Speedy Death (19 page)

Alastair Bing glowered, and led the way to Eleanor’s room. He tapped at the door, put his head round, and in a few words informed his daughter of what was about to happen.

‘Just take this card between the thumb and first finger, please, Miss Bing. No, the other hand. That’s it.’

They bore the card away with them, and the inspector quietly closed the door.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘Comparisons unnecessary, Toddie, I guess?’

The sergeant grinned.

‘You’re right, sir. Miss Eleanor Bing was certainly the last person to handle that poker, I fancy. Where’s the powder?’

‘Hum! Somehow, I rather expected as much, although how it affects the case, as the case stands, I can’t quite say,’ said the inspector later on. ‘You see, we’re out to find the murderer of Everard Mountjoy, not to discover why Miss Bing walks about the house at night bashing Guy Fawkes’ napper with a poker. Which reminds me,’ he went on, almost without a pause, ‘of a small duty I ought to perform. Go and dig out one of the ladies, and ask her to accompany me up to Miss Eleanor’s room again. I want to have a look in her medicine cupboard. Now, what excuse shall I make? Bit of bandage for a cut finger!’

He drew out a small penknife. ‘Just as well to have a little real blood while we’re about it,’ he said, almost gaily. ‘Never tell a lie if it’s just as easy to be truthful.’

‘YOU’RE LOOKING VERY
jovial this morning, sir, if I may say so,’ said Inspector Boring to Carstairs next day.

Carstairs, out for an after-breakfast stroll in the grounds, had encountered the long-faced police officer and had stopped to chat with him.

‘Yes, I am going to a wedding in about an hour’s time,’ Carstairs somewhat surprisingly answered. ‘Mr Garde Bing and Miss Dorothy Clark are getting married by special licence in Wavertree.’

‘Are they, by Jove!’ said the inspector. He lowered his voice. ‘What’s the little idea, sir?”

Carstairs smiled slightly and shook his head.

‘Oh, come now, sir,’ persisted Boring, almost pleadingly. ‘It is a bit out of the ordinary, you must admit. Yesterday we take their finger-prints, and today they go and get married. There must be something in it.’

‘I don’t see why, inspector.’

Carstairs was frankly amused, and did not trouble to hide the fact.

‘What have the two things to do with one another?’ he asked.

‘Ah!’ said the inspector, in the tone of one who has a grievance. ‘What have all the facts in this case to do with one another? That’s what I’d like to know, hanged if I wouldn’t! Do you know what the Chief Constable said to me this morning? He asked me if I’d like to call in Scotland Yard.’

Carstairs whistled softly.

‘Yes, that’s what he asked me. Of course, it may come to that yet, sir. Now, look here, Mr Carstairs, why don’t some of you ladies and gentlemen come across with what you know? It would help me considerably, and, what is more, you know, sir, it will save some of you the sight of a lot of trouble in the witness-box later on.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Carstairs.

‘I mean I’m going to find out who killed Everard Mountjoy. You know the verdict of the coroner’s court! The coroner, guided by us, summed up so that it was utterly impossible to leave the word “murder” out of it. But I can’t prove murder, you see, sir, and yet I know, the same as you know, that murder was done.’

‘But I
don’t
know that murder was done. As I told you and Sir Joseph yesterday, I felt certain at first that Mountjoy was deliberately drowned, and I imagined I knew the identity of the murderer. But I’ve changed my mind.’

‘You and Mrs Bradley seem to think alike upon
most subjects,’ said the inspector, with a grin of distaste at the mention of Mrs Bradley’s name.

‘Upon most subjects we do
not
think alike,’ Carstairs observed, ‘but in this case——’ He left the sentence unfinished, and cocked an eye at the inspector, but the latter would not allow himself to be drawn.

‘Very well, sir,’ he said, with more good-humour than might have been expected from him, ‘you mean you won’t help me. Well, the police get used to that attitude. Still, I should have thought that a clever gentleman like yourself would have come across with any information he might have in his possession, if only to save awkwardness for himself later on. Especially’—Boring paused, as though carefully weighing his words—‘especially,’ he repeated, with slow and solemn emphasis, ‘as I have removed your name from the list of suspected persons.’

‘That’s very good of you, I’m sure, inspector,’ said Carstairs with his quizzical smile. ‘To what, in particular, am I indebted for the honour?’

‘Oh, to yourself, chiefly, and, of course, on the strength of a tip from the Chief Constable. Said you were a member of his London clubs, or something.’

Carstairs chuckled.

‘See what it is to have respectable haunts,’ he said. Then the smile left his face, and he went on very seriously:

‘Look here, inspector! I liked Everard Mountjoy, and I am as keen as you are to find her murderer.
I’ll tell you who I thought it was, and I’ll tell you why I’ve changed my mind.’

‘I’ll tell
you
both those things, sir,’ interpolated the inspector. ‘You thought it was Miss Bing, and you’ve changed your mind because you suspect what we know for a fact, namely, that it was no fainting fit, but a cold-blooded attempt at murder which caused Miss Bing to be found nearly drowned in the bath yesterday morning.’

