Envious Casca (27 page)

"Clever, aren't you? I'm a child in these matters myself, but I gathered from the Inspector that in his opinion it was planted there."

Paula flashed a look round the table. "Yes! That has always stood out a mile!" she declared.

"I don't believe it!" Mottisfont said, reddening angrily. "That's what you chose to hint from the outset, but I consider it a monstrous suggestion! Are you daring to imply that one of us murdered Nat, and tried to fasten the crime onto you?"

"It's so obvious, isn't it?" Stephen said.

Joseph, who had been looking from one to the other, with an expression of almost pathetic bewilderment on his face, was so shocked that his voice sank quite three tones. "It couldn't be true!" he uttered. "It's too infamous! too terrible for words! It was Nat himself who took your case up! It must have been! Good God, Stephen, you couldn't believe a thing like that of anyone here - staying with us - invited here to - No, I tell you! It's too horrible!"

At any other time Mathilda could have laughed to see Joseph's roseate illusions so grotesquely shattered. As it was, the situation confronting them seemed to her to be too grim to admit of laughter. She said in a studiedly cool voice: "What gave the Inspector this idea?"

"The absence of any finger-prints on the case," answered Stephen.

It took a minute or two for the company to assimilate the meaning of this, nor did it seem from Maud's blank face, or from Joseph's puzzled frown, that its full import had been universally realised. But Roydon had realised it, and he said: "It's the meanest thing I ever heard of! I hope you don't imagine that any of us would stoop so low?"

"I don't know at all," said Stephen. "I shall leave it to the Inspector to find out."

"That's all very well!" struck in Paula. "But if there were no finger-prints on the case, how is he to find out?"

"He seems quite optimistic about it," Stephen replied.

It now seemed good to Valerie to declare in agitated tones that she could see what they were all getting at, but if anyone thought she had killed Mr. Herriard they were wrong, and she wished that she had never been born.

Mrs. Dean, whom Stephen's announcement had cast into a mood of bitter reflection, was forced to wrench herself from her thoughts to frustrate an attempt on her daughter's part to break into strong hysterics. Valerie cast herself on the scented bosom in a storm of noisy tears, saying that everyone had been beastly to her ever since she Iiad set foot in this beastly house; and, with the exception of Joseph, who fussed about in an agitated and useless manner, the rest of the party lost no time in dispersing.

Maud told Mathilda, on her placid way to the morning-room, that she thought it was a good thing Stephen was not going to marry Valerie, since she seemed an uncontrolled girl, not at all likely to make him comfortable. She seemed to have no comment to make on the new and lurid light thrown on to Nathaniel's murder, and Mathilda was unable to resist the impulse to ask her if she had grasped the meaning of what Stephen had told them.

"Oh yes!" Maud said. "I always thought something like that must have happened."

Mathilda fairly gasped. "You thought it? You never said so!"

"No, dear. I make a point of not interfering," Maud explained.

"I must confess it hadn't occurred to me that any of us could be quite so base!" Mathilda said.

Maud's face was quite inscrutable. "Hadn't it?" she said, uninterested and unsurprised.

Valerie, meanwhile, had been led upstairs, gustily sobbing, by her mother, who vented her own annoyance at having so precipitately jettisoned Stephen on Joseph, telling him that although she was never one to make trouble she felt bound to say that her girlie had been treated at Lexham with a total lack of consideration.

Poor Joseph was stricken to incoherence by the injustice of this accusation, and could only gaze after the matron in shocked bewilderment. He was recalled to a sense of his surroundings by the entrance of the servants, to clear the table, and went away to look for someone with whom he could discuss the latest developments of the case.

He was fortunate enough to find Mathilda, and at once took her by the arm and led her off to the library. "I'm getting old, Tilda - too old for this kind of thing!" he told her. "Yesterday I thought that if only the cloud could be lifted from Stephen, nothing else would matter. Today I find myself with a possibility so horrible - Tilda, who, I ask of you, could bear such a grudge against Stephen?"

"It might not be so much a question of a grudge as an instinct of pure sauve qui petit," she pointed out.

"No one but a snake in the grass could do such a thing!" She said dryly: "Anyone capable of stabbing his host in the back would surely be quite capable of throwing the blame on to someone else."

