by Helen Reilly
“And what did he have to drink?”
“Just that stout.” Todhunter motioned toward the brown bottle lying on its side against the broken plate.
“It’s my guess,” McKee said, “that whatever it was that killed Luke Cambridge was put into the stout.”
The little detective’s mouth went open. He looked staggered. “Why, I—I brought him the bottle myself.”
McKee grinned. “Well, your fingerprints will certainly be on it.”
Todhunter didn’t pay any attention. He was staring wide-eyed at the brown bottle in which a quarter of an inch of liquid remained.
“What’s more,” he stuttered in an awed voice, “he offered me a drink from the bottle himself and I pretty near took it out of politeness.”
“It’s lucky your dislike of stout outweighed your sense of etiquette. Teetotaler wins,” McKee said. His smile faded. Someone was crossing the hall from the kitchen.
The houseman, Andrews, appeared in the doorway of the study. Andrews had his overcoat on and his hat in his hand. His tan-colored face, turned on the dead man at the table, blanched almost to whiteness.
“Mr Luke,” he gasped. “Mr Luke!” He shrank back.
Pierson strode to him, took him by the shoulder.
“You’re Cambridge’s servant, aren’t you? Where have you been? Where were you? What have you got to say for yourself?”
“Take it easy, Pierson.” The Scotsman spoke gently. “Now, Andrews, don’t be frightened. All we want you to do is to tell us the truth. If you do everything will be all right.”
They took him into the living room in the corner where Todhunter had spent so large a part of the day. After a few minutes Andrews regained his composure and answered the Scotsman’s questions readily.
He had been with Luke Cambridge for more than eight years, was a bachelor and lived in the house. The cook prepared the meals and Andrews served them. Luke Cambridge had his dinner at midday and a light supper in the evening. The hour of the evening meal never varied. It was Andrews’ custom to bring a tray to Mr Cambridge in the study where he ordinarily ate in the evening. Dinner was in the dining room. He said that he had brought the tray promptly at six-fifteen that night as usual. Todhunter nodded agreement to the time.
McKee said, “What did you do then, Andrews?”
Andrews explained the errand to Mrs Pendleton’s house in the village on which Luke Cambridge had sent him. He showed the receipt for the ten dollars which the woman had given him. He had had to wait for her. From the Pendleton house he had come straight home.
“Mr Cambridge took stout with his meals, didn’t he?” McKee asked.
“Yes, sir,” Andrews said. “A glass with his dinner and a glass after supper. Doctor Marlake ordered it.”
“And you forgot to give him his stout tonight, didn’t you?”
“Oh! My goodness—so I did,” the houseman exclaimed. “Where was the bottle kept?”
“On a shelf in the pantry.”
“When was this last bottle opened?”
“Today,” the man said, “for Mr Cambridge’s dinner. He took his usual glass, and when he was through with it I put the rubber plunger in to keep it fresh and put it back on the shelf where it always stands.”
McKee turned to the little detective. “That where you found it?”
Todhunter, flinching slightly every time the stout was mentioned, said that it was.
So far Andrews seemed to be speaking the truth. He hadn’t seen anyone touch, approach or handle the bottle during the day. After a few more questions McKee let him go with a reminder that Captain Rasmussen would want to talk to him.
It was obvious that the contents of the bottle of stout had been tampered with after Luke had taken his accustomed glass at noon. Roughly a seven-hour stretch to fill. Todhunter proceeded to give what his knowledge of that period offered. He said that Ellen and Irene Cambridge and Toby Newell had been there to lunch. Leslie and Muriel Cambridge had come in during the meal. And later, after the women had gone upstairs, Gregory Cambridge had arrived. McKee wanted to know how long they had stayed.
Todhunter reflected.
“Irene Cambridge and Gregory stayed around for about an hour and left together,” he said. “Then Leslie and his wife left, oh, maybe a quarter of an hour afterward, and finally, a short while later, Ellen Cambridge and that fellow she’s engaged to went out. You know about Andrews. The cook went home just before six-fifteen.”
