Miss Prince got up very early on the morning Harry Garlett was to appear
before the magistrates, to be either committed for trial, or sent out
into the world a free man.
Though glad, in a sense, that her friend Agatha Cheale had been saved by
illness from the painful ordeal of appearing against her late employer,
she, Miss Prince, felt, from a selfish point of view, sorry. For it had
been arranged, at Agatha Cheale’s own request, that the older woman
should accompany her to the police court, and Miss Prince had a special
reason for wishing to know what exact evidence as to the arsenic, the
administration of which had undoubtedly killed Mrs. Garlett, would be
tendered to-day.
As things had now fallen out, she would have to possess her soul in
patience till the afternoon.
It may be asked why Miss Prince did not follow the example of
innumerable women belonging to the neighbourhood, that is, go off to
Grendon and, after a more or less long wait, fight her way into the
police court? Had she been thirty years younger she might have done so,
but being the manner of woman she was, the thought of doing so
unladylike and bold a thing never even occurred to her. And yet, during
the whole of the wakeful night which preceded her early rising, her mind
was entirely occupied with the form the evidence against Harry Garlett
was likely to assume.
As is the case with most clever, malicious gossips, no woman could on
occasion keep her own counsel more rigidly than could Miss Prince. No
doubt this was owing, in a measure, to the fact that for more than half
her life she had been the trusted confidante of her father. In no
profession is there so high a standard of loyalty to another’s personal
secrets as in the medical profession, and what is true of the doctor is
generally true also of the doctor’s wife and daughter.
So it was that Miss Prince had kept rigidly to herself a dreadful
suspicion which since the arrest of Harry Garlett had hardened into
certainty.
Lucy Warren, hearing her mistress stirring, had hurried down to cook the
breakfast, and Miss Prince, leaving her cold bedroom, felt a certain
warmth about the heart as there floated up her tiny staircase a pleasant
aroma of frizzling bacon.
Worried and unhappy as she felt, uncertain, too, as to where her duty
lay—a most unusual feeling with her—she yet told herself that she was
indeed fortunate in her good, quiet, sensible young servant. Even as a
child Lucy Warren had been a favourite of hers, and the girl seemed so
superior to her class, so reserved, so proud, that for a moment Miss
Prince asked herself whether she would not do well to confide in Lucy,
for she longed to share her anxiety and uncertainty with some other
human being. But the thought was no sooner there than she dismissed it,
aware that if the moment came when she felt she must share her secret,
it was to a lawyer that a certain fact, known to her alone, must be
admitted.
But one thing she did this morning marked both to herself and to Lucy
Warren the unusual nature of the day. She ordered her breakfast, for the
first time in her life, to be brought to her upstairs sitting room.
Perhaps because it was upstairs, she very seldom used this room, except
when she asked a few friends in to supper and a game of cards. From her
point of view, though she would not have admitted it, the upstairs
sitting room of the Thatched Cottage was a cardroom and nothing else.
She sat down, feeling deadly cold, for though the fire was burning
brightly the room was chilly, as a room in which no fire has been lit
for some days is apt to be. But it was not the cold which made Miss
Prince feel so shivery, and so miserably undecided in her mind. For the
first time in her now long life she was confronted with a problem to
which she could see no solution that would not bring disaster, even
death, in its train.
Lucy Warren came up with her mistress’s breakfast tray. She drew up a
small table and set it before her in silence, making no remark, as
almost any other young woman would have done, as to Miss Prince’s
surprising choice of a breakfast room, and she was just leaving the room
when her mistress called out: “Lucy!”
Lucy turned round. “Yes, ma’am?” she said inquiringly.
Always Miss Prince insisted on being accorded brevet rank both by her
own servants and the people of the village. She hated the term “Miss.”
“Come nearer, Lucy. I want to speak to you.”
And then, somewhat to Miss Prince’s astonishment, she saw that her words
startled the girl. Lucy became painfully red, as she stood before her
mistress twisting and untwisting a bit of apron in her hand, and looking
very unlike her usual composed self.
