The Barmaid Is Brought to Book
The bewilderment registered by Mr. Pulteney’s face at this
extraordinary announcement rapidly gave way to a look of intense
gratification. “At last,” he said, “I have lived! To be mistaken for a
criminal, perhaps a murderer—it is my _nunc dimittis_. All these years
I have lived the blameless life of one who is continually called upon
to edify his juniors; I have risen early in order to convict my pupils
of the sin of being late; I have eaten sparingly in order to pretend
that the food provided by our establishment is satisfying when it is
not; I have pretended to sentiments of patriotism, of rugged
sportsmanship, of moral approval or indignation, which I did not feel.
There is little to choose, believe me, between the fakir and the
schoolmaster; either must spend days of wearisome mortification,
because that is the way in which he gets his living. And now, for one
crowded hour of glorious old age, I have been mistaken for a guilty
intriguer. The blood flows richer in my veins; I am overcome with
gratitude. If only I could have kept it up!”
“Mr. Eames,” said Angela, “there’s one thing you said which you’ve got
to take back. You said Mr. Pulteney was too much a man of reflection
to be a man of action as well. And now you’ve heard how he broke into
a garage, stole a piece of sandwich, and took the cap off a
petrol-tank without being in the least certain that the car wouldn’t
explode. Is this the pale scholar you pictured to us?”
“I apologize,” said Eames. “I apologize to Mr. Pulteney unreservedly.
I will form no more judgments of character. You may tell me that Mrs.
Davis is a murderess, if you will, and I will discuss the proposition
on its merits.”
“Talking of which,” said Angela, “the cream of the situation is that
we _still_ don’t know who it was that was rubbering behind that
beastly mill-house.”
“Oh, as to that,” said Eames diffidently, “I’ve felt fairly certain
about that all along. I suppose it’s the result of living with priests
that one becomes thus worldly wise. But didn’t you know, Mr. Bredon,
that maids always steal their masters’ cigarettes? It is, I believe, a
more or less recognized form of perquisite. Every liberty taken by the
rich is aped by their domestics. And, although she is not in household
service, I have no doubt that the barmaid here claims a like
privilege.”
“Do you mean”—— began Bredon:
“You noticed, surely, that her fingers are a little stained with
brown? I noticed it when she brought in my fried eggs. Ladies
generally have expensive tastes in cigarettes, and I have no doubt
that this maid would go for the Callipoli if she got a chance.”
“Miles, dear,” said Angela softly, “who was it said that it must be a
servant who was listening at our bedroom door?”
“The uneducated do not take Mr. Pulteney’s view about curiosity. I
daresay this young lady often listens at keyholes. With a corpse in
the house, and detectives about, she listens with all the more
avidity. And if the detectives insist on exchanging confidences close
to that precise point in the shrubbery at which she is in the habit of
smoking purloined cigarettes, they put themselves in her hands. But a
stronger motive supervenes; what she overhears out of pure curiosity
turns out to be of vital importance to herself. She learns that the
young man she is walking out with is suspected of murder.”
“Good Lord, and of course it was she who reacted on our suggestions,
not Brinkman! I don’t know if I mentioned it to you, Angela, but when
Leyland and I were talking together at the mill-house, he said the
only thing that would make him hesitate to arrest Simmonds would be
evidence shewing that Simmonds knew he wasn’t Mottram’s heir. And it
was exactly that evidence which ‘Raight-ho’ proceeded to produce.”
“Oh,” cried Angela, “How perfectly odious! You mean that when I
thought I was pumping Emmeline so cleverly, and getting out of her
exactly what I wanted, she was really doing it all on purpose, and
telling me exactly what _she_ wanted?”
“I’m afraid so, my dear. A lot of reputations seem to be going west
to-day. And, of course, I should say it’s odds that her whole story
was absolutely trumped up, invented to suit the occasion. And we’re
back exactly where we were, not knowing whether Simmonds knew he was
cut out of the will or not.”
“On the other hand,” said Angela, “we do know, now, what put the wind
up young Simmonds so badly. When you and Leyland passed him and
Emmeline in the lane last night, she was telling him that he was
suspected of murder, and had better be dashed careful what he said and
who he said it to. Naturally it gave him a bit of a fright when he
thought you were going to pump him about his uncle.”
“And meanwhile, what has Brinkman been up to? We’ve really no evidence
against him until all this about the car cropped up. Dash it all, and
just when I was going to get a game of patience!”
“I don’t want to put my oar in unduly,” said the old gentleman in an
apologetic tone, “but might it not be a good thing to acquaint Mr.
Leyland with the somewhat unusual state of affairs down at the garage?
