The room in which Appleby presently found himself had clearly been a library for a long time. Eighteenth-century Packfords had doubtless here surveyed with complacency their undisturbed rows of handsomely tooled and gilded leather. There was still a mass of stuff to delight any authentic student of bibliopegy who should be set browsing in the place; Eliot and Chapman – to say nothing of Derome – were almost certainly well represented. But in addition to being the sort of library that many country houses can show, this room was also the workshop of a scholar. One table held a litter of photostats; another, piles of unbound learned journals. Here and there drawers and filing-cabinets gaped open – having been stuffed with papers until they could no longer perform their designed functions. Some raw shelving had been run up at one end to stack additional books – most of which seemed older than those more handsomely accommodated. There was a smell of leather.
Lewis Packford had worked here, and here he had died. Appleby walked to the large desk that stood almost in the middle of the room and studied it thoughtfully. It was quite bare, and he knew that its whole surface had been tested for fingerprints. So had everything that had previously been standing on it; there was a careful list in Cavill’s file. There was a modern, well-upholstered revolving chair before the desk. Packford had died in this. Appleby sat down on it.
A man sitting thus, and thus blowing out his brains, would slump forward, so. Of course the body had been moved before any police officer set eyes on it; only in romances are the common instincts of humanity set in abeyance on such occasions. They had lifted the poor chap on that couch. But he had been unmistakably dead.
From his briefcase Appleby produced Cavill’s notes. The revolver was one which nobody had owned to ever seeing before. But it was a common Army type, and it is only in romances, again, that such things are traceable. It had been lying on the floor – and Lewis Packford’s hand had certainly held it. But had that hand belonged to a living man, or to a dead one? When a man is thus shot at very close range, only an eye-witness can positively exclude murder. Unless, of course, the conditions are such that no murderer could have got away.
And that – Appleby said to himself as he stood up again and walked round the room – certainly doesn’t apply in this case. Here is the door through which Mrs Husbands entered, having had to come some distance after hearing the shot. And there is the second door, leading to what is virtually a deserted wing of this rambling house. And there again, straight in front of the desk, is a French window giving on a terrace. And there, yet again, in a corner of the lofty room, stands a cast-iron spiral staircase to a light gallery giving access to the highest ranges of books – and off which, apparently, a small door, concealed by sham books, opens direct upon a higher storey on that side of the house. The whole affords an excellent setting not merely for homicide but even for complicated farce, with actors popping divertingly in and out all over the place.
And there had, after all, been scope for something like farce – or at least for domestic comedy – at Urchins on that night last week when Packford had died. Professor Prodger would obviously be a great success in any absurd play. And Lewis Packford himself had contrived a situation which could be exhibited as entirely ludicrous. But what had actually happened was of another order of drama.
Appleby looked at the window-curtains. They were of a very heavy stuff. He turned on the electric lights, and then drew the curtains across their windows, one by one. He produced his pocket-book, and from his pocket-book a postcard. It was the original postcard – the crux of the whole affair.
Farewell, a long farewell
… He tossed it on the desk, and studied it now from one angle and now from another. He did this with all the lights on, with some of the lights on, with only a single desk-light on. It was this last effect which he was considering when there was a cry and a crash behind him. He turned round. A handsome woman – presumably Mrs Husbands – was standing transfixed in the open doorway. And there was a tray and a litter of broken china on the floor.
This disaster didn’t take very long to sort out, so that it had to be concluded that Mrs Husbands was a competent woman. And it wasn’t until she had set a fresh and undisturbed tray before Appleby that she spoke. ‘Was it necessary,’ she asked coldly, ‘to stage that crude theatrical effect?’
‘You are quite mistaken, madam. I am afraid I had entirely forgotten that you would be coming into the library. Nothing was farther from my thoughts than to distress you in any way. Please accept my apologies.’
‘Thank you.’ Mrs Husbands received these protestations with the scepticism they conceivably deserved. ‘I am glad it was not one of the servants. I hear nothing from them now but that this or that has given them, as they say, quite a turn. And I admit that you gave that to me. The scene was a little too close to what I came upon last week. No doubt it is what you call a reconstruction of the crime.’
