Caustic Soda
“Miss Cross!” exclaimed Roger.
The inspector continued to address himself to Anthony. “You must be
ready for a bit of a shock, I’m afraid. It’s Miss Cross that Mr.
Woodthorpe has been engaged to all the time. She’s been just amusing
herself with you. She’s——”
“I think I shall go to bed,” observed Anthony abruptly, and rose from
his chair. “It’s pretty late. Good-night, you two.”
He went.
The inspector watched the door close, then dropped into his seat.
“It’s a nasty smack for him,” he said sympathetically. “But he’s
young. He’ll get over it.”
Roger found his tongue. “But—but that is almost incredible,
Inspector!”
The inspector looked at him quizzically. “Is it, sir?”
“I can’t believe it of her. Are you sure you’re not making a mistake?”
“Perfectly. I’ve known it for some time as a matter of fact, but I
couldn’t very well drop a hint to your cousin.”
“Of course,” Roger said slowly, readjusting his ideas in the light of
this startling development, “of course this makes Woodthorpe’s
confession a good deal more understandable.”
“Oh, yes, I knew what he was getting at.”
“She must have shown him she was frightened,” Roger pursued, thinking
rapidly. “But the last time I saw her she seemed quite all right.
Something must have happened since then. Inspector—you’re looking
guilty! Out with it!”
“I had a long interview with her this morning,” the inspector
admitted. “Perhaps I _did_ press her pretty closely. I knew she was
concealing her engagement from me, you see, so she might have been
concealing other things as well. Yes, I certainly did press her pretty
closely.”
“What you really did, I suppose, was to convey to her quite obviously
that you still suspected her after all and that if she couldn’t
produce a better explanation of certain matters, she’d be finding
herself very shortly in distinctly hot water?”
“We have to do these things, you know, sir,” confessed the inspector
almost apologetically.
“Well, thank goodness I’m not a policeman,” retorted Roger, making no
effort to conceal his distaste. “No wonder you frightened the poor
girl out of her wits. I suppose you practically told her you were
going to apply for a warrant against her. The rest was inevitable, of
course. So what do you suppose is going to happen now?”
“Perhaps when she finds there isn’t a warrant out against her, Mr.
Woodthorpe will bring her back the same way as he took her away.”
“Oh, so you’re not going to apply for a warrant after all?” said Roger
sarcastically.
“No, sir, I’m not.”
“Very nice for the girl’s reputation, I must say, to be careering
about the Continent with a young man for goodness knows how long.”
“She’s engaged to him,” the inspector pointed out mildly. “It _is_
possible for them to get married abroad, you know.”
Roger snorted.
There was a little silence.
“You seem very put out on her behalf,” the inspector ventured,
curiosity overcoming discretion. “Considering how she’s been treating
your cousin, I mean.”
“She was a minx, I admit,” Roger said, with a little laugh. “I also
admit that she took me in properly; I really thought she was quite
fond of Anthony. But after all, I suppose she had some justification.
If she was engaged to friend Colin all the time, the position must
have been a very difficult one for her, both before Mrs. Vane’s death
and afterward, whether she knew anything about her fiancé’s intrigue
with that lady or not. She couldn’t admit the engagement while she was
under that cloud, you see, and all her energies must have been
concentrated on clearing her name. I don’t say she behaved very
nicely, but that must be the explanation. Having had it forcibly
impressed on her that not only public opinion but the official police
as well were dead against her, she deliberately set out to attach
Anthony to her in order to make sure of getting him and me on her side
and enlisting our energies on her behalf. Don’t you think that’s the
truth of the matter?”
“Not a doubt of it, sir,” agreed the inspector heartily. “That’s the
truth of that all right.”
“And very well she succeeded,” added Roger modestly. “Well, now that
the whole thing’s at an end, so to speak, Inspector, what about a
little bed?”
The inspector’s answer was not a direct one. “So you think the whole
thing’s at an end, do you, Mr. Sheringham?” he said, with a return to
his quizzical expression.
