Strickland was in luck that morning. For the very man he wanted got out of a cab and mounted the steps at his side, a heavily-built man with a large, jovial face and a voice like the bark of a big, good-humoured dog.
“Strickland!” he cried, “I haven’t seen you for a couple of years.”
“I haven’t been visible for a couple of years.”
“Anything wrong?”
“Nothing but what you can put right.”
“I am fortunate,” said the other with a laugh. “Let us lunch together and make what we can of your trouble.”
Henry Murchison was the editor of that famous newspaper The Flame, and twenty-five years in a position where mistakes as to facts are not allowed had made his memory at once prodigious and exact. He chose a table in the window, and when his luncheon was before him, and his invariable tankard within the reach of his hand, he shook himself genially and barked:
“Well! Fire away What can I do?”
“You can tell me about an inquest.”
Murchison looked up with interest.
“An inquest? But can I? I don’t know.”
“It was an inquest upon a Mrs. Clutter — a Mrs. Elizabeth Clutter, and it was held about eighteen months ago.”
Henry Murchison ran a finger down the index of his memories.
“Yes, there was such an inquest,” he replied at length. “It was held in the Isle of Wight. But at a time not very helpful to you.”
“Why?” Strickland asked anxiously.
“It was held in the midst of a general election.”
“But you will have a report of it in your file.”
Murchison looked dubious.
“A very short one. Little more, probably, than a statement of the verdict. We were full up at the time with speeches and policies, fat speeches and thin policies. We couldn’t reduce the one, and we had to try to build up the other. There wasn’t much room left for inquests in the Isle of Wight.”
Strickland’s heart sank. There was always some infernal obstacle in the way. First, Thorne’s scruples and reticence, now the coincidence of a general election. Murchison, looking at his companion over the rim of his tankard, understood how deep was his disappointment.
“Ask me a question or two,” he suggested. “I might remember something.”
“Very well, I will,” Strickland returned. He had the one question ready on his tongue, which must provoke Murchison’s recollections, if they could be provoked at all. “How was Corinne concerned in it?”
“Corinne!”
Murchison’s face cleared like magic.
“Oho! Wait a moment!” he cried, and he buried his face in his hands for a minute and then looked out of the window for a minute with his mouth pursed up and his forehead in a frown. “I have got it,” he said at length, and corrected himself— “at least I have got the proved facts of it. I don’t propose to go behind them.”
“I don’t ask you to,” Strickland agreed.
“Very well,” said Murchison, and whilst he ate, he talked. “Mrs. Elizabeth Clutter was a well-to-do, youngish woman, very neurotic, very lonely. She had a small house in South Audley Street and a bigger house just outside Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight, and divided her time between them.”
“She was a widow?” Strickland interposed.
Murchison reflected for a moment. He looked again out of the window, and then gazed straight into Strickland’s eyes.
“I don’t know. She may have been. She may, on the other hand, only have been separated from her husband. She was alone, at all events. Let me tell my story my own way.”
Strickland had an impression that the editor knew something more about Elizabeth Clutter’s widowhood than he was ready to admit.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“She was alone,” Murchison resumed, “until Corinne came to live with her. Women of that kind are prone to violent friendships which have a very short life. Corinne was the favourite of the moment. She was not the Corinne of to-day. Rudelli hadn’t taken her up. Gran, her present dancing partner, hadn’t polished her. She was poor, pretty as a peach, of course, but with a good many intervals between her engagements. Yes?”
He broke off because he saw Strickland struggling to suppress a question.
“What is it?”
“I was wondering how Corinne and Elizabeth Clutter became acquainted.”
“That was stated. Corinne had an engagement to dance at an hotel in Brighton one Christmas when Mrs. Clutter was staying there. The resulting friendship we shall recognise to have been inevitable if we remember the great pearl of wisdom which fell from the lips of the claimant, the late lamented Mr. Orton.”
“I never heard it,” Strickland remarked.