“And during the day, while these people were here ”
Todhunter interrupted him mournfully. “I did what I could, Inspector, but I couldn’t keep following each one of them around and around. All I could do was keep a general eye on them.”
“I’m not blaming you, Todhunter. I simply want to get the picture clear. So, as a matter of fact, any one of them probably had an opportunity to put whatever was put into that stout.”
Todhunter reluctantly agreed. McKee lit a cigarette, blew smoke in a long thin stream toward the ceiling and followed it with his eyes. He said, speaking slowly,
“The same group of people we’ve had under investigation in the death of Franklin Borrow, with the exception of Mr Toby Newell, and we haven’t checked closely enough on him yet. Yes. I’m not saying that it was done, but any one of this same group could have poisoned Luke Cambridge.” “What about that guy Savage? And what about the Borrow dame?” Pierson asked. “Does that let them out?” The questions were to be answered a little later. Pierson had gone to check with the detectives covering the various people. Marlake had departed. Rasmussen and Baker were still moving about upstairs and McKee and Todhunter were back in the study, taking another look at the dead man, when there was a soft scuffling noise that ended in a light click on the far side of the room. The Scotsman wheeled.
The latch of the door by which he himself had entered the study earlier that evening was being lifted slowly from the catch that held it in place, cautiously. The latch cleared the fastening. The door swung slowly open. The visitor in process of coming so softly into Luke Cambridge’s study was Judith Borrow.
CHAPTER 14
“I TELL YOU I don’t know anything about Mr Cambridge’s death,” Franklin Borrow’s daughter reiterated passionately. “I don’t. I don’t. I don’t” Clenched fists beat themselves on the padded cushions of the big overstuffed chair in a corner of Luke Cambridge’s living room.
Captain Rasmussen was sitting close to her, his shrewd face intent, his arms folded across his chest, his head thrust toward her over them.
McKee leaned against a wall some distance away, smoking negligently. His apparently indifferent and roving gaze took in every taut line of the girl’s face and figure, his attentive ear every cadence of every word she spoke.
Five minutes had elapsed since her entrance to the house. She had filled up most of them with an outburst of tears, an outburst that was not in character with her ordinarily very excellent control and that certainly had not been explained by the meager details she had thus far produced. She appeared to be pulling herself together. The small green toque, tipped forward and sideways at an angle over the broad forehead, had lifted itself, and in spite of the beating of those clenched fists the girl’s slender shoulders were square. She seemed to be reaching, fumbling around inwardly for, and finding, the grip on herself which, McKee recognized, she felt she was badly to need.
Rasmussen continued to regard her with his hard stare.
“All right, Miss Borrow. Let’s have it from the beginning.” He was trying to be calm, judicial. The effort was a strain.
Judith Borrow wiped her eyes, put the small square of linen away in her bag and settled in the chair, crossing one shapely silk-sheathed leg over the other. Her narrow-waisted green coat with the swinging skirts was open over a severely tailored moss-green gown with silver buttons down the front. There were the same silver buttons on the coat too. She had all the earmarks of having had a nasty shock. Of what that shock consisted remained to be seen.
She said, in a contr
alto that training had made clear and balanced, “My father was buried this morning, and today at—yes, it was at around half-past one, because I was only home from the cemetery a short while, Mr Cambridge, Luke Cambridge, called me at my apartment and asked me to come here to Edgewood tonight to see him.”
McKee was startled. He had already had a report of Luke’s day from Todhunter. So it was to the girl Luke had tried to telephone, abortively in the morning from the booth in the drugstore in town, successfully in the early afternoon from his own home. The time jibed. He said nothing. Rasmussen put into words sharply the question he wanted,
“You knew Mr Cambridge, Miss Borrow? Luke Cambridge was a friend of yours?”
“No,” the girl answered, “I never saw him before in my life until tonight.”
“Then why did he send for you, what did he want to see you about?” The local captain snapped his words.
His open incredulity was hardly veiled. Color tinged Judith Borrow’s pale cheeks and her eyes sparkled angrily.
