“That’s enough about that,” the Superintendent interrupted with some hauteur.
“Certainly, sir,” said the Sergeant and crossed out the offending lines.
The Superintendent coughed. “Of course,” he explained, “if one sits up all night...”
“With a sick friend,” the Sergeant interpolated, his eyes again stolidly upon the wall, and the Superintendent, who possessed a sense of humour, made a good mark against the name of Sergeant Hughes.
“By the time Superintendent Maltby arrived the drudgery had been completed,” Sergeant Hughes read. “The police surgeon, Dr. Claxton, had met the late Mr. Horbury’s doctor, Cornish, at White Barn. They made a cursory examination to be certain that life was extinct, and after the police had taken the necessary measurements, Dr. Claxton conveyed the corpse in the station ambulance to the mortuary, having arranged with Dr. Cornish to join him later with a view to a full post-mortem investigation. Whilst the body was being removed, the finger-prints and photographs taken, Inspector Herbert asked Dr. Cornish to look after Mrs. Horbury and prepare her for an interview with Superintendent Maltby, who would doubtless wish to ask her some questions.”
“Up till now, then,” said Maltby, “no one has received any account of what happened last night?”
“No, sir.”
“Beyond that Mrs. Horbury locked her door,” said Mr. Ricardo, and, though the fact was known be the separation of this fact from the rigmarole of Mrs. Wallace gave to it a new significance. There was a pause, even a stiffening of attitudes, a silence.
Mr. Ricardo, however, had up to this moment experienced no flashing revelation which he wished to pass on to his colleagues. From the first aspect of White Barn he had suffered a confusion. He could hardly reconcile Horbury with this house, and still less with his retention of it as a refuge where he and a wife could be “quiet-like together.” But when he had at last accepted these details, he found them weakened, if not contradicted, in that Mrs. Horbury had gone up to her bedroom alone and locked the door. Had they quarrelled, Ricardo wondered? Hardly enough to account for Horbury’s suicide, in any case. Horbury and his wife — the homely background to the flamboyant career — Pommery ‘06 at Bentano’s in the Strand and domestic felicity in Lordship Lane. For a student of life, a fascinating case; but, since his wife had locked the bedroom door, an enigma.
The silence was broken by Hanaud in a most deferential voice. “May I ask a question?”
“Of course,” Maltby answered. “We shall welcome your assistance, although I fancy we shall find the Horbury affair not too difficult.”
“I thank you,” Hanaud answered.
How charmingly correct they both were, Mr. Ricardo reflected, as Hanaud now turned to the charwoman.
“Was it by means of this telephone that Madame Horbury summoned the police this morning?”
A telephone machine was standing almost at Hanaud’s left hand on the writing-table beneath the window.
“Yes, sir.”
Hanaud looked at the handle of the receiver and with a little bow to Sergeant Hughes: “I see there are traces of the powder for the finger prints.”
“We found some old marks of Mrs. Wallace’s fingers which she let us take and a new, quite clear, set, which we take to have been made by Mrs. Horbury,” answered Hughes.
“Then” — and Hanaud turned back to the charwoman— “is this the only telephone in the house?”
“No, no, Mounseer. It is a French gentleman, isn’t it? This is the one which I use for ordering things — coal and food, and suchlike. But there is an extension in the garden-room which Mr. and Mrs. Horbury use when they want to use it. But that’s only onct in a blue moon.”
“But they are rung up, the bell rings here?”
“To be sure,” said Maltby with a touch of impatience. What on earth had the telephone here to do with the case of a man who had cut his throat in the garden-room? The charwoman, however, was all for giving information. When would life have another thrill for her like this?
“Yes, Mounseer, the bell rings here and in the garden-room and you can answer from either.”
“You are bound to hear it, then, wherever you are?”
Mrs. Wallace laughed.
“You’d have to be as deaf as a post not to hear it,” she said. “Bad as a firebell, I says. I can shut the kitchen door never so, but let that bell go off, and there’s no being quiet-like until you’ve answered it.”