"Mottisfont?" he said. "Roydon? Paula? How can you think such a thing of any one of them?"

"I envy you your touching faith in human nature, Joe."

She was sorry, however, that she had said that, for Joseph took it as a cue, and said in a very noble way that he thanked God he had got faith in human nature. While she did not doubt that his trusting disposition had sustained a severe shock, and could even be sorry for his distress, she was in no mood to tolerate play-acting, and soon shook him off. Between his relief at knowing Stephen to be exonerated and his dread of discovering that his beloved niece, or his old friend Mottisfont, or poor young Roydon was the guilty party, he was so spiritually torn that the optimism of a lifetime seemed to be in danger of deserting him.

Of the three people now, presumably, equally suspected of having murdered Nathaniel, Paula showed the most coolness. She discussed, with a cold-bloodedness worthy of Stephen, the chances of Roydon's having done the deed, and said that, speaking from an artistic point of view, she hoped that he hadn't, since he had a Future before him.

"I imagine I must be out of the running," she said, walking about the room in her usual restless way. "No one could suspect me of trying to throw the blame on to my own brother! If there had been any bequests to them in Uncle's will, I should have said that one of the servants had done it, probably Ford; but as it is they none of them had the slightest motive." She turned her brilliant gaze upon Mathilda, adding impulsively: "If one wasn't a suspect oneself, wouldn't it be interesting, Mathilda? I think I could actually enjoy it!"

"Neither Joe nor I are suspects, and I can assure you we aren't enjoying it!" said Mathilda.

"Oh, Joe! He's an escapist," said Paula scornfully. "But you! You ought to be able to appreciate a situation that shows us all up in the raw!"

"I don't think," said Mathilda, "that I care for seeing my friends in the raw."

"I believe that this experience will be very valuable to me as an artist," said Paula.

But Mathilda had never felt less inclined to listen to a dissertation on the benefits of experience to an actress, and she very rudely told Paula to try it on the dog.

It was now nearly eleven o'clock, and all the discomforts of a morning spent in a country house with nothing to do were being suffered by Lexham's unwilling guests. Outside, a grey sky and melting snow offered little inducement to would-be walkers; inside, a general hush brooded over the house; and everyone was uneasily aware of Scotland Yard's presence. While suspicion had centred upon Stephen, everyone else had been ready to discuss the murder in all its aspects; now that Stephen had apparently been exonerated, and the field was left open for his successor, an uneasy shrinking from all mention of the crime was visible in everyone except Paula. Even Mrs. Dean did not speak of it. She joined Maud in the morning-room presently, and, without receiving the slightest encouragement, favoured her with the story of her life, not omitting a list of her unsuccessful suitors, the personal idiosyncrasies of the late Mr. Dean, and all the more repulsive details of two confinements and a miscarriage.

Roydon, who had mumbled something about getting a breath of fresh air, had gone up to his room, on leaving the breakfast-table, thus making an enemy of the second housemaid, who had only just made his bed, and wanted to bring in the vacuum-cleaner. Being a well-trained servant, she withdrew, and went off to complain bitterly to the head-housemaid about visitors who knew no better than to come up before they were wanted, putting one all behind with one's work. The head-housemaid said it was funny, him coming up to his room at this hour; and on these meagre grounds a rumour spread rapidly through the servants' quarters that that Mr. Roydon was looking ever so queer, and behaving so strange that no one wouldn't be surprised to hear that it was him all the time who had done in the master.

All this made a very agreeable subject for conversation at the eleven-o'clock gathering for tea in the kitchen and the hall; and when one of the under-gardeners joined the kitchen-party with a trug of vegetables for the cook, he was able to enliven the discussion by recounting that it was a funny thing, them speaking of young Roydon like they were, for he had himself just seen him going off for a walk on his own. He had come upon him down by the potting-sheds and the manure-heap, and he had somehow thought it was queer, finding him there, and Roydon hadn't half started when he had seen him coming round the corner of the shed. Adjured by two housemaids, one tweeny, and the kitchenmaid, all with their eyes popping out of their heads, to continue this exciting narrative, he said that it was his belief young Roydon had been burning something in the incinerator, because he had been standing close to it, for one thing, and for another he'd take his oath he'd heard someone putting the lid on it.