If Brinkman really intends to do what is popularly known as a ‘bunk,’
he may be off at any moment. Had I been more expert, I could no doubt
have immobilized some important part of the mechanism. As it was, I
was helpless.”
“Where is Leyland, by the way?” asked Bredon.
“He is just coming up the street now,” said Eames, looking out of the
window. “I’ll call to him to come in here.”
“Hullo, what have you been up to?” asked Bredon, as Leyland entered.
“Why, to tell the truth, I have been shadowing Mr. Pulteney. I must
apologize, Mr. Pulteney, but I felt bound to be careful. I’ve had you
kept under close observation all this week; and it was only as I stood
behind the door, watching your investigations into that car, that I
became perfectly convinced of your innocence.”
“What! more suspicion! This is indeed a day! Why, if I had had the
least conception that you were watching me, Mr. Leyland, I would have
led you a rare dance! My movements, I promise you, should have been
full of mystery. I should have gone out every night with a scowl and a
dark lantern. I am overwhelmed.”
“Well, I must apologize at least for spying upon your detective work.
You do very well for an amateur, Mr. Pulteney, but you are not
suspicious enough.”
“Indeed! I overlooked something? How mortifying!”
“Yes, when you took the cushion off that front seat, you failed to
observe that there was a neat tear in it, which had been quite
recently sewn up. Otherwise I am sure that you would have done what I
did just now—cut it open.”
“And is it fair to ask what you found inside?”
“Well, we seem to have gone too far now to have any secrets between
us. I feel sure that both you, Mr. Pulteney, and you, Mr. Eames, are
anxious to see justice done, and are prepared to help at least by your
silence.”
“To be sure,” said Pulteney.
“I am at your service,” said Eames.
“Well, this is actually what I found.” With a dramatic gesture he
produced a small waterproof wallet, and turned out its contents. “You
will find a thousand pounds there, all in Bank of England notes.”
“Well,” said Bredon, when the exclamations of surprise had died away,
“are you still suspecting young Simmonds?”
“I’m not easy about him yet in my own mind. But of course I see
Brinkman’s deeper in this business than I had suspected so far. A man
who’s innocent doesn’t prepare to do a bolt with a thousand pounds and
a motor-car that doesn’t belong to him.”
“Well,” said Bredon, “I suppose we ought to be keeping an eye on Mr.
Brinkman.”
“My dear old thing,” said Leyland, “don’t you realize that I’ve had
two of my men at the _Swan_ all this week, and that Brinkman hasn’t
been unaccounted for for one moment? The trouble is, he knows he’s
being watched, so he won’t give himself away. At least I’m pretty sure
of it. But the motor, of course, puts us in a very good position. We
know how he means to escape, and we can afford to take the watch off
him and put it on the motor instead. Then he’ll shew his hand, because
he’s mad keen to be off. At present he’s in his room, smoking a
cigarette and reading an old novel. He won’t move, I think, until he
makes certain that we’re all out of the way. Probably not till after
supper, because a night ride will suit his purpose best. And he’s got
a night for it too; there’s a big storm coming on, unless I’m
mistaken.”
“And what about Simmonds?” asked Bredon.
“And the barmaid?” added Angela.
“Well, of course I could question both or either of them. But I’d
sooner not, if I can help it; it’s cruel work, I was wondering if you,
Mrs. Bredon, could go and have a talk to that maid after we’ve had our
tea, and see what satisfaction you can get out of her?”
“I don’t mind at all. In fact, I rather want to have it out with dear
Emmeline. I owe her one, you see. Meanwhile, let’s have tea by all
means. I wonder if Brinky will come down to it?”
Brinkman did come down, and tea was not a very enlivening meal.
Everybody in the room looked upon him as a man who was probably a
murderer and certainly a thief. Consequently everybody tried to be
nice to him, and everybody’s style was cramped by the effort. Even Mr.
Pulteney’s verbosity seemed to have been dried up by the embarrassment
of the situation. On the whole, Eames carried it off best. His dry,
melancholy manner was quite unaltered; he talked about patience to
Bredon, he talked Pullford gossip to Brinkman; he tried to draw out
Pulteney on educational questions. But most of the party were glad
when it was over, when Brinkman had shut himself up again, and Angela
had betaken herself to the back premises to have it out with the
barmaid.
The “best room” had been turned by common consent into a sort of
committee room; during all this whirligig of sensations, the
background of their mind was filled with those protuberant portraits
of the late Mr. Davis which so defiantly occupied the walls. It was
here that Angela found them assembled when she came up, some half an
hour later, a little red about the eyes.
