Stella Murdered
Stella dead! Stella poisoned! I think that, apart from Margaret, who
sat silent after her one piercing cry of alarm, we none of us quite
realized the horror of the situation, and I am sure that we none of us
understood the doctor’s muttered references to a mistake, or gave any
thought to the manner of her death. Nothing in the scene before us
suggested tragedy. The sun shone in at the three long windows which
were open wide, and one of the two family cats sat leisurely washing
her face on the sill, the drowsy hum of the bees at work in the garden
border below making a fitting accompaniment to her deliberate graceful
movements. The breakfast table was in the homely disorder of a
completed meal and we sat round it in flannels, prepared for tennis.
Kenneth was still arrayed in cap and gown. The golf clubs, the shoe
trees, and the tennis and golf balls collected from Ethel’s bed lay
heaped together in one of the two armchairs. None of these things
suggested tragedy and death—but poor beautiful Stella lay dead
up-stairs.
Only yesterday I had watched her playing vigorous tennis and one
little picture stood out clearly in my mind. She had stooped low to
the ground to reach the ball, her bare arm sweeping gracefully at its
fullest stretch; her lovely pose, as, lightly poised, she held her
balance with one white-clad shapely leg reaching out behind, tip of
toe and finger-tips of her free hand just touching the ground; her
coppery hair showing little pools of sun-kissed ruddy gold; her amber
eyes alight with pure enjoyment as she gave a little involuntary cry
of pleasure when the ball, curving low, just skimmed the net; all made
a vivid picture of joyous slim agility. And that was only a few hours
ago, but now, while we had been fooling round the breakfast table, she
lay stiff and cold and dead.
Kenneth took off his cap and gown, but for once Ralph was the first to
speak. “Look here, we can’t just sit round the table gaping! What did
The Tundish mean by a mistake? Where is he and where on earth is
Ethel? I’m going out to find some one.”
I tried to persuade him to wait a few minutes as the doctor had so
particularly asked us to stay until he came back, and we sat silent
again.
Then Ralph wondered, “Why on earth didn’t he want us to leave the
room?” and Kenneth made for the door saying that he for one wasn’t
going to be told what he could and he couldn’t do at a time like this.
Fortunately, Ethel came back before he reached it and added her
request to mine. She told us that the doctor was in the dispensary,
examining the bottles from which he had made up Stella’s sleeping
draft, and that he would be with us in less than five minutes. She
went over to Kenneth and put one hand on his shoulder as she spoke,
saying, “Oh! it is all too dreadful! We must try to help The Tundish
all we can—it is simply terrible for him.”
“Do you mean that he has made a mistake then?” Kenneth replied, and I
was surprised to hear how hard and harsh his voice was. No hint of
sympathy softened the bluntness of his question, and Ethel’s hand fell
slowly from his shoulder.
The door opened and The Tundish came in. He stood in the doorway for a
moment looking at Kenneth with as sad a smile as ever I wish to see.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think that I have made any mistake, but I have
very serious news for you all. Will you please sit down?”
He took the chair at the end of the breakfast table again as he spoke,
motioning to Ethel to come and sit beside him. His arm was resting on
the table, and I saw her put her hand against it with a timid little
touch of sympathy which he acknowledged with a smile of thanks.
Kenneth saw it too and reddened and said in an unnaturally formal
voice, “Now, Doctor, we are very anxious to hear what you have to tell
us.” I could have kicked him for the way he said it, and I think that
that was the first time that it crossed my mind that he might be
jealous of The Tundish.
The doctor took no notice of his remark, but proceeded immediately to
tell us in a calm friendly voice, that, as we already knew, he had
made up an ordinary sleeping draft for Stella the night before. The
medicine had been taken up to her bedroom and placed on a little table
by her bed, by the maid, Annie, just before supper. It had consisted
of a mild narcotic taken from one of the bottles that stood on the
lower shelf of the poison cupboard, to which he had added one or two
other ingredients which it was not necessary for him to specify, as
they were entirely harmless in their action. Every prescription, he
explained, was registered in a special book kept for the purpose in
the dispensary, as soon as it was made up, and this he had done in the
usual way. The draft was a mild one and there was no possibility that
it by itself, could have caused death or have had any harmful action.
