Puzzle of the Silver Persian (25 page)

“What was she wearing, beside the scarf?”

“There was little enough of the dress,” said the sergeant. “What there was seemed to be a white silk gown. You saw her last in such a garb, didn’t you?”

Miss Withers admitted that she had.

“Well, what do you think of it?”

She hesitated. As a matter of fact, she thought a good deal of it. “Young man,” said Hildegarde Withers, her voice tense with a difficult determination, “I take off my hat to you. By the living God that made you, and so forth, Gunga Din. You’ve solved your own case, and also those handed over to your superior. I must revise my opinion of the Yard. And now, what do you want of me?”

It was already dark and rather chilly when the limousine had set them on the quay. “I want to get you, and the others at the castle if possible; all together and try to piece out the holes in my case,” said the sergeant. “I know it’s got holes—big ones. But Rosemary was the only person with a motive to kill Noel and Todd—don’t forget that.”

“I haven’t,” said Miss Withers. “I agree with you on that point. And I congratulate you exceedingly. By the way, what about the cigar that the maid saw the mysterious ‘Mrs. Charles’ smoking in her room?”

“At first I thought it meant that a man was disguised as a woman,” said Secker. “Then I remembered that Rosemary Fraser was addicted to brown-paper cigarettes. She carried some of those with her.”

Miss Withers nodded. “You’ve got it all explained, haven’t you?”

He grinned. “And a very good thing for you that we have. You remember that warning letter that Miss Pendavid received?”

The school teacher leaned forward eagerly. “Yes?”

“We tested it at the Yard for fingerprints,” said the sergeant. “Unlike the others, we received some results.”

This was what Miss Withers had been waiting for. “Whose were they?”

Sergeant Secker smiled again. “Yours!” he said.

“Mine? Impossible! Besides, how do you know?”

“We have a set of everybody in the case,” he explained. “An old dodge—we give them their statements to read over, and presto—they’re printed on the specially prepared paper. It always—”

He stopped, for Miss Withers wasn’t listening. She knew that the case was solved. She had the last link in her chain—a chain which surprisingly seemed to bind her own hands.

“Of course,” went on the sergeant, “it’s a dodge on the part of Rosemary. Her last act must have been to get hold of an envelope you’d handled and sent it down to the woman she wanted to frighten.”

Miss Withers shivered a little. “You’re staying at the Queen’s, I suppose. Well, go back there, and I’ll ring you up there after I’ve prepared the others for your interview. We’d better make it tomorrow…”

The sergeant was disappointed, but she managed to overrule him. “In the meantime I’ll be thinking about the holes in your case,” she said.

“But you agree, don’t you?”

“Almost entirely,” said Miss Withers, with a bland stare. “You’ve certainly taken the wind out of my sails.”

She left him there, and as the tide had risen over the causeway she was forced to hire the boatmen to transport her across. She was thinking very long thoughts of her own.

Dinner that night at Dinsul was cheerful enough, in spite of Miss Withers’ preoccupation. She made no announcement of the sergeant’s impending visit, for she desperately needed time to think. As she rose from the table, Treves announced that a gentleman was calling on the telephone. “A Mr. Gunga Din, ma’am,” said Treves after swallowing with some difficulty.

Miss Withers took the instrument. “Young man,” she said reprovingly, “I said I’d call
you.
Getting impatient?”

“Impatient!” echoed the sergeant. “Listen—I just got a message from Cannon back in London. You said you agreed with the case as I outlined it to you tonight. Well, we were both wrong.”

“Wrong? You mean—the body wasn’t Rosemary’s?”

“Oh, it was she, all right enough. And dead, too. In fact, much too dead. Sir Leonard reports that death was due to a blow on the head—and that it happened at least fifteen days ago!”

“Oh,” said Miss Withers blankly.

“So you see, Rosemary Fraser didn’t kill anybody, and I’m right back where I started.” The young sergeant forgot to be a policeman, and was simply a woebegone youngster.

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” said Miss Withers gently. “May I make a suggestion?”

“For God’s sake, do!”

“Wire London for a complete report on the body—every minor detail. And then go to bed and sleep on it.”

“Thanks,” said Sergeant Secker.

