The Ginger Cat Mystery (28 page)
Read The Ginger Cat Mystery Online
Authors: Robin Forsythe
“Kick my heels. By the way, is there any news of Miss Stella Cornell's whereabouts, Heather?”
“You want an excuse to go and see the auburn-haired beauty at the Manor, eh? I must disappoint you. There's no news whatever beyond the fact that Miss Cornell caught a train to London from Bury early that afternoon. She's doubtless in London, and I don't see much use in worrying her in her present trouble.
Au revoir
.”
On Heather's departure Vereker went up to his room and to pass the time took out his case-book and began to write a full account of the tragedy at Marston Manor and a detailed précis of his own work on the case. Having completed this, he sat down in an easy chair, took out a volume of Emerson from his suitcase and fell fast asleep over it. He awoke at five o'clock and was just about to descend to the inn's private room for tea, when a loud knock sounded on his door and made him jump to his feet. He opened the door to find the landlord standing outside.
“Doctor Redgrave would like to see you at once,” said Abner Borham. “He wanted to see the inspector but I told him Mr. Heather had gone to London and wouldn't be back till nine o'clock. He then asked if he might see you.”
“I'll come down right away,” replied Vereker and following the landlord was shown into the private room in which Heather and he had taken their meals during their stay at the “Dog and Partridge.”
“Good afternoon, Vereker,” said the doctor as soon as Borham had closed the door. “I've got rather serious news for you. I wanted to see Inspector Heather, but as soon as he arrives you can pass it on to him. David Cornell has committed suicide, cut his throat from ear to ear with a razor, one of the old pattern which we now call a cut-throat. Young Mary Lister went to his study to tell him his tea was ready and found the man dead in his armchair. She kept her head and 'phoned for me, but, of course, I could do nothing. He must have been dead before Lister discovered him.”
“Terrible business. I'm sorry for his friends and relatives,” replied Vereker recovering swiftly from the shock the news had given him.
“Yes, but this open letter which he typed and left with the superscription âTo those whom it may concern,' makes the whole affair infinitely more terrible. You'd better read it and hand it along to the inspector. It will interest you both. I must now get back at once to the Manor. Mrs. Cornell is in a state of collapse and I must attend to her. I'll possibly see you and the inspector later. I'll be at the Manor till about ten o'clock to-night. So long.”
With these words the doctor hurried away and Vereker, after ordering tea, sat down and read the letter which Doctor Redgrave had left with him. It ran:
TO THOSE WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
I, David Cornell of the Bungalow, Marston-le-Willows, am about to commit what is usually termed
felo de se
. I'm not insane and I hope the coroner won't pass the usual kindly but erroneous verdict that I committed suicide during temporary insanity. The reason for my act is that I feel that the investigation now being carried out by Inspector Heather of Scotland Yard is drawing to a close and that I shall be hanged for shooting my nephew, Frank Cornell. I hereby frankly admit I was the person who shot him and confess I don't in the least regret having done so. The man was an unprincipled and heartless libertine who has ruined the life of my only daughter. My daughter loved him and taking advantage of her weakness he seduced her. Even if he had made reparation by marriage, I couldn't have forgiven him, for he was the last man on earth I would have chosen for her husband. He had, however, no intention of marrying her and when she pressed him to do so to cover her shame, for she is going to be a mother, he simply informed her he was engaged to another woman. As there is no redress at law for this kind of thing which, to my mind, is worse than murder, I took the law into my own hands. For the satisfaction of the inspector who has charge of the case, I state that I made a secret appointment with Frank Cornell in the music room of Marston Manor. He arrived at the appointed hour of twelve o'clock. I chose this rendezvous because he and my daughter used to meet there secretly when they were lovers, but principally because the only plan I could devise for shooting the man in a vital spot was through some aperture to which I could induce him to place his eye. This I managed to do by not answering the prearranged signal which he and my daughter employed when they were in the habit of trysting in the music room. To ascertain what was happening in the room he naturally put his eye to the keyhole. I heard his movements and judging the time accurately, I fired. He simply groaned and fell and I knew I'd accomplished what I had set out to do. Prior to killing Frank Cornell, I had thought out matters and had no intention of paying the penalty fixed by law for such. I intended to drag the man upstairs into his own room and leave him there so as to hide the fact that he had been shot through the