He had just roughly checked over the contents of each of the bottles
he had used and they each of them contained exactly what they were
alleged to contain.
He told us how the poison cupboard, in addition to the stock poisons
that were placed on the lower shelf, held a number of rare and some of
them very dangerous poisons, collected by Dr. Hanson over a long
period in connection with his research work, on a shelf at the top.
These were seldom touched and it had not been necessary for him to
handle them in making up the sleeping draft for Stella. As far as he
could tell they had not been disturbed. Here he turned to me, saying,
“But you may be able to help us there, Jeffcock, for you saw them with
me only the night before last. You had better come along and tell me
if, as far as you can remember, they are still placed as they were
then.”
We trooped into the dispensary, and he opened the heavy steel door of
the cupboard, with the little key which he took from his waistcoat
pocket. The bottles, apparently, were in the exact positions in which
I had seen them only two nights before, the tiny Chinese flagon
lifting its long slender neck with its queer flat stopper above the
diminutive bottles that surrounded it. As far as I could recollect, it
was in the identical place in which I had replaced it when The Tundish
had so urgently begged me to put it down, but, as I explained, any of
the other bottles might have been changed or moved about, for they
were all identical in shape and size, and I had not taken any note of
the names and formulæ on the neatly written labels.
“As far as you can see then, the Chinese flagon has not been moved?”
The Tundish asked. “Do you think that you would be prepared to swear
to that?”
I hesitated before I replied, “No, I don’t think I could swear to it,
but I could state on oath that if it has been, it has been put back
again in very nearly the exact position in which I saw it last.” I
pointed out, however, that unless some of the other bottles were moved
as well, it would be practically impossible to have put it down
anywhere else, and I finished up by asking him if the Chinese flagon
were particularly important.
“Yes,” he said, “it is. I am convinced that some one or other has
added some of the contents of that little bottle to the draft that I
made up for Stella, and that that is the cause of her death.” He spoke
in his quiet precise voice as though he had been making some trivial
statement in general conversation, but the rest of us were too
astonished to say anything at all.
“Come, time presses,” he added after a pause, “let us go back to the
dining-room.”
As soon as we were seated again in our old positions he repeated to
the rest what he had told me with regard to the history of the weird
little Chinese bottle, and the action of its deadly contents. He
explained to us how, in China, he had seen a man who had been poisoned
by it, that Stella’s appearance was exactly similar, and that he knew
of no other poison which produced even approximately similar symptoms.
He feared, although he had of course only had time for a very brief
examination, that there was little if any likelihood of his opinion
being incorrect.
We sat nerved and taut, as one sits looking for the lightning flashes
in a violent storm, and it was Margaret who first broke the silence. I
noticed that she was holding to the table edge, and her finger-tips
were white with the pressure of her grip.
“Did Stella know of the Chinese flagon?” she asked.
“No, not to my knowledge,” he replied, “besides which, it is difficult
to see how she could have got at it had she wished to do so. There are
only the two keys to the cupboard—mine and Miss Summerson’s. Mine I
can answer for, and Miss Summerson left the dispensary yesterday
afternoon at three o’clock in order to go over to Millingham to see
some friends of hers. I gave her special leave for the purpose and she
is not to return until midday to-day. She always carries the key on a
chain attached to her waist and is a model of care in such matters.”
“Then you really do suspect foul play?” I asked. “But who could have
done it and what motive could they have had?”
