"Did you wait while she spoke to them?"
"No, I went up to my room to hear Susie Sclanders's imitations. She does ten minutes on a Wednesday once a month, and she is wonderful, and of course I couldn't listen to her properly with Em talking."
"I see. And Miss Garrowby?"
"Liz arrived back from the village just too late to talk to them."
"What time was this, do you remember?"
"I don't remember the exact time, but it must have been about twenty minutes before dinner. We had dinner early that night because my sister was going out to a W.R.I, meeting. Dinner at Trimmings is always being put either back or forwards because someone is either going somewhere or coming from some place."
"Thank you very much, Miss Fitch. And now, if I might see Searle's room once more I won't bother you again."
"Yes, of course."
"I'll take the Inspector up," Liz said, ignoring the fact that Walter, who was still hovering, was the normal person to escort him.
She got up from the typewriter before Miss Fitch could intervene with any alternative proposal, and led the Inspector out.
"Are you going away because you have come to a conclusion, Inspector, or because you haven't; or shouldn't I ask that?" she said as they went upstairs.
"I am going as a matter of routine. To do what every officer is expected to do; to present his report to his seniors and let them decide what the facts add up to."
"But you do some adding first, surely."
"A lot of subtraction, too," he said, dryly.
The dryness was not lost on her. "Nothing makes sense in this case, does it," she agreed. "Walter says he couldn't have fallen into the river accidentally. And yet he did fall in. Somehow."
She paused on the landing outside the tower room. There was a roof-light there and her face was clear in every detail as she turned to him and said: "The one certain thing in this mess is that Walter had nothing to do with Leslie's death. Please believe that, Inspector. I'm not defending Walter because he is Walter and I am going to marry him. I've known him all my life, and I know what he is capable of and what he is not capable of. And he is not capable of using physical violence to anyone. Do please believe me. He—he just hasn't the guts."
Even his future wife thought him a pushee, Grant observed.
"Don't be misled by that glove, either, Inspector. Do please believe that the most probable explanation is that Leslie picked it up and put it into his pocket meaning to give it back to me. I have looked for the other one of the pair in the car pocket and it isn't there, so the most likely explanation is that they fell out, and Leslie found one and picked it up."
"Why didn't he put it back in the car pocket?"
"I don't know. Why does one do anything? Putting something in one's pocket is almost a reflex. The point is that he wouldn't have kept it for the sake of keeping it. Leslie didn't feel about me like that at all."
The point, Grant thought to himself, wasn't whether Leslie was in love with Liz, but whether Walter believed Liz to be in love with Leslie.
He longed to ask Liz what happens to a girl when she is engaged to a pushee and along comes a left-over from Eden, an escapee from Atlantis, a demon in plain clothes. But the question, though pertinent, would certainly be unproductive. Instead, he asked her if Searle had ever received letters during his stay at Trimmings and she said that as far as she knew he had had none. Then she went away downstairs, and he went into the tower room. The tidy room where Searle had left everything except his personality.
He had not seen it in daylight before, and he spent a few moments having a look at the garden and the valley from the three huge windows. There was one advantage in not caring what your house looked like when it was finished; you could have your windows where they were likely to do most good. Then he turned once more to the task of going through Searle's belongings. Patiently, garment by garment, article by article, he went through them, vainly hoping for some sign, some revelation. He sat in a low chair with the photographic box open on the floor between his feet, and accounted for everything that a photographer might conceivably use. He could think of nothing— neither chemical nor gadget—that was missing from the collection. The box had not been moved since last he saw it, and the empty space still held the outline of what had been abstracted.
It was an innocent space. Articles are abstracted every day from packed cases, leaving the outline of their presence. There was no reason whatever to suppose that what had been taken out was of any significance. But why, in heaven's name, couldn't anyone suggest what that thing might have been?
Once more he tried the small cameras in the space,
v knowing quite well that they would not fit. He even
clapped a pair of Searle's shoes together and tried to fit
them into the space. They were half an inch too long
and the soles protruded above the general level so that the tray would not fit home and the lid was prevented from shutting. Anyhow, why carry clothing in a photographic box when you had ample room in the appropriate cases? Whatever had occupied the space had not been put in at random or in haste. It had been a neat and methodical packing.
Which suggested that the thing was put there because only Searle himself would have the unpacking of it.
Well, this, in the elegant phrase, was where he got off.
He put everything neatly back as he had found it; took another look at the Rushmere valley, and decided that he had had enough of it; and closed the door on the room where Leslie Searle had left everything but his personality.
SEVENTEEN
It was grey in town, but it was a friendly grey and comforting after the rainy levels of the Rushmere. And the young green of the trees in Westminster was vivid as fire against the dark background. It was nice to be among his own kind again; to get into that mental undress that one wears among one's colleagues; to talk the allusive unexplanatory talk that constituted Headquarters' "shop."
But it was not so nice to think of the coming interview with Bryce. Would it be one of Bryce's good days or one of his "off" ones? The Superintendent's average was one off day to three good ones, so the odds were three to one in his favour. On the other hand it was damp weather and the Superintendent's rheumatism was always worst in damp weather.
