House in Charlton Crescent (15 page)

The eyes of the man watching seemed to drink in every detail of her loveliness. “Darling!” he said hoarsely at last. “Don't forget, child. Don't let John Daventry—”

The girl drew up her small golden head. “John Daventry is nothing to me,” she said icily. “If, after all, you do not trust me, Davy!”

“I trust you with everything,” the man said with sudden fire, “even with life itself.”

Several people were coming in. A little group gathered in the middle of the room and obstructed the view of the watcher on the side opposite. When once more she could see clearly the girl had gone, the man was sitting alone at the table. He beckoned to the waitress and put the bill into her hand with what was evidently an unusually liberal tip, to judge by her expression.

The watcher got up and paid her modest account.

“I shall always be thankful that my mother made me learn the lip language when was a child,” she said to herself as she went out.

“And now,” said Inspector Furnival, “there is a little hard work before us, Mr. Cardyn, if we want to elucidate the mystery of Charlton Crescent.”

Bruce Cardyn did not attempt to answer this thrust. Of late he had not been thinking so much of the dead Lady Anne Daventry as of the live Dorothy Fyvert. For Dorothy had been as good as her word. Ever since she had discovered Cardyn to be a detective she had deliberately cold-shouldered him, she had never spoken to him unless absolutely compelled, and she had taken pains to express her contempt for his chosen calling, whenever possible. Yet for that very reason perhaps Cardyn's thoughts dwelt on her persistently. She had dominated them more or less ever since the night of the fire; he had not realized himself to how great an extent until he met her again in Charlton Crescent. Then what had been heretofore a cherished memory became a living, breathing reality—the goddess of his dreams had become a very woman.

Inspector Furnival smiled as he looked at him. 

“Come now, Mr. Cardyn, you must rouse yourself. There are just a few questions I should like you to consider with me before we set to work. I wonder if you can form an idea what they are.”

Cardyn shook his head wearily. “Probably my ideas would not coincide with yours.”

“Well, come in here and I will show you my list. You can see how you would answer them.” The inspector opened the library door as he spoke.

The house was now entirely in the hands of the police. They had just watched the dispersal of the household. John Daventry had gone down to the Keep in his small touring car, taking with him Soames who was about to apply for the transfer of the licence of the Daventry Arms. Mr. and Mrs.

Fyvert had been accompanied to North Coton by their two nieces, with Margaret Balmaine and their respective maids. The other servants had dispersed in different directions, all leaving their addresses with the police. Though none of the furniture had gone the house looked cold and dismantled in the absence of the life and movement that had so recently pervaded it.

Cardyn shivered as he followed Inspector Furnival. The library was the only room in the house that looked much the same as usual. Since Lady Anne's death it had become the headquarters of the police, and Inspector Furnival's papers were strewn about, while books, presumably on subjects in the inspector's mind, lay on the table.

The inspector took his favourite chair, and, drawing a sheet of foolscap towards him, wrote:

“Question 1. Did Lady Anne Daventry herself sell her pearls to Messrs. Spagnum, or did some one impersonate her sufficiently cleverly to deceive their manager?

“Question 2. Who engineered the man at the window?”

Cardyn bent forward as the inspector's capable fingers wrote down the second.

“Engineered?” he questioned.

“Yes—um, well, yes!” The inspector tapped his lip with his pencil. “Perhaps ‘engineered' is not the proper word, and yet it describes what I mean better than ‘managed' or ‘helped.'”

“But do you mean that some one in the house knew—helped?” Bruce questioned.

“In the house or not—I do!” the inspector said firmly. “Why, put it to yourself, Mr. Cardyn. How could any man get up to that window and get away again without being seen unless he had the help of some one! How he did it is sufficiently difficult of explanation, even with the help.

“Question 3. Who made the footmarks on the border, under the window at the back of the hall?

“When those three questions are answered, Mr. Cardyn, we shall be in a position to say who stabbed Lady Anne Daventry, as I firmly believe.”

“Ah, when!” Bruce Cardyn echoed, looking at them.

