“He won’t manage that on his own responsibility, I can assure him. No end of a stir over the Daily Wail here, I can tell you. Well, make him see reason and ring us later. We chaps of the old brigade are laughing like mad at your having got your nose into this. Write me your impressions like a good chap, or wire in the old code to me. Meanwhile, about your questions! Your friend the butler, Edward Soames, was gaoled for petty larceny at Brighton in April 1914 on leaving some North Country Orphanage. Can’t read the name! Oh yes, Dorbury! Your county—Evelake. Enlisted as private in the Larkshire Infantry in 1915, as Edward Sullivan—kept his initials, wise man!—on being given choice of enlistment or reformatory after second conviction for shop-lifting. There was some monkeying about his name then, and the army records are tracking it down for me—his new choice wasn’t discovered apparently for a year or two, and they let him remain as Edward Sullivan. You know what a mess local recruiting stations were in at that time! Served on Salisbury Plain only, and not very gallantly! Owing to persistent malingering, and some noisome skin complaint, he was transferred to the R.A.S.C., and served just six weeks safely at a base near Dieppe, when he was invalided home and discharged. 1917, convicted again as Edward Soames, this time for cat burglary on a very modest scale. Prison chaplain at Blacksea helped him on discharge, and got him a new start as man-servant at Evelake Academy for Boys where there was presumably nothing to steal. Has kept straight since then and kept to name of Edward Soames. But I don’t know how they dared risk him in a Palace!”
“Shortage of staff, and I fancy the Headmaster wasn’t over business-like. At least I gather Soames only gave a very watered-down version of your tale to Mrs. Broome, who admits she was desperate for a man-servant. Well, Herriot, thanks a lot! I’ll let you know if we want his finger-prints, but I don’t think they’d be of any use in this case. I’d like to know our friend Soames’—Sullivan’s—original name if you do get a report of it, just in case he’s some connection with this affair. The C.C. thinks my case against him a bit bogus, but I’m pretty sure he’s at his old Autolycus tricks, and I want to know how and why. Look here, I can’t be bothered with codes! I think I could ring you up safely this evening at ten-thirty or eleven, home address? Love to Jane and the baby—I mean to christen it—beg pardon, him—next week.”
But what would next week bring forth, Dick wondered despairingly, as he put down the receiver and turned to the vestibule. Sounds of a car in the drive had reached him during those last words, and there was Mack extracting himself from the old Humber, more bristling and purposeful than ever. The deceptive peace, the false armistice at the Palace was over indeed.
“What a morning I’ve had!” Mack broke out, drawing Dick into the old library. “Of all the obstructionist, high and dry Tory ritualist holes, this is the limit! Why, I might have been accusing the archangels of crime from the fuss Herne made over giving me a search warrant—chief magistrate on the bench indeed! More like a doting mother saying her blessed bairn had never done wrong in his life! I’ve got the inquest fixed for Monday—in the Town Hall at one o’clock, and the Coroner will do his best to pack the jury with sidesmen, you bet! Autopsy confirmed anyhow—3 grains of morphine—a fatal dose all right. And got on to Ulder’s lawyers who are communicating with sole surviving relative—cousin I think—at Addsey. About time if she’d seen the Daily Wail. Blame myself for thinking one could escape the Press, though you’d have thought a country hole like this in a blizzard was safe enough. You might have reminded me there might be tradesmen’s vans at the back, Dick! Any reporters yet?”
“The poor chaplain has been dealing with them all morning, sir. But I’m sure they got nothing out of him. In fact he may have given them an impression that you suspect an outside job!”
“Infernal cheek of you, Dick! Evelake is full of stories of sinister characters in bars and garages already—more work for the police! You know as well as I do that it was an inside job!”
“Any line on the Chancellor’s bottle, sir?”
“Line! Too many lines! Last night when I got hold of the housekeeper on the telephone she was ready to say the house was a chemist’s shop for medicines, and her master and his son dope-fiends. She said he threw bottles away by the cart load, and just had a good clear out. Then after a good gossip all round, I expect, she saw she’d said the wrong thing, and didn’t want to lose a good place with a luxurious bachelor, so she rang up again, a solicitor at her elbow if you please, to say her master never dosed himself except with a little drop of some stuff Mr. Edgar Chailly brought back from India which couldn’t hurt a fly, as she’d taken cupfuls of it herself. Every one’s in league to protect their employers in this case.”
