“Oh, yes. Often, poor darling. But I never thought she would really ever do such a thing. Oh, I shall never forgive myself, never. Do you think I could possibly have prevented it? You don’t, Mr. Sheringham, do you?”
Roger was tactful, and set about obtaining possession of the letters.
Miss Aldersley, convinced at last that she would only be serving her dead friend’s best interests by handing them over, agreed without much difficulty and went off to find them.
Roger carried them away with him in triumph.
“Don’t take them to the police,” he said, as he gave them to Ronald in the car a minute later. “I don’t trust them. Take them round to the coroner yourself, directly after dinner. He’ll probably be quite glad of the chance of a private word with you, too, as he knows you personally.”
On such small details, Roger told himself with some satisfaction, is the unassailable case built.
But calling in on Colin that night for a last word before going to bed, Roger found that a certain uneasiness still remained with him.
“We’ve got our stories all pat,” he said, sitting on the bed and watching Colin brush his hair, “but we must allow for the unexpected. I don’t think the police are likely now to ask for an adjournment tomorrow; but after Ronald’s attitude, if they have by any remote chance got something up their sleeves for us, they’ll have been keeping it darker than ever.”
Colin looked round from his dressing-table. “But what could they have up their sleeves, man?”
“Goodness knows. But I wish now I’d played that superintendent a little more tactfully. Ah, well, we must just sit tight and know nothing, that’s all. If only that David doesn’t let us all down …”
INQUEST ON A VILE BODY
The coroner shuffled his papers.
“Well, gentlemen, that being so, we’ll proceed to hear the evidence. Mr. Stratton, will you …? Mr. David Stratton, I should have said. Yes. Now, Mr. Stratton, I quite realise that this is a very painful occasion for you. Very painful, indeed. You may be sure that we won’t trouble you more than necessary, but it is my duty to ask you a few questions. Now, let me see. Yes. Perhaps the best thing would be for you to tell us exactly what led up to this distressing event, yes.”
Roger held his breath.
He need not have been alarmed. David gave his evidence clearly and without faltering. He spoke in much the same abrupt, almost jerky tones as those with which he had first answered the questions of Inspector Crane, but now they appeared nothing but a cloak for nervousness.
The coroner was as kind to him as possible, and led him in a way which, Roger considered, might have given a suspicious superintendent of police some pain. (Ronald’s call on the coroner the previous evening had been an excellent move.) After telling his story David was asked a few questions about his own movements; but only, it seemed, with the object of finding out why he had not followed his wife out of the ballroom and whether, had he done so shortly afterwards, it would not have been possible to avert the tragedy; to which David frankly replied that his wife very often behaved in an odd way, and he had no anticipation at all that this performance in particular might have serious consequences. As for ringing up the police-station later, he had learned a long time ago from Dr. Chalmers that his wife could not be held to be always strictly accountable for her actions, and being worried over her disappearance had thought it best to take this precaution; he had never done so before, because the occasion had never arisen. Altogether, Roger thought admiringly, David could not have carried greater conviction had he been innocent.
“Yes,” clucked the elderly little coroner. “Quite so. This is very distressing for you, Mr. Stratton, I know, but I am bound to ask you. With regard to what you say about your wife’s behaviour at times …”
David gave instances, shortly and with obvious reluctance. Mrs. Stratton had been subject to profound fits of depression; she was accustomed occasionally, in company, to drink for effect, though it was impossible to call her a drunkard; she often lost her temper over trifles, and would then rave and storm in a quite unbalanced way; she would worry for days over the most insignificant things; and so on.
When at last David was released, Roger felt that the worst was over.
And evidently the police had not asked for an adjournment, so perhaps no surprises might be expected after all.
Ronald Stratton followed his brother and he, too, gave nothing away. Confirming David’s account of Ena’s behaviour at the party and her loss of temper over their horseplay, which Ronald manfully admitted to have been mistaken with so touchy a subject, he told of the anxiety about her disappearance which had resulted in the prolonged search, and of the finding of the body. He spoke with sincerity and frankness, and obviously created an excellent impression on the jury.