“‘Some has money and some has brains Them that has money was made for them that has brains,’” Henry Murchison quoted. “So Corinne made her home with Elizabeth Clutter. But—” and he wagged a forefinger in the air to emphasise his statement— “let us be quite clear about this. Corinne was dancing in a cabaret show in London on the night when Elizabeth Clutter, in the Isle of Wight, reached out her hand in the dark and drank a tumblerful of disinfectant instead of the sleeping draught which usually stood there.”
Strickland leaned back in his chair with a gasp.
“So that’s it!” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” Murchison returned in a far more indifferent voice. “It’s an accident which has happened not a few times, but never under conditions so unimpeachable. Elizabeth Clutter slept with a whole pharmacopoeia of remedies by her bedside. Nothing is more probable than that she took the wrong glass by mistake. The alternative is that being an ailing melancholy neurotic woman, she took the wrong glass on purpose.”
Strickland, however, was not so easily satisfied. He held his ground.
“It was suggested, wasn’t it, that Maung H’la had changed the glasses — ?” he said.
Murchison shot a quick glance at the persevering cross-examiner on the other side of the table.
“Maung H’Ia? Oh, yes, the Burmese servant! He had a record of nine or ten years of faithful service. I never heard that that suggestion was made.”
Strickland continued, working the case out in his mind as he went along.
“And that Corinne had arranged her alibi for the occasion?”
“Corinne took her engagements when and where she could get them,” Murchison returned. “A conspiracy between her and the Burmese servant was, so far as I remember, never even hinted at during the inquest.”
Murchison called a waiter to clear the plates away, and to place matches and an ash-tray upon the table. He pulled a large cigar case from his pocket and held it out to Strickland. But whilst these preparations were being made, he stole now and again a quick shrewd glance across the table, as though he made a guess why all these questions were fired at him.
Strickland waited until the waiter had gone and his cigar was lit before he ceased from musketry, and took to his hand-grenade.
“And yet,” he said slowly, “both Corinne and Maung H’la, the faithful servant, nearly stood in the dock to answer to a capital charge.”
Henry Murchison was undoubtedly startled. He took his cigar from his lips and stared at Strickland with his lips pursed up in a way he had.
“You know that?” lie barked.
“Yes.”
“Then you know a damned sight more about the case than I do.”
He replaced his cigar, and after smoking for a little while, spoke as one making a concession:
“Of course there’s always certain to be some talk and, perhaps, some suspicion when one of these deaths occurs and an unexpected person inherits—”
“Ah!” Strickland interposed quickly. “That’s what I wanted to know. Then Corinne inherited—”
“Everything, the house in London, the house in the Isle of Wight, the stocks and shares — the whole bag of tricks.”
“So I supposed,” Strickland returned. Yet some doubt troubled him.
Through the window he watched with meticulous attention a pedestrian along fifty yards of pavement, but could never have described that pedestrian, nor was he aware that he watched any one at all.
“You see — what I don’t understand, if she inherited all this money — no, I can’t follow it!”
“What’s your trouble?” Murchison asked.
“Corinne’s still dancing.”
Murchison laughed heartily, and raised his tankard in homage.
“May the bloom never fade from your innocence!” he cried. “Corinne dances. Her passion for her art compels her to. She says so in every interview. We say so in every paragraph. So it must be true. Besides,” he added dryly, “Corinne has a lover.”
Strickland nodded.
“Battchilena?”
“Yes. Battchilena! and Corinne and Battchilena between them could eat up a nice little fortune, during the time it took you to eat up a nice little luncheon. Corinne is like this tankard,” he said, peering regretfully into its depths. “Outwardly nothing could be more respectable, for it looks as if it held or had held a pint of ale. Internally it’s vice itself, for it holds, or did hold, a pint of champagne, and nothing can be more vicious than champagne in the middle of the day.”
He put the tankard, now quite empty, down again upon the table.
“And now, perhaps, you’ll tell me why you are so interested in the little affair of Corinne and Mrs. Elizabeth Clutter,” he said.
Strickland answered readily enough.
