Chapter VI.
Scotland Yard Takes a Hand
It was a singular greeting, to say the least, and the person who uttered it was quite as remarkable as his queer method of expressing himself seemed to indicate.
Grant, though in a fume of hot anger, had the good sense to choke back the first impetuous reprimand trembling on his lips. In fact, wrath quickly subsided into blank incredulity. He saw before him, not the conventional detective who might be described as a superior Robinson—not even the sinewy, sharp-eyed, and well-spoken type of man whom he had once heard giving evidence in a famous jewel-robbery case—but rather one whom he would have expected to meet in the bar of a certain well-known restaurant in Maiden Lane, a corner of old London where literally all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
During his theatrical experiences he had come across scores of such men, dapper little fellows, wizened of face yet curiously youthful in manner; but they, each and all, were labeled “low comedian.” Certainly, a rare intelligence gleamed from this man’s eyes, but that is an attribute not often lacking in humorists who command high salaries because of their facility in laughter-making. This man, too, had the wide, thin-lipped, mobile mouth of the actor. His ivory-white, wrinkled forehead and cheeks, the bluish tint on jaws and chin, his voice, his perky air, the very tilt of his straw hat, were eloquent of the footlights. Even his opening words, bizarre and cheerfully impertinent, smacked of “comic relief.”
“I figure prominently in this particular ‘piece,’” snapped Grant. “May I ask your name, sir?”
“A wise precaution with suspicious characters,” rejoined the other, smiling. Grant was suddenly reminded of a Japanese grinning at a joke, but he bent over a card which the stranger had whisked out of a waistcoat pocket. He read:
Mr. Charles F. Furneaux,
Criminal Investigation Department,
New Scotland Yard, S.W.
He could not control himself. He gazed at Mr. Charles F. Furneaux with a surprise that was not altogether flattering.
“Did the Commissioner of Police send you in response to my telegram?” he said.
“That is what lawyers call a leading question,” came the prompt retort. “And I hate lawyers. They darken understanding, and set honest men at loggerheads.”
“But it happens to be very much to the point at this moment.”
“Well, Mr. Grant, if you really press for an answer, it is ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ The Commissioner received a certain telegram, but he may have acted on other grounds. Even Commissioners can be creatures of impulse, or expediency, just as the situation demands.
“You are here, at any rate.”
“That is what legal jargon terms an admitted fact.”
“Then you had better begin by assuming that I am no villain.”
“It is assumed. It couldn’t well be otherwise after the excellent character you have been given by this young lady.”
“She, at least, will speak well of me, I do believe,” said Grant, with a strange bitterness, for his heart was sore because of the seeming defection of his friend, the postmaster. “What I actually had in mind was the stupidity of the local policeman, who is convinced that I am both a criminal and a fool.”
“The two are often synonymous,” said Furneaux dryly. “But I acquitted you on both counts, Mr. Grant, on hearing, and even seeing, how you spent Monday evening.”
Grant, who had cooled down considerably, found a hint of badinage in this comment.
“You have evidently been told that Miss Martin and I were star-gazing in the garden of my house,” he said. “It happens to be true.”
“Oh, yes. There was a very fine cluster of small stars in Canis Major, south of Sirius, that night.”
“You know something about the constellations, then?” was the astonished query.
“Enough for the purposes of Scotland Yard,” smirked Furneaux, who had checked P. C. Robinson’s one-sided story by referring to Whitaker’s Almanack. “It may relieve your mind if I tell you that I have never seen a real live astronomer in the dock. Venus and Mars are often in trouble, but their devoted observers seldom, if ever.”
Grant warmed to this strange species of detective, though, if pressed for an instant decision, he would vastly have preferred that one of more orthodox style had been intrusted with an inquiry so vital to his own happiness and good repute. Eager, however, to pour forth his worries into any official ear, he brought back the talk to a definite channel.
“Will you come to my place?” he asked. “I have much to say. Let me assure you now, in Miss Martin’s presence, that she is no more concerned in this ghastly business than any other young lady in the village.”
“But she is interested. And you are. And I am. Why not discuss matters here, for the present, I mean? We have a glorious view of your house and grounds. We can see without being seen. None can overhear. I advise both of you to go thoroughly into this matter here and now.”