This was so well received, with such delighted shudders from the tweeny, accompanied by exclamations of Go on, you never! from the two housemaids, that the gardener at once recalled that he had thought Roydon's manner queer-like at the time, and said to himself that that bloke wasn't up to no good, messing about where he had no call to be.

In due course, an echo of these highly-coloured recollections reached Inspector Hemingway's ears, by way of his Sergeant, who, by means of a little flattery, had managed to put himself on excellent terms with the female part of the staff. The Inspector, with the simple intention of unnerving the household, was spending the morning pervading the house with a notebook, a foot-rule, and an abstracted frown. His mysterious investigations were in themselves entirely valueless, but succeeded in making everyone but Maud and Mrs. Dean profoundly uneasy. Mottisfont, for instance, took instant and querulous objection to his presence in his room, and fidgeted about the house, complaining to anyone who could be got to listen to him of the unwarrantable licence taken by the police. Breaking in upon the two ladies in the morning-room, he tried to enlist their support, but Mrs. Dean said that she was sure she had no secrets to hide; and Maud merely expressed the hope that in the course of his investigations the Inspector might find her missing book.

The Inspector had not found the book, and, if the truth were told, he had begun to share the opinions of the rest of the household with regard to it. Since he had first encountered Maud, he had met her five times, and had on each occasion not only to sustain an account of when and where she last remembered to have had the book in her hand, but anecdotes culled from it as well. He darkly suspected that it had been hidden by the other members of the house-party, and told his Sergeant that he didn't blame them.

When the kitchen-gossip about Roydon was reported to him, he was not inclined to set much store by it, but he told the Sergeant that he had better keep a sharp eye on Roydon.

The Sergeant did more than this: he went down the garden to the potting-sheds, and took a look at the incinerator.

This was a large galvanised-iron cylinder, mounted on short legs, and with a chimney running up the centre, through the lid. In theory, by setting light to a little paper, stuffed into the gap left between the sides of the cylinder and its base, any amount of refuse, thrown in the top, would be slowly consumed into the finest ash. In practice, the fire thus kindled usually died out before half the contents of the cylinder had been burnt, so that what came out at the bottom was not ash, but charred and very often revolting scraps of refuse.

From the languid wisp of smoke arising from the chimney, the Sergeant correctly assumed that the fire was burning but sluggishly this morning. He lifted the lid, and found that the incinerator had been stuffed full of kitchen-waste. Somewhere below the unappetising surface the fire, judging by the smell, was smouldering. The Sergeant looked round for a handy stick, and, finding one, began to poke about amongst the rubbish. After turning over some grape-fruit rinds, a collection of grocers' bags, cartons, and egg-boxes, the outer leaves of about six cabbages, and the contents of several wastepaper-baskets, his stick dug up a blood-stained handkerchief, obviously thrust down beneath the litter, but as yet untouched by the fire.

The Sergeant, who had really not expected to find anything of interest in the incinerator, could scarcely believe his eyes. If he had not been a very methodical young man, he would have hurried back to the house immediately, to lay his find before his superior, so excited did he feel. For the handkerchief was not only generously splashed with blood: it also bore an embroidered R in one corner. It was dirty, from its contact with the kitchen-refuse, but the Sergeant felt no repulsion at handling it. He shook some used tea-leaves out of it, folded it carefully, and put it in his pocket. Then he went on poking amongst the rubbish until he had satisfied himself that no other gruesome relics were hidden in the noisome depths of the incinerator. To make quite sure, he raked the bottom out, not, judging by the smother of ash, before it was time. The fire was not burning evenly, and from one side of the cylinder some charred remnants fell out amongst the ash, including a scorched and blackened book. The boards of this had been consumed, and the outer pages crumbled away when touched, but when the Sergeant, idly curious, stirred what remained with his stick, he saw that although the edges had been burnt the inner pages were still perfectly legible. Coronation in Hungary, he read, across the top of one righthand page. Opposite, heading the left page, he saw in the same capital italics: Empress Elizabeth.