“I do, yes,” said Roger, surprised. “Don’t you?”
“I’m very much afraid it is,” the inspector agreed.
Roger looked at him. “What are you driving at, Inspector? Have you
still got a card or two up your sleeve? You surely don’t mean to say
you don’t accept my solution of the mystery?”
The inspector puffed once or twice at his pipe. “If you’d asked me
that question before, when Mr. Walton was still here,” he said slowly,
“I should have said that I did accept it. But as we’re alone—well, no!
I certainly don’t accept it.”
“But—but why ever not?” Roger asked in astonishment.
“Because I happen to know it isn’t correct, sir,” returned the
inspector placidly.
Roger stared at him through the blue haze of tobacco-smoke. “Isn’t
correct? But—but—well, dash it, man, it must be correct!”
The inspector shook his head. “Oh, no, sir, if you’ll pardon me. It
isn’t correct at all. You see, my trouble hasn’t been to find out the
truth; I’ve known that all along. My trouble has been to prove it. To
prove it, I mean, definitely enough to satisfy a court of law. And
that I haven’t been able to do, and I’m afraid, never shall. The
truth’s plain enough, but there’s too many gaps in the chain of legal
proof. It’s a great pity.” The inspector shook his head again, this
time expressing gentle regret.
“What on earth are you talking about?” Roger cried. “Truth obvious all
the time? What do you mean? I haven’t found the truth obvious all the
time!”
Once more the inspector shook his head, now conveying the disappointed
reproof of the master at the too easy failure of a fairly gifted
pupil. “And yet it was staring at you in the face all the time, sir,”
he said in tones of reproach. “The trouble was you wouldn’t look at
it.” He drew again at his pipe for a moment or two, as if collecting
in his mind what he wanted to say. Roger watched him in frank
amazement.
“Yes, that was your trouble, sir,” resumed the inspector, in a
slightly didactic voice. “All the time you’ve been refusing to look
the facts in the face. This was a simple case, so far as just finding
out the truth went; as simple as ever I’ve come across. But that
wouldn’t do for you. Oh, dear, no! You must go and make a complicated
business out of it. As simple a little murder as ever was, but you
want to run about and raise all sorts of irrelevant issues that had
nothing to do with the case at all.”
“Who did murder Mrs. Vane, then?” demanded Rogers, disregarding these
strictures. “If Meadows didn’t, as you seem to be meaning, who the
devil did?”
“That’s the trouble with you people with too much imagination,”
pursued the inspector. “A simple murder’s never enough for you. You
can’t believe a murder can be simple. You’ve got to waste your time
ferreting out a lot of stuff to try to make it look less simple than
it really is. No good detective ought to have too much imagination. He
doesn’t need it. When all——”
“Oh, cut the cackle for the time being!” interrupted Roger rudely.
“Who _did_ murder Mrs. Vane?”
“When all the evidence points to one person, and motive and
opportunity and everything else as well, the real detective doesn’t
waste his time saying, ‘Ah, yes! I know a thing or two worth that.
When all the evidence and the rest of it points to one person, then
the odds are that that person is innocent and someone else has made it
look like that. That’s how I should commit a murder, by Jove! I’d fake
all the evidence to point to somebody else. That’s what must have been
done in this case. So whoever may be guilty, we know one person at any
rate who isn’t, and that’s the one that the foolish inspector from
Scotland Yard, who hasn’t got a nice big imagination like me, is going
to go and suspect. Haw, haw!’” The mincing accent with which the
inspector strove to represent the speech of this superior person with
imagination was offensive in the extreme.
“Who murdered Mrs. Vane, Inspector?” asked Roger coldly.
“Why ask me, Mr. Sheringham?” retorted the inspector, still more
offensively. “I’m only the man from Scotland Yard, without any
imagination. Don’t ask yourself either, though, because the answer’s
staring you in the face; so of course you’d never be able to see it.
Go and ask any child of ten in the village. He’d know. He’s known all
the time, for the matter of that.”