“I want you to cast your mind back to last April and May—I mean, of
course, when your friend Agnes Dean was my servant. You used to be in
and out of my kitchen a good deal, I think.”
Lucy answered freely, eagerly: “Yes, ma’am, I used to come along most
days.”
“Now I want to ask you a very serious question, Lucy, and I rely on you
to keep the fact that I have asked it of you to yourself. Did she tell
you, or were you aware of your own knowledge, that Mr. Garlett was ever
in this house at a time when I was out of it?”
“Not that I know of, ma’am. The only person who used sometimes to come
and wait for you while you was out was Miss Cheale.”
“Of course, I know that,” Miss Prince spoke with a touch of impatience.
“What I want you to try to remember is whether Mr. Garlett was ever in
this house alone for, say, a quarter of an hour? Especially, Lucy,” she
hesitated, then asked the question firmly, “whether he was ever in this
upper part of the house by himself? As you know, he is my landlord. On
him depend all the outside repairs. It is possible, nay, even probable,
he may have come upstairs once or twice on such business as that.”
“Mr. Garlett never bothered about that sort of thing himself, ma’am. He
always sent the builder along. A nice fat lot of money Blackman has made
out of that poor gentleman in the last ten years! Mr. Garlett never
bothered, and Mrs. Garlett was too ill to bother.”
Miss Prince looked fixedly at the girl.
“Then you are not one of those,” she observed in a rather cold tone,
“who believe that Mr. Garlett poisoned Mrs. Garlett?”
Lucy hesitated, and then she made a reply that surprised Miss Prince.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” she said sullenly. “Though it
doesn’t seem to me that Mr. Garlett had any reason to do such a wicked
thing. It wasn’t as if he’d known Miss Bower then—leastways he did know
her, but he didn’t like her. I know that!”
“You know that, Lucy?”
“I do, ma’am. I heard Mr. Garlett say one day, when I was waiting at
table, that he wished Mrs. Maclean hadn’t gone and asked him to take her
niece on at the factory. He said it would be difficult to reprimand
her—that was the word he used—if she did anything that he or old Mr.
Dodson didn’t like. He said it was a mistake to mix up friendship and
business.”
“Whom did he say that to?” asked Miss Prince eagerly. Here she was on
her old familiar ground of gossip.
“He said it to the lawyer, Mr. Toogood,” answered Lucy.
“Was that just before his wife’s death?”
“Well, ’twas perhaps a fortnight before she died. I can’t say exactly.
Miss Cheale had already gone upstairs, and Mr. Garlett had rung for more
port wine, and it was as I came into the dining room that I heard him
say that.”
“Dear me, that’s very interesting.”
“You won’t let on I’ve told you that, ma’am?” asked Lucy earnestly.
“Mother’s fearful lest I be mixed up in it all. She was once called to
an inquest and never forgot it. It made her ill for months afterward,
that it did—she was so terrified. Those lawyers ’ud get anything out of
you. They make you say black’s white—and white’s black.”
“I don’t think there’s the slightest reason to fear that you will be
called as a witness,” said Miss Prince coldly, “and in any case, if you
were called, it would be your duty to attend, Lucy. Surely you would
think it a duty to speak up and tell the truth?”
And then Lucy, emboldened by Miss Prince’s benignant mood, ventured a
question.
“Will you be a witness, ma’am?”
“I? Certainly not! Why should I be?” Miss Prince looked disturbed—she
even flushed a little. “Miss Cheale will be a witness for the
Prosecution, for she was with poor Mrs. Garlett when she died.”
And then Lucy said in a singular tone:
“Miss Cheale will be sorry if Mr. Garlett is hanged. She was such a
friend of his.”
“Not only a friend,” said Miss Prince quickly, “but a relation, too.
Miss Cheale is a distant cousin of Mr. Garlett’s. I’ve always supposed
that that was why Mrs. Garlett left her that legacy.”
Lucy turned away, and perhaps it was as well that Miss Prince did not
see the look that came over her face.
“Lucy? One word more. Has your mother heard from Mr. Guy Cheale lately?
Does she know where he is, and what he’s doing?”