keyhole of the music room door. I had partially effected this when I heard movements in one of the bedrooms on the first floor corridor and hastily made my departure. This miscarriage of my plan, however, was immaterial. Other factors such as bloodstains, the finding of the weapon, the tracing of its purchase, and so forth, were bound to enter into the business, and as I was prepared to kill myself rather than be tried and hanged, I did not carry out measures for escape from suspicion with any degree of thoroughness. I had a sporting chance of escape, and as long as the method of the shooting was undiscovered, my blindness was to a great extent a safeguard against my being suspected. This morning, however, I found out that I was discovered by Mr. Vereker who works in collaboration with his friend, Inspector Heather. I had just had an interview with Mrs. Cornell, and was leaving the Manor by the music room. Knowing that that room had been thoroughly searched by the police, I had just hidden the automatic with which I had committed the crime with the intention of recovering it at a later date, when I heard someone pass heavily on the half-landing. I guessed it was Mr. Vereker because he had an appointment with my sister-in-law, but feeling fairly certain that he hadn't looked into the music room, I quietly let myself out into the garden. There, to my surprise, I was overtaken by Mr. Vereker who made an appointment to meet me at eight in my bungalow. I had just thrown the secret set of keys to the music room, which I possessed, into the lily pool and I began to fear that he had seen me. After Mr. Vereker had left me, I had an impulse to return and recover my automatic, but by this time I was seized with panic and lost my head. I was fairly certain that before long Inspector Heather would make a surprise search of my bungalow so that it would have been foolish to take the weapon back with me. Again, Mr. Vereker might wait in the music room and catch me red-handed in the act of recovering it from the settee, should I attempt to do so. I decided to leave it there. During the afternoon I made some excuse to my sister-in-law for calling on her again and when passing through the music room, I took the opportunity of satisfying myself that my pistol was still where I had hidden it. To my horror, I discovered that it was gone and also that the lock had been removed from the door leading on to the half-landing. This was definite proof to me that the agents of the law knew that I had shot Frank Cornell and that my arrest was only a matter of hours.
At this point, without any of the usual expressions of regret to family, relatives and friends for the pain he would inflict on them by his suicide, the letter came to an end. Vereker with a sigh of relief folded it up, returned it to its covering envelope and thrust it in his pocket. There was nothing to do now but await Inspector Heather's return from London. As far as he himself was concerned, Vereker felt no further interest in the case. That portion of the investigation which always held such a fascination for him was ended, and as he sat smoking and alone in the private room of the inn, a depressing reaction to his days of keen excitement set in. He had a strong distaste for the ceremony of inquests and that function was before him and unavoidable. He looked forward to the next few days with a sense of dreary resignation. There was, he felt, one antidote to this feeling of dejection and that was exercise. Rising quickly to his feet, he left the room, thrust on his hat and, taking his stick, set forth.
As he walked along his thoughts reverted to the tragedy which had followed tragedy in the Marston Manor case and turned especially to the unhappy figure of David Cornell who had played so important a role in it. This was no sordid crime for gain like so many of the murders which he had investigated. It was not a crime of passion though human passion had been the seed from which it had sprung. It arose from the sense of frustrated justice of an intelligent and rather estimable man. He had loved his only child and that child had, in his opinion, been betrayed by a libertine. He had failed through his deep affection for her to view the matter in a judicial light. After all, she was a mature woman, competent to look after herself. She must have been a consenting party to her own downfall. In these days of equality of the sexes her position would be viewed from a different angle to that of past and more sentimental times when a woman was regarded as a weak and helpless creature, incapable of safeguarding her own interests and at the mercy of any designing and unscrupulous male. Yet Vereker could not help feeling sorry for both the girl and her father. Human beings were still creatures of instinct and emotion and they acted on those instincts and emotions rather than on reason. Reason was generally employed very efficiently by those who assessed their fellows' conduct from a detached and aloof point of view. It had to be employed officially by a judge in spite of all his understanding of the weakness of mankind and the irrationality of action based on strong emotion.
