‘Not run over. She’s been murdered, Cynthia.’
It seemed as though for a moment she scarcely took in what he said. She repeated stupidly: ‘Murdered? Murdered, like Dan was?’
‘Yes, like that.’
‘But she can’t be! She can’t be!’ Cynthia cried shrilly. ‘What’ll happen to me?’
This exclamation not unnaturally shook her auditors. Miss Pickhill cast her a horrified glance, and then plucked at Mr Kane’s sleeve, saying in an urgent whisper: ‘It’s the shock! Perhaps a little drop of brandy – just to pull her together! I am an opponent of all forms of intoxicating liquor, but in a case like this – !’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ replied Jim.
‘I don’t believe you!’ Cynthia said, pulling her hand out of Timothy’s. ‘You’re simply trying to have me on!’ He said nothing. She caught her breath, and clutched the lapels of his coat, trying to shake him. ‘Say it isn’t true! You don’t understand ! I shall have to go and live in Putney, or something ghastly, and I couldn’t bear it! Is that why Aunt Violet’s here? I won’t go with her, I won’t, I won’t!’
‘God, this is too awful!’ muttered Beulah.
‘Bit tight,’ Jim said, under his breath. ‘Good job. Better get her up to bed as soon as you can!’
There seemed, however, to be no immediate prospect of being able to follow out this advice. Cynthia, apparently convinced by now that her mother was indeed dead, was engaged in working herself into a state of alarming hysteria. A spate of words jostled one another on her lips and for a few moments stunned the assembled company into appalled silence. ‘It’s all because I broke my mirror!’ she said. ‘I knew something frightful would happen! Mummy said it was just a superstition, and now you see! Everything’s gone wrong, every single thing! First I lost my powder-compact, and Dan said he’d give me another one, but he never did because he was murdered, and then everything was ghastly, and Mummy made me wear black, and was beastly about Lance, and now she’s been murdered, and nobody cares about me, or what becomes of me! I wish I’d married that dreary Bill Uffington! I wish I’d married anybody! It’s all Mummy’s fault I’m not even engaged, because dozens of men have asked me, only she kept on saying I was too young, and could do better if I waited, and now look what’s happened!’
‘Cynthia!’ uttered Miss Pickhill, finding her voice at last. ‘Be quiet, child! You don’t know what you’re saying!’
‘Go away!’ shrieked Cynthia, hurling her handbag at her aunt with more passion than accuracy. ‘I know what you mean to do! You mean to drag me off to that foul house of yours, and cover me up with antimacassars, and make me go to Church, and I’d rather die! And nothing will ever make me believe it wasn’t you who stole my precious compact!’ she added, rounding suddenly on Beulah. ‘It must have been either you or Mapperley, and it was you who said it was the prettiest one you’d ever seen! Mapperley said she didn’t like it as well as my gold one, so that shows! Oh, what am I going to do, with only Aunt Violet left? Oh, Mummy! Oh, Dan!’ She burst into a fit of wild sobbing, which turned into a succession of screams, when her aunt moved towards her. Neither her aunt’s appeals, nor Timothy’s stern command to her to Shut up! had the smallest effect; it was left to Mr Kane to put a summary end to a scene the echoes of which could probably be heard in Berkeley Square. This he did by limping to the sideboard, pouring out a tumbler of water, and casting it full in Cynthia’s face. The shock startled her out of her hysteria; she gave a gasp, stood for a moment in complete silence, and then began to cry in good earnest.
‘Take her up to bed!’ Jim said imperatively.
Between them, Beulah and Miss Pickhill managed to get her out of the room, and up the stairs. Hemingway said: ‘Poor young lady! What you might call a highly-strung type. If you’ll excuse me, there’s a call I want to put through.’
He then withdrew to the library, to discover Mr Eddleston’s home address; and the half-brothers were left alone in the dining-room.
‘Well, my God – !’ said Mr Kane. ‘The company you do keep, Timothy!’
‘You would come!’ Timothy retorted savagely. ‘I told you not to!’
