Death at Dartmoor

by Robin Paige

  “Sir Edgar’s dead,” Lyons said gruffly. He wiped his hands on the front of his leather apron. “Killed by th’ ‘scaped convict. Ever’body ’round here knows that.”

  The constable stepped forward. “Doan’t make it hard fer yer sister er y‘self, Lyons,” he said, lapsing into the man’s own broad dialect. “Us’uns need t’ talk with her. Where c’n us find her?”

  “Right here, sirs,” said a quiet voice, and Charles looked up. The woman was standing in the shadows at the back of the room, having entered through a rear door and down several wooden steps. Beside the door, on the wall, was a small sign that said Hats for Sale Here. “If ye’ud like t’ speak t’ me,” she said, “come this way.”

  “No, Laura!” Lyons said. He slid one leg over his bench and fumbled for a crutch that was leaning against the wall, and Charles saw that one foot was swathed in bandages. Struggling to stand, he shouted, “I forbid ye t’ talk wiv ’em!”

  “I’m sorry, but this b‘ain’t none o’ yer business, Richard,” Mrs. Redman said, straightening her shoulders. “This way, gen’lemen.” She turned to go up the steps again, beckoning Charles and the constable to follow her. When they had passed through the door, she closed it behind them.

  The workroom they had entered was the same size as the shoemaker’s shop in front but much brighter, owing to two large windows on either side and to the walls and ceiling having been freshly whitewashed. Two or three cloth bonnets were displayed on shelves, and a neat little straw sailor hat sat jauntily on a hat stand. Charles knew very little about fashion, but even to his untutored eye, the hat upon which Mrs. Redman was at work—a wide-brimmed white straw fitted with a bright pink ostrich feather, a heap of improbably pink artificial roses, poufed with masses of pink tulle—had a country look. It was the sort of thing that a pub owner’s wife might wear on Sunday, perhaps.

  Mrs. Redman herself was a strikingly attractive woman in her middle years, her hair chestnut brown, her eyes hazel, with a thoughtful, forthright look. She was wearing a blue dress, her hair was tied back with a black ribbon, and there was a twist of black around one arm.

  “Ye’ve come about Sir Edgar?” she said, going to stand behind her workstation. The light fell on her face, and Charles saw that she was quite pale. “Wot c’n I tell ye ’bout him?”

  “You knew him, I understand,” Charles said. He looked around. “He helped you establish yourself as a millineress?”

  At that moment, a side door opened and a little girl of five or six danced in, carrying an orange kitten. “See, Mummy, here her be! Her was hidin’ in the—” She stopped, seeing the strange men. She wore a blue stuff dress with a white pinafore, and her gingery braids were tied with black ribbons. Still holding the kitten, she went to stand behind her mother, clutching at her dress.

  “Yes, Sir Edgar helped me get started,” Mrs. Redman said, and the sadness was apparent both on her face and in her voice. But when she raised her eyes, she was defiant. “He wuz very kind when I wuz in desp‘rate need, after me husband left me an’ our lit’le girl. And him nivver asked nothin’ o’ me in return, no matter what my brother sez. Nothin’ !” It was clear from the set of her jaw that she was conscious of all she was saying.

  “I see,” Charles said. The kitten had leapt out of the little girl’s arms and landed on the worktable, where it was batting the ostrich feather with one paw. “When was your last communication with Sir Edgar?”

  Mrs. Redman scooped up the kitten and returned it to her daughter’s arms. “Go outside an’ play, now, Sarah,” she said. When the girl had obediently closed the door behind her, she turned to face Charles. “Commun‘cation, ye asked? Sir Edgar sent Sarah a doll fer her birthday, but him had no call to write me letters. An’ him b’ain’t here in the last fortnight.”

  The next question was awkward but necessary, and the blunter the better, Charles thought. “Did you and Sir Edgar have a plan to go away together?”

  “Go away?” Her hazel eyes narrowed, her voice was sharp with righteous indignation. “T‘gether? Wot ’re ye sayin’, sir? Sir Edgar wuz a married man! An’ I be still a married lady, ’spite o’ my husband bein’ gone.”

