‘Yes, she’s difficult,’ agreed Hannasyde. ‘It’s always hard when dealing with that type of woman to know when they’re speaking the truth as it was, and when they’re speaking of it as they think it was … Hullo, Hemingway!’
Sergeant Hemingway, a brisk person with a pair of bright eyes and an engaging smile, who had been waiting for his chief outside the gate, fell into step beside him, and said cheerfully: ‘I’ll tell you something, Super. We aren’t going to like this case, not by a long chalk. You know what it smelt like in the servants’ quarters? Pea-soup!’
The Inspector, who was not acquainted with Hemingway, looked a little puzzled, and said: ‘Eh?’
‘Figure of speech,’ explained the Sergeant. ‘Get anything your end, Super?’
‘Not much,’ replied Hannasyde. ‘It’s early yet.’
‘Early or late I don’t like poisoning cases,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Give me a nice clean bullet-wound where I’ve got something to go on, and not too many doctors to mess the case up disagreeing with one another! Ever handled a case of nicotine-poisoning before, Inspector?’
‘No, I can’t say I have,’ admitted the Inspector.
‘If I know anything about it you won’t want to handle another by the time we’re through with this,’ prophesied the Sergeant. ‘Nor me either. The Superintendent here doesn’t believe in premonitions, but I’ve got one right now.’
‘You’ve had them before,’ remarked Hannasyde unkindly.
‘I won’t say I haven’t,’ replied the Sergeant, quite unabashed. ‘This case remind you of anything, Super?’
‘No,’ said Hannasyde. ‘But you’d better tell me, and get it off your chest. What does it remind you of ?’
The Sergeant cocked an eye at him. ‘The Vereker Case,’ he said.
‘The Vereker Case! That was a stabbing affair!’
‘I’m not saying it wasn’t, but when I got the hang of the décor here, and a squint at some of the dramatis personæ that’s what flashed across my mind.’
‘What I don’t like about it,’ said the Inspector slowly, ‘is this nicotine. It seems to me the doctors don’t properly understand it, judging from that report you showed me, Superintendent. I mean, if there wasn’t no more than a slight trace of it in the stomach, so as to make them think he can’t have swallowed much, and yet they find by the state of the blood – and the mouth, wasn’t it? – that –’
‘Mucous membrane and tongue,’ interjected the Sergeant knowledgeably. ‘They tell me you always look for nicotine in the mouth. Liver and kidneys too. It’s a mystery to me why anyone wants to be a doctor.’
‘Well, what I’m getting at is how did he have all that poison in his innards?’ said the Inspector.
‘It is quite possible,’ said Hannasyde, ‘that he didn’t swallow any poison at all.’
‘What?’ demanded the Inspector.
‘Cases have been known,’ continued Hannasyde, ‘where nicotine has either been injected subcutaneously, or even absorbed through the skin, with fatal results. There was apparently an instance once, years ago, of a whole squadron of Hussars being made ill by trying to smuggle tobacco next to their skins.’
‘There you are! What did I tell you?’ said the Sergeant. ‘Nice, simple case we’ve got when we don’t even know whether the poor fellow drank the dope or had it poured over him! One thing, it looks as though whoever did the murder knew a bit about poisons.’
‘Y-es. Or had read it up,’ said Hannasyde. ‘As far as I can see it ought not to be a very difficult matter – given a little chemical knowledge – to prepare nicotine. What did you get out of the servants, Hemingway?’
‘Plenty,’ answered the Sergeant promptly. ‘A sight too much for my taste. According to them any one of the family would have been glad of the chance to do old Matthews in. Proper sort of tyrant he seems to have been. The cook thinks it was Mrs Matthews, on account of the old man wanting to ship his nephew off to Brazil, but what’s the use of that? I don’t say it isn’t good psychology. It is. But so far I don’t get any sort of line on the Matthews dame. No evidence. Then there’s a classy bit of goods, calling herself Rose Daventry. If you was to ask me what I think about her, Super, I’d tell you only that I wouldn’t like to use a word that might shock the Inspector.’
Inspector Davis grinned. ‘I know her,’ he said.