“Quiet-like,” said Mr. Ricardo solemnly, with a nod to the charwoman. “That is the key word.”
“To what?” asked the Superintendent. Mr. Ricardo had not an idea.
But Hanaud hurried to his rescue. “Yes, my friends,” he declared with a serious face, which somehow frightened everyone else in the hall, “I think we shall find that there is much which is too quiet-like in the whole of this affair.”
“The locked door?” Maltby suggested.
“That is one thing,” Hanaud replied, “but only one thing.”
Again there was a pause. Then Maltby, shaking from his shoulders some horror which he did not wish to believe, moved. “Let us see this garden-room.”
He walked to the door upon the right hand, opposite to the window under which stood the Sheraton sideboard. It was a thick mahogany door with a glass handle. He took out his handkerchief and wrapped it round the glass. But Sergeant Hughes interrupted him.
“The only prints upon that handle were the same as those clear prints upon the telephone on the writing table.”
“Mrs. Horbury’s then?” said Maltby.
“Yes.”
“And one set only?” suddenly Hanaud interposed.
“Yes.”
“As she went upstairs — to lock her door? Yes, no doubt,” cried Hanaud. “But when they arrived in the evening, eh, my friend? To spend an evening quiet-like together. Which of them opened this door?”
“No doubt Olivia Horbury.” said the Sergeant, politely condescending.
“Oh, no doubt,” cried Hanaud, and there was no politeness at all in his voice. “And she was kind enough to save us trouble by placing her fingers on the handle in exactly the same position as she did when she drew the door to, to go upstairs to her room and lock herself in. That is curious, no?”
Sergeant Hughes looked uncomfortable. Superintendent Maltby was troubled.
“Yes, I don’t understand that,” he remarked unhappily. “It might, of course, happen by chance, once...”
And Monsieur Hanaud cut in: “Yes, my friend, once — when the moon is blue.”
Superintendent Maltby, with a gesture of annoyance, threw open the door of the garden-room.
CHAPTER 9
THE UNSPOKEN WORD
THEY ENTERED AN oblong room with panelled walls enamelled white. One or two girandoles and one or two water-colours decorated the panels. The carpet was thick and of a warm wine-dark red, and the curtains and pelmets of heavy silk matched it in colour. A white marble fireplace had a panel of blue Wedgwood figures below the mantelshelf. Mr. Ricardo was the last to enter, and, standing by the door, he shut his eyes tight and asked of himself: “What message has this room for me?”
Apparently it had none. Isolate himself as he might, no message shot tingling across his mind. And, besides, Mrs. Wallace, the charwoman, was talking volubly.
“The room was lit and the curtains drawn as though it was still night, and there was the poor gentleman sprawled across the table, and gore — you wanted to be a butcher born, you did, not to feel sickish. Then I screamed and ran out of the room.”
It was not wonderful to Mr. Ricardo that she should feel sickish. He conceived that if his mind had been less alert, he might have felt a trifle sickish himself. Upon his right hand were two french windows opening on to a green and pleasant garden with the great meadow beyond a low hedge. Although birds sang no more, rooks wheeled and cawed about one of the oaks and, as the branches swayed, the sun threw an ever-changing pattern of draperies upon the grass. An idyllic place where
lovers could be quiet-like together — especially at night with the curtains drawn and an aromatic log fire burning on the hearth. Now the small table was pushed forward, and blood had splashed even on the enamelled wall and coagulated in what seemed an enormous pool upon the carpet. A blotting-book bound in a buhl cover, ornamented with mother-of-pearl, had tumbled off the table and stood on its edges, like a child’s tent, on the rim of the dried pool. Beside it were the splinters of a broken wineglass. Mr. Ricardo could almost see the heavy figure of the man slumped over the table and the right arm flung forward just over the spot where a cardboard cover had been placed to mark the position where the knife had fallen.
