespectful to disregard his wishes.

  After commencing with a routine exposition of the law as it affected such cases, and of the various verdicts which it was within their discretion to render, he went briefly and clearly over the admitted facts of the case, and then came to the core of the problem which was before them.

  “You have first to consider,” he said, “whether the evidence is consistent with a theory of self-destruction. When you examine that possibility, you observe that it is not supported by any evidence of an affirmative character. No one has come forward to say that Sir Daniel had ever threatened to put an end to his life. Those who commit suicide often leave letters or other documentary evidences of their intention. There is no such document here. Those who take the desperate remedy of self-destruction are usually of unbalanced character, or suffering from acute mental disturbance, or the ravages of disease. There is no such condition suggested here. In fact, there is no discernible motive at all.

  “It might be rash to conclude that, because no motive has been discovered, therefore none existed, either in fact or imagination, but where no motive can be discerned, and where no disposition to self-destruction has been observed, it is natural to look the more closely at the circumstances of the case before admitting the theory of suicide in explanation of the tragedy.

  “As to that, you have heard the evidence of the position of the wound, and the course which the bullet took. You have heard the opinion of Sir Lionel Tipshift that it is not reasonable to suppose that such a wound should be self-inflicted.”

  Mr. Wheeler rose. “I have on my notes that he stated it was a possible thing.”

  The Coroner paused a moment to consider the implication of the interjection. He had not supposed that Mr. Wheeler would advocate the theory of suicide, and, had he intended to do so, he would have expected that he would have taken a different line at an earlier stage. He was right in that. Mr. Wheeler did not now propose to go far enough to risk the possibility that the jury’s verdict might be one of felo de se, or suicide while of unsound mind.

  He recognized, as a practical man, that he would almost certainly fail in the attempt, and it might be a real though probably not an insuperable obstacle to collecting the insurance money, for the company to be able to point to the fact that the family, through their solicitor, had publicly contended that Sir Daniel had taken his own life. But, feeling assured that there was no risk that the jury would bring in such a verdict, and facing the contingency—still possible, however improbable it might be—that the case would end with Lady Denton in a criminal dock, he saw advantage in the fact that he would then be able to bring into prominence that admission that Sir Lionel had made, that suicide was a “possible” thing.

  The Coroner looked for a moment at Mr. Wheeler’s inscrutable face, and then at his notes of the evidence taken on the earlier day, and said dryly: “Yes—possible.” But the tone did not matter. The word was there. Mr. Wheeler, well content, listened silently as the Coroner resumed:

  “You will probably dismiss from your minds, for the reasons that I have stated, any theory of self-destruction, and so arrive at the real problem of by whose hand, and whether by accident or design, Sir Daniel Denton was killed. No theory of accidental death has been put forward, and the fact that the weapon must have been taken from his own drawer may seem to discount that possibility.

  “You may also be able to eliminate any question of homicide other than deliberate murder when you consider, not only that the pistol must have been taken from the drawer, but that there was no sign of a struggle, and that the shot came from behind. You may also decide that it is at least a probable deduction that whoever knew where that weapon lay, who could secure it, either with Sir Daniel’s consent or without his knowledge, and who could take up that position, immediately beside or behind him, in his own study, must have been known to him, and, most probably, a member of his own household.

  “Examining every possibility, as you are bound to do, you may first consider the position of Lady Denton. Her own account is that she was in the drawing room, at the other side of the hall, when she heard the shot, and that she ran at once to her husband’s side. When she found him a dying man, she screamed for help, as any woman would be likely to do. She says that when she reached the room the murderer had left, which is quite possible, the window being unbarred, if not actually standing open at the time. You may think that the murderer, whoever he was, would be unlikely to remain after the commission of such a crime, and that Lady Denton’s account in this particular is no more than you would have expected to hear.

  “Her tale, in itself, was simple and natural, and was not shaken in the course of her examination. Such witness is most often true.

  “Then you will come to the position of Gerard Denton. I do not know how he may have impressed you in the witness box—I know how he impressed me—but as he gave his evidence, and as it was supported, as you will doubtless remember, by that of Lady Denton, and of the gardener’s boy, he appeared to be removed from any suspicion of complicity in the crime.

  “That evidence was in accordance with written statements which had already been taken by the police—very properly taken—before the inquest was held. Such evidence—apart from that of Lady Denton—and those statements we now know to be false. You have heard Inspector Pinkey, and you know the dreadful alternative which Gerard Denton preferred to the ordeal of explanation. You may find—but it is entirely for you to decide—that the conclusion is irresistible. But the decision is yours.