Furneaux spoke emphatically. Even Doris put in a timid plea.
“Perhaps that would be the best thing to do,” she said. “Mr. Furneaux has been most sympathetic. I am sure he understands things already in a way that is quite wonderful to me.”
The very sound of her voice was comforting. Grant might have argued with the detective, but could not resist Doris. Without further demur he went through the whole story, giving precise details of events on the Monday night. Then the recital widened out into a history of his relations with Adelaide Melhuish. He omitted nothing. Doris gasped when she heard Superintendent Fowler’s version of the view a coroner’s jury might take of her presence in the garden of The Hollies at a late hour. But Grant did not spare her. He reasoned that she ought to be prepared for an ordeal which could not be avoided. He was governed by the astute belief that his very outspokenness in this respect would weaken the inferences which the police might otherwise draw from it.
Furneaux uttered never a word. He was a first-rate listener, though his behavior was most undetective-like, since he hardly looked at Grant or the girl, but seemed to devote his attention almost exclusively to the scenic panorama in front.
However, when Grant came to the somewhat strenuous passage-at-arms of the previous night between Ingerman and himself, the little man broke in at once.
“Isidor G. Ingerman?” he cried. “Is he a tall, lanky, cadaverous, rather crooked person, with black hair turning gray, and an absurdly melodious voice?”
“You have described him without an unnecessary word,” said Grant.
Furneaux clicked his tongue in a peculiar fashion.
“Go on!” he said. “It’s a regular romance—quite in your line, Mr. Grant, of course, but none the less enthralling because, as you so happily phrased Miss Martin’s lesson in astronomy, it happens to be true.”
Grant was scrupulously fair to Ingerman. He admitted the “financier’s” adroitness of speech, and made clear the fact that if the visit had the levying of blackmail for its object such a possible outcome was only hinted at vaguely. Being a novelist, one whose temperament sought for sunshine rather than gloom in life, he wound up in lighter vein. The ruse which tricked P. C. Robinson into a breathless scamper of nearly a mile on a hot day in June was described with gusto. Doris, who knew the village constable well, laughed outright, while Furneaux cackled shrilly. None who might be watching the little group in that delightful garden, with its scent of old-world flowers and drone of bees, could have guessed that a grewsome tragedy formed their major theme.
The girl was the first to realize that even harmless merriment was in ill accord with the presence of death, for the body of Adelaide Melhuish lay within forty yards of the place where they stood.
“May I leave you now?” she inquired. “Father may be wanting help in the office.”
“I shan’t detain you more than a few seconds,” said Furneaux briskly. “On Monday evening you two young people parted at half past ten. How do you fix the time?”
Doris answered without hesitation:
“The large window of Mr. Grant’s study was open, and we both heard a clock in the hall chime the half-hour. I said, ‘Goodness me, is that half past ten?’ and started for home at once. Mr. Grant came with me as far as the bridge. When I reached my room, in exactly five minutes after leaving The Hollies, I stood at the open window—that window”—and she pointed to a dormer casement above the sitting-room—“and looked out. It was a particularly fine night, mild, but not very clear, as a slight mist often rises from the river after a hot day in summer. I may have been there about ten minutes, no longer, when I saw the study window of The Hollies thrown open, and Mr. Grant’s figure was silhouetted by the lamp behind him. He seemed to be listening for something, so I, who must have heard any unusual sound, listened too. There was nothing. I could hear the ripple of the river beneath the bridge, so everything was very still. After a minute, or two, perhaps—no longer—Mr. Grant went in, and closed the window. Then I went to bed.”
“Did Mr. Grant draw any blind or curtains?”
“There are muslin curtains attached to each side of the window. One cannot see into the room from a distance.”
Furneaux measured an imaginary line drawn from Doris’s bedroom to the edge of the cliff, and prolonged it.
“Nor can you see the river or foot of the lawn from your room,” he commented.
“No. In winter I can just make out the edge of the lawn. When the trees are in leaf, all the lower part is hidden.”
“You had actually retired to rest about eleven, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“So if Mr. Grant came out again you would not know?” Doris blushed furiously, but her reply was unfaltering.
“I would have known during the next half-hour, at least,” she said. “An inclined mirror hangs in my room. I use it sometimes for adjusting a hat. The square of light from Mr. Grant’s room is reflected in it, and any sudden increase in the illumination caused by opening the window or pulling the curtains aside would certainly have caught my eye.”