The table stood close to the fireplace with a chair, against the wall behind it, in which Horbury had been sitting. It was small and there should have been, one would have thought, letters, papers of some sort, scattered upon the floor. For a fountain pen with its nib exposed had peeped out beneath his arm.
“There were no papers,” Inspector Herbert explained. “It struck me as curious.”
The Superintendent walked to the fireplace and, going down on his knees, poked amongst the ashes. Then he sat back upon his heels. “Yes, it’s curious,” he said slowly. “If he burnt papers, he did it thoroughly. There’s nothing here but an old butt of a cigar. He must have tossed that into the fire, and then put an end to everything.”
Hanaud, for his part, was more concerned with the appointments of the room. The table at which Horbury had sat was on the further side of the fireplace from the door, and still further along the wall, in the corner, a cushioned chair with arms was placed. It looked diagonally across the room towards the door, and the cushion at the back of it was crumpled. A long table stood against the wall running between that corner and the windows. Opposite to the fireplace was a sofa with a back, and upon that, too, there were cushions which had been disarranged. At the end of it a round mahogany table was placed, and on it was a glass half full of champagne.
“It seems that at one moment Madame Horbury sat here with her glass of champagne at her elbow and, as that good woman tells us,” Hanaud said with a glance towards the charwoman, “she took no more of it than she usually did. And there upon the floor are the splinters of Horbury’s glass. But why should Horbury, of all men, have put the bottle back in the cupboard?”
Superintendent Maltby nodded his head. “We don’t want to make difficulties for ourselves, do we?” To him this was a plain case of suicide by a man of a very stormy history, who might well have found himself with no option between death or a long term of penal servitude. “These are small matters.”
“Yet there is another. May I again interfere?”
Hanaud was all smiles and deference and entirely at Mister the Superintendent’s disposal. Mister the Superintendent, indeed, was beginning to wonder whether he had been wise to invite this burly Frenchman. But he tried not to show it.
“Of course,” he said. “My dear Hanaud, we know of your painstaking methods. A hair on a coat-sleeve, a key lost or found...”
“Lost or found!” cried Hanaud. “Was ever anything more properly, more profoundly said? My dear Monsieur!”
He walked lightly across the room to the table against the end wall. On it stood a telephone instrument of the modern kind, ear and mouthpiece in one, resting on a cradle, and a dial at the foot of the instrument. But it was not the telephone which had attracted him. Almost, but not quite, behind the machine, something had gleamed.
“Yes, another little matter, and that, too, out of place,” and Monsieur Hanaud was not the man to keep a note of triumph out of his voice. He held up a bunch of keys, picking it up daintily by the ring.
“You will observe that there is a Yale latch-key on the ring. Is not this the bunch of keys which the good Horbury carried on a chain in the pocket of his trousers? Yes? It seems so. Perhaps Mister Herbert will tell us.”
“Them’s his keys,” said Mrs. Wallace. “I’ve seen them over and over.”
Sergeant Hughes, at a nod from Maltby, took the keys and went out of the room. When he returned, he addressed himself to Maltby.
“It is the key of the front door, sir.”
Maltby crossed to the side table and, taking a piece of chalk from his pocket, held it above the spot where Hanaud’s eye had discovered the bunch.
“That the place?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Maltby marked the place and both men stood for a moment in a perplexity. After all, why should Horbury have taken the bunch off the chain on which he usually carried it?
“If the lock of the door had been stiff, for instance,” said Hanaud. “Yes, it would have been easier to turn it:”
“But the lock wasn’t stiff,” replied Hughes. “And why should he put the bunch on the table?”
All three men stared again at the chalk mark on the table. Another little thing. But an unusual thing. And therefore needing explanation.
“It’s certainly odd,” Maltby exclaimed. He turned rather savagely upon the charwoman. “You never saw them off the chain?”
“Never,” she declared. “Cross my thumbs!”
“But it might happen?”
Mrs. Wallace sniggered. “And it might rain pigs and chocolate creams,” she answered, “but it don’t.”