  “Should you feel that, while you are satisfied that murder was committed, the evidence does not point to any person with sufficient certainty as the perpetrator of the crime, you may render your verdict in that way. But should you, as reasonable men, and on such evidence as you would regard as conclusive in the conduct of your own affairs, consider that the case is proved beyond serious doubt, you will, I feel sure, do your duty as citizens, and render your verdict without fear or favour, either toward the living or the dead.”

  Mr. Duckworth had omitted one or two things that he had meant to say, but he had led himself up to an impressive climax, as he usually did, and his dramatic instinct was sufficiently strong to cause him to cease at that point. He added briefly, on a lower note: “You will consider your verdict,” on which there was a moment of whispering among the jury, and of bending over toward one another, so that it seemed that they might be about to agree without leaving the box. But, after that, the foreman exchanged an inaudible word with the usher, and they rose and filed out to the seclusion of the jury-room.

  After they were gone, the usher had a whispered word with the Coroner’s clerk, Mr. Leadbeater, who had another with the Coroner, who announced that the Court stood adjourned until the jury should be ready to render their verdict. He retired to his own room, and a stir of conversation arose among those who remained.

  Lady Denton, sitting beside Mr. Wheeler, showed no outward sign of emotion, though she found it somewhat difficult to follow the anecdote which he considered appropriate for the occasion, and which he told with force and humour.

  “It isn’t worth getting up,” he said at the first. “Ten minutes will be about their time.” Other experi­enced observers took the same view. But as the minutes passed, and they did not return, he began the tale of an inquest he had attended three years before at
which the jury had brought in a verdict so perverse and startling that the Coroner had refused to accept it, and had sent them back to resume their deliberations.

  “Not,” he added, “that there’s any danger of that here. It’s just between ‘Gerard Denton’ and ‘some person unknown,’ and not much doubt even between those.”

  Lady Denton understood that he was intending to allay any disproportioned anxiety she might be feeling, and to prepare her against the remote contingency that the jury might have an opinion of their own with which to surprise the Court.

  It was half an hour later that the Coroner resumed his seat, and the jury filed back into the box.

  The foreman stated in reply to the usual question, that they were agreed on their verdict. They found that Sir Daniel Denton had been murdered by Gerard Denton, who had committed suicide when he had seen that he could not otherwise escape the penalty of his crime.

  The Coroner said: “Thank you, gentlemen. It is a verdict with which I entirely agree.” And entered it in somewhat different phraseology. They came out of the jury box with a pleasant sense which his words had given them, that they had shown themselves to be some­what cleverer than their fellow men.

  Lady Denton rose, shook hands with Mr. Wheeler, giving him a word of thanks which he surely deserved, and passed out quickly to her waiting car. She went through a little crowd round the door, from which there arose a sympathetic murmur that almost grew to a cheer.

  Inspector Pinkey said he would go back on the three-seven—the same train that Mr. Wheeler was taking. There would be just time for a late lunch at the Station Inn. Would Superintendent Trackfield join them? No, he thought not. The Superintendent was the one living man who had reason to be dissatisfied with the verdict they had just heard, which convicted him of an incompetence which he did not readily admit to his own mind. Perhaps it was natural that he was the one man also who was not entirely convinced that the verdict was soundly reached.

  “I wish,” he said, “that I could be more sure than I am that that boy isn’t telling the truth.”

  Inspector Pinkey looked at him curiously. He asked: “Does it matter now?”

  It was a question to which the Superintendent found no reply.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  Adelaide Denton lay in a moonlit room and looked up at the stars. She remembered—she had read somewhere—that if anyone tries to put a matter aside, refusing to think of it, it may remain festering in the mind like a sore that is surface-healed; but if it be boldly faced and considered, it will fade out in a natural manner. “There is nothing,” she had read, “too terrible for a resolute mind to face it successfully; but it may be fatal to run away.”

  Well, she would face it. She would justify or condemn herself. She was not fond of running away.

  Three weeks ago she would not have thought it possible that such things could enter her life. She had been unfaithful to her husband two years ago. But that was a dead thing. No one knew. No one suspected. No one ever had. And the man was dead. Even now she was not sorry for what she had done then. Not in the least. She had never had any mental difficulty in facing that sin. But she had been foolish, senti­mentally foolish, to keep the letters. Foolish beyond words. She would admit that. But for that she would not have killed—have had to kill—two men.

  Things might not have happened as they had if she had not detected Redwin’s dishonesty and denounced him to her husband. “You’ll be sorry for this before you’re through.” Those had been his words to her as he had left the house, and, after that, she had found that the letters were gone. She went over every incident in her mind, not seeing where she could have acted differently, till she came to the day when she had seen the postman drop the afternoon letters into the box.

  She had been just too late—a mere five seconds too late—to take them from him. It had all hinged upon that. And among them had been the packet addressed to her husband in Redwin’s unmistakable writing, the contents of which were so easy to guess, and which he must never see. She had seen the writing plainly through the small round glazed window in the letter box, which would have been too small, even had she broken it, for the packet to come through.