Questioned by the coroner, he not only agreed with David’s estimate of the dead woman’s mental instability, but conveyed the impression, without actually saying so, that David had been loyally minimising this lack of balance, which in reality was a great deal more pronounced than he had suggested. He added further examples of her strange behaviour.
Celia Stratton confirmed this, and added that when staying with David she had frequently been distressed to hear his wife shrieking at him in their bedroom till all hours of the morning, like a mad woman.
“Like a mad woman?” repeated the coroner deprecatingly. “You’re sure that isn’t too strong an expression, Miss Stratton?”
“Not in the least,” Celia reported firmly. “If you’d heard her, you’d understand. She used almost to yowl, one might say, as if she’d completely lost control of herself.”
“Dear me,” said the coroner sadly. “Very painful, indeed.”
Roger privately thought that Celia had overdone it a trifle, but there was no doubt that the idea must be getting home to the jury that Ena Stratton had been anything but normal.
As Celia was about to leave the stand, the coroner added one more question:
“If you realised that your sister-in-law was really so seriously unbalanced as this, I wonder you did not advise your brother to consult an alienist about her, Miss Stratton?”
“But I did!” Celia retorted indignantly. “Of course I did. My elder brother and I both wanted him to do so. But he said he’d already consulted Dr. Chalmers, who had advised him that though his wife was unbalanced to some extent, it couldn’t be considered pronounced enough to warrant sending her to a home just yet, though that might come later.”
“I see, I see,” hastily agreed the coroner. “Yes, we can hear all about that from Dr. Chalmers himself, yes.”
Roger smiled and blessed the ways of coroners’ courts. In a court of law, governed by the rules of evidence, Celia’s last statement would not have been allowed even to reach completion; and it was a useful one. But not perhaps, Roger reflected, for Dr. Chalmers, who stood a chance of getting hauled over the coals for negligence.
Roger also noticed, with considerable interest, that so far not a word had been said about chairs.
He himself was called next.
Asked to do so, he described glibly enough the part he had played in the scene that followed the discovery of the body.
“In consequence of a communication made to me by Mr. Williamson, I called Mr. Ronald Stratton quietly out of the next room and accompanied him up to the roof, followed by Mr. Williamson.”
Yes. Just a moment, Mr. Sheringham. What was this communication that Mr. Williamson made to you?”
“He told me that he had found Mrs. Stratton,” amplified Roger, who had thought he had achieved rather nicely the official phraseology.
He continued his story.
“And I should like to say, Mr. Coroner,” he said unctuously, “that I take full responsibility for the cutting down of the body before the police arrived.”
“Of course. Quite so. Yes. You had naturally to make certain that life was extinct. Of course. Yes, Mr. Sheringham? And then?”
Roger went on.
Not a word was said about chairs.
“Quite so. Your experience, of which we have all of course heard, was of great service. We can be sure that everything was done in a perfectly regular and proper manner. Yes. Now, Mr. Sheringham, you have heard the evidence that has been given regarding the state of Mrs. Stratton’s mind. Did you yourself notice anything unusual in her behaviour?”
“Yes. My attention had been called to Mrs. Stratton earlier in the evening, in consequence of overhearing a remark made by Mr. Williamson to Mr. Ronald Stratton.” Roger paused provocatively.
“I think you may tell us what the remark was, Mr. Sheringham. We are not bound by the strict laws of evidence here, you know.”
“Mr. Williamson said: ‘Is your sister-in-law mad, Ronald?’”
Laughter in court.
“Ah!” said the coroner, not without a smile himself. “Indeed? That is very interesting. We will hear from Mr. Williamson himself about that. And that caused you to observe Mrs. Stratton closely, Mr. Sheringham?”
“It did. With the result that I considered that Mr. Williamson’s question, though put in a somewhat exaggerated form, was not without foundation.”
“What did you see that led you to that conclusion?”
“I noticed then that Mrs. Stratton was evidently suffering from a mild form of exhibitionism. She wished to be attracting notice all the time.” Roger cited the climbing on the beam and the Apache dance, a reference to which he had been anxious to make, and added a reference to his conversation with Mrs. Stratton on the roof, in the course of which she had threatened suicide.