Bryce was smoking a pipe. So it was one of his good days. (On his off days he lit cigarettes and extinguished them in the ashtray five seconds after he had extinguished the match.)
Grant wondered how to begin. He couldn't very well say: Four days ago you handed over a situation to me, and the situation as far as I'm concerned is in all essentials exactly what it was four days ago. But that, put brutally, was how the case stood.
It was Bryce who saved him. Bryce examined him with his small shrewd eyes, and said: "If ever I saw 'Please, sir, it wasn't me' written on a man's face, it is on yours now," and Grant laughed.
"Yes, sir. It's a mess." He laid his notebooks on the table and took the chair at the other side of the table that was known in the office as the Suspect's Seat.
"You don't think that Bunny-Boy Whitmore did it, then?"
"No, sir. I think it's unlikely to the point of absurdity."
"Accident?"
"Bunny-Boy doesn't think so," Grant said with a grin.
"Doesn't he, indeed. Hasn't he even enough sense to come in out of the rain?"
"He's a simple sort of creature, in some ways. He just doesn't believe that it was an accident, and says so. The fact that it would be to his advantage to have it proved an accident is irrelevant in his view, apparently. He is wildly puzzled and troubled about the disappearance. I am quite sure he had nothing to do with it."
"Any alternative suggestion?" "Well, there is someone who had the opportunity, the motive, and the means."
"What are we waiting for?" Bryce said, flippant "Unfortunately the fourth ingredient is missing." "No evidence." "Not one sliver of a tittle." "Who is it?"
"The mother of Walter Whitmore's fiancée. Ste
pmother actually. She brought Liz Garrowby up from babyhood and is fanatically maternal about her. I don't mean possessive, but-------"
"All the best for our Liz."
"Yes. She was enormously pleased about her stepdaughter marrying her nephew, and keeping everything in the family, and I think Searle looked like upsetting the apple-cart. That is a possible motive. She has no alibi for the night in question, and she could have reached the place where they were camped quite easily. She knew where it was because each evening the men telephoned Trimmings, the Fitch place, to report progress, and on Wednesday night they described the place where they were going to bivouac."
"But she couldn't know that the men would quarrel and go back to the river separately. How was she going to work it?"
"Well, there's an odd thing about that quarrel.
Searle from all accounts was a markedly equable person, but it was he who provoked that quarrel. At least Whitmore says so, and I have no reason to doubt him. He twitted Whitmore about not being good enough for Liz Garrowby and boasted that he could take her from him in a week. He was quite sober, so anything so completely out of character must have had an ulterior motive."
"You think he manufactured a parting with Whitmore that evening? Why?"
"It could have been because he hoped to meet Liz Garrowby somewhere. The Garrowby girl was not at home that evening when the two men telephoned, so Mrs. Garrowby did proxy. I suggest that she might also have done proxy in a more serious way."
" 'Liz says will you meet her at the third oak past the old mill.' "
"Something like that."
"And then raging mother waits for him with a blunt instrument and tips the body into the river. I wish to heaven you had been able to recover that body."
"You don't wish it as badly as I do, sir. Without a corpse where are we?"
"Even with a corpse you have no-case."
"No. But it would be comforting, not to say illuminating, to know the state of the skull bones."
"Any evidence that Searle was interested in the girl?"
"He had one of her gloves in his collar drawer."
Bryce grunted. "I thought that sort of thing went out with valentines," he said, unconsciously paraphrasing Sergeant Williams.
"I showed it to her and she took it well. Said that he had probably picked it up and meant to give it back to her."
"And now I'll tell one," commented the Superintendent.
"She's a nice girl," Grant said, mildly.
"So was Madeleine Smith. Any second favourite in the suspect stakes?"
"No. Just the field. The men who had no reason to love Searle, and had the opportunity and no satisfactory alibi."
"Are there many?" Bryce said, surprised by the plural.
"There's Toby Tullis, who is still sick at the snubbing Searle administered. Tullis lives on the river-bank and has a boat. His alibi depends on the word of an infatuated follower. There's Serge Ratoff the dancer, who loathed Searle because of the attention Toby paid him. Serge, according to himself, was dancing on the greensward by the river's rim on Wednesday night. There's Silas Weekley, the distinguished English novelist, who lives in the lane down which Searle disappeared from human ken on Wednesday night. Silas has a thing about beauty; has a constant urge to destroy it. He was working in a hut at the end of the garden that night, so he says."
"No bets on the field?"
"N-o. I think not. A saver on Weekley, perhaps. He is the type that might go over the borderline any day, and spend the rest of his life happily typing away in Broadmoor. But Tullis wouldn't jeopardise all he has J built up by a silly murder like this. He is much too shrewd. As for Ratoff, I can imagine him setting off to do a murder, but long before he was half-way there he would have another fine idea and forget what he originally set out to do."
"Is this village entirely inhabited by crack-pots?"
"It has been 'discovered,' unfortunately. The aborigines are sane enough."
"Well, I suppose there is nothing we can do until the body turns up."
"// it turns up."
"They usually do, in time."