“Speaks well for the employers,” said Dick. “But Soames is not that type. Just a word about him! Last night—” Dick, plunging into the story of his observations yesterday, felt they were hardly convincing, and failed to attract Mack’s suspicions.
“Well, well, odd, but still! Dick, how often am I to repeat to you that if you stick to motive you can’t go far wrong. That chap may be up to no good, but I don’t believe he is a lunatic who murders for a bit of sport. I’ve got reports on Staples too, and I don’t think much of him. A little worm, but he seems to have told the truth all along the line. I’ll let you look at the notes later. What I want to do first of all is to present my warrant and have a thorough search upstairs.”
XI
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
“But this is unwarrantable,” was the Bishop’s first not very happy reaction to this request when Dick led Mack into his room. He was sitting, as he had done most of the day, in his armchair by the fire, dozing, writing and saying nothing, a stricken old man. “You have turned my house upside down already. Your men are still, I believe, occupied in making hay of my manuscripts; our rooms have been ransacked without proper authority—the High Sheriff rang up this morning to sympathize with my chaplain—the Lord Lieutenant proposes to call. I tell you it is unwarrantable.”
“It’s not that, for here’s the warrant,” snapped Mack, turning to the attendant Tonks. “And what, may I ask,” he added, his eye caught by a long shining sports car parked below the Bishop’s windows, just out of sight from the drive, “what is that car doing here? Whose is it?”
“It belongs to my—to Mr. Fitzroy, my daughter’s fiancé.” The Bishop stumbled a little over Clive’s proper designation. “He has come here, though against my wishes, to see my daughter and, I gather, take her away to some relative, after paying a visit to the Hospital on our poor old maid.”
“Hullo, where’s Dick? Hullo, Bobs!” Judith’s voice rang out from the hall, as the Bishop spoke. (How like that young woman to time her entrance so perfectly, thought Dick, though you bet Mack will be sticky about the exit.) “Thank you, Mabel! Thank you, Doris! Only my dressing-case, for I’m coming back in a day or two, when this house doesn’t smell of police. Bobs, this is Clive! Isn’t he perfectly sweet? And he’s brought me the most surprising news, though it’s made me a bit wonky somehow. I must tell Father this minute!”
“Mack’s there,” Bobs warned her, but Judith had already run into the library, followed by her future husband.
“And how darned good to see a layman,” was Dick’s unregenerate thought as he stared at Clive, the tall young guardsman. Not only the type Dick had ragged with at school, counted amongst his vast miscellany of friends at Oxford and found kinship with in France, but above all, just the type for pretty, wild Judith, he decided. Clive was no rich, vacuous nonentity: he was the huntin’, fishin’, shootin’ young officer, who would take Judith off from her London friends and night-clubs, forget about her divorce, adore her gaiety and laugh at her follies, and in the end make an honest woman of her, with tweeds, herbaceous borders, children, dogs and all. The Bishop and Mrs. Broome had viewed him only as an enemy who had brought their Judith to Sin (all the more perhaps because it was not only his name which had figured in her divorce-suit), but it was clear that for the moment the Bishop w
as watching him with undisguised admiration. For Clive was no fool and knew something of the law: he was no respecter of constables—Chief or otherwise—and he was ready to speak his mind.
“Oh Father!” Judith’s clear voice was a little awed and broken. “I had to come and see you! I couldn’t wait any longer! Clive has brought me the—the strangest news!”
“Keep it till we’re alone—” (Clive’s voice of command would be very useful with Judith!) “It’s this gentleman I want to see.” He turned upon Mack. “I’ve come to ask you, sir, what you mean by your behaviour to my fiancée? It has been consistently brutal and, what’s more, illegal!”
“Meaning what?” asked Mack bristling.
“You questioned her before she had an opportunity of getting her solicitor.”
“Not a formal examination,” snapped Mack. “Chailly was in the house anyway, if she’d asked for him.”
“You searched her without a warrant.”
