Crime at Tattenham Corner (27 page)

“And me, milady, when you are gone and Señor da Dominiguez, what am I to do?”

“Stay here,” Lady Burslem said decidedly. “I will let you know when I make any fresh plans, and where you can join me. Now, inspector, I am ready.”

“I have a private car at a side-door, if you will kindly come this way. I thought you would prefer it.”

The inspector led the way to the right to the same entrance by which Sir John and Harbord had already left.

As they reached the door of the lift there came a tragic interruption – a loud voice for once rendered unsteady by tears.

“Where are you going, Sophie? Where is this – man – this brute taking you?”

“To prison,” Lady Burslem said quietly. “He – he says I helped to murder your husband. Never mind, Kitty. It does not matter. Nothing matters now.”

“Indeed, it does matter,” Mrs. Jimmy contradicted noisily. “It is a vile thing – a wicked thing. You that are as innocent as a child unborn. And you, sir” – turning with a vicious fury to Stoddart – “what sort of a man do you call yourself? A cheat – a coward – a – a –”

The inspector's eyes fell shamefacedly before hers. But he touched the bell for the lift.

“I am sorry, but I have no time for more this morning.”

“You will hear some more, though,” Mrs. Jimmy raved as the lift came up.

The inspector moved aside to let Lady Burslem pass in and stepped in after her. Then he barred the entrance with his arm until the door was closed. 

“I cannot allow anyone else to come in. Later on, you will be allowed to see Lady Burslem if she wishes it.”

“Yes, yes! I will see you later,” Lady Burslem said feverishly. “You have been very kind, Kitty. I shall not forget.”

It was the room in which prisoners were allowed to see their friends, a long table ran down the middle and at each end stood a warder. At one side Pamela Burslem was sitting on a visitors' chair, her head bent on her hands, her shoulders shaken by dry, bitter sobs. Her small, piquant face was disfigured by marks of recent weeping, but she was not crying now. Instead, her eyes were hard and bright, though her whole frame was shaken by those hard, tearless sobs. On the other side of the table of division Sir John Burslem was standing, that tall, gaunt figure of a man with the thin, yellowing face that was like and yet so unlike the father Pamela had known and loved all her life.

“Pam, my child, you must be brave,” he was saying in the voice that was the one thing that seemed unaltered to Pamela.

Pamela made a desperate attempt to steady herself, but those racking sobs still shook her.

“Can you ever forgive me? Never – never shall I 
forgive – never can I forget –”

“Forgive you, child?” Sir John put out his hand as though to lay it on her head; then with a glance at the warders drew it back. “It is I who should ask your forgiveness, dear,” he said gently. “When I think of all the worry and the suffering I have brought upon you and Sophie, I feel as if I should never forgive myself.” Then Pamela raised her head. “Was it fair, dad? You let – her – know, and you let me go on thinking –” Another of those sobs choked her utterance.

“My dear child.” Her father's eyes were full of pity; his voice was very gentle. “It was not a question of my letting Sophie know. Fate – Fate brought her into my terrible secret. But you – you were too young. I could not shadow your young life. I thought – I hoped you might never know it. It was too appalling a burden to be shared by a young girl – a child almost.”

“Lady Burslem is not very much older,” Pamela murmured resentfully.

“My poor Sophie – no!” Sir John said tenderly. “Pam, remember that whatever happens you must be good to Sophie. She has been faithful to me, devoted to me, as I firmly believe no other woman on earth would have been or ever has been to the man she loved. For my sake she has given up the world. I leave her as a sacred charge to you, Pam.”

Pamela looked at him for a minute in silence. Then, as some sense of his meaning dawned upon her, every drop of colour drained slowly from her face.

“Dad, oh, dad! You can't – it can't –”

The head warder, who in pity had been looking away from the girl's agonized face, now made a sign to Sir John.

“Time is up, sir.”

Sir John looked almost relieved, though the sorrow in his eyes was ever deepening. “Go now, my dear child. You shall see me again before long. And forgive your most unhappy father. Good-bye, my little Pam.”

