Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (18 page)

As they arrived at the spot where the ledge began to widen Margaret stopped and peered over the edge. Down below the waves were thrashing and beating, with a sullen roar and a seething white foam, among the huge boulders. She shuddered.

“How – how
horrible!
”
she said in a low voice.

Roger had waited for her and she walked slowly on, but still gazing down into the turmoil as if fascinated. Anthony watched her with a nameless anxiety: there
were
people (weren’t there?) who got a bit rocky on heights and as often as not threw themselves over from sheer fascinated funk. “Better not walk so near the edge, Margaret,” he called out to her above the roar of the waves.

Suddenly she stopped short and stared down among the rocks, leaning perilously over; it seemed as if something had riveted her attention.

“What’s that?” she asked Roger, pointing a slim forefinger. “Isn’t there something on that big greeny rock, just out of the water? It looks like a – yes, it’s a shoe, surely.”

Roger followed the direction she indicated. “Yes,” he agreed. “It’s an old shoe, I think. There must be a good man – hullo, wait a minute!” He stood for an instant staring down, frowning. “Shin down and get it, Anthony, will you?” he said abruptly the next moment. “You’re younger than I am. I’ve got an idea.”

“You have?” Margaret asked eagerly, as Anthony hastened to obey. “What?”

“Half a minute, till I’ve had a look at it.”

Five minutes later Roger was turning the shoe over in his hands. It was a lady’s, size six, soaked with sea water and in a dilapidated condition; the buckle had been torn off, and the leather was slit on either side of the toe down to the sole.

Roger’s eyes gleamed. “Eureka!” he exclaimed softly. “Good for your sharp eyes, lady. You understand what this is, both of you, don’t you?”

“Roger!” Margaret cried. “Do explain! I don’t know what it is, except an old shoe. What is it?”

“It’s one of the shoes worn by the murderer to disguise his footprints, precisely as I said,” Roger explained, with a not unjustified triumph. “Don’t you see why the leather’s cut like this? To enable the shoe to be crammed on to a foot several sizes too large for it. He had the pair all ready with him, made use of them, and then threw them down into the sea.”

“Jolly good, Roger!” Anthony exclaimed, smiting his cousin on the back in his exuberance. “Then you were right when you said the murderer was a man.”

“I was, Anthony; and this clinches it once and for all. No woman would want to make a shoe this size still larger to fit her foot. I shall have to hare off and see the inspector about this. In the meantime, you shin down again and hunt among those rocks for the second one; it’s bound to be somewhere about. Children, this is the biggest thing that’s happened since I took up the case!”

“The biggest thing that’s happened since you took up the case, is it, sir?” said a voice behind them. “Well, well, that’s interesting. May I have a look at that shoe?”

They wheeled round, startled. Then Anthony glared, Margaret stiffened and Roger grinned.

“Hullo, Inspector!” cried the last. “Where in the world did you spring from?”

“The cave, sir,” the inspector replied, a little twinkle in his blue eyes, as he possessed himself of the shoe. “Though not so much sprung as crawled.” He turned the shoe over in his hand, examining it with professional intentness.

“Find anything interesting in the cave, by the way?” Roger asked airily.

The inspector glanced up from the shoe, his twinkle again to the fore. “Only what you did, I fancy, Mr Sheringham, sir,” he replied blandly. “A copy of
London
Opinion
, eh?”

“Well, I hope you found that as interesting as I did,” Roger returned, somewhat discomfited.

Anthony had been watching this exchange without joy. When one has been anointed ass enough to suspect, on grounds of mere material evidence, a particularly high-souled young woman, it would only be decent, to Anthony’s mind, on finding one’s self confronted with the said high-souled young woman at least to exhibit signs of uncontrollable embarrassment and gloom. Yet so far from exhibiting any such signs, the inspector had completely ignored the high-souled young woman’s existence. Things like that were simply not done.

“I expect you’d probably like to be getting back now,” said Anthony to the high-souled young woman, in tones of frigid correctness. “May I see you home?”

“Thank you, that is very kind of you,” replied the high-souled young woman no less stiffly.

They turned and walked, like two faintly animated ramrods, back the way they had come.

