Who Killed Charmian Karslake? (20 page)

“Sounds as if the fellow must have been a bit of a maniac,” Harbord commented. “Why on earth did he take the sapphire ball, anyway? It only added enormously to the risk of discovery, and he would never have been able to dispose of it.”

“Probably he didn't realize this at the time. As for being a maniac, I incline to the opinion that there must be a bit of a kink somewhere in every murderer, or they would never put their necks in danger for the sort of motives that most of them have. I have heard of a man who committed a particularly revolting murder for the sake of a couple of pounds. However, in this case robbery was not the motive, I feel sure.”

“The handbag was found by the side of the path leading to the Abbey,” Harbord said thoughtfully. “That seems to prove that the murderer must have been someone inside the Abbey. I have thought sometimes, particularly since the attack on Mrs. Richard, that Charmian Karslake might have been murdered by somebody connected with the stables or employed about the garage or the gardens.”

“Oh, well,” Stoddart observed, throwing his cigarette end into the fire-place, “this theory of mine does not entirely do away with that possibility. The man might have gone only a few steps towards the Abbey and then turned back or cut through the bushes towards the stable-yard. You come out of the shrubbery on to the broad walk that runs all round the Abbey and from there could get almost anywhere. There are several entrances to the Abbey. Those downy old monks seem to have known the value of a side door. But, when you speak of the possibility of Miss Karslake's murderer being somebody employed outside the house, you forget the man in evening dress whom the French maid saw coming down the corridor the night of the murder.”

“No, I haven't!” Harbord contradicted. “But I never placed much reliance on that story. The man might have been anybody, and the French girl didn't really know that he went to Miss Karslake's room. She was not a very satisfactory witness.”

“She was not,” the inspector agreed. “Sometimes I think I will have another talk with her. She is in North Wales now with a friend of Lady Penn-Moreton's who wanted a temporary maid. Well, Alfred, I am afraid sitting here talking will not get us much forrarder. We will go across to the Abbey. First, though, I must show you this.” He unlocked his desk and brought out a paper.

Harbord gazed at it in a puzzled fashion.

“Looks like gibberish to me. What does it mean?”

The inspector took it from him.

“It is a message in cipher from the wireless operator on board the ‘White-Wings,' Mr. Juggs's yacht now on the high seas. Translated into English as she is spoke it reads: ‘Evening shoes size eight carefully cleaned but still bearing traces of blood found in Bird's cabin.' Bird, of course, is the pseudonym for Richard Penn-Moreton.”

Harbord drew a deep breath.

“Is the wireless operator to be trusted?”

“Our own staff,” the inspector answered briefly. “Venables.”

“The inference being that he has found the shoes worn by Miss Karslake's murderer,” Harbord said slowly.

“Ay, the inference,” the inspector agreed. “But inferences are mostly wrong. And I am glad you say worn by Miss Karslake's murderer, Alfred. That is just as far as it takes us.”

“Who found the shoes?” Harbord pursued. “Not Venables, I presume?”

“No. Spender is on board as steward and Manders as Silas Juggs's own man. Valet, if you can imagine Mr. Juggs with such an appendage.”

Harbord laughed.

“I can't. Imagination fails me.”

“H'm! Manders will find that part of his work easy enough,” the inspector commented. “He is really there – both of them are – at Mr. Juggs's own request to make Mrs. Richard feel quite safe. It seems that she lives in constant fear that she may be attacked again.”

“I am sure I don't wonder, poor soul,” Harbord said compassionately. “Her assailant may be nearer than she imagines. I wonder if she suspects –”

“If she does she wisely keeps her suspicions to herself,” the inspector said meaningly. “Now for the Abbey.”

Down in the Bull Ring the tiny ferns were poking their little heads from between the stones of the old wall. When they had passed the Abbey gates and were walking up to the house, on one side they had the shrubbery that surrounded the Monks' Pool. Here the rhododendrons were blooming bravely, on the other the wide stretch of greensward that spread right up to the wall of the old church was dotted with azaleas nodding their bell-shaped heads in the sunshine.