“If you’ll kindly permit me I might proceed ”
“Go ahead. Go ahead,” Rasmussen expostulated. “That’s what I want, that’s what I’m after.” Her returned poise was getting his goat.
“Thank you.” She inclined her head courteously and went on rather carefully, as though she were refining and choosing her phrases. “It was a rather peculiar call. Mr Cambridge told me that he had had an appointment with my father for Thursday night, an appointment which”—her lip quivered—“my father was unable to keep. Mr Cambridge said that it concerned a private matter between them, a matter which, as my father’s daughter, he wanted to talk to me about, alone. He explained that he couldn’t come to me and he asked whether I would do him the favor of coming here to Edgewood tonight to see him. When he stressed the fact that my father would have wished the interview to take place of course I agreed. Mr Cambridge gave me careful directions. I was to take the six-eighteen from New York to Edgewood where I would be met by a taximan who would drive me straight to this house. In addition”—her cool gaze went to McKee—“Mr Cambridge asked me not to mention my visit to anyone in advance, not to talk of it until after I had seen and spoken to him.”
She wasn’t apologizing for having deliberately foxed the man watching her apartment in New York. She was stating the reason for it and asserting her right to do as she had done. The Scotsman let a ghost of a smile crinkle his mouth.
The girl didn’t smile. She returned to the local captain. “I did take the six-eighteen. I was met by the taximan. I did ride to this house. When I reached here’—the fluid voice faltered, dropped almost to a whisper—“Mr Cambridge was dead.”
McKee contemplated without speaking. It was a strange story. It could be true. Luke Cambridge had telephoned her. She wouldn’t dare to say so if he hadn’t. On the other hand, she could be giving them a cunning admixture of fact and fiction—to cloak the act of murder. He was convinced, although they would have to wait for the autopsy report and the chemical analysis, that Luke Cambridge had been killed either with one of the complicated alkaloids or with the old stand-by of the poisoner in a hurry, the poisoner who wanted no incriminating tales told by his dying victim, hydrocyanic acid. In either case death would have been a matter of a very few minutes. He followed the next part of Judith Borrow’s narrative closely.
“If,” Rasmussen was asking, “Mr Cambridge was dead when you got here how did you get in? Who admitted you? Describe what you did. in detail.”
The girl complied. “The taximan desposited me in the driveway at the rear of the house. He pointed to a door to that—to that room in there and then he drove away. I walked up the path. There was a light in the windows. I rapped on the door. When I didn’t get any reply after a minute or so I—well—I opened the door and walked in. I thought Mr Cambridge might be in some other part of the house and I knew he was expecting me.”
“And you found Mr Cambridge sitting there at the table dead?” Rasmussen’s tone indicated his suspicion. “Well, let’s figure it out, Miss Borrow. You came straight here from the station, that would make it about seven twenty-two, twenty-three, that you got here and found him. Yeah, that would be about it. Now, what did you do after that?”
“I-- ” The girl raised her hands, let them fall to the arms of the chair. The white column of her throat rounded, stiffened. “It was—terrible.”
She gave terror its full value in the chill she managed to convey, the pupils of her eyes expanding, contracting, her cheeks blanched. She leaned her forehead against a doubled fist.
“I stood there for a while looking at him. I knew he was dead. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. He just sat there, with his eyes wide open, staring and staring at me. I—I couldn’t stand it. I lost my head. I couldn’t think, couldn’t reason. I didn’t stop to. I just turned and ran.”
“Where to?” Rasmussen demanded.
The girl gestured helplessly. “I don’t know. I haven’t the slightest idea. All I wanted to do was to get away from that—that figure in the room there. I kept on running through the snow and the darkness. After a time, I don’t know how long, I found myself standing still, leaning against a tree near a picket fence. There was snow on the tops of the pickets in little caps.” She paused.
“And then you came back,” Rasmussen said.
“Yes,” the girl replied, pushing springing black curls away from her temples with quick fingers.
Rasmussen edged forward on his chair. He looked her full in the face. “What did you come back for, Miss Borrow? Why, after what you’ve said happened, did you return to this house almost an hour later?”