Inspector Moresby must have been singularly devoid of all sensibility; even this pointed behaviour failed to move him to any exhibition of remorse. “You’re quite right, Mr Sheringham, sir,” he observed, inhumanly unconscious of the censure conveyed in every line of the dignified retreating figures. “This
is
interesting, this shoe. I’ll send a man down some time to look for its fellow. Now sit down and tell me all about it. What made you think that the murderer is a man, and what had that copy of
London
Opinion
got to tell
you
?”

Now it had certainly been no part of Roger’s plans to give the inspector, for the time being at any rate, any idea for his new theory. Beyond reporting to him, as in duty bound, the discovery of that significant shoe, he was going to say nothing of the deductions he had been able to draw from it. The inspector himself had chosen to establish a rivalry between them, and Roger had not been slow to accept the challenge. Yet in a quarter of an hour’s time, by a judicious mixture of flattery, cajolery and officialism, the inspector had succeeded in scooping from Roger’s mind every thought that had passed through it during the last twelve hours, together with the full story of his activities for that period. It was not for nothing that Inspector Moresby had reached the heights he now adorned.

“Well, I’ll not say you’re on the wrong tack, sir,” he observed cautiously, when Roger had hung the last bow and tied the final ribbon about his newly decorated theory. “I’ll not say you’re on the wrong tack, though I won’t say I think you’re on the right one either. The reasoning’s clever, and though it’s easy enough for me to pick holes in it, it’s just as easy for you to fill ‘em up again. The thing’s too vague to say either way just yet.”

“I made a perfectly legitimate set of deductions, and I’ve just had them confirmed in a rather remarkable way,” Roger insisted not altogether too pleased with this hardly exuberant praise for his efforts.

“That’s quite right,” the inspector agreed soothingly. “But the trouble is, you see, that in a case like this when the known facts are so precious few, it’s possible to make half a dozen sets of deductions from them, all quite different. For instance,” he went on with a paternal air which Roger found somewhat hard to bear, “for instance, I’ve no doubt that if you gave me time, I could prove to you, just as conclusively as you’ve proved your own theory, that the real murderer is the doctor’s secretary – (what’s her name?) Miss Williamson.”

“Miss Williamson?” Roger echoed, startled out of his mild annoyance. “Good Heavens, I never thought seriously of her. You don’t really think –?”

“I do not, sir,” the inspector smiled. “Not for one minute. I can’t say it ever entered my mind before. But – wait a minute!” He thought rapidly for a moment, still smiling. “How’s this? Miss Williamson’s setting her cap at the doctor –” Roger caught his breath and looked at the other narrowly, but the inspector returned his gaze with bland innocence “– but knows she can’t get him, or
thinks
of course that she can’t get him, till Mrs Vane’s out of the way. You’ve seen the lady, and you probably gathered as well as I did that if Miss Williamson makes up her mind to a thing, that thing’s going to happen. She strolled over from the house to the top of the cliffs that Tuesday afternoon to get a breath of air, and sees Mrs Vane making for the Russells’ house, alone; not a soul in sight. ‘Here’s my opportunity!’ she says, joins Mrs Vane and easily persuades her, on some pretext or other, to accompany her down to the ledge; and there all she’s got to do is to push her over. That fits the facts all right, doesn’t it?”

“But was Miss Williamson out that afternoon?” Roger asked shrewdly.

“Oh, yes, sir,” said the inspector, with an air of mild surprise. “Didn’t you know that?”

“No,” Roger had to admit. “I didn’t.”

“Oh, yes. She went out just as I said, for a breath of air. It was a hot afternoon and the laboratory got a bit stuffy. She was on the top of the cliffs for about half an hour, and says she saw nobody. It was a bit before the time of the murder, but we’ve only got her word for that. If nobody saw her go out and nobody saw her come in, how are we to know she is telling the truth? I tried to get some confirmation of her statement from the doctor, but he’s as vague as you like. Might have been the morning, so far as he remembers. Besides, he wasn’t in the laboratory all the afternoon himself; I got that from the maid who took his tea into him there; he wasn’t there then.”

“Well, how about the coat-button? How is that going to fit in?”

