Roger realised that he was still looking at Ronald, and Ronald at him. And he was pretty sure that the thoughts which had just been chasing each other through his own mind had equally been chasing themselves through Ronald’s.
Aloud he said:
“That’s a bit of a nuisance.”
“Yes,” said Ronald.
Dr. Mitchell’s house was of cheerfully modern red brick, with a small garden in front full of flowering shrubs and a glimpse down one side of a lawn and rose-bushes at the back. It stood in a pleasant green avenue, and Roger had had no difficulty in finding it, on the instructions Ronald had given him. He had asked Ronald to drop him at the Westerford cross-roads, whence he could make his way to Dr. Mitchell’s on foot, as he considered that it might be unwise for Ronald to drive all the way to the house. For all anyone knew, Ronald might now be under police suspicion, and he must not appear to be trying to tamper with the medical evidence.
For that matter, so might Roger himself; but people in Westerford could not recognise him as they could Ronald, and Ronald’s car.
He waited for Dr. Mitchell in a somewhat severe room with an official-looking desk in one corner of the room and, rather incongruously, a piano in another.
“Why Sheringham, this is a surprise. Delighted to see you. Come into the other room and have some tea.”
Dr. Mitchell, no longer Jack the Ripper but a thoroughly respectable practitioner in a lounge suit, was obviously pleased to see him.
Roger, however, had no time for tea, though his conscience felt a little uneasy as he tried to detach the doctor from the young woman waiting in the next room, who would certainly be cursing him heartily for the next fifteen minutes.
“Thanks very much, but I’m rather in a hurry. Can you spare me a couple of minutes, or are you in the middle of tea?”
“Not a bit. Sit down. You’ve not come to consult me professionally, surely?”
Dr. Mitchell seated himself at the official-looking desk, and Roger took a convenient chair.
“No. At least, not exactly. I just wanted to ask you one or two questions about Mrs. Stratton.”
“Oh, yes?” said Dr. Mitchell, quite pleasantly but quite non-committally.
“You may know,” Roger began, “that I’ve done a good deal of work at one time and another with the police?”
“Of course. But you don’t mean to tell me you’re interested in Mrs. Stratton’s death from that point of view?”
“No, no. What I was going to say was that, having worked so much with the police, I know the signs; and quite between ourselves, I’m pretty sure,” said Roger frankly, “that they’re not altogether satisfied about Mrs. Stratton’s death.” He had worked out with some care the best way of approaching Dr. Mitchell.
A slightly worried look appeared on the other’s face. “Well, to tell you the truth, Sheringham, I was a little afraid of that myself. I don’t know what’s in their minds, but calling for a post-mortem and so on—”
“I think I know what’s in their minds,” Roger said, with a confidential air. “It’s this. They suspect that something is being kept back from them which the coroner ought to know. They think it very odd, you see, both that Mrs. Stratton should have taken her life at a party where everything ought to have been bright and gay and—”
“Alcoholic depression,” put in Dr. Mitchell.
“That’s a good point,” Roger said gratefully.
“I was going to suggest it in my report as a contributory cause. I suppose,” said Dr. Mitchell a little uneasily, “this is all quite between ourselves?”
“Oh, entirely. And I think we’d better be quite frank, as you’ll understand in a minute. So I’ll say at once that the other thing which the police find curious, as the inspector himself told me,” said Roger, not altogether accurately, “is that David Stratton should have warned them about suicide so that before it happened, when he’d never done such a thing before. You knew about that?”
“Yes, I heard that last night. But I don’t quite see the idea.”
“Why,” said Roger, producing his old ace of trumps, “they suspect that there was some direct cause for Mrs. Stratton doing what she did, beyond just general depression and melancholia, and they suspect a conspiracy among all of us to hush it up.”
“But what kind of direct cause?”
“Oh, a violent quarrel between herself and some other person, probably her husband. Or a scene of some kind. Anything like that.”
“But we can give evidence that there wasn’t.”
“If we get the chance!” Roger cried. “But you know what the procedure is when the police are suspicious. The inquest is adjourned for further evidence, after just a formal identification of the remains. And you know what happens then. The newspapers get hold of it.”
