Eternity Ring (3 page)

“He is a very pleasant acquaintance,” said Mrs. Abbott with finality. Then she turned her head sharply. “What’s that? It sounds like someone running.”

Frank Abbott had heard those stumbling, running footsteps for a full half minute before Monica turned her head. They all heard them now—desperate, stumbling, running feet coming down off the old path from the Common and across the road. There was the sound of gasping breath, the clatter of the gate thrown back. And then before any of them could reach the outer door there were hands that beat on it, and a girl’s voice screaming, “Murder! Murder! Let me in!”

It was two or three days later that Frank Abbott, off duty for the evening and very comfortable in one of Miss Maud Silver’s Victorian chairs with the bright blue covers and the curly walnut legs, looked across at her knitting placidly on the other side of the hearth and broke off his narrative to remark,

“It’s right up your street, you know. What a pity you couldn’t have been there.”

Miss Silver’s needles clicked. An infant vest revolved. She coughed slightly and said,

“My dear Frank, pray continue.”

He went on looking at her in the half teasing way which did not quite conceal a deep affection and respect. From her Edwardian fringe, rigidly controlled by a hair-net, to her black woollen stockings and beaded glacé shoes she was the perfect survival of a type now almost extinct. She might have stepped out of any family album to be immediately recognized as a spinster relative of slender means but indomitable character, or at a second view as the invaluable governess whose pupils, doing her credit in after life, would never forget what they owed to her ministrations.

What no one would have guessed was that Miss Maud Silver, after twenty years of the schoolroom, had left it behind her to become a highly successful private detective. Not that she described herself in this manner. She remained a gentlewoman, and she found the phrase repugnant to a gentlewoman’s feelings. Her professional card described her as:

Miss Maud Silver

15 Montague Mansions

and added in the right-hand bottom corner the legend, “Private enquiries.”

Her new profession had brought her modest comfort and a great many friends. Their portraits thronged the mantel-piece and a couple of occasional tables. There were a good many young men and girls and a number of blooming babies in old-fashioned frames of silver, and fretwork, and silver filagree upon plush.

As Miss Silver looked about her room her heart was wont to swell with gratitude to Providence, not only for having surrounded her with all this comfort, but for having preserved her and her possessions through six terrible years of war. There had been a bomb at the end of the street. Her windows had been broken, and one of the blue plush curtains had sustained a rather nasty cut, but it had been so neatly mended by her invaluable Emma that even she herself could hardly see the darn. A lot of dust and rubble had got into the carpet of the same bright peacock-blue shade as the curtains, but it had returned from the cleaners as good as new. Her pictures had not been damaged at all. “Hope” still turned her bandaged eyes upon some inner dream. The “Black Brunswicker” bade an eternal farewell to his bride. Millais’ lovely nun still pleaded for “Mercy” in the picture which everyone used to call the “Huguenot.” “Bubbles” still watched the flight of perishable joy. Cosy, very cosy, was Miss Silver’s invariable conclusion. And so providentially preserved.

She said, “Pray continue, my dear Frank,” and was all attention.

“Well, as I said, it’s right up your street. There was this girl battering on the door and crying murder, and falling down in a dead faint as soon as she got inside. Rather a pretty girl—on the up-and-coming side, I should think, when not on the edge of being frightened to death.”

“Was she known to your aunt and Miss Grey?”

“Oh, yes. Name of Mary Stokes. Demobilized from the A.T.S. and helping on an uncle’s farm on the other side of the Common. Rather pretty, as I said. Rather silly and—I’m not so sure about this, but I got a sort of idea that underneath all the screaming and fainting there was something—well, tough.”

“What made you think so?”

“I don’t know. She came round pretty quick—I thought there were indications that the brain was ticking over. I may have got it all wrong—girls are so odd. Of course you read them like a book. I wish you had been there. Anyhow Monica and Miss Grey got her round, and after some preliminary gasping this is what she said. Her uncle has a farm on the other side of the Common—Tomlin’s Farm it’s called. All the land over there and down as far as Deeping used to belong to a family called Tomalyn. They’ve died out years ago, but the farm keeps the name. The farmer is Stokes, same like the niece. Well, she was coming in to Deeping by the path I told you about, the one running through Dead Man’s Copse.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“Would it be the way she would naturally come?”