After an hour's walking the texture of Vereker's thoughts changed quietly, almost imperceptibly. His eyes, which had been flitting from one object to another without conscious observation or had been fixed blandly on the broad, well-kept road which he traversed, now began to take an interest in the beautiful Suffolk landscape round him. This was the Constable country and was still utterly unchanged and unspoilt. In this district of Marston there were no electric pylons to point out the march of time and change of manner of a people's living. Suffolk was, as someone had so aptly called it, “The Unknown County.” Progress in life, if it could be called progress, had been so rapid that the artist's eye had only in very recent years begun to detach visual beauty from associated ideas bearing on a hundred other basic emotions. Only recently had the artist turned to industrial scenes, to smoke and chimneys and machinery to catch their beauty and express it as part of the beauty of contemporary life, of another era in history. To Vereker, at this moment, there came a violent reaction to an older school of painting, and the wide sweep of sweet agricultural landscape, its placidity and charm appealed with the sudden thrill of a new discovery. A windmill on a rise caught his eye, the intersecting lines of hill and dale adjusted themselves into a pattern. Above the landscape the cloud masses swung in sympathy with the general scheme. He drew a sketch-book from his pocket and began to make a rough outline of his composition. The detective's craze for investigation had vanished; he had returned to his life-long passion for painting. His one desire now was to see the close of the Marston case, to get his artist's gear together and forget that such a thing as crime existed.
It was dark when he returned to the “Dog and Partridge,” physically tired but mentally refreshed. He found Heather in the little room just about to sit down to his evening meal.
“Well, Heather,” he said, “I suppose you've heard the news. It's all over.”
“Yes,” replied the inspector in his matter-of-fact way, “it's all over, as you say, but it's not the kind of finish I like to see to a case. Most disappointing!”
“You came back with handcuffs ready for use, I presume. What happened about the music room lock?”
“Turned out according to plan. We were right; the shot had been fired through the large keyhole and the expert was amazed that it had been so effective. Still, it was, and an unlucky shot for Mr. Frank Cornell. But I like a case where you can finish up with a dramatic arrest, a sensational trial and a healthy hanging. There's always a sense of satisfaction in putting the darbies on your man. It would have been a most unpleasant job for me to arrest the blind man, though, of course, I'd have had to do it. It's not for me to go into the rights and wrongs of the affair, but I had a sneaking regard for Mr. David Cornell. Put yourself in his shoes and try to think how you'd have felt.”
“I've been doing that all afternoon, Heather, and I'm not going to think about it any more. When all's said and done his suicide has saved a lot of trouble and another famous trial. There are several points in this amazing case that still bother me, but it's hardly worth discussing them now.”
“I agree,” said Heather. “The man was extremely intelligent, but he did some of the most foolish things a man can do if he wants to dodge the police.”
“For instance?” asked Vereker.
“Why on earth did he write a note making an appointment with Frank Cornell? Unless he could retrieve the note subsequently it was almost bound to be discovered.”
“That struck me, too,” said Vereker. “It rather amazed me at the time that he could write a note at all, but that was only my ignorance. I tried it out myself with eyes shut and my note was perfectly legible. As he himself says in his final confession, he felt that discovery was almost certain and didn't trouble over much to guard against it. He knew that modern methods of detection make a murderer's escape more difficult every day and he was prepared to die by his own hand should Fate go against him. The concealment of the pistol in the music room also seemed to me to be too bold a move to be safe, and his discussion of the whole case looked like the procedure of a man deliberately trying to sail as near the wind as possible for the fun of running risks.”
