Puzzle of the Silver Persian (24 page)

“Very well.” He rang a bell and spoke to the young man who appeared. “Bring Hammond here, will you?”

He rose. “I’ll turn over my office to you, madam, for half an hour. And—if you need help, just call loudly.” He smiled and withdrew. A few moments later the terrible Gerald was ushered in, and the door closed firmly behind him.

“You’re a liar,” said that fat-faced urchin. “You’re not my aunt. I haven’t got any aunt.”

“Well, I’ll do until an aunt comes along,” Miss Withers said. Her tone was somewhat stern, and young Hammond left off scratching himself to stare at her. He saw the lady cross over to the master’s desk and take down a light cane which hung above it—mainly for moral significance, let us add.

“Hey!” cried the terrible Gerald. He backed swiftly toward the door, but Miss Withers was swifter. She turned the key in the lock and then took the pride of the Hammond household firmly by the nape of the neck.

She led him to a chair near the window. “Young man, sit down.” He sat, aided by a shove. “And now you and I are going to have a very pleasant little chat. At least, I hope it will be pleasant.”

Gerald had his doubts. “I don’ wanna chat—I don’—”

“Quiet,” Miss Withers advised. “Gerald, do you see this cane? Do you know what it is for?”

Gerald knew. He had felt it, or a similar one, twice already since his stay at the school—once for swearing and once for teaching a smaller boy to sing “Down in the Lehigh Valley.”

“Yes,” he admitted sullenly.

“Good!” Miss Withers smiled. “Then you and I will be able to come to an understanding. You said just now that I was a liar, which we shall let pass. I am not your aunt, nor did I say that I was. But a lie has been told—a lie which has done a good deal of harm.”

She swished with the stick so that it whistled in the air. “Gerald, I want you to be frank with me. Just what lie did you tell about your father?”

“I didn’t tell any lie—an’ if you lick me I’ll pay you back good and plenty.”

“I have switched larger boys than you,” Miss Withers told him. “And they lived to thank me for it.” Gerald showed natural skepticism at that statement.

“Well, are you ready to answer me?”

“I didn’t tell—”

Smack! The light cane caught Gerald Hammond on the ankles, and he opened his mouth to let forth a tremendous howl. But Miss Withers spoke calmly.

“If you cry out, Mr. Starling will come, and as he is stronger than I am I shall turn the stick over to him.”

Gerald closed his mouth. “Answer me,” said the school teacher. “You may as well get out with it.”

Gerald flushed and stammered, and then suddenly poured forth a torrent of words. Yes, he had told a lie, and it was good enough for his father, too. His father had licked him for cutting a teenty-weenty notch in the leg of the ship’s piano, licked him with a slipper. “And I—I told Mama that Papa was the man who was necking that big Fraser girl on deck,” he blurted. “I told her that I’d got out of the cabin where Mama locked me, and was playing Trap the Neckers with Virgil and his flashlight, and that I saw Papa and the Fraser girl get into the blanket locker box…”

“Aha!” said Hildegarde Withers. “And it wasn’t true?”

“N-no. But it served Papa right for licking me. I guess Mama was good an’ mad.”

“Did she mention this to your father?”

Gerald laughed scornfully. “Not her! She wouldn’t even speak to him, hardly, for days. She was good an’ mad, she was.”

“But you didn’t think of admitting the truth?”

“I’d have got another licking,” said Gerald simply.

Miss Withers stared out of the window at a peaceful landscape of rolling green hills and little pearl-gray cottages covered with vines. Her mouth was drawn rather tightly.

“Gerald, who was the man who got into the blanket locker?”

The youth frowned. “I don’ know his name. It was the guy who sold drinks and candy and stuff in the bar. An’ another man said he would give me a dollar if I could catch the big Fraser girl up to anything so he could have a laugh on her, and I saw them get into the locker, and I went down and told him and got the dollar. And I spent it,” he added.

“On yourself, of course?”

He shook his head. “I had to give Virgil a dime because he owned the flashlight.”

Miss Withers stared at him. “Young man, when you grow up you’ll probably be a bandit.”

Gerald sniffed. “I don’ wanna be a bandit. I wanna be a gangster.”

She nodded. A great many blanks had been filled in by this somewhat unwilling interview.

