The Blind Side (14 page)

Lee took no notice.

“What did you say about Cousin Lucy? Do please come in. Why do you want her things?”

“Three nightgowns,” said Miss Challoner rapidly, “three vests, bedroom slippers, dressing-gown, toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste.”

“Why?” said Lee, staring at her.

“She forbade me to telephone,” said Miss Challoner. “When I said, ‘I will ring up Craddock House and let them know that you are with me,' she absolutely forbade me to do so, and in her alarming state of agitation I felt obliged to give her the promise she demanded. But nightgowns and a toothbrush she must have, so I have come to fetch them.”

Lee felt quite dazed. She said in a light faraway voice,

“I haven't the least idea what you're talking about. Would you like to tell me—but it doesn't matter if you don't want to.”

“You look extremely washed out,” said Miss Challoner. “I can't think why you should be so confused. I find this hot weather very bracing myself. It seems to me quite obvious if poor Lucy is to be confined to her bed for several days, that she will require her nightgowns and a toothbrush.”

Lee took hold of the door jamb. She said as slowly and distinctly as she could,

“Cousin Lucy started for the Continent last night. I saw her off at Victoria.”

“She didn't go,” said Miss Challoner.

“I saw her off.”

“Did you see her to the barrier, or did you see her into the train?”

“To the barrier, but—”

“She didn't go,” said Miss Challoner firmly.

“What did she do?” Lee could only manage a whisper.

“She turned back. As soon as you were gone. She had something on her mind and she felt she couldn't start—something to do with that niece of hers, Mavis Grey. She felt she must see her again before she went. But she couldn't find her. She seems to have gone to and fro looking for her for hours, and she seems to have worked herself into a terrible state of nerves. Really, by the time she came to me she was quite unhinged. Dr. Clarke says she must be kept perfectly quiet and not attempt to get out of bed for several days. I have had to lend her a nightgown, but I always wear flannel, and she dislikes it very much. She has lost her luggage ticket, so I cannot get any of her things out of the cloakroom, and nightgowns and a toothbrush she must have.”

About a third of the way through this speech Lee took her hand off the jamb and stepped back. She tried to draw Miss Challoner with her, and she tried to stem the flow of her words. She might have spared herself the pains. Nobody had ever yet succeeded in interrupting Miss Challoner, and nobody ever would. She merely raised her voice, increased its volume, and pronounced each word more forcibly. What she began to say, that she would finish. She finished.

Lee said in a trembling voice, “Oh, do please come inside,” but it was too late.

Detective Abbott came out of Ross Craddock's flat and crossed the landing. He said,

“Just a moment, madam. I think the Inspector would like to see you.”

Miss Challoner swung round.

“The Inspector?”

“Yes, madam. I think he would like to know at what hour Miss Lucy Craddock reached you in the agitated state which you have just described to Miss Fenton.”

“I can't see what it's got to do with the police,” said Miss Challoner briskly, “but I am sure I have nothing to conceal. Miss Craddock knocked me up at a quarter past three this morning.”

CHAPTER XXI

Inspector Lamb sat at Ross Craddock's writing-table and gazed frowningly at what the fingerprint experts had sent him. The heat of yesterday had turned to heavy cloud and the threat of rain.

“I've taken a dislike to this place, Abbott,” he said.

“Did you say ‘place,' or ‘case,' sir?”

