Roger Plays a Lone Hand
It was some minutes before Roger would agree to abandon, once and for
all time, his cherished theory of suicide. Suicide had smoothed all
difficulties away; suicide had explained both deaths in the simplest
possible terms, reduced them to a common denominator; in spite of
superficial appearances surely in some way it _must_ be suicide. Not
until the inspector had patiently, and for half-a-dozen times in
succession, pointed out that the very last place in which a voluntary
consumer of aconitine would put the poison was among the contents of
his tobacco-jar, and the very last way he would choose of imbibing it
was through the stem of his pipe, did Roger reluctantly admit that,
hang it! yes, it really did begin to look as if the man had been
murdered after all.
“But you don’t think he was under the impression that aconitine was a
narcotic and that he could smoke it like opium and so have an easy
passage?” he suggested as a final gleam of hope.
“I do not,” said the inspector, briskly extinguishing the gleam. “A
man who’s going to use a drug like aconitine at all is going to know
something about it; and the very least he’d know is that it isn’t a
narcotic. No, sir, there’s no other conclusion at all. Meadows was
murdered.”
“Curse the man, then!” Roger observed with feeling. “He’d simply got
no right to be, that’s all I can say. Now we’re put right back to the
beginning again. Well, who murdered him, Inspector? Perhaps you’ll
tell me that too?”
The inspector tugged at his moustache. “I was hoping you’d be able to
tell me that, Mr. Sheringham.”
“I see,” Roger said bitterly. “I might have known you weren’t pouring
out all this confidential information for nothing. You want to pick my
magnificent brains again, I suppose?”
“Well, if you like to put it that way, sir,” remarked the inspector in
deprecating tones.
“I do. I hate calling a pick-axe an ‘agricultural implement.’ All
right, pick away.”
The inspector drank a little beer with a thoughtful air. “Let’s begin
with a motive, then. Now can you see anyone in the case with a motive
for Meadow’s death?”
“Wait a minute. You still think his death is mixed up with Mrs.
Vane’s? You’re taking that as a starting-point?”
“Well, we can always keep the other possibility before us, but it
seems a fair enough assumption, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes; the balance of probability is certainly in favour of it. But I
don’t think we ought to forget that Meadows (we’ll call him Meadows;
it’s easier) was quite possibly a blackmailer, among his other
activities; and once we admit blackmail the field is enormously
widened.”
“Oh, yes, sir; I’m not forgetting that. But you must remember that he
was certainly down here for some specific purpose to do with his
wife—the coincidence otherwise would be so great that I think we can
wash it out altogether; so if he _was_ blackmailing, it was either his
wife or somebody very closely connected with his wife.”
“Such as her husband?”
“Such as Dr. Vane,” said the inspector meticulously. “Well, you see
what I mean. It seems to me we can take it for granted that his death
_is_ due to somebody already mixed up with the case.”
“Yes,” Roger agreed. “I think you’ve clinched that point.”
“So that brings us back to what I asked you first of all: can you see
anyone in the case with a motive for getting him out of the way?”
“Plenty!” said Roger promptly. “And the one with the biggest motive of
all was Mrs. Vane herself.”
“Excluding her, I was really meaning,” the inspector amplified, with
quite exemplary patience.
“Well, confining ourselves for the moment to the blackmail _motif_, I
suppose Dr. Vane’s the next on the list. He’d have plenty of reason to
get rid of his wife’s real husband, especially if he was threatening
to give the whole show away—as he probably was.”
“Even after his wife was dead? What would it matter to the doctor
then?”
“Everything! Nobody likes to be shown up as a credulous fool, imposed
upon by a clever and unscrupulous woman. Besides, there are bound to
be reasons there that we don’t know anything about, wheels within
wheels. How do we know, for instance, that she hadn’t somehow made him
an accessory to some real breach of the law? It would be a useful
weapon for a woman in such a precarious position as she was. And
Meadows might have got wind of it.”
“Very ingenious, sir,” the inspector approved. “Yes, you make out
quite a pretty case against the doctor; though how you’re going to
prove it is a different matter. And now cutting out the blackmail
idea—or rather, taking another aspect of it. Who after all, whether it
was Dr. Vane or not, would have the greatest incentive to put Meadows
out of the way—to ensure his mouth being shut for ever, if you like?”