Dr. Mitchell nodded. “I see the point.”
“Precisely. It wasn’t the kind of party that anyone will want to advertise, seeing that it ended in a real death. You can imagine the amount of mud-slinging there would be. And no one who attended it would escape. It’s to the interest of all of us to see that the inquest is not adjourned tomorrow and that everything passes off smoothly and quickly. And I imagine that is to the interest of you and Chalmers as much as anyone.”
Dr. Mitchell sighed. “My dear Sheringham, if you just knew the ridiculously tiny things which give offence in a doctor! Yes, I should think it is in our interest.”
“Very well, then. I’m working to do that and dispel the police suspicions, and I want you to give me all the help you can.”
“Anything I can do, that isn’t
too
unprofessional, I certainly will.”
“That’s good. I thought of going to talk it over with Chalmers, and then I remembered that I’d had a chat with him last night but not with you. Besides, I know the evidence he is prepared to give on one very important point, and I didn’t know your opinion. Chalmers considers that Mrs. Stratton was a suicidal subject. Do you?”
“Yes, undoubtedly.”
“Good. Even though it’s a stock remark that the people who talk about suicide don’t commit it?” Roger ventured.
“That may be true of the normal person. But Mrs. Stratton wasn’t normal. I’m prepared to back Phil up in that too, by the way. Well, it was obvious. No, I think Mrs. Stratton must be excepted from that stock remark. She was quite irresponsible and likely to act on any wild impulse.”
“Well, that’s quite satisfactory. Now, you agree with Chalmers about the time of death? I think he puts that somewhere round about two a.m. Within half an hour, anyhow, of her leaving the ballroom.”
“Yes. It’s very difficult to say, you know, especially in the case of sudden death, and with the complication of the cold night air; but it was certainly within an hour of her leaving the ballroom, and quite probably half an hour.”
“The sooner,” said Roger airily, “the better.”
Dr. Mitchell looked interrogative.
“You saw her state of mind when she flung out of the ballroom. Without giving all the details, we can certainly tell the police that she left in a raging fury, after working herself up over nothing at all. Any impulse might have been present in her mind then. The longer the time of death is delayed, the longer the time for reflection, and the less the impulse.”
“I see what you mean,” said Dr. Mitchell slowly. “Yes, perhaps an hour was rather an over-statement on my part. After all, Chalmers has been practising longer than I have. He may quite probably be right in cutting it down to half an hour.”
“As an outside limit. It may quite well have happened immediately?”
“Oh, yes; quite well.”
“Good again. Now, another point. You made your report to the inspector last night. Have you made one to the superintendent yet?”
“Yes. I was intending to go down to see him this afternoon, but he came to me instead, directly after lunch. He told me about the post-mortem at the same time.”
“Yes? And what did you report to him?”
“There was nothing to add, really, to what I’d said to the inspector. He asked a good many questions—”
“He did, did he?”
“Yes, but I had to keep telling him I couldn’t give him any more information till after the p.m.”
“Of course. Now, I understand this afternoon you found a good deal of bruising on the body, and particularly one place on the back of the head?”
“Yes, we did. Not a very bad one, and it was hidden under the hair, just at the back of the scalp; though I don’t think we’d have missed it last night if we hadn’t both been so whacked.”
“Yes.”
Roger paused. Now that he had come to the really crucial part of the interview, he was not quite sure how to proceed. Somehow Dr. Mitchell had got to help him to explain that bruise away, and yet he could not even hint to the doctor why. But Roger was sure that the police would draw precisely the same deduction from it as his own; and while the body bruises were damning enough, the stunning bruise might be fatal. Somehow a convincing explanation of that bruise had got to be found—
must
be found, before there could be any hope of achieving anything else at all.
“Yes,” he said at last, taking the bull by the horns, “and how do you account for the presence of that bruise on the head, Mitchell?”
“Well,” said Dr. Mitchell bluntly, “I suppose someone must have given her a knock on it.”
Roger looked at him in distress. This was about as bad as it could be.
“Is that the only possible explanation? I mean, it looks so much like that quarrel which we know didn’t take place,” he added feebly.
