“It does not strike me,” he said, “that such a collection of poems would be likely to interest the owner of this flat.”
He folded the slip and put it carefully into his pocket-book. He added:
“On the other hand, Browning’s Love Songs do appeal very strongly to some women.” He fixed his eyeglass and regarded the young detective. “You have not found the book itself, have you?”
“No, sir. There are a few novels in the bedroom but no poetry of any kind.”
Doctor Hailey nodded. He asked to be shown the collection and made a detailed examination of it. The novels were all of the lurid, sex type. It was as he had anticipated. He opened each of the books and glanced at the fly leaves. They were all blank. He turned to Biles:
“I am ready to bet that Mrs. Bardwell did not pay that bill at the Book Club,” he declared. “And I am ready to bet also that this book was not bought for her.”
The detective shrugged his shoulders.
“Probably not,” he said unconcernedly.
“Then, why should the receipt for it be lying in this room?’
“My dear doctor, how should I know? I suppose because the man who possessed it chose to throw it away here.”
The doctor shook his head.
“Men do not buy collections of Love Songs for themselves, nor, for that matter, do women. They buy them almost invariably, to give to people they are interested in. Everybody, I think, recognises that.”
He broke off. A look of impatience came into Biles’ face.
“Well?”
“Therefore a man does not, as a rule, reveal to one woman the fact that he has made such a purchase on behalf of another. I mean, it is difficult to believe that any man on intimate terms with Mrs. Bardwell would have invited her jealousy by leaving such plain evidence of his interest in another woman lying about in her room. I assume, you see, that no man would give that poor lady this particular book.”
Biles shrugged his shoulders. The point seemed to him immaterial. He glanced round the bedroom with troubled eyes.
“I wish,” he declared, “that we had something to go on—something definite leading towards some individual.”
His words were addressed impartially to his subordinate and to Doctor Hailey. The former looked blank. But the doctor’s expression was almost eager. He raised his eyeglass and put it into his eye.
“My dear Biles,” he said, “we have something definite to go on. I was about to suggest to you, when you interrupted me, that the receipt for the books probably fell from the pocket of the purchaser through a hole in that pocket, just as the little box containing the additional bees which he had not found it necessary to release was destined to fall later, when the man, having assured himself that an insect of unimpaired vigour was loose and on the wing, descended in Piccadilly Circus from Mrs. Bardwell’s car.”
He paused. The detective had turned to him, interested once more. The thought crossed Doctor Hailey’s mind that it was a pity Biles had not been gifted by Providence with an appreciation of human nature as keen as his grasp of material circumstances. He allowed his eyeglass to drop in a manner which proclaimed that he had shot his bolt. He asked:
“You have not perhaps taken occasion to watch a man receiving a shop receipt for goods he has just bought and paid for? Believe me, a spectacle full of instruction in human nature. The receipt is handed, as a rule, by a girl, and the man, as a rule, pushes it into his nearest pocket, because he does not desire to be so rude or so untidy as to drop it on the floor. Shyness, politeness and tidiness, my dear Biles, are all prominent elements in our racial character.”
Again he broke off, this time to take a pinch of snuff. The two detectives watched that process with some impatience.
“A man with a hole in his coat pocket—a hole not very large, yet large enough to allow a piece of crumpled paper to work its way out as the wearer of the coat strode up and down the floor of the room—is not that a clue? A doctor perhaps with, deep in his soul, the desire for such women as Mrs. Bardwell, cheap, yet attractive women.”
“I thought you expressed the opinion that he bought the love songs for some other woman,” Biles snapped.
“Exactly. Some other woman sufficiently like Mrs. Bardwell to attract him, though evidently possessed of a veneer of education to which Mrs. Bardwell could lay no claim.” Doctor Hailey’s large and kindly face grew thoughtful. “Has it not struck you,” he asked, “that though a man may not be faithful to any one woman, he is almost always faithful to a type? Again and again I have seen in first and second wives the same qualities of mind and appearance, both good and bad. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that our first loves and our last are kindred spirits, recognised and chosen by needs and desires which do not change, or change but little, throughout the course of life.”
“Even so, my dear Hailey.”
Biles’ look of perplexity had deepened. The doctor, however, was too eager to be discouraged.
“If Mrs. Bardwell was in fact murdered,” he continued, “the figure of her murderer is not, I think, very difficult to visualise: a doctor in early middle life—because the dead woman is about thirty—with a practice in the country, but the tastes of a townsman, a trifle careless of his clothes, since he tolerates holes in his pockets, a sentimental egoist, since he buys Browning’s Love Songs while plans of murder are turning over in his mind.” He broke off and thought a moment. “It is probable that Mrs. Bardwell was an expensive luxury. Some women, too, fight like tigers for the possession of the men they rely on. Yet, though she had undoubtedly obtained a great, perhaps a terrible, hold on him, she had failed to make him marry her.”
He turned to Biles and readjusted his eyeglass.
“Why, do you suppose,” he asked, “Mrs. Bardwell failed to make this doctor marry her?”
“I have no idea.” The detective’s tones were crisp almost to the point of abruptness.