Two warders moved towards him. One stood back and held the door open for Pamela. But the girl waited, looking after Sir John, a world of longing in her eyes.

“Dad!” she whispered brokenly.

Then groping for the wall and the door like a blind woman, she helped herself along to the passage outside where Stanyard and Wilmer were waiting for her. Stanyard took her bodily in his arms and half carried her to the waiting car.

The Burslem Mystery was the talk of London. In the first place, it had excited the popular imagination as no murder case of recent years had done. Ellerby's disappearance had intrigued the public and had intensified the horror of the murder, and recent developments had raised popular excitement to fever height. The daily papers were full of it. Edition after edition was sold out and the wildest rumours were current. When Sir John and Lady Burslem had appeared at the police court, not only was the court thronged, so that even standing-room was impossible, but the enormous crowd that had gathered outside was larger than anything ever seen in that part of London.

Nothing but formal evidence of arrest was taken that first time, and the case was adjourned for a week to give the police time to complete their inquiries and the Burslems time to prepare their defence. In the meantime the public was anticipating the unfolding of a story as dramatic, as absorbing in its human interest as anything that had ever appeared upon the boards.

Inspector Stoddart had been warmly congratulated by his superiors on his successful handling of the case. This evening, however, as he sat in his private office there was no triumph in his face, only a great sadness. Harbord, sitting opposite, had just come in to express his admiration for his superior's acumen and was surprised and puzzled by his reception.

“When I think of that poor, little woman's pluck and her devotion to her husband, how she has planned and schemed to guard and save him, and then remember how I have hunted her, I do not feel proud. I can only think of her despair.”

“But, after all, you have to think of the other man,” Harbord objected. “From all accounts he was much interested in his life and his exploring work. Why should his brother shoot him? And then there is Mrs. James to consider.”

“Pwf!” The inspector snapped his fingers. “That is all that Mrs. James would care. But now Sir John has made a statement in which he says that his brother, who had evidently been waiting for him, stopped his car at Hughlin's Wood and attacked him, reproaching him with having advised the sale of some shares which, low then, went up enormously later. And he had discovered that Sir John had bought the shares himself and thereby made what to James Burslem would have been quite a fortune. He had professed himself dissatisfied with his brother's advice on several occasions before, and this seemed to have put the lid on it. He had always been a man of violent temper, and he rushed at Sir John, stick in hand, and violently assaulted him. Sir John defended himself. Then James Burslem produced a pistol; Sir John tried to snatch it and managed to get hold of it.

“He declares that he had not the slightest intention of using it against his brother, that he did not even know it was loaded, but in the scuffle it went off, and. James Burslem fell back dead. Sir John was horrified, at what he had done and tried this best to restore his brother – in vain. Both he and Lady Burslem got thoroughly panicky. Of course he was a perfect fool. He ought to have gone at once to the police and given himself up that night – probably would have reduced the charge to manslaughter, though the share business was a nasty snag.

“The idea of impersonating his brother came to Lady Burslem first. She got it out of a French novel, she says. The two brothers had always been alike. The change of the contents of the pockets was soon made, and Sir John and Lady Burslem got in their car and drove back to 15 Porthwick Square. There, as we know, Sir John hurriedly made that extraordinary will, giving sole control of his great financial enterprises to his wife. And of course you see the idea – intending for the future to direct them through her.”

Harbord looked thoughtful. He had listened with absorbed attention to the story as related by his superior. “Why did he throw his brother's body into the ditch? That looked pretty bad, and would not have worked in well with the plea of manslaughter?”

“It would not,” the inspector agreed. “Possibly Sir John sees that, for he swears that he left the body lying by the side of the road, quite near the ditch, but certainly not in it.”

“How did it get in, then?” Harbord asked abruptly.

“Ask me another. Lady Burslem told me that the horrible idea had occurred to her several times that possibly James Burslem was not dead when they left him, and receiving consciousness and turning over in his weak condition managed to roll into the ditch and was drowned.”