“Both,” said the Inspector succinctly. He threw a gloomy glance at the large photograph of Miss Mavis Grey which Peterson's ministrations had restored to an upright position and placed upon the mantelpiece. It had been found on the floor with a crack across the glass and across Miss Grey's slender neck. “That girl's a liar if I ever saw one,” he added. “Now look here, I'm going to run over what we've got against the lot of them—just to clear my own mind, as it were. You can take it down.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Number one—Mr. Peter Renshaw. Plenty of stuff there. He is on bad terms with his cousin. He has words with him about Miss Grey. He is seen just inside his open door when Miss Grey comes back to the flat at three
A
.
M
., when, to my mind, there's no doubt at all that the murder had already been committed.
And
he comes in for most of the money. On the top of that we have his suspicious behaviour with the revolver. Apart from this there is no other fingerprint of his inside the flat. Got that down?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Number two—Miss Mavis Grey. All her behaviour very suspicious, and a real determined liar. What's the sense of her admitting she was in the flat with Mr. Craddock and ran away from him to Mr. Renshaw, and then denying that she went back to the flat again, when the same witness can swear to having seen her enter Mr. Renshaw's flat on both occasions? Plenty of her fingerprints everywhere—on the glass, on the decanter, on the table that was knocked over, and, for all we know, on the revolver before Mr. Renshaw started playing with it. Why can't she say what she was doing that second time, confound her?”

Detective Abbott looked up.

“It seems to me, sir, that she admits the first visit because she doesn't mind admitting that she hit Craddock over the heat with the decanter, but she won't admit the second visit because she then either shot Craddock herself or saw someone else shoot him.”

“Mr. Peter Renshaw?”

“Not necessarily—” He hesitated.

“If you've got anything to say, say it!”

“It was something that struck me as rather curious.”

“When?”

“Yesterday—just before I brought Miss Challoner in to you. She was talking to Miss Fenton at the open door of number seven, and Miss Fenton was trying to get her to come in. Well, just as I said that you would like to see her, the sitting-room door opened and Mavis Grey came out. Renshaw was behind her, and I'm pretty sure they'd been quarrelling. Both of them had the look of it, and the girl was in a hurry to get away. Well, this is what I noticed. She was in a hurry, but she wasn't in such a hurry that she would pass Miss Fenton. She would have had to touch her, you know, and she wouldn't do it. She baulked, and when Miss Fenton did move she shied past her just like a horse does when it's scared. I thought it was odd, sir.”

“Might only mean she'd been quarrelling with Mr. Renshaw about Miss Fenton.”

Without speaking, Detective Abbott registered a polite rejection of this theory.

The Inspector said somewhat testily,

“Number three is Miss Lucy Craddock. Very suspicious behaviour indeed. She disapproves of Mr. Craddock's attentions to her niece, quarrels with him, and is told she will have to turn out of her flat. Instead of leaving Victoria at seven-thirty-three as she had planned, on a trip to the Continent, she puts her luggage in the cloakroom and goes off to find Miss Mavis Grey. She calls at Mr. Ernest Grey's house in Holland Park at a quarter to nine, and is told that Miss Grey is out. Between then and a quarter past three in the morning, when she arrives at Miss Challoner's flat in Portland Place, we haven't been able to trace her movements. She was probably trying to find Miss Grey. She may have come back here to find her, or she may not. All we know for sure is that she was looking for her, and that when she turned up at Miss Challoner's she was in an unhinged and distracted condition. Her doctor says she won't be fit to make a statement for a day or two. Fingerprints which correspond to what are probably hers, taken from objects in her own flat, have been found on the back of one of the chairs in here. But as Miss Bingham saw her leave this flat in the afternoon that doesn't prove anything.”

“She may have wandered in and found him dead. That would account for the shock.”

“Then why didn't she raise the house? What would you expect a timid old lady to do? Yell her head off and rouse the house. Why didn't she do it? And I say the answer to that is, either she shot him herself, or she saw the person who shot him and she didn't want to give him away.”

“Him—or her—” said Detective Abbott in a meditative voice.

Inspector Lamb looked at him sharply. After a moment he said,

“Number four—Miss Lee Fenton. Nothing against her except these.” He tapped a sheet covered with fingerprints. “The room was fairly plastered with them—both sides of the hall door, both sides of this door, backs of three chairs, and the mark of her whole hand on the corner of this writing-table. Now she couldn't have been in in the afternoon, because she didn't get here till eight o'clock, and then, she says, she had a bath and went straight to bed. Then there are those footprints. Peterson swears that they were the marks of a naked foot and quite distinct when he found the body. By the time he came back with Rush they were nothing but bloodstained smears. Now they weren't Miss Grey's footprints, because she was wearing silver shoes when Miss Bingham saw her—and, by the way, those shoes have never been found, so it's likely they were badly stained. All she'll say is that they were old, and that she threw them away.”