Doctor Hailey moved across the room to a writing table which stood near the window. He took a sheet of paper and marked a small circle on it. Around this he drew a much larger circle. He returned to the detective who had been watching him.
“Here is London,” he said, pointing to the small circle. “And here is the country round it up to a distance of forty miles—that is to say, up to a two-hour journey by motor-car. As our doctor seems to make frequent visits to town that is not, I think, too narrow a radius. Beyond about forty miles, London is no longer within easy reach.”
He struck his pencil at two places through the circumference of the larger circle, marking off a segment.
“Here,” he went on, “are the Surrey Highlands, the area within our district, where heather grows and where, in consequence, almost everyone keeps bees.”
He raised his head and faced the two men, whose interest he seemed to have recaptured:
“It should not,” he suggested, “be impossible to discover whether or not, within this area, there is a doctor in practice who keeps Cyprian bees, is constantly running up to London, wears an overcoat with a hole in one of the pockets, and lives apart from his wife.”
“Good heavens!” Biles drew his breath sharply. His instincts as a man-hunter had reasserted themselves. He glanced at the doctor with an enthusiasm which lacked nothing of generosity. The younger detective, however, retained his somewhat critical expression.
“Why should the doctor be living apart from his wife?” he asked.
“Because, had she not left him as soon as he tired of her, he would probably have killed her long ago. And in that case he would almost certainly have married Mrs. Bardwell during the first flush of his devotion to her. I know these sensualists who are also puffed up with literary vanity. Marriage possesses for them an almost incredible attractiveness.”
He glanced at his watch as he spoke. The recollection of a professional appointment had come suddenly to his memory.
Doctor Hailey was kept fully occupied during the next day and was unable, in consequence, to pursue the mystery of the Cyprian bees any further. In the late afternoon, however, he rang up Inspector Biles at Scotland Yard. A voice, the tones of which were sufficiently dispirited, informed him that the whole of the Home Counties did not contain a doctor answering the description with which he had furnished the police.
“Mrs. Bardwell,” Biles added, “kept a maid, who has been on holiday. She returned last night and has now told us that her mistress received very few men at her flat and that a doctor was not among the number. Of course it is possible that a doctor may have called during the last fortnight, in the girl’s absence. But in the circumstances, I’m afraid, we must look on the murder theory as rather far-fetched. After all, the dead woman possessed a car and may have been in the country herself on the morning on which she was stung. Bees often get trapped in cars.”
Doctor Hailey hung up the receiver and took a pinch of snuff. His face wore a puzzled expression. He sat down in his big armchair and closed his eyes that he might pass in fresh review the various scraps of evidence he had collected. If the dead woman had not received the doctor at her house then the idea that they were on intimate terms could scarcely be maintained. In that case the whole of his deductions must be invalidated. He got up and walked down Harley Street to the Times Book Club. He showed the receipt which he had retained and asked if he might see the assistant who had conducted the sale. This girl remembered the incident quite clearly. It had occurred about a week earlier. The man who had bought the volume of poems was accompanied by a young woman.
“Did you happen to notice,” Doctor Hailey asked, “what his companion looked like?”
“I think she was very much ‘made up.’ She had fair hair. But I can’t say that I noticed her carefully.”
“And the man?”
The girl shrugged her shoulders. “I’m afraid I don’t remember him clearly. A business man, perhaps.” She thought a moment. “He was a good deal older than she was, I should say.”
Doctor Hailey left the shop and walked back towards Harley Street. On one point at least he had not been mistaken. The purchaser of the Love Songs was a man and he had bought them for a woman who was not Mrs. Bardwell—Biles had mentioned that this lady had auburn hair. Why should the man have visited Mrs. Bardwell so soon after making this purchase? He sighed. After all, though, why not? Biles was quite right in thinking that no jury in the world would listen to evidence the only basis of which was character-reading at second hand. He reached his door and was about to let himself into the house, when a cab drew up beside him. The young detective, Todcaster, to whom Biles had introduced him at Park Mansions, got out.
“Can I see you a moment, doctor?” he asked.
They entered the house together. Todcaster produced a letter from his pocket and handed it to Doctor Hailey. It was a prescription, written on Mrs. Bardwell’s note paper and signed only with initials, which were nearly indecipherable.
“I found it after you had gone,” the young man explained. “It was dispensed as you can see by a local chemist. Today I have seen him and he says he has had other similar prescriptions to dispense. But he has no idea who the writer is. Mrs. Bardwell had the medicine a few days ago.”
Doctor Hailey read the prescription, which was a simple iron tonic. The signature was illegible. He shook his head.
“This does not carry us much further, I’m afraid,” he declared.
“You can’t tell from the initials who the doctor is?”
“No.”
“In that case, I think we shall have to throw our hands in.” Todcaster’s voice expressed considerable disappointment. It was obvious that he had hoped to make his reputation out of the solution of the mystery. “Your reasoning, yesterday,” he added, “impressed me very much, sir, if I may say so.”