“Yes, I suspect foul play, murder in short, to use the horrid word,
but I am not able to answer the rest of your question. The position as
I see it is this. Besides the six of us sitting here at this table
there were only the two maids in the house last night after the
medicine was taken up-stairs, making eight in all. Of the eight,
obviously suspicion falls most readily on me as I made the medicine
up, but I can assure you most positively that no mistake was made with
the prescription. So far as I know, Annie, who carried it up-stairs,
does not even know of the existence of the little flagon, and I think
that we can probably rule her out of it. Of the rest of you, suspicion
points most readily to you, Jeffcock, for I told you all about the
poison only the night before, and to you, Ethel, who already knew
about it from your father.”
He put his hand over hers and smiled at her as he spoke, but Kenneth
sprang up at once crying out angrily, “How dare you make such a
suggestion about Miss Hanson?”
“Don’t be a fool, Kenneth,” she replied tersely, “and I was ‘Ethel’ to
The Tundish when you were a little boy at school.”
The doctor stood up, all pleasant serenity. “I do think I was very
careful to say that suspicion pointed most readily to me, but we are
delaying too long and there are things that must be done. The police
must be informed—they will have to investigate the matter—and so this
is perhaps the last opportunity we shall have of talking quietly
together. Stella has been killed unmercifully and in cold blood—it
seems impossible to believe, but terrible if it is true—that the
murderer is probably here with us in this room now. Possibly you are
wondering, even as I am talking to you, whether I am the murderer and
whether I could have nerve enough to face you all like this. Well, I
want to beg and pray of you that you will put all such thoughts on one
side, for if we once allow our imaginations to run riot and let our
suspicions get the better of our friendships and beliefs, these next
few days may grow memories that we shall all look back on with nothing
but shame and regret. I do solemnly swear to you that I did not do
this horrible thing. If I am arrested on suspicion, remember that
suspicion may still fall on you. We shall all be questioned again and
again by the police. If any information should come to light to ease
my own position, then it may equally throw suspicion on one of the
rest of you. I don’t for one moment suggest that we should do anything
to hinder their investigations, but apart from that, for God’s sake
let us keep our heads and admit no one guilty until his or her guilt
has been actually proved.”
I think that we were all of us impressed by the earnest way in which
he spoke, and Ethel went up to him and kissed him there in front of us
all. “Of course you didn’t do it, Tundish dear,” she said, “and no one
who knows you could think so for a moment.”
Kenneth said, “Oh, yes, that’s all very well, but doesn’t it apply
equally to us all?”
“Why, of course it does. Who suggested that it didn’t.”
“But unless the doctor is mistaken about the poison, one of us must
have done it. You simply can’t get away from that.”
I said, “I am sure that the doctor is right, the less we think about
who it may have been the better.” But I was already thinking of the
conversation I had overheard between Ethel and the doctor at the club,
and what he and Stella had said in the drawing-room last night. The
words, “Your abominable share . . . father’s death . . . I shall tell
them,” came whispering in my ears.
Ethel had taken her chair again, and I saw the tears well up in her
brown eyes as Kenneth was speaking, and then suddenly she buried her
face in her arms. The Tundish put his hand on her shoulder, saying,
“Now we must waste no more time. First the servants must be told.
Ralph, please ring the bell. And I must telephone or wire to Stella’s
people. What is her address, Ethel?”
“It’s in Kensington. She lives with her uncle, Mr. Crawford, but she
told me only yesterday that he is away and that the house is shut. I
haven’t the least idea where he has gone to or what his address is
now. Whatever shall we do?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. The police will see to it for us. Very
likely she may have some letter stating where he is. We will tell them
directly they come.”
Annie, the maid who had taken the fateful medicine up-stairs the night
before, appeared with a tray to clear away the things. She was a nice
quiet girl of about twenty-eight who had been with the Hansons a good
ten years. She put the tray down on the sideboard, saying, “Why,
what’s the matter with. Miss Ethel? There’s no bad news from
Folkestone, I hope, sir?”
“No, Annie, but run down-stairs and tell cook that I want her here at
once. Come back again yourself.”