‘Well, she thinks the niece did it, because her uncle didn’t cotton to her marrying the doctor. At least, that’s the reason she gave me, but what she meant was that Miss Stella Matthews makes a lot more work in the house than little Rosebud likes. After that I had a go at the under-housemaid. Country girl, name of Stevens. She doesn’t think anything, never having been brought up to it. Ruling out a couple of gardeners and the kitchen-maid, there’s the butler. I’ve got his evidence taped for you, Chief, and it’s the best of a bad lot, which is all I’ll say for it. Main points being that when he went up to bed a few minutes after eleven he saw Miss Harriet Matthews come out of her brother’s room.’
‘Did he indeed?’ said Hannasyde. ‘That’s interesting. She gave me to understand that she didn’t see Matthews, after he went up to bed.’
‘Well, if you’re pleased, Super, it’s O.K. by me,’ said the Sergeant. ‘But if you know what motive she had for doing the old boy in, you know a sight more than I could find out.’
‘She’s a very eccentric kind of woman,’ said the Inspector thoughtfully. ‘Regular cough-drop.’
‘Well, I’m bound to say I haven’t so far come across a case of anyone doing a murder just because they were eccentric,’ said the Sergeant, ‘but that isn’t to say I won’t. Maybe you’ll like my next bit of evidence. According to Beecher, there was a brand-new bottle of some tonic or other blown over into the washbasin in Matthews’ bathroom, and consequently smashed. Miss Harriet found it, and disposed of the bits of glass by dropping them into the kitchen-stove. Seems a funny thing to do, to my way of thinking, but the servants made nothing of it. Said it was the sort of silly trick she would get up to. My last titbit is highly scandalous. They say the doctor drinks. Beecher-the-Butler has it firmly wedged in his head that Matthews had got something on the doctor, but unless it was him being over-fond of the bottle he doesn’t know what it may have been.’
‘The doctor gave me a perfectly straightforward account of that,’ replied Hannasyde. ‘Matthews appears to have threatened to broadcast the fact that Fielding’s father died in an Inebriates’ Home if Fielding didn’t leave his niece alone.’
The Sergeant opened his eyes at that. ‘What things they do get up to in the suburbs!’ he remarked admiringly. ‘Now, some people might call that blackmail, Super.’
Hannasyde nodded. ‘I do myself.’
‘Blackmail’s one of the most powerful motives for murder I know, Super.’
‘Admittedly. But I didn’t get the impression that Fielding was so desperately in love with Miss Stella that he’d commit murder on her account.’
The Inspector, who had been listening with knit brows, said: ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if the doctor thought Miss Stella was going to inherit a tidy little fortune. I’d have gone bail myself Matthews would have left the lot to her, or most of it anyway. Very fond of her he was, judging from all I hear. Gave her a Riley Sports car only six months ago, and he wasn’t the sort to give anything to someone he didn’t like a good bit.’
Hannasyde was silent for a moment. Then he said: ‘Why nicotine? He’s been attending Matthews, and we know that Matthews’ wasn’t a good life. If he’d wanted to murder him wouldn’t he have done it gradually, so that no one would ever have suspected?’
‘There’s that, of course,’ agreed Hemingway. ‘On the other hand, nicotine looks to me like the very poison you wouldn’t expect a doctor to use. How’s that, Chief ?’
‘Yes, I had thought of that,’ said Hannasyde.
‘That’s where psychology comes in,’ said the Sergeant briskly. ‘What’s our next move?’
‘I’ve got to see Mrs Lupto
n, Matthews’ elder sister. It transpired that it was she who demanded the P.M.’
‘Well, well, well!’ said the Sergeant. ‘So it wasn’t Plausible Percy after all? Now we are getting somewhere!’
‘If you mean that it wasn’t Fielding,’ said Hannasyde patiently, ‘no, it wasn’t. But as he seems, according to all the evidence I’ve heard yet, to have been perfectly willing, and even anxious to have the P.M., I don’t think we’re getting as far as you imagine. We’ll see what Mrs Lupton has to tell us, and then I must pay a call on the heir.’
‘Who’s he?’ inquired the Sergeant.
‘He,’ said Hannasyde slowly, ‘is Gregory Matthews’ eldest nephew. He lives in town, and I shall be interested to make his acquaintance. From all I can gather he seems to be an extremely unpopular and unpleasant gentleman.’