Their ring at the front door was answered by a footman, with Brook hovering behind. The inspector stepped inside.

“I think you are expecting us, Mr. Brook?”

“Oh, yes, Inspector Stoddart.” The butler was looking rather worried. “My orders from Sir Arthur are to get you anything you may require. You have the key that has been made for poor Miss Karslake's room, I think?”

“I have. But I don't know that I shall want it today,” the inspector said, moving towards the stairs. “It is the first-floor rooms I am going through today, particularly Mrs. Richard's.”

“Certainly, inspector. I will come up with you and open them up.” The butler followed him. “Sir Arthur gave me all the keys but that new one of Miss Karslake's before he went away. This is Mrs. Richard's, the first on the right. I hope you may find something there which will help you to discover who the brute was that attacked the poor young lady.”

“I hope we shall.” The inspector held out his hand. “If you will give me the keys, Mr. Brook, we really need not trouble you to come any farther.”

The butler made no motion to part with them.

“It is no trouble, I assure you, inspector. And the lock of Mrs. Richard's room requires humouring. It wasn't often locked while Mrs. Richard was here, with the nurses going in and out and so on.”

“No, I suppose it wouldn't be,” the inspector agreed.

“Mrs. Richard looked very much altered when she went away, poor thing,” the butler went on conversationally. “I hope the sea air may set her up, but concussion of the brain is a nasty thing, as I know. A cousin of mine had it – slipped down at the top of one of those nasty, moving staircases and was never the same again.”

“H'm! Well, I hope that will not be the case with Mrs. Richard,” the inspector observed as he took the key and fitted it into the lock. The door opened at once.

The inspector, still holding it in his hand, looked at the butler. “Not so difficult as you expected, Mr. Brook! Now we really will not detain you.”

“No, I will leave you, inspector.” But Brook still hesitated. “I hope Mrs. Richard will be quite safe for the future for poor Mr. Richard's sake as well as her own. He was like a madman when first he heard of the attack.”

“Ah, well! I dare say we all of us should be, in his place.” The inspector motioned Harbord inside. “You are very fond of Mr. Richard – like him better than Sir Arthur, don't you, Mr. Brook?”

The butler smiled a little.

“Oh, I wouldn't say that, inspector. I have always been devoted to all the family. But Mr. Richard's very bright and friendly. Well, then, if you have all you want, gentlemen –”

“Quite, thanks!” The inspector stood for a minute watching the butler's retreating back, then he went back to Harbord, closing the door behind him.

Mrs. Richard's room and Dicky's dressing-room, which opened out of it, had the tidy and rather desolate appearance of rooms which are not in daily use. The big bed in the middle of Sadie's room had been stripped, and the furniture had been put straight, but by the inspector's orders no cleaning had been done. Harbord was already at work going through the waste-paper-basket. The inspector went on to the dressing-room; in the communicating doorway he paused.

“You won't find anything there, Alfred. That will have been attended to. I don't like that butler.”

“I don't much, either,” Harbord agreed. “Never did for that matter. I have always suspected him of keeping something back. But there is something rather fine about his devotion to the Moretons. If he knew one of them was guilty he would screen him with his life, I am certain.”

“Such devotion may be very fine, but it is a damned nuisance sometimes,” the inspector said in a preoccupied tone as he went on and opened the door of Dicky's wardrobe.

Both men worked on in silence for some time. Harbord had finished with the waste-paper-basket and had turned his attention to Mrs. Richard's writing-table, which stood close at hand, when he heard a sharp exclamation from the inspector.

“This is a trifle that has been overlooked, Alfred.”

The younger man sprang up. The inspector was standing near the window, his pocket microscope screwed into his eye as he examined a black evening coat he was holding.

“Look here!” he said, pointing to the sleeve of the coat.