“Good God!” Roger exclaimed, genuinely shocked. “You don’t seriously
mean that——” He paused.
“Of course I do!” returned the inspector more genially. “Good
gracious, sir, I can’t think how you can have persuaded yourself she
didn’t. Everything was against her—every single thing! There wasn’t a
loophole, so far as commonsense went (I’m not talking about legal
proof, mind you). Of course she did it!” He lay back in his chair and
roared with callous laughter at Roger’s unmistakable discomfiture. It
was the inspector’s hour, and he was evidently going to enjoy every
minute of it.
“But—but I can’t believe it!” Roger stammered. “Margaret Cross! Good
Lord!”
“Well, perhaps I ought not to laugh at you, sir,” the inspector went
on, continuing nevertheless to do so with the utmost heartiness.
“After all, you’re not the first one to be taken in by a pretty face
and a nice, innocent, appealing sort of manner, are you? Why, there’s
mugs in London being taken in by ’em every day!”
The country mug winced slightly, but no words came to him.
“Of course I wouldn’t be saying any of this if Mr. Walton were here,”
said the inspector, ceasing to laugh. “It’d be a nasty shock for him,
very nasty indeed; and the one he’s got already is quite enough.
You’ll keep it all dark from him, of course.”
Roger found his voice. “Who killed Meadows, then?” he asked abruptly.
“Why, the girl!” ejaculated the inspector. “She killed ’em both, I
keep telling you. Meadows saw her with Mrs. Vane, lay low for a few
days, then sprang it on her and started in to blackmail her, no doubt;
probably wanted most of that ten thousand pounds she was to get under
the will. So she finished him off, too.”
“Oh, rot!” Roger cried incredulously.
“It’s true enough, sir,” said the inspector more seriously. “I saw it
all the time; knew he must have been murdered when we found him there
dead. It was a nasty blow for me too, I can tell you, because he was
my only witness against her for the murder of Mrs. Vane. That’s what I
was going to arrest him for, as a matter of fact, to keep him safe in
prison and make him talk—not because I thought he’d committed the
murder himself, like you; I never did think so. In fact, I knew he
hadn’t. Yes, she spoilt my case against her there completely.”
“But—but look here, can you prove these extraordinary assertions in
any way, Inspector?”
“Well enough for commonsense, sir, though not beyond all reasonable
doubt, which is what the law wants. Let’s take the two cases in turn.
What were the clues in the first one? The coat-button and the
footprints. Well, the footprints had been made by a number six shoe,
fairly new, the heels not worn at the side; Miss Cross I found out,
had been wearing shoes that afternoon which answered to that
description. That wasn’t conclusive, of course; half-a-dozen people
might have been wearing shoes like that. But the coat-button was.
There was no getting round that. The maid was dead certain that button
had been on Miss Cross’s coat when she went out, and there it was in
the dead woman’s hand. That would want a lot of explaining away.”
“But it _could_ be explained away.”
“Oh, yes, sir; it could,” agreed the inspector cheerfully. “I showed
you how myself.”
“But what about those shoes I found in the sea? You said they were
Mrs. Russell’s.”
“So they were, sir. But what about them? You never seriously thought
those were really the shoes the murderer had worn, did you?”
Roger choked slightly, but made no reply.
“Oh, I can’t believe you thought that,” continued the inspector with
relish. “Why, that was an old pair, not new like the pair that had
made those footprints. A child could have seen that. Besides, they’d
only been in the water an hour or two.”
“What?” Roger cried.
“Oh, didn’t you know that, sir?” asked the inspector innocently. “Oh,
yes; they weren’t much more than wet through. And you don’t mean to
say you never recognised them, sir? Well, dear me!”
“Rub it in, rub it in,” Roger groaned. “Dance on my body if you like.
I’ve no doubt I deserve it. No, I didn’t recognise them. Would you
mind explaining to my futile intelligence what exactly you mean by
that?”