‘Yes, but I’ve got to face Mother!’ said Jim. ‘You know perfectly well she thinks that if I wasn’t holding your hand at every critical stage in your career I ought to have been! Look here, Timothy, the whole of this affair’s fantastic! Who murdered the woman? Have you any idea?’
‘Only what I’ve gathered from the questions Hemingway asked Beulah. If you rule out Beulah, and the servants, everything seems to point to Godfrey Poulton. Apparently, he was the last person to see her alive. Butterwick – you don’t know him: Seaton-Carew’s boy-friend – Guisborough, and Poulton all came to see her this afternoon, in that order. I don’t know why, or what happened. And I can’t see the ghost of a reason for either Butterwick or Guisborough to have murdered her. If, as I’ve rather suspected, Mrs Haddington had been blackmailing Lady Nest, that gives Poulton a motive – but, good God, he must be mad to do it bang on top of the first murder! And I’m damned if I see why he murdered Seaton-Carew, unless Seaton-Carew was joined with Mrs Haddington in the blackmailing business. Even then – ! Well, it doesn’t make sense! He’s one of those who could have murdered Seaton-Carew; so’s young Butterwick – who, incidentally, is just the sort of neurotic who might have done it, in a fit of jealousy! Guisborough couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the first murder, and why he should suddenly burst in and strangle Mrs Haddington, in exact imitation of the first death, is more than I can fathom! The only motive he’s got, as far as I know, is that Mrs Haddington didn’t favour his suit, and if you think this is a good way of promoting it, all I can say is, it’s too far-fetched for me! He’s an overbalanced, tiresome sort of a chap, frothing over with half-baked political ideas, but he’s not by any means mad.’
‘Well, Poulton is most certainly not mad!’ said Jim. ‘I don’t know him well, but his reputation in the City is for long-headedness. Unexcitable chap, too. Don’t bite my head off ! – I’m not trying to be offensive! – but just where does Beulah stand in this imbroglio?’
‘You can take it from me she didn’t do it. Unless I miss my bet, she all unwittingly provided herself with an alibi. That’s being checked up on at this moment. I don’t think she quite grasped what Hemingway was after, but I did. If the man he’s sent off to her digs finds there what she says he will – and he will! – I think the time factor will let her out. She couldn’t possibly have got here from Earl’s Court a minute before she says she did. And, I ask you, Jim, is it likely that she’d go all the way to Earl’s Court, if she meant to slip back into the house and murder her employer? How was she to know in which room Mrs Haddington would be, too? The likeliest bet, at that hour, would be her bedroom, with her maid in attendance! Would even a lunatic go looking into all the possible rooms in a house teeming with servants? It doesn’t make sense!’
‘No,’ Jim agreed. ‘But unless there’s a homicidal maniac sculling about, none of it makes sense! I can just swallow Poulton’s murdering someone who was black mailing his wife – though I find that difficult, because from what I know of him he’d be far more likely to settle a blackmailer’s hash in some equally ruthless but strictly legal fashion – but I can’t swallow his murdering the blackmailer’s partner two days later! I don’t know your pal Guisborough, but I suppose, if he’s crazy about that afflictive girl, and Mrs Haddington was an effective bar to matrimony – the kid’s only nineteen, isn’t she? – he might have thought it would be a clever thing to murder the woman in exactly the same way the first chap was murdered, banking on Hemingway thinking that the same man must have done both deeds.’
‘You know, Jim, that’s definitely good!’ Timothy said thoughtfully. ‘The only snag is that it requires a cold-blooded type to think of it, let alone carry it out, and Guisborough isn’t that type. Far more down Poulton’s street, but of course the theory doesn’t fit him, because he’s already a suspect for the first m
urder. Guisborough’s an impulsive chap, and, to do him justice, I don’t think he’d murder a woman with the object of marrying her daughter! He might commit a murder in the heat of the moment, but I honestly don’t see him coolly plotting a crime like this.’
‘All right, what’s your theory?’