"According to the local police, five people have been drowned in the Rushmere in the last forty years. That is, leaving Mere Harbour and the shipping part out of the reckoning. Two were drowned higher up than Salcott and three lower down. The three who were drowned lower down than Salcott all turned up within a day or two. The two who were drowned above the village have never turned up at all."
"It's a nice look-out for Walter Whitmore," Bryce commented.
"Yes," Grant said, thinking it over. "They weren't very kind to him this morning."
"The papers? No. Awfully good-mannered and discreet but they couldn't have made pleasant reading for Bunny-Boy. A nasty spot to be in. No accusation, so no possible defence. Not that he has any," he added.
He was silent for a little, tapping his teeth with his pipe as was his habit when cogitating.
"Well, I suppose there is nothing we can do at the moment. You make a neat shipshape report and we'll see what the Commissioner says. But I don't see that there is anything more we can do. Death by drowning, no evidence so far to show whether accidental or otherwise. That's your conclusion, isn't it?"
As Grant did not answer immediately, he looked up and said sharply: "Isn't it?"
Now you see it, now you don't.
Something wrong in the set-up.
Don't let your flair ride you, Grant.
Something phoney somewhere.
Now you see it, now you don't.
Conjurer's patter.
The trick of the distracted attention.
You could get away with anything if you distracted the attention.
Something phoney somewhere. . . .
"Grant!"
He came back to the realisation of his chiefs surprise. What was he to say? Acquiesce and let it go? Stick to the facts and the evidence, and stay on the safe side?
With a detached regret he heard his own voice saying: "Have you ever seen a lady sawn in half, sir?"
"I have," Bryce said, eyeing him with a wary disapproval.
"It seems to me that there is a strong aroma of sawn-lady about this case," Grant said, and then remembered that this was the metaphor he had used to Sergeant Williams.
But Bryce's reaction was very different from the Sergeant's.
"Oh, my God!" he groaned. "You're not going to do a Lamont on us, are you, Grant?"
Years ago Grant had gone into the farthest Highlands after a man and had brought him back; brought him back sewn up in a case so fault-proof that only the sentence remained to be said; and had handed him over with the remark that on the whole he thought they had got the wrong man. (They had.) The Yard had never forgotten it, and any wild opinion in contradiction to the evidence was still known as "doing a Lamont."
The sudden mention of Jerry Lamont heartened Grant. It had been even more absurd to feel that Jerry Lamont was innocent in the face of an unbreakable case, than it was to smell "sawn-lady" in a simple drowning.
"Grant!"
"There's something very odd about the set-up," Grant said stubbornly.
"What is odd?"
"If I knew that it would be down in my report. It isn't any one thing. It's the—the whole set-up. The atmosphere. The smell of it. It doesn't smell right."
"Couldn't you just explain to an ordinary hardworking policeman what smells so wrong about it?"
Grant ignored the Superintendent's heavy-handed-ness, and said:
"It's all wrong from the beginning, don't you see. Searle's walking in from nowhere, into the party. Yes, I know that we know about him. That he is who he says he is, and all that. We even know that he came to England just as he says he did. Via Paris. His place was booked by the American Express office at the Madeleine. But that doesn't alter the fact that the whole episode has something queer about it. Was it so likely that he would be all that keen to meet Walter just because they were both friends of Cooney Wiggin?"
"Don't ask me! Was it?"
"Why this need to meet Walter?"
"Perhaps he had heard him broadcast and just couldn't wait."
"And he had no letters." "Who hadn't?"
"Searle. He had no letters all the time he was at Salcott."
"Perhaps he is allergic to the gum on envelopes. Or I have heard that people leave letters lying at their bank to be called for."
"That's another thing. None of the usual American banks or agencies has ever heard of him. And there is one tiny thing that seems odd to me out of all proportion to its actual value. Actual value to this case, I mean. He had a tin box, rather like an outsize paintbox, that he used to hold all his photographic stuff. Something is gone out of the box. Something roughly 10 inches by 3Vi by 4, that was packed in the lower compartment (it has a tray like a paint-box with a deeper space below). Nothing that is now among his belongings fits the space, and no one can suggest what the thing could have been."
"And what is so odd about that? There must be a hundred and one things that might have been packed in a space that size."
"As what, for instance, sir?"
"Well—well, I can't think off-hand, but there must be dozens."
"There is ample space in his other cases for anything he wanted to pack. So it wouldn't be clothes, or ordinary possessions. Whatever was there, in the tin box, was something that he kept where only he would be likely to handle it."
Bryce’s attention grew more sober at that.
"Now it is missing. It is of no obvious importance in this case. No importance at all, perhaps. It is just an oddity and it sticks in my mind."
"What do you think he might have been after at Trimmings? Blackmail?" Bryce asked, with interest at last.
"I don't know. I hadn't thought of blackmail."
"What could have been in the box that he could turn into cash? Not letters, that shape. Documents, perhaps? Documents in a roll."
"I don't know. Yes, perhaps. The thing against the blackmail idea is that he seemed to have ample means."
"Blackmailers usually have."
"Yes. But Searle had a profession that kept him very nicely. Only a hog would want more. And somehow he didn't look to me like a hog."