‘The crime?’
‘Suicide is a crime, I have been told.’
‘No doubt. But all that I was in fact attempting to reconstruct was the appearance which that postcard probably bore when you first saw it. And you can guess what I am after, Mrs Husbands. I want to see whether, in one light or another, some gleam or glitter from its surface might suggest wet ink.’
‘How very ingenious. But the ink was in simple fact wet.’
Appleby bowed. ‘I am far from being disposed to question the veracity of your evidence in the matter. It satisfied, as you will remember, a thoroughly capable officer of my own. But in a crisis, you know, one can sometimes form – perfectly sincerely – impressions that are not wholly accurate.’
‘No doubt. But the ink was wet.’
‘It is not a matter we need pursue farther.’ Appleby was studying the housekeeper with a good deal of attention. She was a surprise. She was a surprise not merely because she was herself so decidedly not ‘one of the servants’ – although it hadn’t in fact been mentioned to him that she was a domestic employee of the genteel variety. She was a surprise because she was rather tremendous – a handsome woman in full maturity.
Appleby wondered how long she had been at Urchins. He also wondered what the two recently arrived ladies thought of her. To describe her adequately seemed to call for a rather vulgar Edwardian vocabulary; one would think of phrases like ‘charms’ and ‘ample but alluring proportions.’ Yet she wasn’t vulgar herself, and she had a presence which quite knocked comedy – let alone farce – out of the picture. Passion smouldered in the black eyes of this intimidating person. If she put on a turn, it would be as a tragedy queen. She could probably scare a man stiff. In fact, one might find oneself allured by her one week, and bolting precipitately from her across Europe the next. Across Europe… Appleby was aware that it wasn’t utterly at random that this notion had come into his head. It was just conceivable that here in Mrs Husbands was another factor in the supposedly belated emotional education of Lewis Packford.
‘Do I understand,’ Mrs Husbands asked, ‘that there are other aspects of Mr Packford’s death on which you wish to question me?’ She spoke very coldly. It was evident that she wouldn’t lightly forgive Appleby for occasioning her loss of nerve a few minutes before.
‘A short conversation would certainly be very valuable to me.’ Appleby glanced at the tray. ‘That’s a most delicious cold lunch. But perhaps it can wait a little. Shall we sit down?’
Mrs Husbands sat down. ‘I see no reason,’ she said without cordiality, ‘why you shouldn’t eat as we talk – if talk we must. It was my impression that the police had satisfied themselves and concluded their inquiries.’
‘That would meet with your approval? You feel that nothing more should be done?’
‘I feel nothing of the sort. But let the police turn their attention to those women. They should both go to prison.’
‘Mrs Packford and the other lady who appears to have – well, some interest in that title? You regard them as implicated in Mr Packford’s death?’ Appleby, who hadn’t adopted the suggestion that he should begin to eat, glanced at Mrs Husbands with what was no more than an air of polite interrogation. But he was now very interested in her indeed. For she had spoken in a sudden flare of anger. If Packford’s death had been clamped down, so to speak, under a tolerably firm lid, this was the first really promising jolt it had received.
‘Implicated in his death? They caused it.’ Mrs Husbands was breathing quickly, but her voice was again under control.
‘You mean that they murdered him – the two of them together?’
‘Not that. Of course I know that he shot himself. But they drove him to it.’
‘I see. Well, that is a very different matter. These ladies may have confronted him with an awkward situation, leading to his committing suicide. But it’s not clear that, as a result they should be put in prison.’
‘Hadn’t they both married him? Isn’t that utterly illegal?’
Appleby received this question in thoughtful silence. It was obvious that Mrs Husbands, although only a superior employee, was fully informed of the present situation at Urchins. It was obvious that, although both competent and distinctly frightening, she was not a woman of much intelligence. Either that – or, what was equally tenable at the moment – she was in so deep a state of emotional disturbance over Packford’s death that her power of quite ordinary judgement was impaired.