‘This is a new one on me,’ remarked the Sergeant. ‘Where does he come into the case?’
Hannasyde gave a laugh. ‘That’s the snag, Skipper. He doesn’t. And I can’t help feeling that he’s the very person who ought to!’
Five
Women!’ said the Inspector, half-an-hour later. ‘Women!’
They had just come away from an interview with Gertrude Lupton, and there was some excuse for the Inspector’s voice of loathing. Hannasyde laughed, but Sergeant Hemingway, always interested in new types, said: ‘Now this is what I call a nice morning. You wouldn’t believe anyone would start a scandal in the family just for the fun of it, would you?’
‘Not fun, jealousy,’ Hannasyde corrected. ‘And she happened to be right.’
‘Right or wrong, it’s my belief she hadn’t a bit of reason for wanting that post-mortem,’ said the indignant Inspector. ‘I’m not surprised her husband looked so uncomfortable. More shame to him, letting her run riot the way she does!’
‘Poor devil!’ said Hannasyde. ‘All the same, but for her there wouldn’t have been a case at all, so really we’ve nothing to grumble about, whatever her motive may have been.’
The Sergeant scratched the tip of his nose in a reflective manner. ‘No motive. Bit of womanly intuition, if you ask me. Funny things, women.’
‘You don’t believe in that, do you?’ asked the Inspector scornfully.
The Sergeant looked at him with a penetrating eye. ‘You a married man, Inspector?’
‘I’m not.’
‘That was what you call a rhetorical question,’ said the Sergeant. ‘I know you aren’t. You’d believe in woman’s instinct fast enough if you were. Why, they’re always having fits of it, even the best of them, and about once in a dozen times it turns out to be right. Granite-faced Gertrude had a Feeling someone did her brother in, and if you knew as much about woman’s Feelings as I do, you wouldn’t go around saying she did it out of spite. Not she! What she thought was: “I don’t like any of the people in this house.” And believe me, Inspector, once a woman gets a thought like that into her head she’ll develop a Feeling against the whole lot in double-quick time.’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ said the Inspector, who had taken an unreasoning dislike to Mrs Lupton, ‘if we found she did it, and was acting like this to put us off the scent.’
The Sergeant exchanged an indulgent glance with Hannasyde. ‘Bad psychology,’ he said. ‘She’s all right.’
‘Wasting our time!’ snorted the Inspector. ‘There wasn’t a thing she could tell us we didn’t know already. Don’t you agree, Superintendent?’
Hannasyde, who had not been paying much attention, said: ‘Agree? Oh! No, I don’t agree with either of you. I think she had more than a Feeling, and I think she did tell us several things.’
The Sergeant nodded. ‘I thought you were on to something,’ he remarked.
‘You were wrong,’ said Hannasyde calmly. ‘But this Lupton woman, though unpleasant, is scrupulously honest. In the Matthews household we interviewed a number of people who were all frightened, and who therefore said whatever they thought would be safest. Mrs Lupton isn’t afraid of me or of any other policeman, and she was rigidly determined not to make the smallest accusation against anyone. She isn’t being spiteful; she’s out for justice. Which makes what she did say quite valuable. When a woman like Miss Matthews says that her sister-in-law is equal to anything, I disbelieve her, just as I discount Mrs Matthews’ delicate implication that Harriet would have liked to have seen her brother put quietly out of the way. But when an uncompromisingly honest woman like Mrs Lupton tells me that her sister-in-law will go to any lengths to get her own way, I begin to sit up and take notice. The people she suspects are Mrs Matthews, the boy Guy, and the doctor.’
‘Sweeping sort of suspicion,’ commented the Inspector.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Hannasyde. ‘She ruled out the girl, Stella, and I got the impression that she dislikes that girl cordially. But she said positively that Stella would not have done such a thing, which to my mind gave a good deal of weight to her pronouncement that any one of the other three have it in them to commit murder. I know nothing about female intuition, Hemingway, but if Mrs Lupton suspected foul play it wasn’t because she detected anything odd about her brother’s body, but because she knew that the situation at the Poplars had been tense enough to end in murder. Which is what I wanted to find out.’
The Sergeant nodded. ‘Right, Chief.’
