Puzzle of the Silver Persian (30 page)

“It’s a great pity,” Miss Withers remarked, “that you didn’t tell me that. It makes everything simple. She built up her identity in Rosemary’s clothes as ‘Mrs. Charles’—prepared her later letters in those cheap rooms, and no doubt left the things in one of them or in a check room somewhere when she decided to come down here.

“Anyway, I mustn’t get ahead of myself. Candida brought the gift cigarettes to the hotel, found the flowers which Leslie Reverson had sent her, and put his card into the ebony box. It was meant only as a herring across the trail, although she may not have felt toward him then as she did later. She offered me one of the poisoned cigarettes, perhaps hoping that I would take it and be put out of the way. I refused, and soon after I left the room she sat down before the fire with a doped cigarette, hoping to be found there…”

“Here’s a bad flaw,” pointed out Cannon. “How’d she know you would return?”

“She couldn’t have known, of course. I hurried back because I remembered that Leslie had touched his aunt for only ten shillings in the tea room, and the cigarettes cost much more. His flowers had probably been put into the plumbing. Candida didn’t count on my return—she wouldn’t have tried to fool me with a fake faint. Perhaps she really did pass out from the fumes of the cigarette burning beside her—you can rest assured that she did not puff on it—but she only planned on fooling the maid, who was due any moment with a hot-water bottle to turn the bed back for the night.

“She was flushed with success of her plotting,” Miss Withers went on. “She was sure that she was getting by with it and that no one suspected her. As a matter of fact, at that time I didn’t. But you did—because you adjourned the inquest.”

Cannon nodded. “But go on—you’ve been a lot closer to this case than I.”

“It was then,” said Miss Withers, “that Candida sent a message to the Hammonds, which I wasted a good deal of time in appropriating. But they were out of her reach, and I read very little from the letter. It confused me, in fact. Then the Hammonds separated, or rather I discovered that they had separated…”

Cannon held up his hand. “What about that couple?” he demanded. “Tom Hammond worked for a New York chemical firm, and for a while I wondered…”

“So did his wife,” Miss Withers told him. “But Hammond’s connection with chemicals is only through his being advertising manager for a commercial fire extinguisher company. His only sin in this affair was to run wild after his wife walked out on him. But I’ll come to them later. It was at about this point in the development of the case that Candida Noring took Leslie, who was at least five years her junior, under her wing. On the trip down to Cornwall she slipped a warning letter into his coat, but that must have been as far as she could go. She weakened in her sworn purpose, as you shall see.

“Up in London I was wasting my time in suspecting Loulu Hammond, and in shadowing her husband in hopes that I might catch her trying to attack him. That ended in a fiasco, as you know.”

“And as Sergeant Secker knows, to his sorrow,” put in Cannon.

“All in the game,” said Miss Withers sternly. “Anyway, the message from Cornwall asking me to come down caught me just in time. I had made up my mind that nothing would happen in London. I’d been thinking about that message which the Honorable Emily received. It pointed to someone in London—and I decided to be contrary and do what I thought the murderer expected me not to do.

“I came down here yesterday. The sergeant followed close behind, with a clever explanation of the murders which I did not entirely agree with, although I kept my own counsel. You see, he brought word of the fact that my fingerprints were found on the warning letter which the Honorable Emily had sent up to the Yard after it had put a good scare into her. That told me everything. I saw to the bottom of the mystery, or thought I did. The sergeant was sure that Rosemary Fraser had lived to exact vengeance upon the two men she hated, and then had jumped in the Thames. I knew that couldn’t be true—for Rosemary would never have sent poisoned cigarettes to her one friend, Candida. Nor could Rosemary have managed to get my fingerprints upon a letter she sent to the Honorable Emily.

“No, the sergeant was wrong, and the person who had sent that last warning message had sent it, not from London, but from Dinsul Castle itself! For it was simply the post-marked envelope from my letter to the Honorable Emily, which arrived one morning—with the original address washed out by ink-remover from the town stationery store! The address was re-written, the black border was added, and the message put inside. Of course, the envelope was open, but the Honorable Emily never realized the significance of that. Nor did Candida know that my prints were on the letter—she simply saw to it that she used gloves.