‘Illegal?’ Appleby said. ‘Of course, there has undeniably been illegality somewhere in the business – if, that is to say, two marriages were actually performed and registered. But it is extremely unlikely that the first of the ladies has in any degree broken the law. There would have to be most unusual circumstances of collusion to bring about anything of the sort. And the second lady is much more likely to have been an innocent party than not. I fear, in fact, that your mind is in some confusion in this matter. The only person who had certainly performed a criminal act was Mr Packford himself. But you are disposed to judge him innocent?’
‘I judge him base and despicable!’
Appleby received this too in silence for a time. Mrs Husbands, to put it mildly, seemed a little lacking in discretion. For what was emerging from her performance was the portrait of a woman who felt herself to have been betrayed, and who had undergone some violent revulsion of feeling in consequence. It was odd that Cavill had missed so striking an addition to his gallery of psychological types. Not that there was anything out-of-the-way in her. Indeed, in this very house there were two other women upon whom similar emotional confusions might be at play at this very moment. Perhaps Mrs Husbands differed from Ruth chiefly in the disposition to let her hair down in tense situations. As for Alice the barmaid, she was still an unknown quantity.
‘It certainly seems,’ Appleby said, ‘as if the late Mr Packford allowed himself to behave in a manner suggesting some little weakness of character.’
‘He was an extremely upright and generous man!’ Mrs Husbands had produced this like a flash. She hadn’t much power of resistance, Appleby reflected, to the quite elementary wiles which a policeman carries round. About Lewis Packford she would allow herself words as bitter as she could lay her tongue to. But the mildest stricture advanced upon him by anybody else would produce an instantaneous impulse of defence. She was an impulsive woman, and perhaps she was an unstable one. What she didn’t seem to be was cunning. But this might be the consequence of her being very cunning indeed. And if she were that, there was every probability that her place wouldn’t prove to be entirely in the background of this affair.
‘Mr Packford’s death,’ Appleby said vaguely, ‘must have come at the end of a day of great strain for everybody concerned. I understand that both these ladies arrived virtually simultaneously and quite out of the blue.’
‘I know nothing about the blue.’ Mrs Husbands had managed to achieve again her former cold tone. ‘But it was certainly my impression that Mr Packford had received no warning whatever that these predatory persons were about to descend upon him.’
‘I see.’ Mrs Husband’s speech, it occurred to Appleby, was decidedly that of an educated woman. And he wondered how Packford had picked her up. Perhaps she was the widow of someone among his learned and academic acquaintance. ‘But is it quite fair to describe them in that way? One of them was his legal wife, after all, and the other believed herself to be so.’
‘They are both designing women.’
‘Well, let us leave it at that. They both turned up – each announcing herself as Mrs Packford?’
‘Precisely that, Sir John. Each had apparently received an anonymous letter, and I suspect that each was acting upon specific advice it had contained. For each arrived with a suitcase, rang the front-door bell, and announced herself as being the – the mistress of the house. I should have said myself that they were mistresses of quite another variety.’
‘Again, Mrs Husbands, I don’t know that that’s quite fair. However, there they were. And this extraordinary situation was presently known to the whole household?’
‘Certainly, it was. Our parlour maid came to me, and I went at once to Mr Packford. Naturally, I imagined some insolent imposture. His only suggestion was that I should find these – these ambiguous persons rooms. And then he went in to his friends – Professor Prodger and the rest, who were at tea – and explained.’
‘Explained?’
‘He explained that he was married. In fact he explained that – rather awkwardly – he was doubly married.’
Mrs Husbands was making a great effort to preserve her cool and acrid tone. ‘Canon Rixon has told me that he appeared like a man in a daze.’
‘And then?’
‘And then the – the two persons dined with Mr Packford and his friends.’
‘That must have been extremely queer. Was it your own opinion that Mr Packford was – well, noticeably discomposed?’
‘He must have been – if what happened later is to be explained. But it is Canon Rixon’s opinion that Mr Packford, although disturbed, didn’t really grasp the full gravity of his position. His mind was still largely on something else.’