Inspector Davis was not so easily satisfied. ‘Yes, but what I’d like to know is, how did Matthews take that poison? It’s worrying me a lot, that is, because so far we haven’t discovered a blessed thing he swallowed that the others didn’t, barring the tonic he may have had after dinner.’
‘Guy Matthews might conceivably have dropped the poison into that whiskey-and-soda from a phial concealed in his hand,’ suggested Hannasyde.
The Inspector gave a disparaging sniff.
‘Don’t you fret, Inspector,’ said Hemingway. ‘The Chief’s after something a bit more recondite. Am I right, Super?’
‘More or less. Anyway, we’ll go back to town now, and look up Randall Matthews.’
Parting from Inspector Davis at the Police Station, Hannasyde and his subordinate travelled back to London on the Underground Railway. Randall Matthews rented a flat in a road off St James’s Street, but was not in at one o’clock, when the Superintendent called. His manservant, eyeing the police with disfavour, declined to hazard any opinion of the probable time of his master’s return, but Hannasyde and his Sergeant, coming back at three o’clock, found a Mercédès car parked outside the house, and rightly conjectured that its owner was Mr Randall Matthews.
This time the manservant, instead of addressing them through the smallest possible opening of the front door, reluctantly held it wide for the Superintendent to pass through.
The two men were ushered into a small hall which was decorated in shades of grey, and left there while Benson went to inform his master of their arrival.
The Sergeant looked round rather dubiously, and scratched his chin with the brim of his bowler hat. ‘What you might call Arty,’ he remarked. ‘Ever thought that décor is highly significant, Super? Take that divan.’
‘What about it?’ asked Hannasyde, glancing a little scornfully at the piece in question, which was wide, and low, and covered with pearl-grey velvet.
‘Not sure,’ replied the Sergeant. ‘If it had upwards of a dozen cushions with gold tassels chucked on it careless-like I should have known what to think. But it hasn’t. All the same, Super, we can write this bird down as having expensive tastes. Would you call the pictures oriental?’
‘Chinese prints,’ replied Hannasyde briefly.
‘I wouldn’t wonder,’ agreed the Sergeant. ‘It all fits in with what I was thinking.’
The looking-glass door at one side of the hall opened at this moment, and Randall Matthews strolled towards them, holding Hannasyde’s card between his finger and thumb.
‘More décor,’ muttered the Sergeant.
It could hardly have been by design, but Randall was dressed in a suit of pe
arl-grey flannel that harmonised beautifully with the background. He raised his eyes from the card, and said: ‘Ah, good afternoon, Superintendent! I might almost say, Welcome to my humble abode. Won’t you come in?’ He made a gesture towards the room he had come from. ‘Both of you, of course. You must introduce me to your friend.’
‘Sergeant Hemingway,’ said Hannasyde, his calm eyes slightly frowning.
‘How do you do, Sergeant?’ said Randall affably. ‘Ah, Benson, take the Sergeant’s hat.’
The Sergeant, equal to this as to any other occasion and growing more bird-like with interest every moment, handed his hat to the servant, and followed Hannasyde into a room that looked out on to the street, and seemed, with the exception of its bookshelves, to be entirely composed of Spanish leather.
Randall picked up a box containing Russian cigarettes, and offered it to his visitors. It was declined, so he selected one for himself, and lit it, and waved his hand in the direction of two chairs. ‘But won’t you sit down? And before we go any further, do tell me how my poor uncle was poisoned!’
Hannasyde raised his brows. ‘Did you then think that he had been poisoned, Mr Matthews? I understand that you described Mrs Lupton’s suspicion as a canard.’
‘I’m sure that must be correct,’ agreed Randall. ‘It is very much the sort of thing I should unhesitatingly say of my dear Aunt Gertrude’s pronouncements. But I have so much intuition, my dear Superintendent. Your genial presence convicts me of error. I am not at all ashamed to acknowledge my mistakes. I make very few.’
‘You are to be congratulated,’ commented Hannasyde dryly. ‘Your uncle was poisoned.’
‘Yes, Superintendent, yes. You would not otherwise be here. Is it permitted that I should know how?’
‘He died from nicotine poisoning,’ replied Hannasyde.
‘What a shame!’ said Randall. ‘It sounds very common – almost vulgar. I think I will throw away the rest of my cigarette.’