“I have a couple of friends whom I greatly value, and if this little affair were to take a new turn I am afraid that the fortunes of those two friends might be very much damaged by the scandal.”
He foresaw no danger more serious than that at the moment. But he did foresee that very clearly. From the facts of the inquest as they had been stated by Murchison, there was not to be extracted the merest shadow of a plea which could persuade so staunch a spirit as Ariadne Ferne to contract her friendship with Corinne. She would, on the contrary, flaunt it the more noisily, if any attempt were made to persuade her. There lay the peril, and Strickland spoke with a quiet and simple earnestness which moved his companion to a strong sympathy.
“It’s possible,” said Murchison with a smile, “that if I set my wits to work, I might guess correctly who your two friends are. And I agree. A scandal in which Corinne was so gravely concerned might do the whole of the little set in which Corinne moves a certain amount of harm, and your two friends in particular. They are on the by-paths with the big high-road very close, but not yet reached. A wrong turn now, and they might tramp a blind alley for the rest of their lives, what? Yes, but the whole affair’s over — over, eighteen months ago. It can’t take a new turn.”
Strickland, however, was not reassured. He shook his head.
“I should like to be as sure of that as you,” he returned slowly. “Just listen to this After the inquest Maung H’la was sent back to Burma. I don’t say that he was deported by an order. No, he wasn’t. But he was none the less definitely sent back by the authorities. He took work as a gardener at the ruby mines. Then one day he saw a man, a white man, coming along the road, and in a panic he hid. The white man, a complete stranger, stopped and inquired for him. Maung H’la bolted and made for his native village, hidden away in the jungle The stranger followed him. Three days afterwards Maung was found dead. A very cautious man sent the news to me, but he meant to leave me in no doubt that Maung H’la had been murdered.”
“Though it couldn’t be proved, eh?”
“Though it couldn’t be proved.”
“And the stranger?”
“He took the river steamer to Mandalay and disappeared.”
Murchison turned this unexpected incident over in his mind. His face became grave.
“Yes, that does alter the look of things, doesn’t it?” he said. “Sounds like mischief, what? I tell you what you might do. You might come down with me to the office now. I have an idea that we might catch the reporter who went down to that inquest.”
Strickland accepted the proposition with a warmth of gratitude which Henry Murchison was no longer at a loss to account for; and five minutes later the two men left the club together.
IX. A LOST OPPORTUNITY
IN A NARROW lane at the back of Fleet Street, the great edifice of The Flame newspaper pulsed and thudded like an ocean liner. Even at this hour of the afternoon its passages were thronged with clerks and reporters and compositors, all of them in a tremendous hurry. The lifts clanged up and down from the fifth floor to the basement, vans accumulated round the block, bales of paper were carried in, and such a clatter and bustle of affairs permeated the building as convinced Strickland that surely the country must come to an end that night unless The Flame was issued before twelve o’clock. Murchison, however, moved through the turmoil with an Olympian calm, and led his companion to his own quiet room upon the first floor. He spoke upon a telephone.
“Will you bring me all that we have got about the inquest on Mrs. Elizabeth Clutter?” he commanded, and within a space of time which seemed to Strickland amazingly brief, a clerk came into the room with a large square envelope. Within the envelope there was just one cutting and that a short one.
“There you are!”
Murchison placed Strickland in his chair, laid the cutting before him and went out of the room. But the report did no more than confirm the accuracy of Murchison’s memory. It was not even as complete. There had apparently been not one moment of sensation. Corinne had answered all the questions put to her by the coroner with no more than the distress natural to the occasion. Maung H’la, speaking very good English, had accounted for all his movements upon the night of Elizabeth Clutter’s death. The verdict, “Death by Misadventure,” followed inevitably. All was slab and drab and as innocent as could be.
“Yet Maung H’la was sent back to Burma,” Strickland cried in exasperation. “Yet he did come near to standing in the dock, with Corinne by him.”
