Through The Wall (24 page)

Miss Silver pushed the door open and came into the room. Cassy Remington whisked round. For a moment those rather bright blue eyes of hers stared. Then she gave a little affected cry.

“Oh! You gave me quite a fright! What is it? How in the world did you come here? What do you want?” With each of the short sentences her voice was higher and angrier.

Miss Silver said very composedly,

“I want to make sure that Penny does not drink that coffee or take that tablet which you have laid out for her.”

Cassy Remington laughed, high and shrill.

“The tablet! Dear me—you must forgive me if I laugh! You can have it analysed if you like! And what a fool you will be making of yourself! I can show you the bottle it came out of. They are perfectly harmless tablets. My sister has taken them for years.”

Miss Silver coughed gently.

“How full was the bottle when you took it from Mrs. Brand’s room, and how empty is it now? It is that cup of coffee which should be analysed. I think I will take charge of it.”

She came up to the table as she spoke. But she had hardly lifted the cup before Cassy caught her by the wrist and dashed it from her hand. The cup fell, the coffee spilled upon the carpet. The blue eyes blazed in triumph.

“Now get it analysed!”

Miss Silver raised her voice and called, “Mr. Cunningham!”

It was plain that he had not remained on the far side of the door between the houses, since he was in the room before she had finished saying his name. Miss Silver addressed him immediately and without any sign of disturbance.

“Will you be so kind as to pick up that coffee-cup? The contents will have to be analysed.” Then, as he did so, “There should, I think, be enough of the coffee left to show whether it has been tampered with.”

He stood there with the cup in his hand, tilting it.

“There is about a third left, and a considerable white sediment.”

Penny had not moved, except to lift her eyes to Miss Silver’s face. They had a wide, fixed look. Cassy Remington stood beside the table, rigid with anger, her colour high. At Richard’s last word she made a sudden spring, catching at his hand and at the cup. But the attempt failed. The hand was lifted and the cup held high above her reach. In a kind of whirlwind of fury she ran out of the room and down the stairs.

Richard Cunningham said, “What now?” He brought his hand down and gave Miss Silver the cup. She said gravely,

“I think you should go after her, and I think you should be quick.”

She set down the cup, went over to the window, and opened it. The sound of running feet came to them, stumbling in their haste. She said gravely,

“You had better go through the other house and take Constable Wilkins with you. I will call up the police.”

She had a start of them. Richard Cunningham had to put his shoes on, lay hands on a torch, and collect Joe Wilkins from the kitchen. They went out of the back door and stood listening at the edge of the lawn where the steps went down towards the beach. She could have reached it, knowing every step of the way. But the tide was up, there was no sand to muffle her footsteps. If she moved upon the shingle, they would hear her. They heard nothing.

Descending from terrace to terrace, each was found to be empty. They came down the last steps and stood where the body of Helen Adrian had lain. The water did not come up so far. Even the highest tide with the wind behind it would not come up as far as the steps.

Richard spoke his thought aloud.

“She couldn’t get around the point.”

“Not either way—not for getting on for three hours, I should say.”

“Could she get away up the cove?”

Joe shook his head in the dark.

“Not likely—not her. I’ve done it when I was a boy, but I wouldn’t say I could do it now—not in the dark.”

They did what they could. Joe tramped in the shingle, making a circuit of the upper end of the cove, throwing the torchlight before him, whilst Richard stood on guard at the bottom of the steps. Listening to the noise which his boots made on the shingle, magnified by an echo from the steep sides of the cove, Richard considered that Cassy Remington had very little chance of getting away unheard. He began to wonder if they had missed her in the dark somewhere on one of the terraces, a supposition which brought a host of unwelcome fears in its train. Suppose she had doubled back into the house. If she was the murderer they had been looking for she might be insane, and was certainly dangerous. He endured some of the longest and most uncomfortable minutes of his life until the arrival of the police set him free to go back to the house. He had not imagined that he would ever greet Crisp with so much relief.

He found everyone up in both houses, and a state of furious activity prevailing, with Crisp at his most belligerent directing it. Everyone, of course, had done everything they shouldn’t. It was inexcusable that the coffee should have been spilt. It was inexcusable that Miss Remington should have been allowed to leave the house. For his part, he could not see why she had done so. He knew what he would call evidence, but apparently Miss Silver had different ideas about it. Admitting that the two-thirds-empty coffee-cup contained a sediment, it wasn’t for him to say what it was. All this in front of everyone in the drawing-room.

Miss Silver coughed with dignity.

