Girls and Murder
Ludmouth village is nearly a mile away from its station. On arriving
at the latter Roger and Anthony put their traps in the combined
ticket-office, porter’s room, luggage depot and cloakroom, and
proceeded to make enquiries regarding hotels.
“’Otel?” repeated the combined porter, station-master and
ticket-inspector, scratching the top of his head with an air of
profound cogitation. “Why, there ain’t no ’otel ’ereabouts.
Leastaways, not what you might call an ’otel, there ain’t.”
“Well, a pub, then,” rejoined Roger a trifle irritably. The journey
had been a long and tiresome one, and since changing at Bournemouth
they had seemed to progress at the rate of ten miles an hour. For one
who was as eager to get going as Roger had been all that day, few
things could have been more maddening than the journey as habitually
performed between Bournemouth and Ludmouth. It is not to say that the
train does not go fast when it is going, but stations seem to
demoralise it completely; it sits down and ruminates for a matter of
twenty minutes in each one before it can bring itself to go on to the
next. “What’s the name of the best pub in Ludmouth?”
The combination chuckled hoarsely. “The best pub?” he echoed with
considerable amusement. “The _best_ pub, hey? Oho! Hoo!”
“I’ve said something funny,” Roger pointed out to Anthony. “You see?
The gentleman is amused. I asked the name of the best pub, so no
wonder he’s convulsed with mirth.”
Anthony inspected the combination with some attention. “I don’t think
he’s laughing at you at all. I think he’s just seen a joke that
Gladstone made in 1884.”
“There ain’t nobbut one!” roared the combination. “So when you says
the _best_ pub I——”
“Where is the one pub in Ludmouth?” asked Roger patiently.
“Why, in the village, o’ course.”
“Where is the village of Ludmouth and its one pub?” Roger pursued with
almost superhuman self-restraint.
This time a more lucid reply was forthcoming, and the two strode out
into the hot sunshine and down the country road in the direction
indicated, leaving behind them a combination of porter, station-master
and ticket-inspector guffawing at irregular intervals as some fresh
aspect of this cream of jests appeared to occur to him.
It was a warm walk into the village, and they were glad enough to
plunge into the gloom of the little old-fashioned inn which stood in
the middle of the small cluster of houses which constitutes the
nucleus of the village. A smart rap or two on the counter brought the
landlord, a large man of aspect not unlike a benevolent ox and
perspiring almost audibly.
“Can’t serve you, gents, I’m afraid,” he rumbled cheerfully.
“Leastaways lemonade you can have, or ginger-beer, for the matter of
that; but nothing else.”
“That so?” said Roger. “Then produce two large tankards of beer, the
biggest tankards and the wettest beer you’ve got, for we came not as
travellers but as residents.”
“You don’t mean you want to stay ’ere as well? You want rooms?”
“Rooms we shall want, certainly; but what we want just at the moment
is beer—and don’t forget what I told you about the size of those
tankards.”
“Oh, well, that’s a different matter, that is,” agreed the landlord.
“I can let you have a couple of quart tankards, if they’re any use to
you.”
“Any _use?_ You watch!”
With much wheezing and creaking the landlord filled the two huge
tankards, and the two fell upon them gratefully. Then Roger replaced
his on the counter and wiped his mouth.
“So this is the only inn hereabouts, is it?” he asked with a careless
air.
“Yes, sir; it is that. Ludmouth’s a small village, you see, as far as
the village goes.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, there’s far more big ’ouses round and gentry and suchlike than
there is of us villagers, and naturally they don’t want
public-’ouses.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, quite so. By the way, I believe there’s a friend of
mine somewhere about here called Moresby. You seen or heard of him by
any chance?”
“Mr. Moresby?” beamed the landlord. “Why he’s staying ’ere, he is.
Took ’is room this very mornin’, he did. Well, fancy that!”
“Fancy it indeed! You hear that, Anthony? Dear old Moresby staying
under the very same roof-tree! What do you think of that, eh?”
“Good enough,” Anthony agreed.
“I should say so.” He took another pull at his tankard. “Been having
some excitement down here, landlord, haven’t you? Lady fell over a
cliff, or something?”
“Mrs. Vane, sir? Yes. Very sad business, very sad indeed. A wonderful
nice lady she was too, they say, though I can’t say as how I knew ’er
meself. A bit of a stranger in these parts, she was, you see. ’Adn’t
been married to the doctor more nor five years.”
“The doctor? Her husband is a doctor, is he?”
“Well, in a manner o’ speaking he is. He’s always called Dr. Vane,
though he don’t do no doctoring. Plenty o’ money he’s got now and
always ’as ’ad since he settled ’ere twenty or more years ago, but a
doctor he was once, they do say, an’ Dr. Vane he’s always called.”