“Oh, Clive darling, he didn’t strip me, you know!” cried Judith brightly. “Only my cases!”
“Property of the deceased was missing,” said Mack fiercely. “Every one gave us permission to hunt for it. No need of a search warrant if leave is freely given.” His tone grew a trifle less bellicose as he asked himself uncomfortably if he had not omitted the formality with the girl, whom he consistently described to himself by the usual Anglo-Saxon word.
“Oh, my sweet, what a horrid fib!” cried Judith. “You just banged straight into my room and shook out my frillies! Mabel was there, you know, and she’ll back me up.”
“So I’m taking Judith away, sir!” Clive turned to the Bishop. “I’m sure you’d rather I got her out of the clutches of these bullying policemen, and an aunt of mine is hoping to see us both. No, you can’t detain her, sir!” He turned upon Mack who was obviously on the verge of a break-out. “You’ve not a shred of proof against her: you’ve searched her things—illegally too—and I’ll leave her address. Could any human being in their senses think that she went and poisoned a parson anyway?”
“Every one who was threatened by blackmail here is suspect, every one!” Mack glared at the Bishop and his daughter. “Has she acquainted you with the hold Mr. Ulder had over her and you too?”
“Nonsense! Of course I’d have paid up,” said Clive with the impatience of the wealthy at the mention of a trivial debt. “And then horsewhipped him till he didn’t dare to come near me again.”
“Someone found a safer way to silence him. I suppose you didn’t happen to visit the Palace on Wednesday night?” Mack had wholly forgotten his office now. He was speaking as a Scot to a braggart Englishman, a working man to a self assertive aristocratic idler, a hunter to a rival who was robbing him of lawful prey.
For a moment Dick thought there really would be murder in the house, and prepared unconsciously to tackle low, but Clive checked himself and laughed shortly.
“That’s actionable I should think, slander and unjustifiable defamation. I was staying with my uncle, Claude Vivian, who is Member for the County, as you may know. Anyhow, you’ll get a reminder when he asks a question about all this in the House.”
“Indeed! And I suppose he’ll produce the evidence Ulder held against you and Mrs. Mortimer. Even if we don’t find Ulder’s papers and that hotel bill, the Law can follow up his evidence and make things very unpleasant for you!”
“You’d take on the job of blackmail?” sneered Clive. “I hoped you’d suggest that! What’s your price?”
“Insults won’t do you any good, sir. It would be my duty to follow up information, however received, and communicate with the King’s Proctor.”
Judith suddenly clapped her hands. No one present had ever seen her pale and subdued for five minutes before: that was, they were to realize, her full and unusual tribute to the past.
“Oh, Clive, I must tell him! It’s too good a joke! Well, no, not a joke exactly, but—Daddy darling, Clive came here to-day, though you’ve never allowed it before, because the strangest thing has happened. He had a cable to say that Mike, poor old Mike, was dying of cholera in Egypt, and an hour ago a telegram came to say he’d gone! And, of course, it did make me feel—well, queer, you know, though he was pretty horrid to me, and I never loved him after the first. He wouldn’t,” she added with appalling candour, “hear of my having a baby, you know, and I do think that’s so unfair, though I wouldn’t listen to people who wanted me to go to law about it, because I do think that sort of case is so vulgar, don’t you? Still, he’s dead! And he did so like being alive! However, I mustn’t be morbid.” (No one was indeed likely to accuse Judith of this fault!) “And you may say ‘all’s well that ends well’. For here I am a respectable widow, and Clive’s going for a special licence, and we’ll be married in a day or two, quite quiet it must be, I’m afraid, but most luckily I’ve got a dream of a grey georgette I’ve never worn—you remember it, Major Mack? And the past doesn’t matter a bit, Clive said—though I’d like you all to know we had separate rooms at Blacksea, darling!—why, we could book a room at the King’s Proctor’s without the tiniest risk now, if he takes couples in! It always sounds so like a pub, you know!”
“Much was said, little was done and an earthquake broke up the meeting.” That saying of Thucydides covered the remainder of the interview pretty well, as Bobs remarked to Dick. Clive carried Judith off while Mack was still debating whether you could or couldn’t restrain the prospective bride of the Member’s nephew, and Judith’s last words to her family were spoken in the octagon vestibule, with Clive waiting at the car.
