Mr. Sheringham Hits the Mark
Roger did not reappear until the car was at the front door and the
other members of the party already making their farewells on the
steps. His leave-taking was necessarily a little hurried; but perhaps
this was not altogether without design. Roger did not feel at all
inclined to linger in the society of Lady Jefferson.
He shook hands warmly enough with her husband, however, and the manner
of their parting was sufficient to assure the latter, without the
necessity of any words being spoken on the subject, that his
confidences would be regarded as inviolate. The taciturn Jefferson
became almost effusive in return.
Arrived at the station, Roger personally superintended the purchase of
the tickets and deftly shepherded Mrs. Plant into a non-smoking
carriage explaining that the cigars which he and Alec proposed to
smoke would spell disaster to the subtleties of _Parfum Jasmine_. A
short but interesting conversation with the guard, followed by the
exchange of certain pieces of silver, ensured the locking of the door
of their own first-class smoker.
“And so ends an extremely interesting little visit,” Roger observed as
soon as the train started, leaning back luxuriously in his corner and
putting his feet on the seat. “Well, I shan’t be sorry to get back to
London, on the whole, I must say, though the country is all very well
in its way. I always think you ought to take the country in small
doses to appreciate it properly, don’t you?”
“No,” said Alec.
“Or look at it in comfort from the windows of a train,” Roger went on,
waving an appreciative hand towards the countryside through which they
were passing. “Fields, woods, streams, barley——”
“That isn’t barley. It’s wheat.”
“—barley, trees—delightful, my dear Alexander! But how much more
delightful seen like this in one charming flash, that leaves a picture
printed on the brain only to give way the next instant to another
equally charming one, than stuck down in the middle, for instance, of
one of those fields of barley——”
“Wheat.”
“—of barley, with the prospect of a ten-mile walk in this blazing
sunshine between you and the next long drink. Don’t you agree?”
“No.”
“I thought you wouldn’t. But reflect. Sunshine, considered from the
purely æsthetic point of view, is, I am quite willing to grant you, a
thing of——”
“What _are_ you talking about?” Alec asked despairingly.
“Sunshine, Alexander,” returned Roger blandly.
“Well, for goodness’ sake stop talking about sunshine. What I want to
know is, have you got any farther?”
Roger was evidently in one of his maddening moods.
“What with?” he asked blankly.
“The Stanworth affair of course, you idiot!” shouted the exasperated
Alec.
“Ah, yes, of course. The Stanworth affair,” Roger replied innocently.
“Did I do that bit well, Alec?” he asked with a sudden change of tone.
“What bit?”
“When I said, ‘What with?’ Did I say it with an air of bland
innocence? The best detectives always do, you know. When they reach
this stage of the proceedings they always pretend to have forgotten
all about the case in hand. Why they do so, I’ve never been able to
imagine; but it’s evidently the correct etiquette for the job. By the
way, Alec,” he added kindly, “you did your part very well. The idiot
friend always shouts in an irritated and peevish way like that. I
really think we make quite a model pair, don’t you?”
“Will you stop yapping and tell me whether you’ve got any farther with
Stanworth’s murder?” Alec demanded doggedly.
“Oh, _that_?” said Roger with studied carelessness. “I solved that
exactly forty-three minutes ago.”
“_What?_”
“I said that I solved the mystery exactly forty-three minutes ago. And
a few odd seconds, of course. It was an interesting little problem in
its way, my dear Alexander Watson, but absurdly simple once one had
grasped the really vital factor in the case. For some extraordinary
reason I appeared to have overlooked it before; hence the delay. But
don’t put that bit in when you come to write up the case, or I shall
never land the next vacancy for a stolen-crown-jewels recoverer to an
influential emperor.”
“You’ve solved it, have you?” Alec growled sceptically. “I seem to
have heard something like that before.”
“Meaning Jefferson? Yes, I admit I backed the wrong horse there. But
this is a very different matter. I’ve really solved it this time.”
“Oh? Well, let’s hear it.”
“With the greatest pleasure,” Roger responded heartily. “Let me see
now. Where shall I begin? Well, I think I’ve told you all the really
important things that I managed to elicit from Mrs. Plant and
Jefferson, haven’t I? Except one.” Roger dropped his bantering manner
with startling suddenness. “Alec,” he said seriously, “that man
Stanworth was as choice a scoundrel as I’ve ever heard of. What I
didn’t tell you is that he gave Mrs. Plant three months in which to
find two hundred and fifty pounds for him; and hinted that if she
hadn’t got it already, a pretty woman like her would have no
difficulty in laying her hands on it.”
“Good God!” Alec breathed.
“He even went farther than that and offered to introduce her to a rich
man out of whom she would be able to wheedle it, if she played her
cards properly. Oh, I tell you, shooting was much too easy a death for
friend Stanworth. And the person who did it ought to be acclaimed as a
public benefactor, instead of being hanged by a grateful country; as
he certainly would be, if all this had got into the hands of the
police.”
“You can hardly expect the law to recognise the principle of poetic
justice for all that,” Alec objected.