“I see. And where does he live? Near here?”
“A matter of a mile or so out Sandsea way; big ’ouse standin’ in its
own grounds back from the cliffs. You couldn’t miss it. Very lonely,
like. You might take a stroll out there and see it if you’ve got
nothing to do.”
“By Jove, yes, we might, mightn’t we, Anthony?”
“I should think so,” said Anthony cautiously.
“But first of all about these rooms. How many have you got vacant,
landlord?”
“Well, besides Mr. Moresby’s, there’s four others altogether. If you’d
like to step up in a minute or two and see ’em, you could choose which
ones you’d like.”
“We won’t bother. We’ll take them all.”
“What, all four of ’em?”
“Yes; then we can have a bedroom and a sitting-room apiece, you see.”
“But there’s a sitting-room downstairs I could let you ’ave. A proper
sitting-room.”
“Is there? Good! Then we’ll take that too. I love proper
sitting-rooms. That’ll be five rooms altogether, won’t it? I should
think that ought to be enough for us. What would you say, Anthony?”
“I think that might be enough,” Anthony assented.
“You see, landlord? My friend agrees with me. Then that’s settled.”
“It’ll cost you more, sir,” the landlord demurred in some
bewilderment.
“Of course it will!” Roger agreed heartily. “Ever so much more. But
that can’t be helped. My friend is a very faddy man—a very faddy man
indeed; and if he thinks we ought to have five rooms, then five rooms
we shall have to have. I’m very sorry, landlord, but you see how it
is. And now I expect you’d like us to pay you a deposit, wouldn’t you?
Of course. And after that, there are our bags and things to be got
from the station, if you’ve got a spare man about the place; and you
might tell him from me that if the red-faced man who hands them over
begins to make curious noises all of a sudden, he needn’t take
offence; it only means that he’s just seen a joke that someone told
him the year Queen Victoria was born. Let’s see now; a deposit, you
said, didn’t you? Here’s ten pounds. You might make me out a receipt
for it, and be careful to mention all five rooms on the receipt or I
shall be getting into trouble with my friend. Thanks very much.”
The landlord’s expression, which had been growing blanker and blanker
as this harangue proceeded, brightened at the sight of the two
five-pound notes which Roger laid on the counter; words may be words,
but money is always money. He had not the faintest idea what it was
all about and it was his private opinion that Roger was suffering from
rather more than a touch of the sun, but he proceeded quite readily to
make out the required receipt.
Roger tucked it away in his pocket-book and, professing a morbid
interest in the late Mrs. Vane, began to ask a number of questions
regarding the exact spot where she had fallen over the cliff and how
best to get there. This information having been obtained and the
conveyance of the bags arranged for, he shook the puzzled landlord
heartily by the hand and drew Anthony out into the road.
“Well, I suppose you know what you’re doing,” remarked that young man,
as they set off briskly in accordance with the landlord’s
instructions, “but I’m blessed if I do. Why on earth did you book four
bedrooms?”
Roger smiled gently. “To prevent all the other little journalists from
sharing our advantage in staying under the same roof as Inspector
Moresby of Scotland Yard, Cousin Anthony. A dirty trick, no doubt; but
nevertheless a neat one.”
“Oh, I see. Very cunning. And where are we off to now? The cliffs?”
“Yes. You see, I want to get hold of Moresby as soon as I possibly
can, and it seems to me that if he only arrived here this morning
he’ll still be hanging round those cliffs; so the best thing I can do
is to make for them too.”
“Seems a sound scheme. And after that?”
“Well, I ought to try to get an interview with one of the people at
the house, I suppose, though I don’t much fancy the idea of tackling
the doctor himself.”
“Dr. Vane? No, dash it, you can hardly butt in on him.”
“That’s what I feel. He has a secretary, I believe, though I don’t
know what her name is, and of course there’s the girl cousin, Miss
Cross. She’s the person one ought to make for, I think.”
Anthony frowned. “Seems rather rotten to me.”
“To interview her? Not necessarily, at all. She might have something
to say that she’d very much like published. She knows that the
uncompromising fact about that ten thousand pounds is going to be
talked about pretty hard if there’s any question of Mrs. Vane’s death
not being an accident; naturally she’d like an opportunity of putting
an indirect answer of her own forward.”
“I never thought of that,” Anthony confessed, his frown disappearing.
“Nor did I, till this minute,” Roger said candidly. “Still, it’s true
enough. And there’s a little job for you, Anthony. I shan’t want you
with me while I’m talking to Moresby; it’s going to be difficult
enough to get anything out of him in any case, but your presence would
probably dry him up altogether. So you might stroll along the cliffs,
locate the Vanes’ house, and see if you can discover unobtrusively any
information as to the girl’s movements or where I might be likely to
catch her—outside the house, of course, if possible. What about that?”