“Well, I didn’t try any subterfuges this time; I let her have it
straight from the shoulder. And then she cried, and I cried, and we
both cried together a good bit.”
“The mysterious sex again,” said Mr. Pulteney.
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand, of course. Anyhow, she’s had a rotten
time. That first evening, when she listened outside the door, it was
only for a moment or two, out of sheer curiosity, and she didn’t hear
anything that interested her. It was yesterday evening, when you two
were talking, that she got interested. She overheard at first merely
by accident, which just shews how careful you ought to be. She caught
the name ‘Simmonds’; she heard, for the first time, about the
Euthanasia policy, and what it might have meant to him and to her. She
went on listening, naturally, and so she came in for all Mr. Leyland’s
exposition of the case against Simmonds. You didn’t convince my
husband, Mr. Leyland, but you had a much greater success on the other
side of the wall. The poor girl, who’s been brought up on novelettes
and penny-shockers all her life, drank in the whole story. She really
believed that the man who had been making love to her, the man she was
in love with, was a cold-blooded murderer. She acted I think, very
well. He came round that evening to take her out for an evening walk,
and on the way she taxed him with his supposed crime. If you come to
think of it, that was sporting of her.”
“It was,” said Leyland. “People are found dead in ditches for less
than that.”
“Well, anyhow, it worked all right. Simmonds listened to her charges,
and then denied them all. He didn’t give her any evidence for his
denial, but she believed him. There was no quarrel. Next day, that is
to say this morning, Emmeline heard you two arranging for a talk at
the mill-house. She didn’t suspect the trap; she walked straight into
it. What she heard made her believe that there was only one way to
save Simmonds—to pretend that he knew about the Euthanasia, and knew
the money wasn’t coming to him. The poor girl reflected that Simmonds
had been hanging round the house on the night of Mottram’s death; he
had been there waiting to see her when she left the bar at closing
time. So, bravely again, I think, she came to me with her story about
the anonymous friend and her young man with his lost legacy. Of
course, by sheer accident, I made it much easier for her to pitch me
this yarn, and I swallowed it whole. She thought that, with some
blackening of her own conscience, she had saved an innocent man’s
life.”
“And that’s all she knows, so far?”
“No, at the end of lunch she heard you, Miles, saying that you’d give
me half an hour to talk things over. So when she saw us stealing down
to the now familiar trysting-place by the mill—she hadn’t gone to the
funeral—she followed us and listened again. And, to her horror, she
realized from what you said that all her lying had failed to do its
work. Leyland still believed, believed more than ever, that her young
man was the criminal. Her anxiety put her off her guard, and a sudden
sneeze gave her away. She didn’t dare go back to the house; she hid in
the privet-hedge.”
“And the long and short of it is,” suggested Leyland, “that her story
is no evidence at all. Simmonds may be as guilty or as innocent as you
like; she knew nothing about it. Can she give any account of
Simmonds’s movements on the night of the murder?”
“Well, she says she had to be in the bar up to closing time, and then
she slipped round to the back door, where he was waiting for her, and
stood there talking to him.”
“For how long?”
“She says it might have been a quarter of an hour, or it might have
been three quarters of an hour; she really couldn’t say.”
“That sounds pretty thin.”
“How impossible you bachelors are! Miles, can’t you explain to him?
Oh, well, I suppose it’s no use; you couldn’t possibly understand.”
“It’s certainly rather an unfortunate circumstance for Simmonds that,
just at the moment the gas was turned on in Mottram’s room, he was
indulging in a kind of ecstasy which may have lasted a quarter of an
hour, or may have lasted three quarters.”
“Meanwhile,” said Bredon, “I hope you realize that your own case
against Simmonds is considerably weakened? You were trying to make
out, if you remember, that Simmonds murdered Mottram and burned the
will, knowing that the will cut him out of his inheritance. But since
we have learned to discredit the testimony of ‘Raight-ho,’ we have no
evidence that Simmonds ever knew anything about the will, or had ever
so much as heard of the Euthanasia policy.”
“That’s true. And it’s also true that these last discoveries have made
me more inclined to suspect Brinkman. I shall have to keep my eye on
Simmonds, but for the time being Brinkman is the quarry we must hunt.
It’s Brinkman’s confession I look forward to for the prospect of those
forty pounds.”
“Well, if you can catch Brinkman and make him confess, you’re welcome
to them. Or even if Brinkman does himself in somehow, commits suicide
rather than face the question, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt,
and we’ll treat it as murder. Meanwhile, if you will excuse me, I
think I’ve just time to lay out that patience before supper.”
“Oh, he’s hopeless,” said Angela.