Roger nodded slowly. “I see. Yes; of course. And we know Meadows was
on the spot at the time; I was forgetting that. Yes, certainly that’s
the strongest motive of all.”
“That’s how I look at it, anyway,” said the inspector cheerfully. “In
fact, the way I see it is this. Meadows was in that little cave at the
time, probably waiting to keep an appointment with his wife. Along she
comes, but—with somebody else; not alone. Naturally he lies low;
doesn’t want his name connected with hers at all; that might be
killing the goose with the golden eggs. And while he’s waiting, this
other person pushes his wife over the cliff—_and he knows who that
person is_.”
“A masterly reconstruction,” Roger commented. “So although the
original goose is killed, the gander that did it has delivered himself
into his hands; and contrary to all the laws of nature, that gander is
going to be made to shell out golden eggs just as fast as a
sausage-machine!”
“That’s one way of putting it,” the inspector smiled. “But the gander
thinks differently, and——”
“As Samuel is promptly despatched to fresh meadows and pastures
new!—Well, yes, Inspector, one must admit that’s a sound enough
theory, and very cogently stated.”
“Doesn’t it seem to you the only reasonable theory, sir? Or at any
rate, the most reasonable?”
“I suppose it does,” Roger said thoughtfully. “Yes, the most
reasonable, without doubt. So now we come back to the good old
problem, which I solved so extremely neatly last week—who killed Mrs.
Vane?”
“We do, sir. And as to that, do you see one big fact in this second
case which is going to give us a valuable pointer to the identity of
the double murderer?”
“This is as good as a correspondence course,” Roger murmured: “‘How to
Be a Detective,’ in three lessons—Yes, Teacher, I do. Aconitine.”
“That’s right, sir. It must have been somebody who had access to
aconitine; I think we can take _that_ for granted. I shall make
enquiries at the chemist’s in Sandsea and elsewhere, of course, as a
matter of form; but I don’t fancy they’ll lead to anything. The
murderer knew all about poisons; that’s obvious. Something was wanted
that would act quickly, so the choice was practically limited to
prussic acid, strychnine, aconitine and curare. Prussic acid smells
too strong, so the man could hardly be induced to take it
unsuspectingly; with strychnine he’d shout out and make too much fuss;
curare won’t act except on an open wound; aconitine (a _big_ dose of
aconitine, that is) was just what was wanted.”
“Humph!” Roger said seriously, stroking his chin. “I see what you’re
getting at, of course. But do you really think he——”
“Hullo, you two!” said a voice from the door. “Still yapping? Hope
you’ve got something to drink up here. I’ve got a throat like a
mustard plaster after walking along that road in this heat.”
“Anthony,” said his cousin with not unjustified annoyance, “you’re
gross.”
The conversation swerved abruptly from matters criminal.
__________________________________________________________________
Lying in bed that night, Roger did not get to sleep very quickly.
Apart from this fresh development of the case which in itself was
enough to prolong his meditations well into the small hours, he had
another problem to engage his attention scarcely less closely—_why_
had the inspector emerged, practically unbidden, from his shell of
reticence and volunteered this startling information? The pretext of
picking his amateur colleague’s brains was of course only an empty
excuse, for in the subsequent discussion it was the inspector who had
taken the lead, pointed out the possibilities and established a
workable theory; Roger had contributed nothing of any value to it.
Why, in other words, had the inspector gone out of his way to drop
unmistakable hints that the author of both crimes was Dr. Vane
himself? It was only as he was at last dropping off to sleep that an
illuminating answer occurred to him—the inspector had done this
because that is what he wished Roger to think: his real theory was
something entirely different!
__________________________________________________________________
Shaving the next morning, Roger pursued this train of thought. That
certainly was the explanation of the inspector’s otherwise
inexplicable conduct. Laughing maliciously up his sleeve, he had been
trying to head the officious journalist, against whom he already had a
score to pay, not toward the truth but away from it. Roger grinned at
his reflection in the mirror: very well, but two could play at that
game. Likewise, forewarned was forearmed. He began to ponder a plan of
campaign which should end in extracting the wind from the inspector’s
sails.