Harbord bent over it. The inspector handed him the microscope.

“What do you see?”

Harbord waited a minute.

“A couple of dark spots on the cloth, hardly distinguishable,” he said at last.

“Blood,” the inspector said laconically. “Don't you understand, Harbord? This is the coat worn by Richard Moreton at the ball on the night that Charmian Karslake was murdered.”

“Are you certain it was that coat?” Harbord asked, still scrutinizing the spots.

For answer the inspector took the coat from him, and slipping his hand in the pocket brought out the dance programme all crumpled up.

“Fairly conclusive, that? But what is this?”

This was a thin slip of paper that had slipped up against the lining. It was just a bit of very ordinary writing paper with these words scrawled across it.

“I *will see you tonight. Did you think you could deceive me?”

That was all. There was neither beginning nor ending, and the writing was singularly indistinctive. Certainly it had nothing in common with the big, dashing handwriting with which the detectives had become familiar as that of Charmian Karslake.

The inspector stared at it.

“It isn't Dicky's and it isn't Charmian's unless it is very skilfully disguised.”

Harbord looked at it over his shoulder.

“At any rate this definitely connects Richard Moreton with the crime.”

The inspector stared at the coat, from it to the paper.

“Does it?” he said in a curiously altered tone. “I wonder?”

“Here we are!” said the inspector, taking up his letters. “You didn't see the advertisement in the Agony Column of the ‘Daily Wire' yesterday?”

Harbord shook his head. He had just come in from a two days' sojourn on his own at Hepton. The inspector, who had come up to town to pursue a new line of inquiry, had left the younger man to watch developments in the country.

Stoddart tore open the top letter.

“Ah! I guessed we should do the trick. This is the advertisement that has appeared in the ‘Daily Wire' for a couple of days, Alfred. It is headed – ‘Gossett – Hepton. If any relatives of the late Sylvia Gossett of Hepton will apply to Messrs. Evans and Turner, of 25 Crow's Inn, they will hear of something to their advantage.' A bit taking, isn't it? This is in reply. Evans and Turner have just forwarded it. It was written from an obscure street in Bloomsbury and dated yesterday morning.”

He handed the letter to Harbord, who read:

“We shall just manage it if we get off at once. Come along. What is the news from Hepton? We'll walk along the Embankment and you can tell me everything as we go along.”

The inspector stepped out smartly. When they reached the Embankment he looked at Harbord.

“Well?”

“I am afraid I have very little to report. I have had tea with the butler and the housekeeper twice, and the only thing that I have got out of them that bears upon the subject at all is that Dicky is subject to corns, that he had a particularly nasty one on the day of the ball, and was complaining that he hadn't got time to get up to town to consult his chiropodist.”

“And you take it that that means?” Stoddart glanced keenly at his subordinate.

“As the shoes found in his cabin,” Harbord pursued diffidently, “were a size larger than he wears himself and the same as those worn by John Larpent, doesn't it seem possible, even probable, that Mr. Dicky borrowed his friend's shoes for the occasion?”

“Quite possible,” the inspector agreed. “As for probable – well, we must not give way to the fascinating temptation of trying to make things fit into a certain theory, like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. You went through Sir Arthur's room and the study?”

“Yes. Everything was in apple-pie order, as I rather expected to find it,” Harbord said gloomily.

“Ah, well, things are moving. I expect we shall know more soon,” the inspector said briskly.

A turning from the Embankment led them into the Crow's Inn Gardens, and from thence it was but a step to the offices of Messrs. Evans and Turner. They were a few minutes in advance of the hour named by Mr. John Gossett, but the inspector went straight in and up to the second floor. A shabby-looking man who had been standing outside glanced at them curiously and then after a moment's hesitation followed them up.

They were admitted at once. A rosy-looking man came to meet them.

“Inspector Stoddart?” he said inquiringly. “Mr. Turner is expecting you.”

He opened a door at the right-hand side and ushered them into Mr. Turner's presence.