“Well, seeing that you’d had them in your hands not twenty-four hours
before, I thought you might have recognised them. Didn’t you get hold
of a pair of Mrs. Russell’s shoes, and give them to Miss Cross to give
back for you?”
“Great Scott, you don’t mean to say _those_ were the ones?”
“Indeed they were, sir, as it wouldn’t have taken you five minutes to
find out, if you’d ever thought of it. The girl lost her head a bit
over that. It’s easy enough to see what happened. You’d been putting
forward the idea that the murderer was a man, who’d made those marks
with a pair of woman’s shoes to throw us off the track. She’s getting
pretty desperate by then, seeing how strongly I suspected her (I never
troubled to hide that), so she makes some excuse to get away, nips
back to the house, slashes the shoes up the sides to give the
impression they’d been prepared for big feet, and throws them over the
top of the cliff. Then she makes another excuse to get you down on to
the ledge, where they can be found. Why, bless you, sir, _you_ never
found those shoes! She did!”
“It’s perfectly true,” Roger muttered. “She did. I remember.”
“Yes, it’s all plain enough as far as commonsense goes, but no good
for a court of law, I’m afraid. A smart counsel could tear all that to
shreds with his eyes shut. The same with the second case too.”
“Yes, go on to that.”
“Well, there, sir, I really did my best to put you on the right track.
I _told_ you that Meadows was murdered by the same person who killed
Mrs. Vane, and because he’d seen the first murder done, I told you
that, and I told you that it must have been someone who had access to
aconitine. You said just now you thought I meant Dr. Vane, but I
didn’t of course; I meant the girl. And then the funny thing is you
thought I was trying to pull your leg. Why, it’s all been staring you
in the face. I’ve heard you with my own ears talking with Mr. Walton
about how funnily Miss Cross was behaving, wanting to go over to
France one minute and stay here the next and all the rest of it; and
all you thought was that it was nerves. So it was, but not the kind
you meant!
“And I’d given you another hint long before that, when I told you
there was real bad blood in that family. I told you straight out they
were practically all of them criminals; and still you thought she
couldn’t be, just because she had an innocent face. Of course the
first thing I’d done was to have the records searched for her at the
Yard, _and_ found her in them too. Never actually been in prison, you
understand, but mixed up before she came here with a very shady crew
indeed; a house she got a job in as a parlourmaid was burgled for
instance, and another where she was supposed to be the governess; we
never laid our hands on the lot that did it but there’s no doubt that
she was in with them, though nothing could be proved against her. Oh,
and several other things too. She was a bad lot all right before she
ever came here, but clever—oh, yes, clever enough.”
“Go on to the second case,” said Roger feebly.
The inspector paused and marshalled his ideas. “Well, now, there, sir,
you made a very bad mistake indeed,” he said with some severity. “You
jumped to the conclusion that Meadows was killed by aconitine in his
tobacco. If you’d troubled to read up aconitine as you ought to have
done, you’d have found out that it’s a vegetable alkaloid, and
vegetable alkaloids lose all their power if they’re burnt. You can
smoke as much aconitine in your tobacco as you like, and it isn’t
going to do you any harm.”
“But that’s what killed him,” Roger protested.
“Oh, no, it isn’t, sir, if you’ll pardon me. He was killed by
aconitine placed in his _pipe_, not his tobacco. Aconitine was put in
the bowl or the stem of his _pipe_, sir, where his saliva melted it,
and he swallowed it before he knew what he’d done. And that not only
proves that it couldn’t have been put there three weeks before, as you
thought, but must have been during the previous night, but also that
it was put there by someone who knew a little about poisons but not
very much, for otherwise there’d have been none wasted in the tobacco.
She meant to make sure of the job all right, by the way; there was
enough of the stuff there to kill a hundred people.”
“But wait a minute!” Roger interrupted. “You’re wrong there,
Inspector. It _could_ have been put there by Mrs. Vane. I found out
that Meadows only smoked his pipes a week at a time, remember!”
The inspector’s expression was more pitying than chagrined. “Yes, but
did you find out when he changed them, Mr. Sheringham, sir? I did, you
see. On Sunday mornings. So it couldn’t have been Mrs. Vane after all.