The cook was an acquisition of about six months. I suppose that it
really is impossible for the mere male to appreciate the value of a
good servant, and to understand how easily the mistress of a house may
be willing to allow efficiency to pardon defects in appearance and
manner, but I felt that, for myself, I would sooner live on perpetual
bread and cheese than suffer the Hansons’ cook. Ethel had told me more
than one story of her selfish unreasonableness, but had added that she
was a good cook, and that they preferred to put up with her, rather
than risk a month or two of cooking and washing up with possibly
something more disastrous still at the end of it.
She came back with Annie, standing just inside the door with her arms
folded and her beady black eyes darting from one of us to the other,
as she took in the scene. Her face was unhealthily pasty and her small
shapeless nose tilted upward from a mouth that seemed ever to be posed
in a disagreeable smirk.
The Tundish explained that Miss Palfreeman had been found dead in her
bed, and that, as there was some uncertainty as to the reason for her
death, it would be necessary for him to call in the police, and for an
inquest to be held.
Cook, who had been christened with the inappropriate name of Grace,
was all alarm and anger in a moment. “What! The police in this ’ere
house,” she said, “and the master and mistress away as well! Not if I
have anything to do with it, by your leave, sir! I come here with a
good character to cook, I did, and if I am to be questioned by the
police I’d better pack and be off at once, by your leave, Miss Ethel,”
and she gave her head a nasty little shake and stood with her arms
folded and a smirk on her pale unwholesome face, as she waited for the
doctor and Ethel to unite in begging her to stay.
But she hadn’t bargained for The Tundish. “Very well then, Grace, you
had better go and pack up your belongings at once, for the police will
be here in less than half an hour. I warn you, however, that they will
look on your action as being very suspicious, and that they will take
you to the police station and ask you any questions they may want to
in public, instead of quietly here in private. You can go. And you,
Annie?” he added, turning to the younger woman.
“Oh, I shall stay, sir.”
“Well, look here, Annie, I may as well warn you that we are all in a
pretty mess. Miss Palfreeman has most certainly been poisoned, and I
don’t see how she can possibly have poisoned herself. I shall be the
object of most suspicion, as it was I who made up medicine for her
last night, but you will be suspected too, for you took it up-stairs
to her room. But neither you nor I will have anything to fear, if we
answer truly all the questions we are asked. Now be a good girl, and
get the table cleared quickly, while I ring up the police.”
The telephone is fixed just outside the drawing-room door on a little
bracket in the hall, and he went to it as he finished speaking, but
before he reached the instrument the bell rang sharply. Somebody was
calling us.
The doctor lifted the receiver and we could tell at once by his tone
of voice as he replied that he had been listening to serious news.
“Oh, dear, I am sorry. Yes, of course I’ll come at once. I’ll put a
few things together and be with you as soon as I can.” He replaced the
receiver and stood thinking deeply. Then he explained to us that he
had been called to an urgent case—a case that he could not possibly
hand over to another doctor, at least not without seeing him first. He
could do nothing for Stella, and it was his obvious duty to go. Would
I ring up the police? “And by the way,” he added, “you, Ralph, had
better run up to the courts and scratch all your names from the
tournament. You need not give too much information. Tell them that
Miss Palfreeman is ill and that the rest of you have decided to
scratch on account of the heat. We can then be guided by the police
when they come. We must all of us remember that this is going to be
none too good for your father’s practise, Ethel. You ring up the
police, Jeffcock, while Ralph goes to the club. I must go at once.
There are other people in trouble besides ourselves.”
He turned at the door to give one look at Ethel, who still sat at the
table with her face buried on her arms, “You look after her, Kenneth,”
he said kindly. But Kenneth looked straight back at him with his lips
tight shut and a scowl on his handsome young face, and said never a
word in reply. The Tundish shrugged his shoulders, made a little
grimace, and went off down the passage to the dispensary. I went to
the telephone.