“Why didn’t I suspect the Honorable Emily or Leslie? Simple enough. The former had neither motive nor was she the type to concoct such a fantastic plot. She would hardly have sent for me to come down here, either, if she had been trying to get by with anything. Leslie—well, if you can picture that young man having the devilish cleverness to see that a London postmark would give the murderer a wonderful alibi, and take that means of getting it on a black-bordered letter, you have a better imagination than I.

“The fact that Rosemary’s body had been found I simply set aside as something beyond explanation for the moment. At dinner I dropped a hint saying that I knew Rosemary had not been murdered, because at that time I was convinced that Candida had been killing off the persons she suspected of murdering Rosemary—a sort of Lone Avenger idea. I hoped that the case would be closed, with dead Rosemary as the culprit. When the sergeant phoned that the body had been dead for more than two weeks, I was not surprised. I let him stew, for all my energies were given up to the problem—what would be the highest justice in a case of this kind? For I knew that Candida had a very real motive for killing the two men whose acts had forced Rosemary into suicide. I did not think that she meant to go on with it, I was sure that the warning messages were simply designed to worry the persons whose laughter had hurt Rosemary at that dinner table. But I was not sure…”

“You made a fine mess of it,” said Cannon. “You rush in where courts would deliberate for hours—”

“And so I did!” declared Miss Withers. “All that night. You see, on my way up to bed I saw Candida and Leslie Reverson out on the rock path which leads from the hall window to the Saint’s Chair. I saw him slip and nearly fall to his death. Candida saved him when she could have let him fall—and then I knew that she was not bent on more murders. She had saved a life—a life more valuable than the two she had taken. And so I made my decision. Sometime in the forenoon I would have it out with her.

“But I could not bear to think of handing her over to the police. You see, I was still haunted by the thought of the young couple whom I had sent to the gallows out in the Catalina Pepper-Tree affair.”

Cannon saw the light. “I read the papers sometimes,” he cut in. “So that was you!” His voice had a new note in it. “Then you’re not just a bloody meddler.”

“I’m afraid I am,” said Miss Withers. “But let’s get on to the end of this. This morning there was no opportunity for me to have it out with Candida. She left the place early to play golf. But while she was bathing—as I thought—the butler and I heard a crash in the Honorable Emily’s room. Tobermory the cat had knocked down the robin’s cage—he had had his eye on the bird for weeks. Considered it his by right of capture, I suppose.

“That meant nothing to me at the time, nor did the fact that when I finally got a chance at the bathroom I found the towels and washcloth wet but the mat dry. I spent the morning interviewing the sergeant and in explaining to my own satisfaction the manner in which the body of Rosemary could possibly have appeared in the Thames. On my way back to Dinsul for lunch I was picked up by young Reverson and Candida in the limousine, and I learned to my horror that the young man wanted to marry her. That wouldn’t do at all. I was convinced that she had had a change of heart, but I wasn’t prepared to let her settle down calmly in that way. And so I dropped a hint which made her understand that I knew something, and she sent him away on a wild-goose chase. We came to my room, Candida and I, and I told her frankly that I knew why she killed Noel and Todd—that I understood the powerful forces which made her go off the track. She convinced me that she had completely recovered from her fantasy. The warning letters to the others, she maintained, were simply to frighten them. Remembering how she had saved Leslie’s life when she herself had marked him for death, I believed her, like a sentimental old fool.”

Inspector Cannon did not disagree with the phrase. “Go on,” he said.

“I made her promise that she would leave Dinsul this afternoon, giving Leslie any excuse which she could think of, and giving me a surety that no innocent person would ever suffer for her crimes. Oh, I know what you think. But I decided that her conscience would punish her enough. She had suffered terribly already, you see.

“Then Sergeant Secker arrived with word that you were on your way to arrest Candida. I was stupefied, for that was the first intimation I had had that you were not blinded by the idea that Rosemary had lived to commit the murders. I racked my brains for a way to convince you, using the information which I had, that Candida could not have committed the murders. I hoped to argue you out of your purpose when you arrived. Then we found the body of the Honorable Emily—where Candida had killed her that morning!”