His left eyebrow rose a trifle.

“It’s the nearest way.”

“There is another?”

“Yes, there is. It’s a little longer and comes into the village farther on—in fact very nearly at the other end. It’s the driving-road. No one in their senses would take a car over the other, though I daresay it’s been done—there are a lot of lunatics on the road. Anyhow that’s one of the things that made me feel Miss Mary Strokes might be tough. I gather that the local inhabitants don’t queue up to go through Dead Man’s Copse in the dark.”

Miss Silver’s needles clicked.

“It was dark?”

He shrugged slightly.

“As pitch. After six of a black January evening.”

She said, “Go on, Frank.”

“Well, this is her story. The path dips to the Copse, which is quite a dense little wood. She says she heard something and went off the path into the bushes. When she was asked why, she said because she was frightened, and when she was asked what frightened her she said she didn’t know, she just thought she heard something. You can go round and round like that for quite a time without getting any forarder. When she had led the local constable round and round the mulberry bush for as long as my patience would last I suggested that we should get on with what happened.”

Miss Silver’s small, shrewd eyes were on his face.

“Did she appear to you to be trying to gain time—to collect herself, or perhaps to think out what she was going to say?”

A faint smile just touched his lips.

“It did occur to me—especially when she had another prolonged sobbing fit. When we got her going she said she heard the noise again, and this time it was footsteps and something being dragged. They passed close beside her and on to the path, and then there was the beam of a torch and she saw a man’s hand and arm and—what he had been dragging. She said it was the body of a murdered girl and that is what she has stuck to up hill and down dale.”

Miss Silver was knitting rapidly. She held her needles low, in the continental fashion, and hardly ever glanced at them. She looked across them now and said,

“Dear me!”

“Dear me it is—and with knobs on.”

“My dear Frank—what an expression!”

“Consider it retracted. We are keeping the corpse waiting. Mary Stokes says it was a young woman, and a stranger, with fair hair and a shocking wound on the head. She was quite sure anyone with a wound like that must be dead. She says the hair hung down and hid the face a good deal. She described the clothes—a black coat, black gloves, no hat, and—here’s the thing that has us all intrigued—one earring, and a rather peculiar one at that.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“She seems to have seen a good deal. You say she stated that the girl’s hair was falling all about her face. It seems strange that she should have been able to see an earring.”

“It’s a lot stranger than that. She says the man turned the girl over and looked for the other earring, and it wasn’t there. She said he looked for it like a madman, turning the beam this way and that, feeling in the hair.”

Miss Silver said, “How extremely shocking!”

“Well, it is rather. When he couldn’t find it he left the body lying there and went back into the wood, and Mary Stokes came out from behind her bush and ran for her life. Well, we got the local constable, a good hearty chap, and we went up to view the spot. Mary went faint on us, so I went back to Abbottsleigh and fetched my car. That’s how I know what the track is like to drive on—I’m one of the fools who’ve done it. When we got Mary there, there wasn’t any corpse. She went on being faint in spite of a pretty nipping air, and when it came to trying to fix the spot she didn’t seem to have any ideas on the subject. Just said she’d got well along into the Copse, but not far in and she wasn’t nearly clear of it, but it was too dark to say for certain, and oh, please couldn’t she go home to Uncle, and a lot more of that kind of thing and more tears. I said no, she couldn’t, and then a County Inspector rolled up from Lenton, and he said so too. Well, we searched the place from end to end, and neither then nor next day when we went over it by daylight was there the slightest sign of anything having been dragged through the bushes at the side of the path. On the wood side there’s the sort of ditch which ought to show footprints—soft sides and a muddy bottom. And nothing you could swear to from one end to the other except Mary’s own footprints where there’s a sort of gap and the remains of a track going off into the wood. No sign of anything being dragged there either. It looks as if Mary had come down on to the path from the bushes like she says and then come running back again. The two best prints are certainly those of running feet—the toe very deeply marked and scarcely a trace of the heel. That was the only corroboration of her story until this afternoon. There was no corpse on the path or in the wood, and no sign of one ever having been there. There was no one missing from the neighbourhood. There was no stray earring.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“The other one of the pair, which I think you described as peculiar. ”

“Well, it was. You know the kind of ring they call an eternity ring?”