“Of course “ — Maltby disregarded the charwoman’s nettled rejoinder— “Horbury might have wanted to telephone. Standing up straight after dialling, the edge of the table may have pressed the bunch into his thigh He may have taken the keys from the spring hook of the chain and tossed them where they fell. A little fanciful?” he asked of Sergeant Hughes, who looked more than a little troubled by this sudden high flight of his superior officer.
“No, sir, not fanciful at all,” he replied, “but” — and he blurted out the uncontroversial fact— “that telephone wasn’t used last night.”
Mrs. Wallace sniggered again. But it was Hanaud who spoke, a little startled perhaps and certainly perplexed.
“I should like to be very sure of that,” he said quietly.
“You may be,” said the Sergeant. “That — well, that handle thing was tested for prints. There wasn’t a mark of any kind upon it.”
“No, and there wouldn’t be,” cried Mrs. Wallace, folding her arms across her body. “Not if it wasn’t used last night. Yesterday morning I dusted it, I did, and when I dusts, I dusts.”
“Did you take the receiver from the cradle?”
“That I did,” she answered. “I holds the spring down, see? With my left hand. Then I takes off the handle thing. Then I slips one of the two telephone books on to them supports to keep them down. Then I dusts the thing thoroughly — earpiece and mouthpiece and all — and slips it back again.”
She contemplated Monsieur Hanaud with an aggressive face, but he answered her with a bow which was quite disarming. “Madame, I do not doubt you for a moment. The whole room is an example for housewives.”
Mrs. Wallace relaxed from her indignation; and the next moment she smiled. For Sergeant Hughes added his tribute of praise.
“That’s true,” he said. “I never saw furniture so clean. There are marks on Mr. Horbury’s chair and table made by him, as we know, and a few on the mantel shelf and the arm of the settee, where Mrs. Horbury sat with her glass of champagne. They correspond with the prints on the telephone in the hall. But, apart from those, nothing at all.”
“Except, perhaps,” Hanaud suggested, “some on the arms of that chair in the corner where the cushion is disarranged?”
Hughes was for the moment taken aback.
“No, sir,” he answered after a pause. “That’s queer, that is. I was here whilst the finger-print men were at work. There were no prints on that chair at all. It may be that the cushion was thrown on to the chair, perhaps by Horbury himself from his chair behind the table.”
It seemed, however, that Hanaud had lost interest in the matter.
“Very likely,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders and a nod of his head. “Lit
tle things. As the Superintendent tells us wisely, we must not make too much of them.”
A bell rang in the passage and the knocker rattled upon the outside door.
“It will be the doctor,” said Herbert, and Maltby nodded to the charwoman.
“Will you let him in, please, and then we need not keep you from your duties.”
The charwoman brought into the parlour a minute afterwards a big-boned, loose-limbed man, with a genial, bluff manner, and a suit of dark clothes even looser than his limbs.
“Dr. Claxton,” said the charwoman.
“And very many thanks for your help, Mrs. Wallace,” Maltby said gratefully. “When I ring, will you ask Mrs. Horbury if she is ready to receive us?”
Before Mrs. Wallace was out of the room, Claxton held out to Maltby a narrow longish cardboard box. “The Inspector at the station wanted you to see this.”
Maltby took off the lid and all could see the gleam of a long-bladed knife. Hanaud took a step towards it and Maltby made him an apology.
“I forget my manners. Dr. Claxton, I present you to Monsieur Hanaud of the Paris Sureté.”
“It is an honour,” returned Dr. Claxton with a keen glance at the Frenchman.
“And Mr. Ricardo,” added Maltby with a wave of the hand a little too careless.
But Dr. Claxton turned with a smile and an extended hand.
“Of Grosvenor Square?” he asked, and lifted Mr. Ricardo into a heaven of delight. He wondered whether, if by any chance he should ever fall ill, it would seem unusual if he were to send to Lordship Lane for a doctor. He had no time to solve this important problem at the moment. For Maltby was kneeling down by that clotted mush of blood on the floor.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 155