Lucy did not turn round, as a properly trained servant ought to have
done.
“Mother heard from Mr. Cheale? Not that I know of. Why should she?”
Then she slipped out of the room and went down the stairs at such a pace
that her mistress concluded she must have heard some one knocking at the
back door.
Miss Prince began eating her now cold egg and bacon. She felt sick and
shivery, yet she forced herself to eat, and after a while the food and
her good China tea made her feel a little better. But even so she was in
a miserable state of uncertainty.
With all her odious peculiarities she had a strict, if a narrow, sense
of duty, and she could not make up her mind as to what she ought to do
with regard to a sinister fact known to herself alone.
Miss Prince, for her misfortune, knew of a place in Terriford where
arsenic could be found. And deep in her heart she was quite certain it
was from that store or cache of arsenic that had been stolen the dose of
poison which had killed Emily Garlett.
That store or cache of arsenic was here, in her own house, close by
where she was now considering the difficult problem of what it was her
duty to do.
Sitting there, in front of the now bright fire, she could visualize with
horrid clearness the fat glass-stoppered bottle with the red label on
which was printed in black letters the word “Arsenic.”
The bottle—which contained a sufficient quantity of the deadly poison to
have killed every one in the village—stood on the top shelf of her drug
cupboard, in a tiny room next door, known all over the village as “Miss
Prince’s medicine room.”
As residuary legatee to her father, everything that had belonged to him
at his death had passed into her possession, and she had chosen to take
with her to her new home the drugs that had been in his dispensary.
In a country medical practice every little counts. Thanks to Miss
Prince, the poorer folk in Terriford had hardly ever had occasion to
consult Dr. Maclean. He had spoken to her of the matter only once—years
ago—soon after his arrival. She had said what had been far more true
then than it was to-day—that the working folk were so miserably poor
that it would be sheer cruelty to ask them to send for the doctor for
every trifling ailment. Further, she had asserted that often she
relieved him of work for which he could never expect any payment, and
Dr. Maclean had admitted, somewhat reluctantly, the force of the
argument.
But while the knowledge of that stoppered bottle on the top shelf of the
drug cupboard which she generally, but not invariably, kept locked, made
her feel acutely anxious, she tried to persuade herself that it could
not be her duty to force herself into this, to her, horrible affair. Not
only was the thought of appearing in the witness-box at a great trial
terrible to one with Miss Prince’s old-fashioned feminine outlook on
life, but she was well aware that she would certainly be severely
censured, by both counsel and judge in the case, for keeping such
poisons as arsenic and strychnine in her house.
She faced the grim certainty that she, and she alone, could supply the
missing link in the chain of circumstantial evidence now tightening
around Harry Garlett. But would that link be missed? Never having liked
him, and having now no doubt as to his guilt, she equally had no doubt
as to his fate. Was it essential that she, his wife’s oldest friend,
should hound him to his death?
She asked herself with a sharp feeling of self-rebuke why she had been
such a fool as to keep a poison which she never had any reason to use?
But there it was, she had kept it.
Getting up at last, she took off a small bookshelf “The Student’s
Handbook of Forensic Medicine and Public Health,” and turning to the
entry “Metallic Irritants,” she quickly made herself mistress of what
information was there.
She learned that white arsenic—that is the type of arsenic in her
possession—was not only colourless and odourless, but almost devoid of
taste, thus very easily administered in powdered sugar, and even she,
with her wide knowledge of drugs, received a certain shock when she
discovered that a pinch of arsenic holds no less than seventeen grains,
two grains being a fatal dose.
Now Miss Prince, in common with almost every one in the neighbourhood,
had severely blamed Dr. Maclean for his lack of suspicion, but, as she
read the little black volume by which her father had set such store, she
realized that the old doctor had not been so much to blame after all.
For, whereas in many cases the symptoms of arsenical poisoning point to
an irritant administered, all sorts of anomalies may and do occur. In
fact the symptoms are frequently so misleading that death due to the
action of arsenic has even been described as spontaneous internal
inflammation!
Miss Prince put her book back on its shelf and went out on the landing.