She smiled.

“An old fashion which has come back—a circle of small stones set continuously. Extremely pretty but not very practical. The stones are sadly apt to fall out.”

“You know everything—I’ve always said so. But have you ever seen an earring like that?”

“No, indeed. It would be very difficult to arrange, would it not? You see, an earring would have to open on a hinge, or it could not be passed through the ear.”

He laughed.

“I didn’t think of that. But I suppose it could be managed. Anyhow Mary Stokes swears, and sticks to it, that what she saw in the corpse’s ear was an eternity ring set with diamonds.”

Miss Silver continued to knit, her small, quite pleasing features composed, her air attentive. After a moment she said,

“You have something more to tell me, I think.”

He nodded.

“When I tore myself away on Sunday night there were two major schools of thought in Deeping. According to one, Mary Stokes had been pulling everybody’s leg. Passion for the limelight. Exhibitionism—only in the country they call it plain showing-off. Quite a tenable theory, and compatible with everything except those running footprints. The other school of thought, which is adhered to by a minority, maintains that Mary was telling the truth, with perhaps some natural enhancing of the horrid details, but that the corpse wasn’t dead and just upped and walked away after Miss Stokes had run screaming down the path.”

“Pray continue. You mentioned this afternoon—”

He nodded.

“I did. Round about half past four we got a report from out Hampstead way. A woman had been in and said her lodger was missing—went out on Friday and never came back. Description of missing person—young woman round about thirty or perhaps less, fair hair shoulder length, hazel eyes, medium height, very slight build. Went out dressed in a black coat and black beret, both very smart. Light stockings, black shoes. And large hoop earrings ‘set all round with little diamonds like those eternity rings.’ ”

There was a pause, yet it hardly appeared to be one, so charged was it with Miss Silver’s intelligent interest. When she observed, “A truly strange coincidence,” Frank Abbott laughed and said,

“Do you believe in coincidences to that extent? I’m afraid I don’t.”

Miss Silver continued to knit.

“I have known some strange ones.”

He laughed again.

“As strange as this?”

She made no direct answer, but said,

“Who is this missing woman? The landlady must have known a little more about her than that she wore a black coat and rather curious earrings.”

“Well, she doesn’t seem to know very much. I went down to see her, and this is what it amounts to. The missing woman hadn’t been with her very long—not more than a month. Name Mrs. Rogers. Christian name Louise. Slight foreign accent. She told Mrs. Hopper—that’s the landlady—that she was French, but had married an Englishman who was dead. She was nicely spoken, didn’t bring anyone home with her, and paid on the nail. She told Mrs. Hopper once that her family had been very rich, but they had lost everything in the war. Then she looked mysterious and said, ‘Perhaps I shall get some of it back—who knows? That is why I am in England. If a thing is stolen, the law can get it back. That is why I am here.’ She went out some time on Friday morning. Mrs. Hopper doesn’t know when, because she was out shopping for the week-end. Well, it was on Saturday evening that Mary Stokes says she saw a fair-haired corpse with one eternity earring in Dead Man’s Copse, and Louise Rogers has never gone back to Hampstead. I asked Mrs. Hopper whether she’d ever heard of Deeping, and she seemed to think that it was a patent food or a furniture polish.” He leaned forward and stretched his hands to the cheerful glow of Miss Silver’s fire. “Of course, you know, if it weren’t for Mary Stokes, one would simply conclude that Mrs. Rogers was week-ending and hadn’t bothered to let her landlady know.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“If she had intended to stay away she would have taken a suit-case. Is anything missing?”

“Mrs. Hopper says no.”

Miss Silver inclined her head.