“Yes, I could do that for you. And meet you later on?”
“Yes; just stroll back along the top of the cliffs again and I shall
be sure to run into you. Well, there’s the sea not three hundred yards
ahead, and nothing but nice, open downs along the top of the cliffs up
there. We turn off to the right, I suppose, and you go straight along
while I make for the edge just over there. I expect I shall be through
in something under an hour. So long!”
As Anthony made his way leisurely over the springy turf in the
direction in which he judged his objective to lie, he pondered with no
little interest over the object of their journey down to this charming
part of the world and its possible outcome. There was in his make-up
none of that eager curiosity regarding his fellow-creatures, their
minds and the passions which sway them that had led Roger, after the
way had once been opened to him, to explore the vast field of
criminology with all its intense and absorbing interest for the
student of the human animal. Indeed the notion of nosing out hidden
facts and secret horrors (“like a bally policeman,” as he had
contemptuously phrased it to Roger over their lunch on the train) had
at first actually repelled him; it was not until Roger had been at
considerable pains to point out the moral duty which every living
person owes to the dead that his eyes were opened to any wider
conception of the idea. And even then, though admitting that there
must be detectives just as much as there must be hangmen, he was quite
firm in his gratitude to Providence that he at any rate was not one of
them; nor could Roger, expatiating on the glories of a clever piece of
deductive reasoning, the exquisite satisfaction of logical proof, the
ardour of the chase with a human quarry (but none the less a quarry
that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred deserved not a jot of
mercy) at the end of it, move him an inch from this position.
It was this state of mind which had caused him to receive with ominous
disapproval Roger’s pointed information about the girl cousin and her
ten thousand pounds. A girl, to Anthony’s mind, should not be
mentioned in the same breath as the word murder. Girls were things
apart. Murder concerned men; not girls. Girls might be and very often
were murdered, but not by other girls. If it were distasteful to hunt
down a man suspected of murder, how impossible would it not be to
harry a wretched girl in the same circumstances?
As his thoughts progressed with his steps, an idea began to form in
Anthony’s mind. He would not only seek out the whereabouts of Miss
Cross, as Roger had asked him; he would contrive to speak to her for a
minute or two and, if possible, drop a veiled warning as to the things
that might be expected to happen—that were, in fact, even now
happening—together with an equally veiled hint that at any rate he,
Anthony Walton, was prepared to extend to her any help within his
power, should she wish to accept it. After all, that was the least a
chap could do. It was the only decent thing. Ten to one she wouldn’t
need anything of the sort, but the offer—yes, of course it was the
only decent thing to do. Girls were weak, helpless things. Let them
know they’ve got a man behind them (even a perfect stranger if the
case is serious enough to warrant it) and it makes all the difference
in the world to ’em. Naturally!
In the glow of this resolution Anthony had unconsciously directed his
steps toward the sea, so that he was now striding along the very edge
of the cliffs. Coming to his senses with a jerk, he pulled up short
and looked inland. Not five hundred yards to his right there stood, in
a large fenced area which evidently stretched to the road half-a-mile
away, a big red house. As the landlord of the inn had said, there was
no mistaking it. Anthony gazed at it for a few moments without moving;
now that he was face to face with it, the task of penetrating its
purlieus and demanding speech with an unknown lady in order to warn
her against dangers which quite probably did not exist at all,
suddenly took on a somewhat formidable aspect.
His eyes left its red roof and began, probably with an instinctive
idea of looking for help, to sweep the remainder of the view, arriving
in due course at the edge of the cliff just in front of him. At this
point Anthony started violently, for seated on a small grassy ledge
not a dozen feet below the cliff top, which was crumbled away at the
point to form a steep but not impossible slope down, was a girl who
was occupied in gazing as hard at Anthony as he had been gazing at the
house. As his glance at last fell upon her she also started, coloured
faintly, and hurriedly transferred her eyes to the horizon in front of
her.
On an impulse Anthony stepped forward and raised his hat.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I am looking for Dr. Vane’s house.
Could you tell me if that is it?”
The girl twisted half round to face him. She wore no hat, and the sun
glinted on her dark hair, unshingled and twisted in two coils on
either side of her head; the eyes with which she looked at Anthony
were large and brown, and the simple little black frock she was
wearing suited her lithe, graceful body so well that one would have
said she should never wear anything else.
“I thought you must be,” she said calmly. “Yes, it is. Did you want to
see anyone in particular?”
“Well, yes; I— That is, I rather wanted to see Miss Cross.”
The girl suddenly stiffened. “I am Miss Cross,” she said coldly.