Timothy was frowning. ‘I haven’t really got one. The whole thing seems to hinge on the first murder, and I haven’t a clue who did that. There were five people who could have killed Seaton-Carew: Mrs Haddington, Poulton, Butterwick, Beulah, and me. You can rule Beulah and me out, and you can also rule out Mrs Haddington. I thought at one moment that things were pointing her way. No real reason, but what Beulah told me about that wretched coil of wire made it look slightly fishy. Well, that theory seems to have ended in a pretty nasty blind alley. We’re left with Poulton and Butterwick – and, of the two, Butterwick’s my fancy for the first murder, and Poulton for the second. And that combination doesn’t add up, look at it how you may!’
‘Hold on a minute! Didn’t you tell me that the doctor’s movements weren’t entirely accounted for that evening?’
‘No, hang it all, Jim, you must draw the line some where! Do you see a fashionable physician strangling a man in the middle of a Bridge-party?’
‘Why not? What if Seaton-Carew was a danger to him?’
‘Blackmailing him, do you mean? More likely to have slipped something lethal into his drink, if he wanted to get rid of him!’
‘Not at all,’ said Jim. ‘Poison would have made him
instantly suspect!’
‘You win that point,’ admitted Timothy. ‘Now tell me why he murdered Mrs Haddington!’
‘I haven’t yet worked that one out,’ confessed Jim.
‘And while you are working it out, work out how he got into the house without anyone’s knowing it!’
‘I can’t.’
‘Of course you can’t! And don’t ask me to consider poor old Roddy Vickerstown, because it’s a sheer waste of time. He’s not above lending the light of his countenance to hopeless outsiders, who feed and wine him in the style to which he’s accustomed, but he does draw the line somewhere! He’s tottering round the town saying that the fellah can’t be a gentleman, because strangling is the lowest form of murder, and no one with any breeding at all would dream of killing a man in somebody else’s house. Dam’ bad form, my boy!’
Jim grinned. ‘All right, wash him out too! Where do you go from there?’
‘I think the first murder was premeditated, and the second wasn’t. And, working from that point, it looks as if the same man did both. Quite obviously, things were desperate, and Mrs Haddington had to be silenced. Supposing she knew who committed the first murder?’
‘Then why didn’t she clear herself by telling the police what she knew?’
‘That’s just the point: if she’d been in danger of taking the rap, she undoubtedly would have told the police. But you weren’t privileged to know the lady! She was one of the most coldblooded, calculating females I’ve encountered. My guess – and I admit it is only a guess – is that she was planning the biggest blackmailing coup of her career, and that was why she had to be eliminated.’
‘Yes, but wait a bit, Timothy! What was to stop the guilty party paying up until all the smoke had cleared away, and then disposing of Mrs Haddington, when the police were not haunting the house?’
‘The fact that Mrs Haddington was herself a suspect!’ said Timothy instantly. ‘He dared not chance it. If she got charged with the murder, she’d spill the beans at once: she’d have to!’
‘I expect there’s a flaw in it somewhere,’ said Jim, ‘but I’m bound to say it’s quite ingenious, if you can clear the first hurdle. Would she really cash in on the death of an old friend?’
‘I should say that the only thing she wouldn’t cash in on would be Cynthia,’ replied Timothy. ‘She was a remarkably repellent piece of work, but I’ll hand her this! – she was utterly devoted to that very unrewarding girl! Praise be to God, here’s my intended at last! How are things, darling?’
‘Nightmareish!’ Beulah said, shuddering. ‘We’ve got her to bed, and Mrs Foston’s going to sit with her till she goes to sleep. I don’t think it’ll be long. I’m sorry for Miss Pickhill, having to take on the job of looking after her. I know she’s a bit drunk, and, of course, shock does make people react queerly, but when I left she seemed to be deriving consolation from the thought that she would now be frightfully well-off, and could do anything she liked. For God’s sake, take me out, and give me something to eat! With the slightest encouragement, I shall pass out, which is probably because I’ve had nothing but a cup of tea and a biscuit since luncheon.’
‘You will get no encouragement from either of us,’ said Timothy, taking her arm in a sustaining way, and propelling her towards the door. ‘Come on, Jim! Dinner!’
Seventeen
It was some little time later that Sergeant Snettisham returned to Charles Street, and laid before his chief Mrs Haddington’s household bills. He explained that it had taken him rather a long time to complete the journey, because in each instance he had just missed a train. His timing added ten minutes to Beulah’s estimate of the double journey; he gave it as his opinion that to allow only half an hour from door to door was running it very fine.