“Whoa!” cried Cannon. “Not so fast. What about the locked and bolted doors and the time of death?”

“One door was bolted on the inside—the one leading into the bedroom,” said Miss Withers. “The other was simply locked, with a lock which I picked in five minutes with a hairpin. Furthermore, I have an idea that the key of the other bathroom—the one in which Candida left the water running and wet the towels in order to establish an alibi—will fit that door, too.” Miss Withers shrugged.

“I was fooled, utterly. I did not have sense enough to read the message of the bath mat and the attack on the bird. She must have gone down the hall, opened the Honorable Emily’s bathroom door, and drowned her in the brimming tub before she could cry out.”

Cannon smote the table. “Brides in the Bath! That’s it—too easy if you know how. One of our big cases some years back. Fellow named Smith married two or three women and killed them off presto chango—by simply coming into their bathrooms, putting one hand under their knees and the other at their throats, and it’s done. Up with the knees as the head goes under water, and the victim gives a great gasp and goes out like a light. I was a sergeant then, and witnessed an experiment that the chief inspector in charge made. He got a friend, young lady in a bathing dress, to play the part of the victim, in a big tub. It was just an experiment, but she gasped and went under. It took twenty minutes to bring her back to life.”

Miss Withers nodded. “Candida may have read of it. Anyway, she came out of the room, locked the hall door behind her, and went calmly out to play golf. Perhaps by accident she left the hot water running over the body, and it kept on all morning, with the overflow drain taking care of it as it came in.

“The Honorable Emily was in the habit of soaking herself you see, and nobody thought anything of her long absence. It was also her habit to keep to her rooms on the days when tourists were permitted to visit Dinsul. Candida did not know it, perhaps, but the hot water would keep up the temperature of the corpse and so give her a perfect alibi. The hot water ran out shortly before noon, so that the body was found in cold water. That fooled the doctor, though an autopsy will probably change his mind.”

Cannon nodded. “But what made you change your mind? One moment you were quiet about all this, and then you break loose—”

Miss Withers was shamefaced. “Of course, I suspected that Candida, as a reaction from saving Leslie, whom she liked very much, might have struck down his aunt. But I trusted the verdict of the surgeon and the local police—and made up my mind that it was an unfortunate coincidence that the Honorable Emily had died of her old heart trouble just at this time. Until I knew of the witness—”

“Witness to the murder? Don’t be—”

“I’m not!” cried Miss Withers testily. “There was a witness. A witness who knew, through solid walls, that the Honorable Emily was dead. A witness who later proved his eerie powers by signaling anticipation when the butler started up from the kitchen with his milk, five minutes before the man arrived. I’m speaking of the first witness for the prosecution—Tobermory!”

“The cat? But how on earth could he know?”

“You don’t know cats, then. Tobermory had waited weeks for his chance at the bird. While his mistress was alive, he knew he was due for a spanking with a newspaper if he harmed it. As soon as his super-senses told him that authority was removed, he sprang for the bird cage. That proved to me that his mistress died no later than nine o’clock this morning—died before Candida had left for the golf course!

“It’s clear enough, for those who have the wit to see. It would be too great a coincidence to believe that when he had waited so long he should choose just that moment by accident. I only saw through it when I went to my room. By then I knew that Candida, with your permission, was leaving Dinsul. She must have been in deadly fear of me. If she had reached London, or even Penzance, perhaps, she would have managed to disappear.

“Then I acted—for instead of my optimistic hope that she had killed only two rather guilty persons, I realized that she was a true killer—knew that she had struck down a friendly, innocent woman who did no one any harm, and whom I had come down here to try to protect. I failed in that—and I was determined not to fail in apprehending her murderer.”

“Well,” said the inspector after a moment, “you succeeded, with the help of the tide. It’s all clear to me now—you’ve filled in the gaps splendidly—but I still don’t see that I have any better chance of getting a warrant out of the D.P.P. than I did before. This is all circumstantial—and I can’t bring this what’s-his-name of a cat into court.”