The pressure of space due to the progress of a general election was all very well. But there was reserve — yes, a note of reserve about the whole conduct of the proceedings — which was unusual — very unusual. He leaned back in his chair, whilst the great building throbbed and vibrated. He was carried away to the deck of the ship where on his journey home he had brooded through so many starry evenings upon Thorne’s hints and his own fears. Was he reading into this report suspicions horn of his ceaseless conjectures during the days and nights between Bombay and Port Said, between Port Said and Marseilles? He rose up from the chair, irritated to the point where he could not remain seated, where he must walk from the table to the window and from the window to the table, like a bear in its cage. In the midst of his pacing, Murchison again entered the room. He was followed by a young, red-headed man with a sharp pale face, into which some of the red of his hair seemed to have run.
“This,” said Murchison, “is Mr. Angus Trevor, who reported the inquest,” and once again he left the room.
Mr. Angus Trevor sat down at the end of the table and, reaching over, picked up the cutting. He read it through carefully, put it down again with a nod, and scratched his head slowly and methodically.
“Yes,” he said, with his eyes turned inwards. “Yes, that’s about it. Not so bad either.”
Strickland stopped his pacing.
“But is that all? Did nothing more happen which you didn’t report?”
Mr. Trevor took no offence at the abruptness of the question. Strickland’s distress was too obviously sincere. Trevor was familiar enough, from the experience of innumerable interviews, with performances of the various emotions, to be able to appreciate a genuine one when he saw it.
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “You see, I know very well that the public’s a carnivorous beast, and would much rather that I served up Corinne piping hot on a silver dish than that I gave it pap. Well, all this is pap. Well, then, I had to give it pap. Well, then, obviously pap was all
that I had to give.”
Strickland took another turn to the window and back again. He stopped at the end of the table opposite to Angus Trevor.
“What about Clutter, the husband?” he asked.
“Oh, Clutter didn’t come upon the scene at all. I suppose Clutter was dead,” replied Angus Trevor easily.
“But you are not sure? I have a reason for asking.”
Angus Trevor scratched his head again. “Wait a bit,” he said, and he took up the cutting once more and studied it with care. “Oh, yes! Miss Corinne didn’t know whether Clutter was alive or dead. I don’t know why I left it out. Perhaps there wasn’t room. She described Mrs. Clutter as subject to fits of remorse. Apparently, she and her husband had not hit it off very well. She had a morbid sense of guilt and since she did not volunteer any statement, Corinne did not question her.”
“Oh!” Strickland exclaimed. Here, at all events, was the promise of a new explanation. Elizabeth Clutter might have deliberately killed herself. Strickland grasped at it eagerly. He might have been very sorry for Elizabeth Clutter had he known her. But he had not. His concern was solely with certain living people, and this explanation, if it were only true, would save them from all the discredit, the touch of infamy which he feared.
“So there was a suggestion of suicide?” he cried hopefully.
“Corinne certainly suggested it,” Trevor answered in a very dry tone. “But the jury didn’t agree.”
No, nor did the police, since they were within an ace of putting Corinne upon her trial. Nor did the stranger who had pursued Maung H’la into the jungle and made his account with him there. Strickland’s hope was as the seed which sprang up in a night and withered away. He flung himself disconsolately down in his chair again.
“There’s something about this report which I don’t understand, Mr. Trevor,” he said, “even allowing for the general election.”
Mr. Trevor was politely curious.
“It seems to me all straight to the point,” he said after consulting it again.
“Too straight to the point,” Strickland retorted. “What I know about coroners is, to be sure, not very much. But I have always understood them to be laws unto themselves. Rather meddlesome people, on the whole. Talkative people, overbearing people, and rather insolent in their virtue. Every little peccadillo, twenty years old perhaps and with no real bearing on the case, must be dragged up out of its grave and gibbeted. But this coroner seems to have been a very mirror of circumspection. Not a question about the husband, who he was, whether he was dead, whether, if he was dead, he and his wife were separated before he died, when he died, of what he died, where he died. I should have expected this coroner to be busily prying into all these details; and I am bound to say, I wish to heaven he had been.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 64