“You have an unshakable witness in Miss Martin,” said Furneaux, stabbing a finger at Grant. “Now, I’ll hurry off. You and I, Mr. Grant, meet at Philippi, otherwise known as the crowner’s quest.”
Any benevolent intent he may have had in leaving these young people together was, however, frustrated by Doris, whose composure seemed to have fled since her statement about the mirror. She resolutely accompanied the detective, and Grant had to follow. All three passed into the post office, Doris using the private door. Mr. Martin looked up from his desk when they appeared, and requested his daughter to check a bundle of postal orders. The pretext was painfully obvious, but Grant was not so wishful now to clear up matters with Doris’s father, as the girl herself might be trusted to pass on an accurate account of the affair from beginning to end.
He was about to reach the street quick on Furneaux’s heels when the little man turned suddenly.
“By the way, don’t you want a shilling’s worth of stamps?” he said.
Grant smiled comprehension, and went back to the counter, where Doris herself served him. She did not try to avoid his glance, but rather met it with a baffling serenity oddly at variance with her momentary loss of self-possession in the garden.
When he entered the street the detective had vanished.
He walked down the hill at a rapid pace, disregarding the eyes peeping at him through open doorways, over narrow window-curtains, and covertly staring when people passed in the roadway. The sensitive side of his temperament shrank from this thinly-veiled hostility. He was by way of being popular in Steynholme, yet not a soul spoke to him. Before he reached the bridge, the other side of him, the man of action, of cool resource in an emergency, rose in rebellion against the league of silly clodhoppers. Back he strode to the post office and dashed off a telegram. It ran:
“Walter Hart, Savage Club, Adelphi, London. Come here and help to lay a ghost.”
He signed it in full, name and address. Doris was gone, but her father received it, and read the text in a bewildered way.
“I find myself deserted by my Steynholme friends so I am trying to import one stanch one,” said Grant, almost vindictively.
Martin murmured the cost, and Grant stormed out again. This time, passing the Hare and Hounds, he looked at door and windows. He caught a face scowling at him over a brown wire blind bearing the words “Wines and Spirits” on it in letters of dull gold. It was a commonplace type of face, small-featured, ginger-moustached, and crowned by a billy-cock hat set at a rakish angle. Its most marked characteristic was the positive hatred which glowed in the sharp, pale-blue eyes. Grant wondered who this highly censorious young man might be. At any rate, he meant to ascertain whether or not the critic was susceptible of satire at his own expense. He walked up to the window, elevated his eyebrows at the frowning person within, pretended to read the words on the screen, looked again at the man inside, and shook his head gravely in the manner of one who has accurately determined cause and effect.
Fred Elkin was quick-witted enough to appreciate Grant’s unspoken comment. He was also unmannerly enough to put out his tongue. Then Grant laughed, and turned on his heel.
Mr. Siddle, quietly observant of recent comings and goings, was standing at the door of the shop, and missed no item of this dumb show. He raised both hands in silent condemnation of Elkin’s childishness, whereupon the horse-dealer jerked a thumb toward Grant’s retreating figure, and went through a rapid pantomime of the hanging process. His crony disapproved again, and went in. Now, both those men were on the jury panel, so, to all appearance, Grant would be judged by at least one deadly enemy, whose animosity might or might not be fairly balanced by the chemist’s impartial mind.
The tenant of The Hollies actually dreaded the loneliness of his dwelling now, though it was that very quality which had drawn him to Steynholme a year earlier. Work or reading was equally out of the question that day. He sought the industrious Bates, who was trenching celery in the kitchen garden.
“Have ’ee made out owt about un, sir?” inquired that hardy individual, pausing to spit on the handle of his spade.
“No,” said Grant. “The thing is a greater mystery than ever.”
“I’m thinkin’ her mun ha’ bin killed by a loony,” announced Bates.
“Something of the kind, no doubt. But why are the little less dangerous loonies of Steynholme united in the belief that I am the guilty one?”
“Ax me another,” growled Bates.
“Who is spreading this rumor? Robinson?”
“’E dussen’t, sir. ’E looks fierce, but ’e’ll ’old ’is tongue. T’super will see to that.”