“I have told you of the conversation which I was able to overhear between Miss Remington and Mrs. Brand, Inspector. This is confirmed by Mrs. Brand herself, and by Miss Penny Halliday who also overheard it. To all three of us it was, I think, evidence that Miss Remington intended to accuse Mr. Felix Brand. I do not think that any one of us believed that she would be telling the truth. When she told her sister she intended to tell the police that she had seen Mr. Felix come in off the road at twenty to five, Mrs. Brand replied, ‘And did you?’ After which Miss Remington attempted to frighten her sister into acquiescence by asserting that her dress would be found to be stained down the front with blood, as well as with the fruit juice spilled on it at lunch. If this proves to be the case, both Mr. Felix and Miss Penny, as well as Eliza Cotton, will tell you that Mrs. Brand sleeps heavily in the afternoon, and that it would be perfectly possible for the murderer to have wiped the knife on her dress without waking her up. I believe you will find that that is what Miss Remington did.”

Florence Brand stared between resentment and relief. To be told that she slept heavily—and in front of all those people! But to have Cassy make her out a murderess! She came down on the side of relief. She said in a dull voice,

“She was always spiteful from a child!”

The search for Cassy Remington went on. Lights flashed on the beach, and the sound of men’s voices came up. Nobody went to bed. Eliza made tea and brought it in. By an unspoken consensus of opinion no one suggested coffee.

It was during her second cup of tea that Florence Brand said in an affronted manner,

“I really cannot think where Cassy can be. We are all being kept out of our beds. It is most uncomfortable.”

Miss Silver coughed, and supplied the mot juste.

“Crime is an excessively uncomfortable thing, Mrs. Brand.”

During the short time which elapsed before the arrival of the police Miss Silver witnessed a curious little scene. The telephone was in the dining-room, and she had perforce to leave Penny in order to ring up the station at Ledlington. She did so with reluctance, and made what haste she could to return. She had a tenderness for young girls, and was concerned for the shock which had been suffered.

As she came up the stairs, Felix Brand’s door was thrown open and he came out on to the landing, a pair of trousers hastily pulled on, his pyjama jacket open at the throat, his black hair standing on end like the crest on a helmet. Seeing Miss Silver, who had by then arrived upon the top step, he checked, stared, and called out,

“What’s happening?”

Miss Silver coughed.

“Miss Remington has, I believe, just made an attempt upon Penny’s life.”

His face worked. He said, “Penny—” in a stunned voice. And, as if it had been a call to her, she came running out of Cassy Remington’s room, stumbling and weeping, to fling herself into his arms. They closed round her. The dark dishevelled head was bent. They murmured incoherences which were meant for each other and for no one else.

Miss Silver took the opportunity of returning to her room and resuming her shoes, a very neat pair with little beaded bows reserved for evening wear. Competent as she was to confront any situation with dignity, she would not have wished to meet Inspector Crisp in her stocking feet. The loss of an inch in height alone—to say nothing of the distaste which a gentlewoman feels for appearing in public with her toilet incomplete!

When she had put on her shoes she went up the steep attic stair to knock upon Eliza’s door and acquaint her with what had happened. It appeared that Eliza was not surprised.

“A spiteful little toad if there ever was one. Always wanting what she hadn’t got, and the sharp end of her tongue for those that had it. Mr. Brand couldn’t abide her, and that’s a fact. But Penny that never harmed a soul!” Eliza reached for a formidable flannel dressing-gown. “She’ll take it hard. You shouldn’t have left her.”

Miss Silver smiled in a perfectly amiable manner and advised her to dress.

“Penny is with Mr. Felix, and I believe he is comforting her better than anyone else could. Perhaps you would put a kettle on. I expect we shall all be glad of a cup of tea presently. I am afraid that it may be very late indeed before we get to bed.”

It was very late indeed. But in the end the search was given up and the police departed, to return again with the first of the daylight. The tide was out, and in the light before the sunrise the wet sands and the rocks which ran out across them on either side of the cove had something of the look of a silverpoint drawing. There was no colour yet. Sky and sea, rock, sand and shingle, waited for it. With the first touch of the sun there would be blue shoaling to green and amethyst in the water, and pale forget-me-not blue in the sky. The rocks would have their olive and purple shadows, and sand and shingle would shine in all the shades from gold to brown. But the sun had not yet risen, and everything was grey and chill when the two constables whom Crisp had sent to resume the search came on the body of Cassy Remington in one of the rocky pools. Just how she got there, no one would ever know. In the panic fear which had sent her running from the house she may have forgotten that the tide was up and stumbled into deep water before she could check herself. There was a sudden drop not far from the high tide mark, and she could not swim. Or the sea may have held less terror for her than having to face exposure and the sentence of the law. Nobody would ever know. The verdict at the inquest would be death by misadventure.