The girl met his gaze without flinching. She said, “Standing there in the darkness, leaning against the tree, realization came over me. I knew I’d been a coward, that I’d run away out of sheer blind terror. Running away never helps anybody. I made myself turn around and retrace my steps. I knew there were things that ought to be done, that I had to let someone know. You couldn’t just leave a man sitting there dead and alone like that, that’s all. That’s absolutely all.” Her glance went past Rasmussen to the Scotsman, leaning against the wall, his hooded brown gaze inscrutable.
Rasmussen continued to stare at her, thumbs thrust through the armholes of his vest. He obviously didn’t believe a word of what she had said.
“This taxi driver who met you at the station and brought you here the first time,” he asked, “what did he look like, Miss Borrow?”
Judith Borrow said: “He was a very small man with wide shoulders and a birthmark on his left cheek. Mr Cambridge described him to me over the phone. He said that was the sort of man I was to look for. I had no difficulty in recognizing him when he walked up to me on the platform and asked if I was Miss Borrow. He led me to his cab and drove me straight here.”
Officer Baker, enormous in his blue uniform, was in the hall outside, ears cocked. Rasmussen said, “Joe.” Baker pushed a bullethead around the door. “Yes, Chief.”
Rasmussen said, “Go down to the taxi office and bring Frankie Sylvester here.” Baker said, “Right, Chief,” and vanished. The front door closed behind him. The house was very still. The clock on an upper landing ticked distantly. The slim figure in green was tight, waiting. For an instant the long shadowy room that smelled of another age was wrapped in complete silence. McKee broke it. He said,
“If it’s all right with you, Captain, what about letting the relatives know? They ought to be informed.” Rasmussen evidently didn’t relish the job. McKee added, “I’ll do it if you like.”
The captain showed his relief. McKee left the living room and re-entered the study. The telephone was on Luke Cambridge’s desk, a handsome old desk at right angles to the table at which he still sat and against the wall opposite the fireplace. The Scotsman consulted a loose-leaf red leather notebook, took the receiver off the hook and gave Gregory Cambridge’s number.
As far as the girl and her statement went the taxi driver would tell the tale. While he waited for the
connection the Scotsman glanced down at papers in a wire basket, at a sheaf of bills on a spike on top of a ledger, at the drawers, right and left. The bottom right-hand drawer was open a couple of inches. More papers in stacks showed through the opening. In spite of the fact that Luke Cambridge had given up going daily to his office in the village he evidently kept in close touch with his affairs.
Gregory Cambridge came on. He said quickly, “Yes?” McKee said, “I think you better come over to your brother Luke’s house, Mr Cambridge. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your brother Luke is dead.”
A pause was filled with nothing at all. Then Gregory Cambridge said in a stifled tone, “Dead? Luke?” and with sudden harshness, “Who is this? Who is this speaking?” “Inspector McKee of the Manhattan Homicide Squad.” “Oh—inspector—yes, yes—I’ll—I’ll be over right away.” Gregory Cambridge was shaky, incoherent. He seemed dazed.
McKee hung up. He went back to the living room. Rasmussen was still at it, taking the girl laboriously over the ground she had already covered. “You’re quite sure,” he demanded at the end of ten minutes of close questioning, “that when you opened the door and entered the study Luke Cambridge was already dead?”
The girl’s dark, vivid face was weary but there was plenty of fire left in her. The eyes fastened steadily on Rasmussen’s were luminous and although her trained contralto showed signs of strain it didn’t break as she said coldly,
“I’m quite sure that Mr Cambridge was dead when I entered the study, quite, quite sure.”
There was finality in the tight-lipped pronouncement.
The girl was definitely hostile and armed. She was also firm. .
The short and barren pause that ensued was ended by the entrance of Joe Baker who came in with the taximan in tow.
“Hello, Frankie,” Rasmussen said.
The little square-shouldered man with the disfiguring red birthmark on his cheek ripped off his hat. “Hello, Cap,” he said.
“Frankie, did you pick this woman up at the station tonight?” Rasmussen waved toward Judith Borrow.