“Someone is talking. That is quite certain.”
“There’s a chap in the ’Are an’ ’Ounds—kem ’ere last night.”
“Ingerman?”
“Ay, sir, that’s the name. ’E’s makin’ a song of it, I hear.”
“Anybody else?”
“Fred Elkin is gassin’ about. Do ’ee know un? Breeds ’osses at Mount Farm, a mile that-a-way,” and Bates pointed to the west.
Grant hazarded a guess, and described the face of condemnation seen at the inn. Bates nodded.
“That’s un,” he said. Then he drove the spade into the rich loam. “They do say,” he added, apparently as an after-thought, “as Fred Elkin is mighty sweet on Doris, but her’ll ’ave nowt to do wi’ un.”
Grant whistled softly. This explanation threw light on a dark place.
“The plot thickens,” he said. “Mr. Elkin becomes more interesting than he looks. Are there other disappointed swains in the offing?”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Has Miss Martin any other suitors?”
“Lots of ’em ’ud be after her like wasps round a plum-tree if she’d give ’em ’alf a chance. But you put a stopper on ’em.”
Bates was blunt of speech, though a philosopher withal.
“Elkin is my only serious rival, then?” laughed Grant, passing off as a joke a thrust which was shrewder than the gardener knew.
“’E ’as plenty of brass, but I reckon nowt on ’im,” was the contemptuous answer.
“Well, he is not a likely person to kill a woman he had never before seen. Miss Martin will marry whom she chooses, no doubt. The present problem is to find out who murdered Miss Melhuish. Now, had I been the victim you would be thinking hard, Bates.”
“I tell ’ee, sir, it wur a loony.”
Nor was Bates to be moved from that opinion. He held to it, through thick and thin, for many days.
Grant wandered into the front garden. His eyes rose involuntarily to the distant post office, and he noticed at once that the dormer window was closed. Yet Doris shared his own love of fresh air, and that window had always been open till that very hour. Somehow, this simple thing seemed to shut him out of her life. He walked to the river, and gazed at the spot where the body was drawn ashore. In the absence of rain the water ran clear as gin, and the marks made by the feet of Adelaide Melhuish’s murderer were still perceptible. If only those misshapen blotches could reveal their secret! If only some Heaven-sent ray of intuition would enable him to put the police on the track of the criminal! Theoretically, a novelist and essayist should be a first-rate detective, yet, brought face to face with an actual felony, here was one who perforce remained blind and dumb.
Yet he was not blameworthy for failing to solve a mystery which was rapidly establishing a record for bewildering elements. Wherein he did err most lamentably was in his reading of a woman’s heart.
No answering telegram came from his friend in London. The day wore slowly till it was time to attend the inquest. He found a crowd gathered in front of the Hare and Hounds. Superintendent Fowler was there, and quite a number of policemen, whose presence was explained when a buzz of excitement heralded Grant’s arrival. He decided not to stand this sort of persecution a moment longer.
Before the superintendent could interfere, he leaped on to a set of stone mounting-steps which stood opposite the door. Instantly, seeing that he was about to speak, the angry murmuring of the mob was hushed. He looked into a hundred stolid faces, and stretched out his right hand.
“I cannot help feeling,” he said, in slow, incisive accents which carried far, “that a set of peculiar circumstances has led you Steynholme folk to suspect me of being responsible, in some way, for the death of the lady whose body was found in the river near my house. Now, I want to tell you that I am not only an innocent but a much-maligned man. The law of the land will establish both facts in due season. But I want to warn some of you, too, I shall not trouble to issue writs for libel. If any blackguard among you dares to insult me openly, I shall smash his face.”
He knew when to stop. Superintendent Fowler’s nudge was not called for, as the orator simply met the scrutiny of all those eyes without another word.
Curiously enough, the sense of justice is inherent in every haphazard gathering of the public. Grant’s soldierly bearing, his calm defiance of hostile opinion, the outspoken threat which he so plainly meant, won instant favor. Someone shouted, “Hear, hear!” and the crowd applauded. From that moment he had little to complain of in the attitude of the community as a whole. There were subtle and dangerous enemies to be fought and conquered, but Steynholme looked on, keen to learn of any new sensation, of course, but placidly content that the final verdict should be left in the hands of the authorities.