Doctor Hailey inclined his head. But his eyes were vacant. So a doctor had called on the dead woman recently, and also, apparently, made earlier visits; a doctor, too, whose prescriptions were unfamiliar to the local chemist. He turned to the young detective:
“I have just heard from Biles,” he said, “that the maid has come back. Do you happen to know if she has any recollection of these professional visits?”
“I asked her that myself. She says that she knows nothing about them.”
Again the far-away look came to the doctor’s eyes. The fact that the prescriptions were written on Mrs. Bardwell’s note paper showed that they had been given during an attendance at the flat. For what reason had the dead woman been at pains to hide the doctor’s visits from her maid?
“Should I be troubling you very much,” he said, “if I asked you to take me back to Park Mansions? I confess that I would like to ask that girl a few questions. A doctor can obtain information which is not likely to be imparted to any layman.”
As they drove through the crowded streets, Doctor Hailey asked himself again the question which had caused him to embark on this fresh investigation. What reason had Mrs. Bardwell for hiding her need of medical attendance from her maid? Even supposing that her doctor was also her lover, there seemed to be no sense in such a concealment. He opened his eyes and saw the stream of London’s home-going population surging around the cab. Sweet-faced girls and splendid youths, mingled with women whose eyes told their story of disappointment and men who wore pressing responsibility as habitual expression. No wonder the police despaired of finding any nameless human being in this vast tide of humanity, of hopes and fears, of desires and purposes!
The cab stopped. They entered the lift and came to the door of the flat. Todcaster rang the bell. A moment later the door was opened by a young girl who invited them to enter in tones which scarcely disguised the anxiety she apparently felt at the return of the police. She closed the door and then led the way along the dim entrance corridor. She opened the door of the drawing-room.
As the light from the windows fell on her face Doctor Hailey repressed an exclamation of amazement. He started as though a new idea had sprung to his mind. A slight flush mounted to his cheek. He raised his eyeglass and inserted it quickly in his eye.
“I have troubled you,” he said to the girl, “because there are a few points about Mrs. Bardwell’s health, before her fatal seizure, which I think you can help us to understand. I may say that I am a doctor assisting the police.”
“Oh, yes!”
The girl’s voice was low. Her pretty, heavily powdered face seemed drawn with anxiety and her eyes moved restlessly from one man to the other. She raised her hand in a gesture of uneasiness and clasped her brow, seeming to press her golden curls into the white flesh.
“Perhaps it might be better if I spoke to you alone?”
Doctor Hailey’s tones were very gentle. He looked at Todcaster as he spoke and the detective immediately got up and left the room. Then he turned to the girl.
“Your mistress,” he asked, “discharged you from her employment a fortnight ago?”
The girl started violently and all the blood seemed to ebb from her cheeks. Wild fear stared at him from her big, lustrous eyes.
“No!”
“My dear girl, if I may say so, you have everything to gain, nothing to lose, by telling the truth.”
He spoke coldly. Yet there was a reassuring note in his voice. He saw fear give place a little to that quality of weakness which he had expected to find in her character—the quality which had attracted Mrs. Bardwell’s lover which explained, in some subtle fashion, the gift of the Love Songs. He repeated his question. The girl hung her head. She consented. He let his eyeglass fall.
“Because of your intimacy with a man she had been accustomed to look on as h
er own particular friend?”
“Oh, no! No! It is not true!”
Again her eyes challenged him; she had thrown back her head, revealing the full roundness of her throat. The light gleamed among her curls. No wonder that this beauty had been able to dispossess her mistress!
“Listen to me!” Doctor Hailey’s face had grown stern. “You have denied that any doctor came to this flat—at least so far as you know. As it happens, however, a number of prescriptions were dispensed for Mrs. Bardwell by the local chemist. So that either she took great pains to hide from you the fact that she was calling in a doctor, or you have not been speaking the truth.”
“She did not tell me.”
He raised his hand. “It will be easy,” he said, “to get an answer to that question. If your mistress was really hiding her doctor’s visits from you, she must have taken her prescriptions herself to the chemist. I shall find out from him later on whether or not that is so.”
Again the girl’s mood changed. She began to whimper, pressing a tiny lace handkerchief to her eyes in coquettish fashion. Doctor Hailey drew a deep breath. He waited a moment before framing his next remark. Then he said:
“You realise, I suppose, that if a girl helps a man to commit a crime, she is as guilty as he is in the eyes of the law.”
“What do you mean?”
All her defences now were abandoned. She stood before him, abject in her terror, with staring eyes and trembling lips.
“That your presence here today proves you have had a share in this business. Why did you return to the flat?”
“Because—because—”
“Because he—the man you are shielding—wanted to find out what the police were doing in the place?”
She tottered towards him. She laid her hands on his arm.
“Oh, God, I am so frightened,” she whimpered.
“You have reason to be frightened.”
He led her to a chair. But suddenly, she seemed to gather her strength anew. Her grasp on his arm tightened.
“I didn’t want him to do it,” she cried in tones of anguish. “I swear that I didn’t. And I swear that I have no idea, even yet, what he did do. We were going to be married—immediately.”
The Measure of Malice Page 12