“She would be well informed. A woman who lets lodgings keeps a very sharp eye upon that sort of thing. People have a way of removing their things by degrees and then going off without paying the rent.”

“Well, she says there isn’t anything missing. To use her own words, ‘She went off in what she stood up in, her good black coat and beret—very smart and quite the lady, though foreign.’ And the question is, did she go to Deeping and pose as Mary Stokes’ corpse, and if she did, where did she go from there?”

Miss Silver stopped knitting for a moment and said quite gravely,

“I do not think you can neglect the possibility that she has met with a violent death.”

“I suppose not. I’m to go to Deeping tomorrow and smell round. The locals won’t bless me, but it’s all fixed up with the Chief Constable. They’re sending me because I was there when Mary put on her act, and because I’m supposed to know the place. As a matter of fact, any knowledge I have is extremely sketchy. My uncle has only recently come back from a long stretch overseas. Monica got stuck out there too, so the only one I’ve seen much of in the last ten years is my cousin Cicely. I used to go down and take her out when she was at school. Monica wrote to the headmistress about it, and I got brevet rank as brother.”

“I think I saw your cousin’s marriage in the papers some months ago, to a Mr. Hathaway.”

“Yes. They’ve split, and she’s at home again. Nobody knows what happened. She was right on the top of the world for about three months, and then she walked in one day and said she’d come home and she never wanted to see Grant again. You know, she’s a bit of an heiress. My grandmother came into a packet from her father, who was one of our shipping peers, and she left the whole lot to Cicely.”

“My dear Frank!”

He laughed.

“Uncle Reg and I mingle our tears. She couldn’t do him out of Abbottsleigh, because that was Abbott property, but he’s got precious little to keep it up on. She quarrelled with him because he took his turn of service aboard instead of buying himself out of it. My father, of course, hadn’t been on speaking terms with her for years—she was furious about his marriage to my mother. Being the second son, she’d got it all mapped out that he was to marry money. And of course the pen went right through my name when I joined the police.”

Miss Silver pressed her lips together for a moment before saying,

“Did it not occur to her that she might have made it possible for you to continue your studies for the Bar as your father had intended?”

He looked at her with sardonic amusement.

“Oh, yes, it occurred to her all right. She had me down and told me just how thriftless and foolish my father had always been, and how entirely in keeping it was that he should die before he had provided me with a profession. I can see her now, sitting up as bleak as an east wind and telling me she didn’t propose to put a premium on folly and incompetence by taking over his responsibilities.”

“My dear Frank!”

His look softened momentarily.

“Blessing in disguise, I shouldn’t wonder. I should probably never have got a brief—to say nothing of not meeting you. Well, that was my last visit to Abbottsleigh till Uncle Reg came back the other day.” He laughed. “I told her what I thought of her in a few well chosen words and cleared out. You know, what’s so charming for me is that I’m her dead spit and image. I can even see it myself.”

“Is your cousin like her too?”

“Oh, no—Cis is a little brown thing.”

There was a pause. Then Miss Silver said,

“Just why have you been telling me all this, Frank?”

A gleam of humour came and went. He said casually,

“Oh, I don’t know—I do tell you things, don’t I?”

She looked at him with affectionate severity and produced a quotation from her favourite Lord Tennyson.

“ ‘And trust me not at all or all in all.’ ”

He laughed.

“And, ‘A lie that is half the truth is ever the biggest of lies,’ or words to that effect. All right, I’ll come clean. Monica is dying to meet you. How would you like to come down on a visit to Abbottsleigh?”

She maintained her gaze.

“Are you offering me a professional engagement?”

He laughed a little.

“Not at the moment.”

“What do you mean by that, Frank?”

His lip twisted.

“I don’t know what I mean. State of mind quite chaotic. The nearest I can get to it is that the thing as it stands makes nonsense, and you have a way of inducing things to make sense. All quite vague and filmy, and mixed up with the fact that Monica really is dying to meet you—” He broke off, and then said quite seriously, “I’d like you to see Mary Stokes and tell me whether she’s lying. Also to what extent. And why.”