“I’m afraid, however, that I attached no importance to this threat. I put it down as being part of her general desire to impress.”
“
Are you still of this opinion?”
“No, I think now that I was mistaken. Not so much from what did actually happen later, as that I believe now that Mrs. Stratton was actually more unbalanced than I suspected, and so was ready to carry her mania of being important to still greater lengths.”
“You think, then, that she would even carry it to the length of suicide?”
“In sufficiently picturesque circumstances,” said Roger grimly, “yes, I do.”
He was allowed to stand down.
Still not a word about chairs.
Roger was really surprised. He had expected without fail a question or two regarding the position of the chair when the body was being cut down, or at the very least its presence, but the questions had not come.
His uneasiness began to return. Were the police keeping something up their sleeves after all concerning that chair?
Mr. Williamson was the next witness, and Roger regarded him with an apprehensive eye. He had had no time that morning to rehearse Mr. Williamson again in his part, and beyond a hurried injunction to refer to Mrs. Lefroy if his memory failed him in any detail of the chair-wiping, had spoken no more to him about it since the previous evening. And it was quite too much to expect that Mr. Williamson also would be allowed to get away with it in silence.
Roger remembered now that Mr. Williamson’s reply to this injunction had been a little curious. What had he said? Something about it being all right, he had had it out with Lilian. Roger felt still more apprehensive. What on earth had Mr. Williamson meant by that? Roger had been careless in not finding out at once. Perhaps devastatingly careless. Had Mrs. Williamson got hold of her husband and undone all the good work by informing him that he had never wiped a chair for Mrs. Lefroy at all? But how, for that matter, could Mrs. Williamson possibly know that he had not?
In the meantime Mr. Williamson’s evidence had been proceeding.
“How did I find the body, eh? Well, you see, we were all looking, and I wondered if anyone had looked on the roof, so I went up there. And then I found her, you see.”
“But what called your attention to her? I understand that other people had already searched on the roof.”
“Oh, well, I don’t suppose they’d bumped into her. That’s what I did, you see. I bumped into her. Eh? Yes. And she seemed a bit heavy for a straw figure—and that,” said Mr. Williamson, also achieving the correct phraseology, “aroused my suspicions.”
The coroner took him briefly through the resulting alarm and the attempt to render first aid, and then, reverting to the question to Ronald Stratton which Mr. Sheringham had overheard, asked Mr. Williamson what had prompted it.
“Well, I’d just been talking to her, you see,” said Mr. Williamson uneasily. “I mean, she’d just been talking to me.”
“And what had been the nature of the conversation?”
“Why, she’d been talking about her soul,” explained Mr. Williamson, his slight diffidence giving place to indignation. “Eh? Popping down double whiskies nineteen to the dozen, and talking about her soul, and whether it wouldn’t be better to put her head in a gas-oven and finish it all off. What? Well!”
Under cover of the resulting laughter Roger, who was sitting between Ronald Stratton and Colin, whispered to the latter:
“That was a good touch. He couldn’t have done that better if we’d rehearsed, him. Carried conviction.”
“Let’s hope he says his real lesson as well,” Colin whispered back.
The coroner, quelling the laughter indulgently, questioned Mr. Williamson further about the conversation, and gently underlined the undoubted fact that Mrs. Stratton had been contemplating suicide even before the scene in the ballroom.
“He’s made up his mind all right,” Ronald Stratton whispered happily to Roger. “I thought he had, last night.”
Then at last came the series of questions which Roger had been awaiting.
“Now tell me, Mr. Williamson. When you went back to guard the roof after the body had been taken downstairs, did anyone join you up there?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Mr. Williamson affably. “Mrs. Lefroy did.”
“Yes, and what happened?”
“What happened? Well, I told her, you know, and showed her the gallows and the end of the rope, and all that.”
“Yes. And then?”
“Eh? Oh, she came over queer. Is that what you mean? She felt a bit faint, I suppose. Women do sometimes,” explained Mr. Williamson with kindness.