There were two other inquests. Penny had to give her evidence, and Miss Silver to give hers. Analysis of the tablet which Miss Remington had offered Penny showed it to be quite harmless by itself, but the coffee in which it was to have been dissolved already contained so much of the same drug as to make it highly improbable that she would ever have waked again. Mrs. Brand deposed to having a bottle of these tablets. It had been three-quarters full, and was now empty.

The verdict was a foregone conclusion. Nobody could leave the court with any doubt that the cove murders had been committed by Cassy Remington, and that she had met her death after attempting yet another.

Miss Silver bade a gracious farewell to Inspector Crisp. It was their third encounter, and there still existed considerable irritation on his side. There was nothing on hers but a cordial appreciation of his zeal and devotion to duty. This ceremony over, she returned to Cove House for tea, after which meal she intended to rejoin her niece Ethel at Farne. Ina Felton, who had also had to give evidence, went straight to her room, where Eliza brought her a tray. The party in the study consisting only of Marian Brand and Richard Cunningham, Miss Silver felt able, now that the inquests were over, to respond quite frankly when questioned as to what had made her suspect Cassy Remington.

Marian said, “She appeared to have no motive.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“For murdering Helen Adrian—no. But after talking to Mr. Cunningham I immediately began to wonder whether Helen Adrian was the person whom the murderer had intended to kill. There was someone else in the house who might have been aimed at—someone for whose death envy, malice, and stupidity might have supplied a motive. I began, in short, to think whether Helen Adrian had not been killed in mistake for the person whose scarf she had been wearing. That blue and yellow head-scarf—the colours were bright and conspicuous—everyone in both houses had seen her wearing it. If someone had looked out of a window on the beach side of the house on Thursday night and had seen the beam of an electric torch flicker over the colours of that scarf, would that person not have taken the wearer to be Marian Brand? It seemed to me the most likely thing in the world. When Mrs. Felton broke her silence and told us what she had seen that night I found that the torchlight had, in fact, picked up the scarf in the way I surmised—Mr. Felton having stumbled on the steps, with the result that the beam threw high. I had from the first considered that it might be Marian Brand whose death was intended. I now became convinced of it. I had to consider who had a motive and an opportunity. Only Penny’s and Miss Remington’s rooms look out towards the beach. Mrs. Brand or Mr. Felix might have seen the scarf from the bathroom window. Mrs. Brand is not a pleasant character. She appears to be as nearly without natural affection as anyone I have ever encountered. But she is heavy in mind and body, and indolent to the point of sloth. I could not bring myself to believe that she would without any immediate provocation leave the house at night and go down those steps to the beach with the intention of murdering someone. I felt tolerably sure that she would think of a number of excellent reasons for not doing anything that would involve so much effort.”

Richard Cunningham permitted himself an appreciative smile.

“How right you are! Do you always see through people just like that? It is rather shattering, you know.”

Miss Silver returned the smile.

“It is sometimes useful. Let me continue. Mr. Felix Brand might have killed Helen Adrian in a fit of passionate jealousy, or he might conceivably have killed Miss Marian because the money which would come to him at her death might induce Miss Adrian to marry him, but I could not in either case believe that he would have brought that bloodstained scarf up to the house and hung it on the peg from which it had been taken. If he knew that it was Helen Adrian whom he had killed, it was incredible. Everything pointed to the fact that he was overwhelmed with shock and horror and intent on suicide. He would not have any room in his thought for the scarf, or any care for its disposal. This would apply equally whether he thought he was attacking Marian Brand and discovered his mistake too late, or whether he knew that he was striking Helen Adrian down. With the body of the woman for whom he felt a jealous passion at his feet, I could not bring myself to believe that he would have troubled about the scarf. If, on the other hand, he remained under the impression that he had in fact killed Miss Marian, where was his motive for suicide? Or, supposing him to be overcome by remorse, what possible significance had the return of the scarf? I found myself unable to believe in Felix Brand as the murderer.”

Marian said in a voice not perfectly steady,

“You did not think it was someone on this side of the house?”

Miss Silver looked at her very kindly indeed.