Miss Withers had an hour or so with the Honorable Emily in the large and draughty sitting room of Dinsul and then climbed the stairs toward her own bedroom. Halfway up she saw the window open and heard voices outside.

Leslie and Candida Noring seemed to be having a party of their own, hung between sea and sky. She paused to eavesdrop and soon saw that they had not sprouted wings like the gulls.

Lighted only by the moon, the young couple were edging their way out on the narrow pathway cut in the rock, toward the Saint’s Chair.

Leslie was ahead. “Go back, you silly,” he was saying. “It’s too risky.”

But Candida, with a low laugh, suddenly brushed past him, leaning for one terrible moment over the brink of the cliff, and then clutching with strong sure fingers at the rock again.

“Beat you!” she cried.
“I’m
going to wear the trousers.”

But Leslie Reverson, startled by what had happened, slipped to his knees. Miss Withers tried to scream, tried to jump through the window and catch him, but she found herself paralyzed, like a person in a nightmare.

Reverson scrabbled and clawed at the granite, but he was off the path. The rock sloped away steeply… Candida, almost mounted to the Chair, looked back. She did not scream nor faint. For a long moment she stared, her face white and frightened in the moonlight, and then she rushed to his aid.

Flinging herself on her face on the rock, she caught Leslie’s wrist and drew him back over the edge.

Neither of them spoke, but Candida was holding him in her arms, tenderly. It was a scene beautiful and terrible, and Miss Withers knew that she had no right to watch. She softly withdrew from the window and went to her room, still seeing clearly outlined before her weary old eyes the picture of the boy and the girl clinging together.

It was a picture that Miss Withers was to remember for a long time.

W
HAT WITH ONE THING
and another, it was not a good night for Hildegarde Withers. After much difficulty in falling asleep she awakened with a start to see something white and ghastly slip across her room and disappear into the wall.

“Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!” she said aloud. “Don’t tell me it’s a ghost!”

The apparition obligingly repeated itself and she realized that what she had taken for a specter was simply the white glare of a pair of high-powered automobile headlights rounding a turn in the road on the mainland.

All the same, she found herself very wide awake. Outside, white moonlight was shining. Feeling for her slippers, the school teacher rose and went to the window. There was moon enough so that she could see the face of her watch—it was barely one o’clock—and here and there in a fisherman’s cottage window a light still glowed.

She threw the window high and leaned out to enjoy the cool perfection of the night. But it was marred by what she knew must be the truth of this unreal, impossible problem—and by the decision which she must make.

After considerable self-communion, Miss Withers returned to her bed and lay sleepless until the soft light of early morning began to slant through her window shades.

Then she slept brokenly, moaning a little as she lay. For all her weariness, her curtains were snapped back, with a noisy jingling of rings, at exactly eight o’clock.

“Good-morning, madam. Not a very fine morning, but it may clear. Shall I draw your bath?”

Miss Withers opened her bright blue eyes with a jerk to see Treves approaching her with a steaming cup of tea.

She was not accustomed to having men—even butlers with families at home—in her bedroom. But Treves was equal to anything. “How do you like your eggs, madam?”

“Er—boiled,” mumbled Miss Withers. “Very boiled.”

“Thank you, madam. I shall bring your tray here in fifteen minutes.”

Miss Withers remembered that she had work to do. “Never mind bringing a tray,” she ordered. “I’ll go down and breakfast with the others.”

Treves paused near the door and cleared his throat. “Your pardon, ma’am. But her ladyship usually warns house guests here at Dinsul that on three days of the week the castle is rather—a public place, so to speak. Today is a Monday, and at any moment a party of tourists is likely to visit the castle. They are not permitted above stairs, and so her ladyship usually spends most of the day in her rooms, and luncheon and dinner are served in her sitting room, very cosy-like. I suggest that you would prefer to breakfast here.”

“Of course,” agreed Miss Withers. “When in Rome, burn Roman candles. If that’s what the others are doing…”

“Master Leslie and the young lady have breakfasted in their beds, and are preparing to go golfing this morning,” he informed her. “I have ordered the car for them.”

“And your mistress?”

“Her ladyship has also had her breakfast tray, and she is, I believe, in her bath.” Treves showed no surprise at her insistence upon checking up on the members of the household. She wondered if he guessed at her mission here.