Now, I had some difficulty in getting my connection, and I dare say I
may have stood for a full five minutes at the instrument with my back
to the hall and the receiver pressed to my ear. The heat was already
oppressive and the delay irritating in itself. My hand I found was
trembling slightly as I held the receiver. The cathedral clock chimed
out ten as I stood, and I had to look at my watch to make sure that I
hadn’t missed a chime, for it seemed incredible that only a little
more than an hour had passed since The Tundish and I had sat down to
breakfast, and we began the farce of the mock inquiry about the notice
that he had stuck up over the landing switch. To look back to the
earlier part of the morning, was, I felt, like looking at the sunshine
receding across the valley as one sat perched on a mountainside with
the rain clouds and the thunder drifting up behind.
I heard Margaret say that she would go to the basement and fetch
something or other for Ethel, and she passed close behind me just as
the exchange was putting me through to a wrong number. I had to shout
and it was some time before I could persuade whoever it was speaking
to me to hang up his receiver. The girl at the exchange seemed to pay
no attention to my repeated attempts to attract her attention, then
just as I did get the number I wanted at last, I fancied that I could
hear some one coming softly down the stairs behind my back, but my
attention being all for my message I did not turn round to see who it
was. Fortunately, I got through to the station superintendent himself
without any further delay. I told him briefly how one of the doctor’s
guests had been found dead in bed, and that Dr. Wallace, the physician
in charge of the practise, had asked me to ring him up and tell him
that he strongly suspected poison. Would he please send some one round
at once along with Dr. Jeffries, the police surgeon, if he was
available? He promised me that they would both be round in less than a
quarter of an hour.
I put down the instrument with a sigh of relief. A step, however
small, I felt, had been taken toward knowledge and away from
uncertainty and indecision.
I turned round to find The Tundish standing close behind me in the
hall. I was surprised, because my hearing is so acute that I am not
often taken unawares. I wondered how long he had been standing there
quietly behind me. He explained that he had come back to ask me to
make quite sure that in his absence no one went up to Stella’s room
before the police were on the scene. He ought to have locked the door,
but had forgotten. I promised him that I would see to it, and he went
back down the passage to the consulting-room and out into Dalehouse
Lane, his patient apparently living in that direction.
Margaret came up the stairs from the basement, carrying a tray, as we
concluded our brief conversation, and I stepped forward to take it
from her. Somehow or other I felt every bit as sorry for her as I did
for Ethel. She was so soft and feminine and there had been such a note
of horror in that one shrill cry of hers when The Tundish had told us
so calmly that Stella was dead, and now that she had recovered from
her first alarm she seemed all concern for Ethel, her blue eyes
shining brightly, her deep breast rising and falling and her hands
fluttering against mine as we stood with the tray between us.
“How splendid he is,” she whispered, looking back at The Tundish as he
disappeared through the baize door at the end of the passage. “How
awful when they arrest him, and what will poor Miss Summerson do?”
“Miss Summerson!” I echoed in surprise, but she gave me no
explanation—just shook her pretty golden head and turned into the
dining-room to rejoin the others.
We found Kenneth standing awkwardly in front of Ethel. She had been
very brave and was recovering again from her little collapse. Margaret
sat down at her side, and made her drink and did her best to comfort
her. “It may be a mistake about the Chinese poison, dear,” she said
caressingly, “doctors do make mistakes, you know.”
I remembered the doctor’s words, however, and how he had described a
death like a peaceful slumber—a slumber rendered horrible by staring
bloodshot eyes and narrow contracted pupils. There could be no
mistaking such a death, I thought.
The front door-bell rang from the outer gate in the garden wall, and
we could hear the tread of feet along the garden path. Annie came up
to open the door. We were face to face with the situation at last.
The three men who were shown into the room were of strikingly
different types. The foremost, Inspector Brown, introduced the other
two to us with a wave of his hand. With his flat-topped peaked hat,
his dark blue uniform braided with black, and his ruddy, healthy, none
too intelligent face, I thought him typical of that section of the
police who have been promoted from the helmet and the beat to higher
spheres of action. He spoke briskly, however, and to the point.