“She must have had a bang on the head to cause a place like that,” Dr. Mitchell pointed out, with reason.
“Yes, but couldn’t she have banged it herself?”
“Oh, she could have, undoubtedly. But do people bang themselves on the back of the scalp?”
“I mean, on a low doorway, or something like that?”
“Not unless she was going through it backwards, surely.”
Roger felt he was losing grip.
He was handicapped by not being able to come out into the open. It was impossible to explain that the police, suspecting not just a more complicated suicide but something far more serious, would almost certainly have been wondering if there might be just such a sign of violence on the back of the head, to explain the absence of any indication of a scuffle on the asphalt surface; for asphalt marks very easily, and if a scuffle had taken place traces of it would undoubtedly remain. And here just such a sign was.
“Well, isn’t there any way she could have got it without having it inflicted on her by another person?” he asked desperately. “And for that matter, the body-bruises too?”
Dr. Mitchell looked serious. “I quite see what you mean, Sheringham, but there’s no getting away from it: she does look as if she’d been knocked about a bit. Bryce himself said so, and he’s sure to put it in his report. He actually said: ‘Hullo, who’s been knocking Ena about?’”
“Hell,” said Roger despondently.
Then suddenly he turned on the other a face full of excitement.
“Mitchell! Were the knees of her stockings torn?”
“The knees of her stockings? I don’t believe they were. No, I’m sure they weren’t, because one was stuck to her knee-cap with a spot of dried blood, and there had been no sign before we turned it down. Why?”
“Because that explains everything,” said Roger happily. “All the bruises. Shall I tell you where she got that mark on the back of her head? From the grand piano.”
“The grand piano?”
“Yes, in the ballroom. Good lord, what an idiot I am. Of course her knees couldn’t have been bruised on the roof, because the asphalt would have torn her stockings. But what will break the skin underneath thin silk, and yet not injure the silk? Moderate friction against a polished wood surface. In other words, we both saw Mrs. Stratton bruising her knees, and all the rest of her—if we happened to be watching. Now, have you got me?”
“That Apache dance she did with Ronald!”
“Of course.” Roger beamed at his pupil. It is so much better for the pupil himself to voice the obvious conclusion. That means that he will take it for granted afterwards that he thought of it for himself, without any prompting; and consequently he will stick to it like glue.
“By Jove,” Roger followed this up, “and I remember now seeing her get up off the floor once by the piano, rubbing her head. Did you see that?”
“No, I can’t say I did.”
“Oh, yes,” said Roger with enthusiasm, who had not seen it either, but was determined that Mrs. Lefroy should have, and Ronald himself, and Colin. “She rubbed her head and said, ‘Oo-er, that was a nasty bump; do it again, Ronald,’ or something like that, you know.”
“Well, that’s the explanation, undoubtedly,” agreed Dr. Mitchell, equally relieved.
“Yes. And I suppose,” added Roger, with a passing qualm of anxiety, “that all the bruises are accounted for in the same way?”
“Oh, certainly. She came down once or twice very heavily. I thought at the time that she must be getting hurt, but she seemed to like it.”
“Precisely. And that’s another point for the coroner’s jury. They’ll be quite ready to believe that a person who liked getting hurt would enjoy the idea of suicide. And so, for that matter, she did. Well, that’s most satisfactory. Did you say something just now, by the way, about a cup of tea?”
Dr. Mitchell rose with alacrity.
Roger almost danced in again through the front door of the Stratton house. Everything was going splendidly. Only one snag now remained, and that depended not on the police but Colin.
But before even breaking the good news to Ronald, Roger hurried straight upstairs to the empty ballroom. And there he did a very regrettable thing.
Closing the door carefully behind him, he chose a nice bubbly piece of moulding on the lower edge of the grand piano and, going down on his hands and knees, rubbed his head carefully against it. There is a certain amount of grease on every head of hair, and Roger contemplated with pleasure the faintly dull patch he had caused on the brilliant shine of the varnish; he would have liked a nice black hair to add to it, but unfortunately such a thing was not available.
It would have been unkind, Roger felt, seeing that the police would probably look for it, not to gratify them with a nice bit of evidence.