“No, my dear. Murder is like a plant. It must have roots, and a certain soil in which to grow. I saw nothing in you or your sister, in Mr. Cunningham or Eliza Cotton, in which such a plant could propagate. People with the habit of considering others, of weighing their obligations, and of observing a temperate self-control, do not suddenly commit murder. In Mr. Felton’s case, he had, of course, no moral scruples where money was concerned, but I did not believe him capable of violent crime. He was of a type to shrink from bloodshed. He had no motive strong enough to make him murder Helen Adrian. She was prepared to pay him ten pounds down, and he would, I think, have believed that he would be able to extract further sums from her. As to any question of a mistake of identity, this would have been impossible, since he let Helen Adrian through from the other house and accompanied her to the terrace from which she fell.”

Marian was very pale. Richard Cunningham’s hand came out and covered hers. Miss Silver coughed with indulgence and resumed her exposition.

“Let us now return to the next-door house. Penny I did not consider at all. She is a good child. In theory she had a motive for wishing Helen Adrian dead, but in practice she was quite incapable of injuring her. That brought me to Miss Remington, whose window looked toward the beach, whose abnormally quick hearing made her the most likely of all the inmates to have heard the glass door in the study open, and whose restless and inquisitive nature might so readily prompt her to investigate. Looking from her window, she would see two people come out of the study and go down toward the beach, one of them a man, the other a woman. She would see what Mrs. Felton saw, the beam of a torch picking up the blue and yellow of that noticeable head-scarf when Mr. Felton stumbled on the steps. That scarf covered Helen Adrian’s fair hair. Miss Remington certainly believed that it was worn by its owner, Marian Brand. Her curiosity would be powerfully excited. I think that she remained at her window for some time, and then went into the garden to find out what was going on. She could have gone out through the kitchen, or by the glass door in the drawing-room. I do not think that she was aware of the fact that the door between the houses had been unlocked. From the garden she saw Mr. Felton come up the steps and go into the house. But where was his companion? Full of curiosity, she goes down towards the beach. On the lowest terrace she is aware of someone standing just above the steep drop to the shingle. We have no proof of this of course, but there is the evidence of a great many small things for which there is no other explanation. We do know that Mr. Felton had quarrelled with Miss Adrian and gone up to the house alone. She waited, perhaps because she did not wish to resume the argument at that time. The tide was nearly full. The place from which she fell is one where there is a good view of the sea. Dark water moving at night has an attraction for many people. I think we may suppose that she stood there for a little to watch it before going in. The night was fine and warm. The sound of the water was in her ears. It would be quite easy for Miss Remington to come up behind her and push her over the edge.”

Even after all that had happened Marian could still shudder at the picture this brought up. She said, “Horrible!” and felt the pressure of Richard’s hand upon her own.

Miss Silver inclined her head.

“We do not know at what moment Miss Remington realized that she had made a mistake, and that the person whom she had pushed over that steep drop was Helen Adrian and not Marian Brand. Miss Adrian may have cried out as she fell. I think she did so, because Miss Remington was at some pains to mention that she had heard a cry, and then to explain it away.”

Marian said,

“I think there was a cry—I think it woke me.”

“Just so. It must have startled Miss Remington very much. She may have recognized her mistake then, or later. I think myself it would have been later, when she went down to make sure that her victim was dead. Before she did so I believe she put on the raincoat which Miss Adrian had left upon the seat.”

Richard Cunningham said,

“How did she know it was there?”

Miss Silver coughed with a shade of reproof.

“You cannot doubt that she would have provided herself with a torch. Eliza informs me that she possessed one. She put on the raincoat to protect her dress, went down the steps, and completed the murder. She could not risk the chance of her victim’s survival. She may have been aware of some circumstance which might have betrayed her identity. She would put on the torch in order to ascertain the extent of the injuries, and it was then, I think, that she recognized Helen Adrian. Instead of feeling any remorse, she thinks only of safeguarding herself and transferring suspicion to Miss Marian. She removes the head-scarf, completes her dreadful work, and returns, leaving the raincoat with its smear of blood on the seat and bringing the scarf back to the house. She had passed close to the study window on the way down, and we may suppose her to have been aware that Mr. Felton had left it open. This, of course, was done in order to allow of Miss Adrian’s return. Since Miss Remington must have been very much on the alert when he went back into the house, her keen hearing would have informed her that the door had not been shut. She had only to go in, hang up the scarf, and then return to her own side of the house by whatever door she had left unlatched. It would not occur to her that she could possibly be suspected. Since she had no interest in Helen Adrian’s death, the quick, resentful brain which had on the spur of the moment caught at and used the raincoat and scarf to cast suspicion on Miss Marian was, I believe, already busy with further plans. It is all over now, and we need not conjecture as to their exact form, but that they were cunning and malicious, and that they would have been directed against Miss Marian, I do not doubt.”