“I don’t see why not,” Roger retorted. “However, we won’t go into that
at present. Well, to my mind there were two chief difficulties in this
Stanworth business. The first one was that at the beginning there
didn’t seem to be any definite motive for killing him; and afterwards,
when we’d found out about him, there were far too many. All those
people in the house, Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, Lady Stanworth, the butler
(who, by the way, appears to be a murderer in a small way already, as
I gather from Jefferson; that was the hold which Stanworth had over
him)—all of them had every reason to kill him; and the case began to
take on the aspect not so much of proving who did it, but, by a
process of elimination, of finding out who didn’t. In that way I
managed eventually to dismiss Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, and Lady
Stanworth. But besides the people actually under our noses in the
house, there were all the others—goodness only knows how many of
them!—of whose very existence we knew nothing; all his other victims.”
“Were there many of them, then?”
“I understand that Stanworth’s practice was a fairly extensive one,”
Roger replied ironically. “Anyhow, I was able to narrow down the field
to a certain extent. Then I began to go over once more the evidence we
had collected. The question I kept asking myself was—is there a single
item that gives a definite pointer towards any certain person, male or
female?”
“Female?” Roger repeated surprisedly.
“Certainly. In spite of everything—the footprint in the flower bed,
for example—I was still keeping before me the possibility of a woman
being mixed up in it. It didn’t seem altogether probable, but I
couldn’t afford to lose sight of the bare possibility. And it’s lucky
I did, for it was just that which finally put me on the right track.”
“Good Lord!”
“Yes; I admit I was slow in the up-take, for the fact had been staring
me in the face the whole time, and I never spotted it. You see, the
key to the whole mystery was that there was a _second_ woman in the
library that night.”
“How on earth do you know that?” Alec asked in consternation.
“By the hair we found on the settee. I put it away in the envelope,
you remember, and promptly forgot all about it, assuming it to have
been one of Mrs. Plant’s. It struck me suddenly in the garden just now
that it wasn’t anything of the sort; Mrs. Plant’s hair is very much
darker. Of course that opened up an entirely new field for
speculation.”
“Good Lord!”
“Yes, it is rather surprising, isn’t it?” Roger continued equably.
“That set my brain galloping away like wildfire, I need hardly tell
you; and five minutes later the whole thing became absolutely plain to
me. I’m a little hazy about some of the details, of course, but the
broad lines are clear enough.”
“You mean you guessed who the second woman was?”
“Hardly guessed. I knew at once who she must be.”
“Who?” Alec asked, with unconcealed eagerness.
“Wait a bit. I’m coming to that. Well, then I began to put two and two
together. I’d got a pretty shrewd idea already of the personal
appearance of the man himself.”
“Oh, it was a man then?”
“Yes, it was a man right enough. There was never any doubt that a man
must have done the actual killing. No woman would have been strong
enough for the struggle that must have taken place. Stanworth was no
weakling, so that gives us the fact that the man must have been a
strong, burly sort of person. From the footprint and the length of
those strides across the bed he was evidently both tall and largely
built; from the clever way in which everything was left he must have
been possessed of a fund of cunning; from the manner in which he left
that window fastened behind him it was clear that he was thoroughly
accustomed to handling lattice windows. Well, what does all that give
us? It looked obvious to me.”
Alec was staring intently at the speaker, following every word with
eager attention. “I think I see what you’re getting at,” he said
slowly.
“I thought you would,” said Roger cheerfully. “Of course there were
other things that clinched it. The disappearance of that footprint,
for instance. That _must_ have been done by somebody who knew what he
was doing. And somebody who heard me say that I was going to fit every
male boot in the house into the mark, you remember. Of course it was
that which made me so sure at first about Jefferson, because I jumped
to the conclusion that it must have been Jefferson whom we saw edging
out of the library door. After that I more or less had Jefferson on
the brain.”
“I did my best to put you off that track,” said Alec with a slight
smile.
“Oh, you did. It wasn’t your fault that I clung to him so
persistently.”
“I tried hard to stop you putting your foot in it, if you remember.”
“I know. And I daresay it’s lucky you did. I might have put things a
good deal more plainly to him, with extremely awkward results, if you
hadn’t dinned it into me so hard.”
“Well,” Alec said slowly, “what are you going to do about it, now
you’ve presumably got at the truth at last?”
“Do about it? Forget it, of course. I told you my views just now, when
I said the man who killed Stanworth ought to be acclaimed as a public
benefactor. As that is unfortunately out of the question, the next
best thing is to forget as diligently as possible that Stanworth did
not after all shoot himself, as everybody else believes.”
“Humph!” said Alec, gazing out of the window. “I wonder! You’re really
sure of that?”
“Absolutely,” said Roger with decision. “Anything else would be
ludicrous under the circumstances. We won’t discuss that side of it
again.”
There was a little pause.
“The—the second woman,” Alec said tentatively. “How were you able to
identify her so positively?”
Roger drew the envelope out of his breast pocket, opened it, and
carefully extracted the hair. He laid it across his knee for the
moment and contemplated it in silence. Then with a sudden movement he
picked it up and threw it through the open window.
“There goes a vital piece of evidence,” he said with a smile. “Well,
for one thing, there was nobody else in the house with just that
particular shade of hair, was there?”
“I suppose not,” Alec replied.
There was another silence, rather longer this time.
Then Roger, glancing curiously across at his companion, remarked very
airily:
“Just to satisfy my natural curiosity, Alec, why exactly _did_ you
kill Stanworth?”