  Her look and the sound of her voice were all the answer Charles needed. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, Mrs. Redman,” he said, feeling embarrassed. “The difficulty is that, just prior to his death, Sir Edgar wrote to his wife, saying that he was leaving the country in the company of a woman. Given his murder, it is necessary to inquire into the identity of—”

  “Rot!” Mrs. Redman’s fists had dropped to her hips, her eyes blazing.

  “I beg your pardon,” Charles said, startled.

  “Wot ye said. It’s rot, rot, rot, that’s wot ‘tis!” she cried hotly. “Sir Edgar wuz th’ kindest, truest gentl’man who ev‘r lived on this earth, an’ whoever sez anything opp’site is a liar!”

  The constable stepped forward. “But ye see, Mrs. Redman,” he began, “Sir Edgar wrote—”

  “Who sez, I wants t’ know,” Mrs. Redman interrupted fiercely. She stamped her foot. “Who sez him wuz runnin’ off? Who sez?”

  Charles stood still, suddenly humbled before the woman’s fierce anger. He frowned, going back in his mind over the sequence of events. Who had reported the letter? The vicar, of course, and then Kate—but both of them had been told about it by Lady Duncan. And Lady Duncan could not produce the letter for verification, for she had burned it.

  “It is his wife who says that he wrote the letter,” he said after a moment. “It was posted from Yelverton.”

  “I doan’t care if her sez ‘twas posted from th’ moon,” Mrs. Redman said angrily. She had folded her arms across her chest and lifted her chin. “ ’Tis all a lie, an’ told for her own reasons. Her’s not any better ’n her should be, t’ tell the plain truth.”

  Charles frowned. No better than she should be? “Is there ...” He paused and cleared his throat. “Did Sir Edgar give you any reason to think that his wife was not... that she—”

  He stopped, at a loss as to how to put the question to a woman who, despite the fact that she worked to support herself and her daughter, was obviously a lady. But Mrs. Redman knew what he was thinking and answered his unasked question.

  “Not in so many words,” she said. “Him wudn’t talk ‘bout his wife that way. But ’tween the lines, I understood.”

  “What did you understand?”

  Her face grew stern. “That him was sorry him ’ud married her down there in Africa, when him wuz so sick that the doctors give him up fer dead. That him suspected her o’ hocus-pocus.” She stopped. “Now, that was a word he used. The very word.”

  “Hocus-pocus?” The constable frowned.

  “Sir Edgar thought Lady Duncan and Mr. Westcott were engaging in some sort of spiritualist fraud?” Charles asked. “Or perhaps a... dalliance?” But surely a gentleman would not accuse his wife of such things to another lady? On the other hand, even a gentleman may say more than he intends to say to a tenderhearted woman who listens to him sympathetically, who understands his feelings and feels for him. He had the idea that Sir Edgar had found such a listener in Mrs. Redman, and perhaps in Mrs. Bernard, as well. Mrs. Bernard, however, could tell them nothing more—or rather, he thought uneasily, had told them all she could.

  “Dalliance?” Mrs. Redman pressed her lips together. “Him didn’t say that, mind. All him said was ‘hocus-pocus.’ Ye c’n make of it wot ye will.”

  Charles was silent for a moment, considering what he had just heard. At last he said, “Did Sir Edgar mention to you anything connected with his cousin, Jack Delany, of Stapleton House?”

  Mrs. Redman gave him a blank look. “No, not that I recall.”

  “And your brother. I noticed that he is using a crutch, but I wondered whether he might have taken any trips or made any journeys in the last four or five days, even short ones.”

  “Journeys?” The lady smiled slightly at the impossibility of this. “Richard’s foot has been bad fer nea
r on a month now. Him c’n hop t’wixt home an’ his bench on that crutch, but him can’t go no farther.”

  “And his doctor?” Charles asked. “Who’s treating him?”

  “Dr. Lorrimer, o’ course. Ye c’n ask him, t’ be sure, if ye doan’t believe me.”

  Charles continued to press the woman, but Mrs. Redman kept to her tale, and none of his questions or prodding did anything to shake her conviction that Lady Duncan had lied about the letter and that Sir Edgar, the truest and kindest gentleman on earth, would not have betrayed his wife, no matter how he felt about her or how deeply distressed he might be by her behavior. But of course, there was no immediate means of checking the woman’s claims with regard to Sir Edgar or of discovering whether her perceptions had any validity, other than confronting Lady Duncan, that is, and Charles was understandably reluctant to do that. He would ask Dr. Lorrimer about Richard Lyons’s injured foot, but other than that, they seemed to have come to a dead end, at least for the moment.