Gerald rose, very hastily. “Wait a moment, young man. Do you realize that you have perhaps wrecked your parents’ lives by this wicked lie? Your father is coming back tomorrow—will you tell him the truth about it all?”

“No,” said Gerald. “He might lick me.”

“He might,” Miss Withers agreed. “And in case he shouldn’t—”

There ensued a very unpleasant ten minutes, in which Miss Withers had her coat torn at the hem, and in which a howling urchin received a healthy warming upon the portion of his anatomy set aside by tradition for the express purpose.

Miss Withers hung up the cane and unlocked the door to find Starling outside. The headmaster looked perturbed.

“Really,” he began, “I had no idea…”

“I don’t approve of corporal punishment as a regular thing myself,” said Miss Withers. “But there are times…”

Gerald was sniveling behind her. “Hammond, go to the dormitory,” said Starling.

“Yes, sir,” said Hammond, and went.

The headmaster stared after him wonderingly. “Do you know, that’s the first time that Hammond has said ‘sir’ to me without being reminded at least twice?”

“Strong medicine,” said Miss Withers. “Repeat in small doses as needed.” She paused. “I happen to be a friend of his mother,” she explained. “It would be a distinct mistake if the boy were taken out of your hands, I’m convinced. In spite of what the father may say, keep him here.”

Starling nodded. “I intend to,” he said. “But the father was a little—unpleasant. I had to tell him that the Honorable Emily Pendavid had advised me not to accommodate him. That seemed to quiet him.”

“Did it!” Miss Withers said, and took her departure.

She rode back through the country lanes of Cornwall without noticing one of the sylvan vistas which opened up on either hand. Ancient stone fences, with stiles of granite slabs already worn thin when the Normans invaded England, slipped past unnoticed and unadmired.

As they came down the long slope leading to the little old town of Penzance, Miss Withers saw a white curl of smoke against the sky.

“The express from London,” explained the chauffeur proudly. It was five o’clock in the afternoon.

They drove onward, at a moderate rate of speed, and crawled through the town behind a truckload of market vegetables, which remained obdurate before repeated hoots of the horn. They stopped at the post office while the school teacher composed a cable, and then went on. Miss Withers was impatient to get back to Dinsul, very impatient indeed—yet she was to change her mind in the next few minutes.

At length the town was behind, and they passed into the huddle of fishing cottages that is Newlyn. Streets so narrow that the limousine almost grated on either wall—turns so sharp that the corner stones of the houses had been chipped away to form a rough curve—and then it happened.

A man, riding away from them on a bicycle, failed to duck into the nearest doorway with his wheel, in spite of the hoot of the horn. There was hardly time to stop—Miss Withers was thrown forward as the brakes screamed, and the rider leaped clear just as his machine was smashed under the tires of the limousine.

“Heavens above!” said Miss Withers. Then she noticed that Sergeant John Secker of the C.I.D. was clinging to the running-board.

He looked in at her, smiled rather feebly, and brushed the dew from his forehead. The sergeant was getting used to narrow escapes.

“Close, but not a hit,” he observed.

“Get in, get in,” she urged.

The driver was surveying the wreck of the bicycle. “Let it go,” said Secker. “I left a two-quid deposit on it, and that’s more than it was worth.” He turned to Miss Withers. “Glad to see you,” he said. “I was just trying to think of a way of getting word to you at the mausoleum without the others knowing.”

“But how did you know where I was?”

He grinned: “When you try to escape the Yard, don’t hail a taxi and go to Paddington,” he said. “Your trail was as clearly marked as an elephant’s.”

“Thank you,” Miss Withers remarked coldly. “And might I inquire—”

“Why I came. Surely. It was easier for me to come down here and take depositions from you and from some of the others involved than to have the provincial police attempt it, or to ask you to come back to town. There are a lot of loose ends to this case still—”

“Loose ends? It’s completely at a loose end, isn’t it?”

The sergeant laughed. “Was,” he admitted. “Though I’ve had a suspicion all along. But it was impossible until this morning.”

Miss Withers had a sudden fear that her own rapidly developing theory was being stolen from her. “You’re not going to tell me—”

“I’m going to tell you that we’ve got the murderer of Rosemary Fraser and Peter Noel and Andy Todd.” He beamed. “Guess who?”

Miss Withers was keeping her own counsel. “Well?”

“Rosemary Fraser herself!”