“And now,” the inspector went on, “the first thing we have to do is to make a thorough and systematic search of the house. I think we will begin with the rooms of the two young ladies. But first let me show you this.” He took a sheet of paper from his pocket-book and handed it to Cardyn.

The young man's heart beat fast as he saw the writing: “The fifty-pound note about which you were inquiring,” Dorothy had written curtly, “was given me last week as my half-yearly allowance, by my aunt, Lady Anne Daventry—”

“What do you think of that?” the inspector inquired.

“I am quite certain that whatever Miss Fyvert tells you is true,” Bruce Cardyn said steadily.

“Quite so, quite so!” The inspector's eyes twinkled as he watched the young man's moody face. “You understand, of course, that this is one of the notes paid by Messrs. Spagnum and Thirgood to the real or supposed Lady Anne Daventry?”

“I recognized that at once!” assented Cardyn. “And that answers your first question. Lady Anne must have sold the pearls herself since she gave part of the price to Miss Fyvert.”

“Oh, oh! Is that all you have to say, Mr. Cardyn?” the inspector questioned ironically. “I do not think matters will be settled quite so quickly as that. But now to the bedrooms— Miss Balmaine's first.”

Margaret Balmaine had occupied a large bedroom on the landing above Lady Anne's. Like the rest of the house it was furnished in Victorian fashion—a big four-poster, a massive wardrobe, a large mahogany dressing-table with a big oval mirror inset; the chairs, the couch and the washstand were all of the same heavy type. Apparently Miss Balmaine had not troubled to make any changes. The only traces of her occupancy that a cursory glance revealed were sundry empty bottles on the toilet table, and a few ashes in the empty fireplace, and an incongruous note was struck by the presence of a small sewing-machine on a side table.

The inspector began to search the room in a very systematic manner. Every shelf, every drawer in the sewing-machine, even every peg in the wardrobe was moved. Every bottle was opened, every small box, every inch of the furniture and bedstead scrutinized. In one thing only, as far as they could see, had Lady Anne been up-to-date with in her bedrooms. Instead of the all-over carpet of Victorian days, the floors were stained and there were soft rugs spread at the bedside and before the fireplace. At last the inspector paused.

“Not much to be learned here?”

“The fireplace!” Cardyn had got out his microscope. The inspector had his in his hand. Together they knelt down, but the ashes were just ashes of wood and coal, that was all. When they had finished, the inspector stood up.

“Well, sometimes there is as much to be learned from what you don't find in a person's room as from what you do.”

Bruce made no answer. He regarded this meticulous search of Margaret Balmaine's room as entirely superfluous. The inspector drew up the bottom sash of the window and leaned out, looking upwards and downwards and twisting himself about this way and that, so that he could get a good view sideways. The creepers on this side of the house grew right up to the window-sills and had been parted so as to climb up each side.

Inspector Furnival stretched out and plucked a large ivy leaf from just below the ledge.

“Miss Balmaine evidently thought it so important to destroy all trace of what she burned that she even gathered the ashes together and threw them out of the window,” he remarked as he displayed a slight powdering of white ash upon the ivy leaf. 

“No hope of finding out what was burnt from that. But as said before we may gather a good deal from the fact that it was burned. But come, want to have a look at Lady Anne's bedroom.” He led the way to the big room below.

Cardyn followed, mildly wondering. It seemed to him that they had gone through every inch of this room over and over again already. Lady Anne's furniture in her own room was even more Victorian than in the rest of the house. The four-poster, with its carefully calendered chintz hangings, seemed to belong to an even earlier period. There were no gimcrack ornaments or bottles of essences or cosmetics in her room, nothing but a few solid boxes and two very large, beautifully cut crystal scent-bottles much like the looking-glass.

The inspector did not waste much time. He went straight to the wardrobe where Lady Anne's dresses were and threw open the door. Modern fashions and post-war tendencies had affected Lady Anne not one whit. John Daventry had once said of her that had crinolines been worn when she was young she would have been wearing them at the time of her death. As it was she wore the long flounced dresses, the fichus, the corsets, the leg of mutton sleeves, and the tightly-fitting bodices of the late Victorian era. Her dress had been simplified by the fact that since her boys' death she had worn nothing but black. In the long drawers reposed her fine old laces, a couple of Indian shawls, dainty cobwebby linen and silk undergarments—her gowns in various stages of wear were hanging in the big middle compartment. The inspector made straight for this division and dived in, to emerge a moment later with a triumphant expression.