  There was little talk between Charles and the constable on the way back to Princetown. Charles felt discouraged and somewhat disheartened, since the whole day had been given over to fumbling up blind alleys, or rather, following moorland tracks that meandered here and there but led nowhere in particular. Jack Delany certainly had motive and opportunity and was the most likely suspect, but there was no evidence to connect him to the crime. Mrs. Redman appeared to have neither motive nor opportunity, and while her brother might have been concerned enough about her reputation to speak to Jack Delany about his sister’s friendship with Sir Edgar, it didn’t seem likely that he had a motive strong enough to compel him to commit murder—or an opportunity, given his crippled condition.

  That left Lady Duncan. She had seemed to Charles nothing more, and certainly nothing less, than a grieving widow whose distress at her husband’s untimely death was complicated by her understandable indignation at his betrayal. Was there something, some grain of truth behind Mrs. Redman’s assertion that Sir Edgar distrusted his wife? And what sort of hocus-pocus—if that was indeed the word he had used—did he suspect? Did it have to do with her interest in spiritualism? Or was there something else?

  And what in the world did any of this have to do with Sir Edgar’s death?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Our researches have evidently been running on parallel lines, and when we unite our results I expect we shall have a fairly full knowledge of the case.

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Though he might be more humble, there is no police like Holmes.

  Willie Hornung (Doyle’s brother-in-law)

  “Ah, there you are, Sheridan!” Doyle exclaimed, as Charles alighted from the brougham outside the Duchy Hotel. “I’ve been looking for you. I’m gratified to report that my researches in Yelverton have proved productive, quite productive, indeed!”

  “Well, that’s good,” Charles said. He spoke dispiritedly, but he was glad that someone, if not himself, had managed to learn something significant that day. He bade good-bye to the constable, who drove off to return the hired rig, and climbed up the steps to join Doyle.

  “It must be getting on to tea time,” he said. “Shall we see whether they have laid tea in the hotel lounge?”

  The tea tray held an admirable assortment of sandwiches, cheeses, and sweets; the fire was blazing brightly; and what was even better, the lounge was unoccupied. Charles filled his plate, poured his tea, and pulled a wing chair as near to the fire as possible.

  “Well?” he asked, settling into the chair and stretching out his stiff legs. He was beginning to feel better already. “What have you learned today, Doyle?”

  “I have discovered,” Doyle said with an air of importance, “Sir Edgar’s horse and gig, in the livery stable in Yelverton.”

  “Indeed!” Charles exclaimed, crossing one leg over the other. “Capital, I must say, Doyle. Worthy of Sherlock himself!”

  Doyle took the other chair. “I have driven the rig back here to Princetown, since I thought you might want to have a look at it. For fingerprints,” he added, with a wave of his hand, “or cigarette stubs or ash or something of the sort. My cursory examination revealed nothing, but I had not the assistance of a hand lens nor the time to use it. You might turn up something else with a good going-over.”

  Charles withheld the comment that it would have been better to have left the gig in Yelverton than to risk a contamination of the evidence. But he said only, “We’ll go over to the stable in a bit and have a look. What else were you able to learn in Yelverton?”

  Doyle leaned forward, smiling under his mustaches. “I have learned the identity of—” He paused. “Well, I shouldn’t go so far as to call him ‘our murderer’ just yet, for the evidence is chiefly circumstantial. However, it appears that, whatever intention he may have announced to his wife, Sir Edgar may not have left the moor after all.”

  “You’re suggesting that someone else drove his horse and gig to Yelverton and left them there?”

  “Exactly, old chap! Precisely.” He dug into his pocket and took out a packet of cigarettes, lighting one. “Someone else, indeed, as you say. Someone who wanted to create the illusion that Sir Edgar had left the moor, and even that he had left the country.”

  “But who?” Charles asked, feeling, he suspected, as Dr. Watson must have felt on many occasions.