She listened intently for a few moments, and then, turning the handle of
the door giving into her medicine room, she went through into the tiny
bare chamber.
After having shut the door softly, she gazed at the substantial wooden
cupboard in which she kept the drugs which were a survival of the days
when she had been her father’s faithful assistant and dispenser.
The cupboard was locked now. But it had been often left open till a few
days ago—owing to the trifling fact that something had gone wrong with
the lock, and that it had become just a little tiresome to turn the key.
If only walls could speak! Miss Prince, gazing up at the grained wood,
would have given years of her life to know if Harry Garlett had ever
stood where she was standing now—but with the cupboard doors wide open
before him.
At last, with an impatient movement, she took a step forward, and stood
by the narrow window of her medicine room, and then, suddenly, she
shrank back, and a deep frown gathered on her face.
Trudging quickly along in the wintry sunshine was James Kentworthy, the
man who had, to use her own expression, bamboozled her. It was easy now
to marvel at her stupidity in supposing for a moment that such an
individual could have been connected, even very distantly, with her poor
friend, Emily Garlett. But she had believed him, absolutely, and on the
strength of it had asked him in to tea. Well she remembered the quiet,
skilful way in which he had examined and cross-examined her concerning
the inmates of the Thatched House.
James Kentworthy was on his way to Bonnie Doon, for it had been arranged
that he and the doctor should drive together to Grendon in order to be
present at the final inquiry before the magistrates.
The private inquiry agent felt, if possible, even more baffled than he
had been at the end of his conversation with Jean Bower. He had learned
everything there was to learn, or so he felt convinced, concerning the
only people who had had access to Mrs. Garlett, and more and more it had
become clear to him that the only human being with a paramount interest
in her death was her husband, Harry Garlett. Twenty years of hard work
in the Criminal Investigation Department had proved to him that where
there is no motive there is no murder, and if this be true of an
ordinary, sordid crime, how much more true when a secret poisoner is in
question!
But Kentworthy was also aware of a fact which is often forgotten by
those interested in murder mysteries—namely, that a motive which may
seem utterly inadequate to one type of mind, to another may be
overwhelmingly sufficient for almost any crime.
Again and again he had asked himself, in the last few days, what manner
of woman was Agatha Cheale? Next to Harry Garlett she was the only human
being who had benefited by Mrs. Garlett’s death. On the other hand, the
young lady had been in the enjoyment of a very exceptional salary. For
her apparently simple and easy services she had been paid at the rate of
three hundred pounds a year. Further, Mr. Toogood had assured him that
Mrs. Garlett, secretive as are so many people concerning their money
affairs, had not even made the husband whom she dearly loved acquainted
with the terms of her will.
All those men whose professions, be they lawyers, doctors, ministers of
the gospel, whose way of life brings them closely in touch with human
nature, soon become aware of how difficult it is to form any accurate
view concerning the secret relations of a man and a woman. Mr.
Kentworthy had come to the reluctant conclusion that long before his
wife’s death Garlett had lived a double life. He was convinced of the
truth of Lucy Warren’s statement as to the meetings in the wood, and the
more convinced because the girl had made it unwillingly, indeed had been
frightened into making it. Twice he had tried in the last three days to
get in touch with her again, each time choosing a moment when Miss
Prince was out. But Lucy Warren had defied him, and the second time he
had seen her she had said with a shrewdness that surprised him:
“I am not bound to tell you anything now. It was different when you came
from the police.”
Kentworthy was convinced that she had told the truth, and so he accepted
it as a fact that Garlett had been in the habit of meeting a woman
secretly at night. Further, he believed that the anonymous letters had
been written by that unknown woman, and he hoped that her association
with Garlett—of whatever nature it might prove to be—would provide a
sufficiently strong motive for her to have committed secret murder.
With his mind full of these vague and uncertain half-suspicions, the
detective came within sight of Bonnie Doon, and then he hastened his
steps, for the doctor’s motor was already before the door waiting to
start for the police court in Grendon where Harry Garlett’s fate was to
be decided to-day so far as it was within the power of the local
magistrates to decide it.