  But she could have broken the box. She saw that now. In any way, with any tool, at any cost of fantastic explanation afterwards. But, instead of that.…

  Her mind went resolutely back to that time, two years ago, when she had gone with Daniel to Teignmouth, and after two days he had complained of so many things that she did not know which might be genuine, or whether all were mere excuses alike. It was depressing weather—a depressing place—the hotel cooking was putrid (he had always been particular about his food, which had made it so extremely silly when he had gone into the kitchen to quarrel with an excellent cook)—the telephone service was bad, so that he could not talk with his broker in London with certainty that his instructions would not be mistaken, as it was essential at the moment that he should be able to do. The last excuse—or reason—had been put forward as the decisive one. He would go back at once. She could stay alone, if she pleased. She did not know whether he had meant that permission to be taken seriously; whether he had said it in a merely perfunctory way, relying upon her declining, as a matter of course, to remain without him; or even whether he had secretly wished, for whatever reason, that he could return alone.

  But in her irritation at what had seemed a perversity of ill-temper, such as he was always liable to exhibit, she had replied that she saw no reason to leave: they had taken the suite for a month, and for that time she would stay. He had stared and said no more than: “Then you understand that you’ll have to stay without me?” and had left for the train an hour later, with the parting words: “I suppose you’ll find your way home when you’ve found it a poor joke to sit sulking here.”

  But she had not sat sulking there, nor had she found it a poor joke. She had gone out on to the beach that afternoon and made George Mansell’s acquaintance, she scarcely knew how—perhaps he could have told her something more about that—and discovered later, amazing coincidence as it had seemed then, that his room at the hotel was next door to her own suite. Let her face what she had gained, and decide whether the price might not, after all, have been no more than was fair, which she could not object that she had now to pay. It was a price that she could not have foreseen, and had she done so it might—it most surely would—have deterred her from what she did.

  But she could not grumble at that. Vaguely, but sufficiently, all the time, she had known it to be a law of the traffic in which she dealt. Those who go outside the bounds of moral or human law must buy in a market which will not bargain, nor mark its goods in a plain way. They must take and use that which they seek to have, and the price will not be discovered till it must be paid at a later time. That was fair enough, for it was a market where no one was bound to deal.

  What had she had? A week of friendship, of companionship, such as she had not known that the world held: a week of delirious excitement, of passionate abandonment of restraint, of deliberate forgetfulness of all that had gone before, or that must be faced on another day: a week of awakening to the fact that the dream was done—that George Mansell must leave, even before she would be due to return to her own home. There was no question of flight with him, no thought of divorce. He went on service where he could take no woman, even had he been married to her. And six months later there had been the news that he was lost, and was doubtless dead.

  She had not been much concerned at the time with any ethical aspect of what she did. She was one of those rather numerous people in whom the moral sense is never very strongly developed, because their own instinctive standards of conduct conform so easily to the environment in which they live. Fundamentally, she had always been her own law.

  When temptation came with sudden, undreamt-of strength, her power of resistance was of an untested weakness. It might be truer to say that she did not resist at all, nor was she conscious of any shame.

  That was partly
because she had done everything with that cool economy of falsehood which was most natural to her character, and which her reason advised. There had been few public indiscretions. There had been numerous excursions, mostly by rail, to quiet places, to which they journeyed, for the first part of the way at least, in separate compartments.

  When she had gone to George’s room in the night, as she often had, it had not been done in a furtive way, but as boldly as though the hotel were hers, quietly, reasonably reliant upon the presumption that no one would be about at the hour she chose—or, if they had, she would not have gone to his door. But it had been no more than three yards, and who was there to hear her steps on the thickly carpeted landing? But no one could ever have seen her look out of her door in the night as one in doubt or afraid, or slip furtively across, as some foolish women have been likely to do, for such actions could not be hers.

  And there had been letters during the next six months, which had come openly, as she had said that they must, and that also had proved to be a discreet boldness—if they had not been kept, as they so foolishly were. For that was before the extent of Sir Daniel’s business correspondence had caused him to have the large locked letter box fixed up, of which he would keep the key. At the time, the letters had always been brought to her, and she ordered their distribution throughout the house. But, in any event, the idea that Sir Daniel would open her letters, or even display an unmannerly curiosity as to their contents, was absurd. His disposition was not of that kind. His faults were contrary. He was more likely to disregard that which he should in courtesy have observed than to pry into her private affairs.

  So it had been. Those were days to which she had looked back with a keen regret, with a secret pleasure as well as a secret grief, but without any thought of self-condemnation invading her mind. It was not that she had seen any justification for what she did. She simply had not thought of that side of it at all.