“You’ve what? Arrested Rosemary Fraser? You mean her suicide was faked?”

“Not faked,” said the sergeant. “Just predated a bit. You see, about six o’clock this morning two boatmen saw something in the Thames that didn’t look right. They investigated, and then called the river police: Rosemary Fraser’s body—or, at least, I was lucky enough to identify it when the word came through. You see, she was addicted to that long blue scarf, and shreds of it were still wound around her throat. Right off I saw the whole thing.”

Miss Withers felt a little ill. “Yes?”

“It’s clear enough, all but the gaps. And they’re small ones. La Fraser decided to die, that night on the ship. But she didn’t want to go without getting back at the people who had been so cruel and unkind to her—as she saw it. She was quite off her base, of course. She wrote all the unpleasant things that she could think of in her diary, but that didn’t satisfy her. She hid herself in a lifeboat while all the hue and cry went on, and next morning, when they were making a thorough search, she kept out of the way of the searchers—probably by slipping from her refuge into another one that had already been searched. Sounds a bit thick, but stowaways have done it before.”

“Um,” said Miss Withers. “Go on.”

“The ship comes up the Thames, and she overhears that the police are to make an investigation about her own disappearance. She hates Peter Noel, because it was her—er—her association with him which started everything. She knows he’ll be questioned and probably searched, so she writes a note to him and slips it where he’ll find it at the last minute. The note, you see, is soaked first in poison that she’s lifted from the doctor’s medicine chest. That would be easy late at night—the watchman makes his rounds very seldom and very regularly, I’m told. Noel has told her one of his cock-and-bull stories about swallowing evidence when he was a spy, or something similar. Well, he is arrested, and the note which is in his pocket would incriminate him and at least make him lose this widow in Minneapolis. He swallows it, thinking to beat the police, and the cyanide soaked into the paper finishes him as it hits his stomach. Remember the report that there was paper in his stomach?”

Miss Withers remembered. The sergeant went on. “Still hiding out, the girl slips ashore, perhaps disguised as one of the crew. It wouldn’t be hard late at night, and the ship stays in port for five days. She had no clothes, but she had money and purchased another outfit.”

“Including another squirrel coat?” Miss Withers suggested. “Go on.”

“She hid out in cheap lodgings, spying on the members of the passenger list of the ship. She had a real grudge against this chap Todd, because it was his misguided wit that exposed her own petty scandal. He went on a terrible binge, you remember, the night that Candida Noring turned him down and went out with Reverson. He had a terrific inferiority complex, which accounts for his virulence about the slight Rosemary gave him on the ship. But he paid for it. She slipped into the hotel—it’s a big place, and she wouldn’t be noticed—and found him dead drunk in his room. No locks on the doors in that place, you know. Well, she dragged him, or else carried him, to the lift shaft, opened the catch by reaching her small hand through the bars, and dropped him down.”

“Throwing the booze after him,” put in Miss Withers. “Which accounts for the broken glass around him. Clear as crystal.”

“In the meantime she’d been dodging from one cheap room to another, and sending those silly black-bordered notes right and left. Pure mania is the only explanation. She wanted to throw a scare into all the people at that table on the ship.”

“Except me,” said Miss Withers.

“Yes, except you. She had a particular hate against her best friend on board—the Noring girl. Another sign of her being clean off her head. Or perhaps Candida had given her a tongue-lashing over the Noel affair. Anyway, she sent a box of poisoned cigarettes to Candida Noring, hoping she’d smoke one and die—though our laboratory men say cyanide wouldn’t be apt to kill that way—and her work was finished. She jumped into the Thames.”

“Aren’t you basing a good deal,” suggested Miss Withers, “upon the mere fact that a victim of the Thames was wearing a few scraps of blue silk around her neck?”

Secker shook his head. “I’m not that stupid. This morning I wired the States a complete description of the dead girl’s teeth made by our expert in such matters, and in half an hour we got an answer from Buffalo. The family dentist of the Frasers said that beyond doubt it was Rosemary.”

Miss Withers felt a distinct jolt. “About this body,” she began. “What was the cause of death?”

“Drowning, of course,” said the sergeant. “She’d been in the water a good bit, and Sir Leonard Tilton is making an autopsy now. Like many of the bodies who go into the river, she’d been sucked in by the propeller of a steamer, and the body was terribly cut up. Clothes mostly torn off, and—”