“The medical evidence puts the stopper on that,” Harbord said after a pause.

The inspector nodded. “Exactly. James Burslem had been dead some little time before he was put into the water.”

“Then this only complicates matters,” Harbord remarked.

“I am afraid it will not be regarded as much of a complication at the trial,” the inspector said.

Harbord drummed his fingers on the table. “What do you think of Burslem's chances of getting off, sir?”

The inspector shrugged his shoulders. “As far as I can see of the case he does not stand an earthly. But juries are curious things and sometimes take very curious views. If Lady Burslem is put in the dock with Sir John, sentiment may triumph over common sense.”

“I cannot even now make out how you got to the bottom of it all,” Harbord remarked in a puzzled fashion.

“I think it was something in Ellerby's manner when he made the identification that did not seem to ring true. Then I had the teeth examined, and, though the two brothers had good teeth, all the evidence went to show that Sir John had had a gold- filled tooth on the top jaw which was absent from that of the corpse found in the ditch. Nowhere have I been able to find the dentist who put it in, and of course both Ellerby and Lady Burslem assured me that Sir John had broken it off and neglected to have another put on. However, independent dental testimony did not confirm this. There was no stump left in the mouth that showed any evidence of having been stopped or crowned with gold. Of course that was not conclusive, but it confirmed my previous opinion. Also I felt certain from his manner that Ellerby was deep in the plot.”

“By the way, what has become of Ellerby?” Harbord interrupted. 

“Sir John merely said he did not know where he was, which I feel certain is a lie. Ellerby is quite safe, though; I always felt certain of that. He managed to do a bunk that night from 15 Porthwick Square. Probably he went to Sir John, who was then lying perdu at Mrs. Johnson's in Lorraine Street, passing as Mrs. Johnson's brother. How the pair of them managed to get out of this country I cannot imagine. Sometimes I think they must have flown over to Spain. For undoubtedly Sir John has been there, and Lady Burslem too. Had this crisis in Sir John's financial affairs not brought them back to England, since Sir John could not bear the thought of the great enterprises he had built up with such indefatigable skill being brought to nothing, there is no doubt that he at any rate would be safe in the Argentine by now; for that was what the sale of Peep o' Day meant. Sir John intended to take as many of his home interests as he could over to South America. Later, of course, Lady Burslem would have joined him and they would have lived in some out-of-the-way spot and hoped never to have been discovered.”

“Would they have succeeded – in escaping detection, I mean?” Harbord asked.

The inspector shook his head.

“No. For the simple reason that we were already on the trail. Their discovery could have been only a matter of time.”

“There are a lot of minor puzzles though,” Harbord said gloomily. “How did Stanyard's cigarette-case get into Sir John's car, and the handkerchief into his?”

“Don't know,” the inspector said shortly. “It may be that I have my own ideas, but ideas are not proof.”

“And the woman in the case – or I should say the women,” Harbord pursued, “the one who watched behind the trees at Hughlin's Wood and the one who drove into the parking ground after Sir John on that fatal night. The one, too, who was seen talking to Stanyard a little way from Epsom.”

The inspector stretched out his hand and possessing himself of a box of cigarettes placed it between them.

“Help yourself. Now I am going to ask you a question, Alfred. If you can answer that it may help you with the answers to yours. How did James Burslem get to Hughlin's Wood that night?”

“I don't know,” said Harbord, staring at him.

“Have you forgotten the second car?” the inspector said quietly. “The one that was seen before Sir John's with a man and a woman in it?”

“N–o!” Harbord hesitated. “I have always taken it for granted that it was Stanyard's car and that possibly he had brought some one down from town.”

“To watch him commit a murder?” the inspector questioned dryly. “No, that idea won't wash, Alfred. As I see it now, Stanyard had nothing to do with the case at all. He does not come into Sir John's story. Nor does he fit into it, anyhow as far as I can see. Somebody else does, though.”