“When you bring my tray, I’d like the morning papers,” she requested.

“They don’t arrive until ten o’clock, madam,” he said, “coming from London.” Treves departed, and Miss Withers drank her tea. Then she slipped into a bathrobe and went out into the hall.

The bathroom was between her room and Candida’s. She opened the door and saw the young woman dropping bath salts into a full tub.

“I’m sorry,” said Miss Withers, as the other hurriedly pulled her negligee around her.

“It doesn’t matter,” smiled Candida. “Thought I turned the key in the door. But I’ll be through in a jiffy—Leslie is waiting for me to go and play golf.”

“Sometimes it’s good for a young man to be kept waiting,” Miss Withers advised. She went back to her room, breathing a plague upon houses in which the one guest bath was always occupied.

Breakfast awaited her—a singularly tasteless meal of tea and cold toast, eggs very hard boiled indeed, and a limp slab of bacon, or so it seemed.

She finished, and then, hoping that Candida really meant what she said about being through in a jiffy, she went out and tried the bathroom door. But this time the key had been turned in the lock, and from within came the faint gurgle of running water. Miss Withers went back to her room, and in a moment Treves knocked to take away the tray.

He balanced it on the palm of one hand and was halfway to the stairs when there came a most tremendous crash from the direction of the wing occupied by the Honorable Emily. Treves dropped the breakfast tray, neatly caught it again in midair, and placed it on a hall table. Then he hurried down to the Honorable Emily’s sitting room.

He was back in a moment, and noticed Miss Withers in her doorway. Over his arm hung Tobermory, a limp gray fur-piece.

“Won’t the mistress make a proper row about
that
!” he observed. “It’s her bird, ma’am. The red-breasted American bird that she brought back with her.”

“Well, what about it?”

“The cat has knocked down the cage, ma’am. It’s smashed on the floor. And he’s ate up the bird, claws, beak, and all.”

Miss Withers shook her head at this announcement of a sad domestic tragedy. “Didn’t you tell your mistress?”

“She’s in her bath, ma’am. I thought it best not to disturb her, ma’am. It seemed wiser to take Toby down to the kitchen for a while.”

Miss Withers didn’t understand. “As a punishment?”

“No, ma’am. You see, if the mistress sees only the cage smashed on the floor, she may think it fell naturally and that the bird flew out of the open window. Otherwise she’d give the cat a good drubbing with a folded newspaper, and it’s bad luck.”

“What?”

“Yes, ma’am. Bad luck for a household, we believe here in this part of the country, to punish a cat. Dogs are the better for it, but not cats. Cats have powerful friends, ma’am.” His face bore a wild, almost fanatical look. “The piskies and buskeys, ma’am…
Themselves,
as we say.”

Touched by this disclosure of Cornish folklore, Miss Withers resolved to become a party to the protection of Tobermory from his just fate. “Leave him in my room,” she said. “I’ll swear that he’s been there all morning.”

She was left alone with the cat, who made a leisurely survey of her room, sniffed at her belongings, and then took his place on her bed, where he stared at her. The school teacher made advances to him, stroking his silvery fur and whisking away the soft feather or two which clung to his whiskers. Finally he purred…

But Miss Withers did not intend to spend the day in a dressing gown. She tried the bathroom door again, rather roughly this time. It was unlocked, and the tremendous iron key fell inwards on the floor as she opened it. She locked herself in and heard the swift footsteps of someone passing by—no doubt Candida hurrying to her golf game.

She bathed, after carefully hanging up the wet towel and washcloth which Candida had draped on the side of the tub. Not for her was any such soaking in hot water as the Honorable Emily delighted in. She soon climbed out upon a delightfully soft and dry bath mat and dried her long and angular body with swift and decisive strokes of the towel.

Back in her own room she dressed swiftly and efficiently, while Tobermory watched. Then suddenly the cat arose, stretched himself, and leaped down to the floor. He went over to the door, and cried “Meowr,” loudly.

“Hush,” said Miss Withers.

“Meowrrr,” cried Tobermory. But he did not want to go out, because when she opened the door he still stood on the inside, waiting.

After about five minutes Treves knocked. He was bearing a saucer of milk.