‘That seems to let her out, then,’ Hemingway said. ‘Not that I ever fancied her much, I’m bound to say.’ He glanced at his watch, and once more turned to the stand which held the telephone directories, and drew out one of the volumes. As he flicked over the pages, he said: ‘I don’t think there’s anything more you can do tonight: you can get off home.’
‘Thank you, sir. What’s going to happen about the Inquest tomorrow?’
‘We shall ask for an adjournment. I’m meeting Mrs Haddington’s solicitor here later in the morning. You’ve sealed up those two rooms? All right: tell your chaps they can clear off now!’
He himself, when he left the house, was driven to the street in Chelsea where Lord Guisborough shared a maisonette with his sister. It was by this time after nine o’clock, and it was apparent to Hemingway, as he alighted from the policecar, that someone in the house was entertaining a party. One or two small cars were parked outside; and from the lower floor issued a muffled roar of sound, strongly reminiscent of the lion-house at the Zoo, but indicated to the initiated that a number of persons, being gathered together, were all talking together. The noise was obviously too great to allow of anyone’s hearing the front-door bell, so, after keeping his finger on it for nearly a minute, Hemingway resorted to the knocker. At the third assault on the door, it was opened to him by a dark young woman in a crumpled skirt, and an orange knitted jumper, who held a large jug in one hand, and had a half-smoked cigarette between her lips. She blinked at Hemingway, and said: ‘Hallo! Who are you? Not that it matters: come right in! The gin ran out twenty minutes ago, but there’s plenty of beer. Have some!’
She raised the jug, and seemed to be about to pour some beer into a non-existent glass. Hemingway thoughtfully straightened the perilously poised jug, saying: ‘No, thank you, miss. Are you the Honourable Beatrice Guisborough?’
‘No, I’m bloody well not! Don’t you go saddling me with outworn titles! I’m Trix Guisborough! Neither more nor less! Try the title-stuff on my brother: he’ll lap it up! Give him time, and he’ll be one of the pillars of the Tory party, poor little sap! Are you one of his nice new respectable pals? Strictly speaking, this is my party, but make yourself at home! You’ll find Lance in that mob.’ She jerked her head towards the door into the studio, which stood open, and revealed a glimpse of many people seen through a thick haze
of tobacco-smoke.
Hemingway produced his card, and handed it to her. It took her a moment or two to get it into focus, and he wondered how many more slightly inebriated young women he was destined to meet that evening. When she had succeeded in deciphering it, she gave a laugh, and exclaimed: ‘God, I shall dine out on this one! A whole, l
ive Chief Inspector at one of my parties!’
‘And very nice too, I’ve no doubt,’ said Hemingway. ‘But I haven’t come to the party, miss, thanking you all the same. What I want is a few words with your brother.’
‘I shouldn’t think they’d do you much good: he’s well away!’ she replied. ‘If you want to call me anything, call me Comrade, not miss! What do you want with Lance?’
‘I’ll tell him, if you’ll be so good as to fetch him along,’ said Hemingway.
‘But why?’ she argued. ‘If it’s about the murder the other night, Lance can’t tell you anything! The man you want is Butterwick. If you don’t recognise the descrip tion, I mean a God-awful little pansy-boy, with curly hair and long eyelashes! You take a look at him, and you’ll know why the privileged classes are doomed! And I don’t want any dirty cracks about Lance!’ she added fiercely. ‘He’s got himself into a rotten set, that’s all that’s the matter with him! He’s got a bourgeois streak which makes him think it’s the hell of a thing to be a peer of the realm, but he’ll get over it! Trust me!’
‘Listen, Comrade!’ said Hemingway. ‘If you were to carry on like this in Russia, keeping the police hanging about instead of hopping to it double-quick, you’d wake up to find yourself in a salt-mine, and not such a bad thing either! You go and tell this bourgeois brother of yours I want to speak to him, and don’t waste your time blasting the privileged classes to me, because, for one thing, I don’t belong to them, and, for another, I don’t like corny stories! That one was stale before the War!’