It was somebody who came during that previous night, while he was
asleep. It wasn’t the doctor, because he’d never have put the stuff in
the tobacco; there’s no conceivable reason why it should have been
Miss Williamson; it _must_ have been Miss Cross. But there again
there’s no absolute proof.”
“Well,” said Roger, “I’ll be damned!”
The inspector helped himself with an absent air from the bottle of
whisky which stood, flanked by a couple of syphons, on a small table
at his elbows. He sipped his drink thoughtfully.
“And you’re not going to apply for a warrant?” Roger asked, when all
this had sunk into him. “You’re going to let her get away with it?”
The inspector allowed a little whisky to sink into him. “No help for
it, I’m sorry to say. We could never get a conviction. As I said, I
think you’ll find that the verdict next Thursday will be suicide, and
we shall let it rest at that; the verdict of accidental death on Mrs.
Vane as well. It isn’t the first time this has happened, you know.
There’s any number of people walking about to-day, free men and women,
that we _know_ to be murderers, but we can’t prove it to the
satisfaction of a court.”
“Yes, I know that, of course,” Roger nodded. “Legal proof is a very
different thing from moral conviction. Well, I must say I’m not sorry.
They were two distinctly unpleasant specimens of humanity of which she
ridded the world, and I should be sorry to hear of her hanging for
them. But—poor Colin!”
“Be thankful she hasn’t got into your own family, Mr. Sheringham,
sir,” replied the inspector philosophically. “And I daresay she won’t
make him a bad wife when all’s said and done. It was his money she was
after, of course; now she’s got that, and an established position, she
may settle down all right.”
“Not the sort of wife I’d choose myself for all that,” Roger said with
a little shiver. “Yes, she must have been after his money, I suppose.
As no doubt Mrs. Vane was before her.”
“No, sir,” said the inspector meditatively. “I’m inclined to think
Mrs. Vane wasn’t; I think she was genuinely fond of the boy. Margaret
knew about her affair with him, of course, and that was another reason
for wanting her out of the way. That’s why the engagement was kept so
secret too. She knew her cousin would never give him up to her, and
would certainly cut her out of her will as well. By the way, it may
interest you to know that the doctor’s marriage settlement is
invalidated, as Mrs. Vane was never his legal wife; I had the wording
looked into and a legal opinion taken. So the girl doesn’t get that
ten thousand after all.”
“‘Much Ado About Nothing,’” Roger commented ironically.
“Or ‘The Dead Hand,’” smiled the inspector. “That was a good title of
yours after all, sir, because it was the button in Mrs. Vane’s dead
hand that makes the whole thing so certain.”
Roger stifled a yawn and looked at his watch. “Good Heavens, do you
know it’s past two, Inspector? We’d better get to bed. Though whether
I shall sleep very much is another question. All this is a little
upsetting, you must understand.—By Jove,” he added as he rose to his
feet, “do you know, even now I can hardly believe that she did it!”
The inspector smiled at him tolerantly as he also rose. “Because she
looked pretty and innocent, and you thought at one time she might be
going to make a match of it with your cousin, sir? Because you saw
her, in fact, as the pretty little heroine of one of your own books?”
“I suppose so,” Roger admitted.
The inspector patted him on the shoulder with a large and consoling
hand. “Do you know what’s the matter with you, sir?” he said kindly.
“You’ve been reading too many of those detective stories.”
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
This transcription follows the text of the edition published by Simon
and Schuster in 1927. However, the following alterations have been
made to correct what are believed to be unambiguous errors in the
text:
* “Maragaret” to “Margaret” (Chapter IX);
* “Couston Hall” to “Clouston Hall” (Chapter XI);
* “witholding” to “withholding” (Chapter XVII);
* “Morseby” to “Moresby” (Chapter XVII);
* “currare” to “curare” (Chapter IX); and
* the phrase “any he was” to “and he was” (Chapter XXVI).