“On her way down the drive,” responded the inspector glibly, “Miss Williamson noticed a coat-button lying on the ground. She recognised it as one of Miss Cross’s, and being a precise, careful sort of person, picked it up and slipped it in her pocket, meaning to give it to Miss Cross later. After the murder, however, she says to herself: ‘Well, there’s nothing to beat a murder that looks like an accident, but I’ll just make sure that if anybody is going to be suspected it shan’t be me!’ and with that she climbs down to where the body is lying (she’s a strong, active-looking woman, so that wouldn’t give her overmuch difficulty) and puts the button in the dead woman’s hand. As for the footprints, they might just as well have been made by her as anyone else.”

“Very neat,” said Roger approvingly. “And the shoes, eh? What about them?”

The inspector laid one finger along the side of his nose and rubbed that organ slowly; his eyes began to twinkle again. “Ah! Well, I can think of several ways of working those shoes in, sir, and I’ve no doubt you can do the same.”

“Meaning that you’ve already made an interesting deduction or two from them, about which you’re determined to keep as tight as a clam?” Roger laughed. “All right, don’t be frightened; I won’t try to open you.”

“I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, sir,” returned the inspector guardedly, and left the implication of his words tactfully vague. “Anyhow, Mr Sheringham,” he went on the next moment, “you see how it is. It’s easy enough to twist the facts, when they’re so few, into meaning exactly what we don’t want them to mean. It’s only in those detective stories, where the inspector from Scotland Yard always shows up so badly, that there’s only one inference drawn from a set of facts (not one fact, I’m meaning; a set) and that’s invariably the right one. The fact of the matter is, sir,” the inspector added in a burst of confidence, “that what I said about Miss Williamson might just apply to anyone. Given the motive in this case,
anybody
might have done it!”

“That’s true enough,” Roger agreed ruefully. “Heaven knows we’ve got a big enough field to search. Still, I’m confident I’m on the right track, and I shall jolly well remain confident, however much you try to damp me. So the next thing I’m going to do is to carry on with my enquiries about a strange man being seen around these cliffs between three and four thirty last Tuesday afternoon.”

“Well, it can’t do any harm, can it?” observed the inspector restraining his enthusiasm.

“And what are you going to do?”

“Me, sir?” said the inspector innocently.

“Yes, come on, Inspector; out with it. You know perfectly well you’ve got your job of work all planned out. Be a pal.”

The inspector smiled. “Well, if you must know, sir, I’m going to make a few enquiries about this shoe.”

“Ah!” Roger observed maliciously. “Well, it can’t do any harm, can it?”

They laughed.

“Inspector,” said Roger softly, “can’t you forget for once that you’re a member of an official body and be human? I found the shoe for you. Isn’t it up to you to let me know what the result of the few enquiries is? Not for publication, of course, unless you say the word.”

The inspector struggled for a moment with his official reticence. “Very well, Mr Sheringham,” he said. “That’s fair enough.”

“Sportsman!” Roger approved as they parted.

Before they had progressed fifty yards in opposite directions, Roger had turned and was running back again. “Inspector!” he called. “Half a minute!”

The inspector turned and was waiting for him. “Yes, sir?”

“There’s one thing I’ve been meaning to ask a real live police inspector,” Roger panted, “and always forgetting at the crucial moment. What do you
really
think at Scotland Yard of detective stories?”

The inspector ruminated. “Well, sir,” he said darkly, “we must have our amusements, I suppose, like everyone else.”

This time they really did part.

The inspector did not return to the inn for lunch, and Roger and Anthony ate a somewhat silent meal, each having plenty to occupy his own thoughts. Roger debated for a short time whether to depute some of the enquiry work, which now seemed to be assuming gigantic proportions, to his cousin, but decided on consideration that rather more delicate handling was required than Anthony would probably be able to bring to it. That young man therefore found himself with the afternoon off duty once more, whereupon he announced casually that he might not be back for tea and made a few guarded enquiries as to the possibility of hiring a two-seater in Ludmouth, just in case one happened to want to see something of the country road. By a superhuman effort Roger managed to refrain from all attempts to amuse himself.

Immediately after lunch he set out once more on his wearisome round.

It was nearly eight o’clock before he returned, and then it was with the glad face and bounding step of one to whom success had come, doubly sweet because almost hopelessly deferred. Anthony and the inspector, halfway through their supper, looked round in astonishment as the remaining member of their trio, almost unrecognisable beneath the enormous grin which decorated his countenance, burst in upon them like a dervish.