“She might have dropped them in the river,” said Detective Abbott.

The Inspector nodded.

“She probably did. It's handy, and even if they're fished up now, the stains will be out of them, and we don't get any farther than what she says—that she threw them away. Well, we've rather got off Miss Fenton, but there isn't anything to get back to except those prints—and the way she looks. Talk about shock—that young woman's had one if I'm not very much mistaken.”

“She may have been fond of Craddock,” Detective Abbott put forward the suggestion blandly.

“Then she was the only one of the lot that was.”

“You never can tell, sir.”

The Inspector turned over the papers in front of him with a frown.

“The other prints found in here, besides Mr. Craddock's own, are Peterson's, Rush's—he says he was in here speaking to him in the early afternoon—and a set of prints at present not identified—four fingers and a thumb of a man's left hand on the door of this room at a height of four foot seven. That means a man of about six foot. Also the same left-hand print from two places on the banisters—one just at the first turn as you go down, and the other near the bottom. These prints are very important indeed, as they point to the presence of another person, as yet unidentified, who may have been the murderer. Well, there we are. Go along down and see if that charwoman's come back—what's her name—Mrs. Green. Lintott checked up on her, and the people in the house where she lodges say she came home about half past nine on the evening of the murder so much the worse for liquor that they had to help her to bed. She lay all day yesterday, and she's supposed to be coming back today. Go and see if she's come. There's a point or two I'd like to ask her about.”

CHAPTER XXII

Mrs. Green came in in her old Burberry with her battered black felt hat mournfully askew. The port-wine mark on her cheek showed up against the puffy pallor of the rest of her face. Her grey hair fuzzed out wildly in all directions. About her neck she wore, in lieu of the crochet shawl reserved for “turns,” the aged black feather boa which marked a return to the normal. A sallow handkerchief was clasped in one hand. On being invited to sit down she gulped and applied it to her eyes.

“Thank you kindly, sir. I'm sure it's all so 'orrible, I don't hardly know where I am. And on top of one of my turns too, and this one so bad, and if it hadn't been for the mite of brandy I come by just in time there's no saying whether I'd be here now.”

The Inspector relaxed.

“Ah—it takes a good bit of brandy to pull you round out of one of those turns, doesn't it, Mrs. Green?”

Mrs. Green wiped her eyes.

“If it's Mrs. Smith where I lodge that's been telling your young man that I drink, then she's no lady,” she said with dignity. “I don't wish her nor no one else to go through the h'agony that I go through when I gets one of my turns, and what they told me in the 'orspital was to take a mite of brandy and lay down quiet, and so I done. And if I'm to get the sack for it, well, it's a cruel shame, and maybe they won't find it so easy to get a respectable woman to come into an 'ouse like this, what with murders and goings on. And if it comes to getting the sack, there's more than me was for it, if it wasn't for Mr. Craddock being done in.”

“And what do you mean by that, Mrs. Green?” said the Inspector.

Mrs. Green eyed him sideways.

“There's those that gives themselves airs and talks haughty now that'd be singing on the other side of their mouth if it wasn't for pore Mr. Craddock lying a mortual corpse at this moment instead of standing up on his two feet and telling them to be off out of here because they wasn't wanted any longer.”

“I really think you had better tell me what you mean, Mrs. Green.”

The sideways look became a downcast one. The pale mouth primmed and said with mincing gentility,

“I'm sure I was never one to put myself forward, sir.”

The Inspector became hearty.

“Pity there aren't more like you in that way, Mrs. Green. But it's everyone's duty to help the police, you know, so I'm sure you're going to tell me what this is all about. If you know of someone who was going to be dismissed by Mr. Craddock, I think you ought to tell me who it is.”

“And him taking it on himself to say as how he'd see to it I got my notice!” said Mrs. Green with an angry toss of the head.