“Yesterday I counted eight gowns, to-day—to-day there are nine.”

“What do you say?” Cardyn was regarding him with a distinctly sceptical expression. “Where should the ninth come from, pray?”

“The ninth,” said the inspector, taking out the garments one by one and laying them on the bed, “was worn by the woman who impersonated Lady Anne at Spagnum and Thirgood's.”

“If there was such a woman,” Bruce questioned, “why should she put her gown here?”

“To get rid of it of course,” the inspector said, with what Bruce usually termed his air of cocksureness. “Don't you remember that every one in the house was likely to have his or her luggage searched? I had some such eventuality as this in my mind when I framed that order. You see the possession of a gown of this kind would inevitably have damned the possessor. It was too bulky to be hidden or burned. This I call a brilliant idea for disposing of it. It might have succeeded, probably would have, if the idea of making a note of the number of dresses in Lady Anne's wardrobe had not occurred to me yesterday. Now, to discover the interloper.”

He turned back to the bed and began to examine the garments minutely.

Cardyn watched him for a moment. “I am not supposing you made a mistake in the number of dresses yesterday. But it is surely possible that the maid transferred another gown of Lady Anne's to the wardrobe?”

“She hadn't the chance!” the inspector said as his quick, capable fingers turned the garments over. “Pirnie went early yesterday afternoon, you may remember. There was nothing to keep her— her work was over. I went over to the wardrobe after she was gone.”

“Then this was only put in last night!”

The inspector nodded. “And I should have caught the person who did it in the act, but the child Maureen had an attack of sleep-walking and I followed her. A good thing I did, for she seemed to be trying to throw herself out of the window. Her sister was terrified.”

“Which window?” Cardyn questioned quickly.

“The one at the back of the landing over this,” the inspector answered, throwing another gown back. “These damned things look all alike and we shall have to get a dressmaking expert here.”

“I believe they always have the name of the woman that made them stuck on somewhere—on a bit of tape, don't you know?” ventured Cardyn. “Now, if one of these was different from the others it might tell us something.”

“Brainy idea!” commented the inspector. “But unfortunately every one of these gowns has the name of Lady Anne's dressmaker upon it. What do you make of that?”

“It looks to me as if you were on the wrong track,” Cardyn commented. “I should say they were all Lady Anne's.”

“Would you indeed!” the inspector questioned in that satiric voice of his that seemed to be reserved for Cardyn.

He had taken a small case from his pocket and was looking intently at what looked like a snippet of black rag laid across.

“I suppose you are wondering where this came from?” As Bruce did not reply, he went on, “It was caught in a little bit of the side of the table on which Miss Balmaine's sewing-machine stands.”

“A—h!” Bruce drew a long breath. “Still–”

“In itself it is nothing. But Miss Balmaine burned something, remember, and there would be bonnet and mantle to get rid of. This tiny bit of silk is almost too small to make certain, but I believe it is exactly the same texture as this gown,” pointing to the one that lay by itself.

Bruce put the piece of silk on the skirt of the gown and examined it through his microscope. “I believe it is. You see this gown is much thicker than some of the others. It is what is called watered silk—and on this little piece I see a suspicion of the water.”

“Well done!” said the inspector absently.

But he did not appear to be much excited at the discovery. He was holding the gown up at arm's length, shaking it and peering into the folds.

He drew out a tiny bit of notepaper, a scrap that had evidently once been part of a letter.

“Ah! at last we have caught our clever friend napping!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “‘Impossible to come to you, my sweetheart, until suspicion has—'” That was all. On the other side of the paper was nothing, and not another scrap of paper was to be found, search and shake as the inspector would. At last he desisted and turned to Cardyn. “I suppose that you will hardly assert that this belonged to Lady Anne.”