Obviously the only thing to do was to go straight ahead with his
investigations as if nothing had been said. It was possible of course
that Dr. Vane really was the murderer, although the inspector clearly
did not think so. Nor for that matter did Roger himself. Not that Dr.
Vane struck him as likely to shrink from murder if murder should be
necessary, but somehow he did not _feel_ him as the murderer of his
wife—he could put it no more reasonably than that; the eliminator of
Meadows, yes, quite possibly; but not the other.
And in that connection, was it so unlikely that the two deaths should
have been brought about by different agents? The inspector had
pretended to think so and had certainly made out a strong case to
support his hypothesis, but did that not now point all the more
strongly to the opposite conclusion? The inspector had been at some
pains even to labour the point; all the more reason therefore to
suspect that his real opinion was just the opposite. Well, well,
things did seem to be getting really very involved. The only way of
straightening them out was to keep a clear head, forget no
possibilities and yet allow none to bias him unduly—and might the best
sleuth win!
Roger brushed his hair with his usual care, put on his coat and walked
demurely down to breakfast.
The inspector was already half-way through his meal, and Anthony had
not put in an appearance. For ten minutes the two exchanged
platitudes, the topic bulking largest in both of their minds being as
if by common consent avoided. Then the inspector mumbled something
about having a busy day in front of him and took his departure. Almost
simultaneously Anthony entered the room.
Roger helped himself to marmalade and watched Anthony scoop the
remainder of the dish of bacon and eggs on to his plate. He had
devoted some earnest thought between platitudes during the last ten
minutes to the promise the inspector had extracted from him the
evening before, and while deprecating any temptation to break it even
in the circumstances, fancied that he had found a blameless way round
it. “Anthony,” he began with some care, “you’re on duty this morning.”
“Right-ho!” said Anthony with equanimity. “But what’s the idea?
Nothing for us to do, is there?”
“Well, yes,” Roger said, with elaborate carelessness. “At least,
nothing _necessary;_ just something I’d rather like to play about
with. To tell you the truth, Anthony, I’m getting a little tired of
this enforced idleness, so I’ve propounded a neat little puzzle to
myself. It’s this: suppose Meadows turned out after all not to have
committed suicide, but to have been murdered!”
“Suppose the moon turned into pink cheese too,” responded Anthony
jocularly. “All right, I’ll suppose that. What about it?”
“Well, you know, it _is_ a possibility,” Roger said, with an air of
trying to convince himself against his reason. “We ought not to lose
sight of it just because it seems improbable. And it would be
remarkably interesting if we could make out some sort of a case to
support it, wouldn’t it?”
“Is that what you want to do?” Anthony asked, cutting himself a second
slice of bread. “Seems a bit of a waste of time to me. However, I’m
game if you want to amuse yourself. Things have been a bit quiet
lately, haven’t they?”
Roger glanced at his cousin in some surprise, but tactfully forebore
to comment on this remarkable statement. It had been his impression
that things had not been at all quiet lately, so far as Anthony and
his affairs were concerned. “You haven’t fixed anything up with
Margaret for this morning, then?” was all he said.
“No,” said Anthony very airily. “She’s got to go into Sandsea, I
believe. Shopping, or some rot. I shan’t be seeing her till to-morrow,
if then.”
Again Roger, with almost superhuman tact this time, refrained from
comment. It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “What have you
quarrelled about now, you pair of idiots?” but he didn’t. For one
thing he had no wish to be accompanied all the morning by a glowering
and resentful Anthony.
“That’s all right then,” he remarked briskly, as if for Anthony and
Margaret not to meet during a whole twenty-four hours was quite the
most ordinary thing in the world. “Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do.
I think it would be rather fun, to say nothing of the exercise in
detectiveship, to assume for one day that Meadows was murdered
(poisoned, of course) and see if we can collect any evidence in
support of the notion. What do you say?”
“Frightful fun,” Anthony agreed mechanically.
“That’s the spirit,” said Roger with great heartiness. “Very well,
then; hurry up with your breakfast, and we’ll see what the Queen will
send us.”