“Good-bye, darlings. Mummy, I’m sorry I’ve been a curse for I adore you. You’ll let Sue come to stay with me when I’m whiter than snow, won’t you? Daddy darling, I’ve plagued you but I worship you. I wonder if I should tell you something I did just now?” Behind very unusual but becoming tear-drops Judith’s eyes sparkled now more brightly than ever. “No, perhaps not, for anyhow it’s all right now!”
All right for her but not for us, thought Bobs gloomily as the light of his life (however delusive an Aurora) disappeared.
Mack strode away with his temper at boiling point. It was not assuaged when Tonks presented himself in the old library to report that he had been unable to find either Soames or Staples for those interviews which had been the first items on Mack’s programme.
“Not though I searched up and down, high and low, sir,” said the ex-verger with pompous resignation. “But, sir, there is a cable come for the Chancellor he told me to show to you,” he added, more hopefully, “and a suspicious circumstance I should like to bring to your notice.”
“Chancellor Chailly Palace Evelake. Paregoric contains opium no morphia. Forwarding prescription. Edgar.”
“Oh well, that’s that! Surgeon says opium would not have the same effect as morphia. Never did really think much doing about that bottle—we wouldn’t have thought of it if he hadn’t tried to hide it away like the old woman he is! What’s the other trouble?”
“Pursuant to your orders, sir, I was keeping an eye on the inmates of the house, and noticed Canon Wye go to his bedroom at twelve o’clock this morning. Shortly after I heard the crackling of a fire, and referred to the housemaid who happened to be passing as to whether it were customary to light fires in bedrooms so early in the day, in view of the fuel shortage. She assured me that such a course was unprecedented.” (“Not on your life,” had been Mabel’s actual expression.) “When the Canon emerged at the luncheon gong he left the door of his room locked behind him, while he rapidly partook of some refreshment.”
“Oh, get on with it, Tonks,” said Mack impatiently. “You’re not writing a parish magazine!”
“The Canon,” pursued Tonks in a pained voice, “returned to his room, locked himself in and only half an hour ago, 3 pip emma, went down to the Chapel. On this occasion the door was unlocked and I entered to find the grate full of ashes burnt paper I would judge, and a great quantity it would seem from the—er—debris.”
�
�Mess,” suggested Mack impatiently.
“Just so, sir. I then made my way to the Chapel. The Canon knelt at his stall engaged, as you may say, in prayer. He did not notice my entrance, for I am accustomed to move about sacred edifices quietly, but continued to groan aloud, sir, uttering phrases to the effect that he had sinned most miserably against God and man. Of course, sir, we know such gentlemen may be over-conscientious, but I thought I should report these circumstances to you.”
Mack followed his subordinate upstairs unwillingly enough, but as he gave a look at the Canon’s fireplace he whistled loudly. Certainly a holocaust had taken place, and so thorough a one that it was impossible to trace any unscathed fragment. Well, if these were indeed the missing papers of Ulder’s, for which the police had made such a hue and cry, the Canon was in a very nasty position! “A very nasty position,” repeated Mack as he made his way down to the Chapel, for if there was one point which seemed incontrovertible it was that those papers could only have been abstracted safely after Ulder had been lulled into his last sleep.
“Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!” It was not so much the words as the heart-broken accent of the Canon’s voice which arrested Mack, as, for the first time, he entered the little Puginesque Chapel, sniffing disdainfully at its ornaments and flowers and a faint suggestion of incense. “Grievous to me … the burden is intolerable!” Mack’s loud cough interrupted the flow of misery from the stalls, and the Canon leapt up, even more torch-like and militant than ever in his surprise.
“You dog me here!” he cried. “You cannot even leave me alone to confess, and make my peace with God!”
“Not if it’s a question for the Law, Canon. I’ve no wish to interrupt any one’s prayers, but if there’s any confession you have to make it should be made to me! And I am bound to ask you at once what exactly was the nature of those papers which you burnt in your room this morning.”
“I had no right to do it!” Canon Wye suddenly quietened down and spoke almost apologetically. “I knew it, but the perusal was so bitter, so humiliating to me—”
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