“Dr. Jeffries you know already, I think, Miss Hanson,” pointing to a
thin elderly gray-haired man. “But I have been fortunate in bringing
with me Detective Inspector Allport of Scotland Yard, who happens to
be in Merchester, and was, as a matter of fact, with me in my room
when your message came through.”
Now we must all of us have painted some sort of a mental picture of
the detective of fiction, even if we have never seen the real living
article in flesh and blood, but I am not willing to imagine that
Detective Inspector Allport of Scotland Yard could hold a place in
anybody’s mental picture. Without exaggeration he was the ugliest
little man I have ever set eyes on, and yet, scanning him feature by
feature, I was only astonished that the tout-ensemble was not even
more grotesque. Little and undersized, his pale watery eyes bulged
after the manner of those of a great many extraordinarily clever
people. His forehead was broad but sloping, and if his skin had not
been of such a visibly coarse unhealthy-looking texture, this would
have been his one redeeming feature. His nose was bulbous, his mouth
slopped all over the place, and his little chin was bunched up into a
kind of irregular prominence which was rendered interesting by reason
of an unbelievably regular, circular dimple in the middle. I gazed on
him, fascinated, and thought at once that for a man so handicapped to
be anything higher in the social scale than a lavatory attendant, must
argue a character and mental equipment to be reckoned with, and I very
soon found out that if perhaps I was inclined to exaggerate his
apparent deficiencies and defects, I altogether underestimated his
brain power and those hidden qualities that compel attention and
respect.
He took charge of the situation at once, speaking rapidly in a voice
of markedly pleasant tone.
“Dr. Wallace, I presume?” he said, turning to me.
I explained the circumstances of The Tundish’s enforced absence, and
how we had been unable to wire to Stella’s uncle. Ethel gave him the
uncle’s address.
“I will look after that—as you suggest, there may probably be
information as to Mr. Crawford’s present whereabouts among the
unfortunate young lady’s papers. If not they will soon find it for me
in London. You can leave it to me and need not bother further. But the
doctor! It is very unfortunate that he has been called away, but I
suppose that he will be back before long. He has no doubt left a note
of the address to which he has gone?”
I had to confess that I didn’t think he had, and Ethel, on being
questioned, could only state that so far as she could gather from what
she had heard of his conversation on the telephone, it might be one of
three.
He pulled down a corner of his funny little mustache and stood biting
at it, obviously annoyed. “Strange, very strange, that he should have
left the house,” he muttered angrily. “However, Doctor, you had better
examine the unfortunate young lady yourself in the meantime. Perhaps
Miss Hanson will be kind enough to show us up to her room. The rest of
you will kindly oblige me by not leaving this room until my return.
Please call up the servants and keep them here as well.”
He asked Ethel if the room had been locked up and everything in it
untouched, and I explained what The Tundish had told me about how he
had left the door unfastened and the instructions he had given me.
The little gargoyle frowned his disapproval, turned on his heel and
left the room, Ethel, Dr. Jeffries and the inspector following. I rang
the bell for Annie and cook.
“Little swipe,” was Kenneth’s comment, and I think we all of us felt
that we could endorse it. The maids came up at once. Grace, clad in
her outdoor clothes, sat down ostentatiously on the edge of a chair
with the feather in her atrocious hat nodding her disapproval and
independence. Her whole attitude showed that she considered her term
of service to be at an end, and that, far from taking the doctor’s
advice, another minute would have seen her out of the house. I saw
Ethel give a wry little smile. Annie stood respectfully against the
wall.
Grace—God save the mark!—and Annie had barely settled down when we
heard footsteps on the stairs. I imagined that it would be Allport and
Brown returning with Ethel to ask us the questions we all expected to
have to answer, but to my surprise Dr. Jeffries came in with them as
well.
Allport came in first, rudely stepping straight in front of Ethel, and
his bulging eyes seemed more prominent than ever as he asked me
angrily, “Where is the key? You told me Dr. Wallace said that the door
of the room was unlocked.”