  “Delany,” Doyle said with satisfaction. “It was just as I suspected. Jack Delany, next in line for Thornworthy.” He drank deeply of his tea and set his cup and saucer on the table between them. “The man who left the rig in Yelverton looked nothing at all like Sir Edgar, you see. According to the stable master’s testimony, he was around thirty-five years of age, tall, thin, clean-shaven, and fair-haired.”

  Charles shook his head, frowning. “It certainly sounds like Delany. Although I wouldn’t have thought—” His frown deepened. “If what you’re suggesting is true, then, Jack Delany would have met Sir Edgar at some point after he left Thomworthy that morning. He shot him, mutilated his face with a rock, and stuffed his body into the kist.”

  “Precisely,” Doyle said with an energetic gesture. “Then Delany drove on—not to Okehampton, where Sir Edgar was liable to be known to the people at the livery stable, but to Yelverton, which, like Okehampton, is on the rail line to the port of Plymouth. He stabled the horse and gig, wrote to Lady Duncan in a fair imitation of his cousin’s hand—to which he would have had ready access over the course of years—and posted the missive to Thornworthy.”

  “And his purpose in writing?”

  “Elementary, my dear Sheridan, elementary!” Doyle beamed. “He intended to give the impression that Sir Edgar was continuing his flight to Plymouth and the wide world beyond, thereby obscuring the possibility of murder.” He leaned back, puffing out clouds of blue smoke. “Then he returned to Princetown on the afternoon train. Both the postmistress and the railway conductor recalled noticing him when I questioned them, you see. A tall, thin, handsome man with fair hair. Jack Delany.”

  “But why?” Charles asked.

  “Why?” Doyle looked at him, somewhat vexed. “Greed is the strongest motive on earth, is it not? The man stood next in line to gain Thornworthy.”

  “I can understand why he would kill Sir Edgar,” Charles said, frowning. “Greed is indeed a powerful motive. It’s the rest of it that I don’t understand. Jack Delany would require his cousin’s dead body to support any claim to Thornworthy. But your reconstruction of the crime has him concealing that body and creating, with the stabling of the gig in Yelverton and the writing of the letter, the false impression that Sir Edgar was leaving the country. Why would he do these things?”

  “I can’t tell you why,” Doyle said crossly. “I can only assert that he did, and offer the testimony of three eyewitnesses: the stable master, the postmistress, and the railway conductor.” He peered over the tops of his glasses. “My dear fellow, do you doubt these people’s testimony as to wha
t they saw with their very own eyes? A tall, thin, fair-haired—”

  “No. No, I don’t doubt it at all. I am simply raising the question of motive, for it seems to me that a man who must prove his cousin dead before he is recognized as the beneficiary of his estate will hardly beat the man’s face until it is unrecognizable and then bend every effort to creating the fiction of his departure from the country.”

  Doyle frowned. Saying nothing, he puffed out several more clouds of smoke, which hung around his head in a haze. “I quite take your point,” he said at last, “and I confess that I have no answer. Delany is without a doubt the man who stabled the horse and mailed the letter. As to why he would do these things when he had no reason, I cannot say. It is a mystery—a very deep mystery.”

  “Well, then,” Charles said, “let me add to the mystery. The constable and I spoke this morning to Jack Delany, who put us onto a woman named Mrs. Redman, whom Sir Edgar set up in millinery business in Mortonhampstead. When we went to see her, we found—” And he related what he and the constable had learned, including Mrs. Redman’s report of Sir Edgar’s ambiguous remark about “hocus-pocus.”

  “Well,” said Doyle in a comfortable tone, “I shouldn’t take those words to refer to Mr. Westcott’s mediumistic work, if I were you. I have satisfied myself that his abilities and those of his spirit contact, Pheneas, are entirely genuine and quite impressive.” He settled himself deeper into his chair. “I am reminded of my investigation into the spiritual phenomena at the home of Colonel Elmore in Dorset, where a restless spirit, perhaps that of a small child whose remains were later discovered in the garden—”

  “Charles!” Kate suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Oh, my dear, I am so glad to see you! You must come upstairs and hear what Avis Cartwright has to say. But first, I must read you this letter from Patsy.” She reached into the pocket of her blue dress. “You will be amazed at what she and Evelyn have—”