‘You are quite right,’ said Carstairs. ‘That is what I thought. So there we are. And I’m forced to the conclusion that Mountjoy’s death was an accident.’

‘Come, come, Mr Carstairs!’ The inspector’s tone was reproachful. ‘You are not handing me that, surely! If Mountjoy was not murdered, why did someone try to kill Miss Bing?
Somebody
still thinks she was the murderer, if you don’t! And why, in the name of goodness, are those two people in such a hurry to get married? If they knew what I know,’ concluded the inspector darkly, ‘they’d think twice. Special licence, indeed! What for, Mr Carstairs? What
for
?’

Carstairs shrugged his shoulders carelessly.

‘Impetuous youth,’ he said, with half humorous sadness. ‘Or perhaps they think Miss Clark stands in need of a husband’s protection.’

‘Protection?’ The inspector ruminated on this for a time, and then exclaimed:

‘Mr Carstairs, you’ve hit it! They are afraid of another attempt on her life! I was wrong about the Guy Fawkes! It was not a practical joke. We
realized that when we heard that Miss Clark and Mrs Bradley had rigged it up between them, and that the young fellows, Bing and what’s-his-name?—Philipson—had had no hand in it. That means they can guess pretty nearly who the poker-fiend was, and have some idea he may try again. Half a minute before you say any more. I’ll just get that idea down clearly. There’s a lot in it.’

He took a newspaper from his tunic, unfolded it, placed it on the ground, and seated himself. Then he produced his note-book, licked his pencil, and wrote busily for several seconds. Carstairs seated himself on the edge of a stone garden ornament and hummed softly.

The inspector finished writing, and rose, tidily picking up the newspaper as he did so. ‘And that brings us back to Eleanor Bing,’ he placidly observed.

‘How do you mean?’

Carstairs was obviously startled.

‘I mean this.’ And from his tunic-pocket the inspector drew a little bottle more than half-filled with small round white tablets. He extended the bottle so that Carstairs could decipher the chemist’s label upon it, but did not offer to relinquish his hold.

‘Aspirin,’ said Carstairs. ‘What’s the point, inspector?’

The inspector returned the bottle to its place.

‘Exhibit One,’ he replied contentedly, ‘to prove that Miss Eleanor Bing is a very poor liar.’

‘Eh?’ Carstairs was still puzzled.

‘Didn’t she tell all of you that she went into Miss Clark’s room that night for aspirin tablets to relieve her neuralgia? Well, I found this bottle in the very front of the little cupboard in her own room. It ought not to be difficult to find out whether it was bought yesterday, and, if so, who has had—let’s see!’

He took out the bottle again.

‘It ought to contain fifty, according to the label. It actually does contain’—he removed stopper and cotton wool, and shook out the tablets on to his hand—’thirty-one. Well, it’s fairly safe to assume that she hasn’t taken nineteen of them since the night before last, so, if I can prove that nobody else has had nineteen out of this bottle since then, I’ve got reason for saying that Miss Bing told a lie when she said she went to Miss Clark’s bedroom for aspirin. This, taken in conjunction with the fact that the finger-prints on the poker are those of Miss Bing, justifies me in assuming that she dealt the blow to that Guy Fawkes. Now, the snag will be to prove whether she thought she was trying to kill Miss Clark, or whether she knew it was only a dummy, and, if the latter is the case, why she wanted to do such a darn fool thing—especially in the middle of the night.’

He paused, and drew breath.

‘I hope I haven’t been boring you,’ he said apologetically. ‘I don’t usually say off a whole long piece like that at once, but I wanted to get the hang of my ideas.’

‘Inspector, you belie your name,’ said Carstairs,
laughing. ‘Boring you may be, but boring you are not.’

They walked up to the house together.

Breakfast was on its last legs, as Garde observed to them when they entered by the French windows. That was to say that Eleanor, who found herself sufficiently recovered from her experiences of the day before to resume her usual position as mistress of ceremonies at the breakfast-table, was pouring out a last cup of coffee for the indolent Bertie, who never dreamed of appearing at breakfast until everyone else had finished. This habit, which would not have endeared anyone else to Eleanor, elicited from her, in this case, nothing more than a long-suffering moan of motherly reproachfulness.

The inspector came to the point in his blunt but effective way.

‘I hope it isn’t the aspirin habit that makes you sleep so sound, Mr Philipson,’ he observed, with heavy jocularity.

‘Aspirin? Good Lord, no! I leave that harmless, unnecessary drug to the ladies,’ said Bertie, laughing.

‘Indeed,’ retorted Eleanor, rising swiftly to the bait, ‘I am sure, Bertie, that you have no reason for saying so when I am the only member of my sex present. Personally, I rarely, if ever, have recourse to such a means of inducing sleep. In fact, I only keep aspirin in the house at all for the sake of the maidservants, in case they should suffer from aching teeth, or some such affliction common to the lower classes. I am constantly saying to Mabel,
“Why don’t you have your teeth properly attended to? You are an insured person. It will cost you nothing. I will arrange your work so that you can visit the dentist at a convenient time!” But no!’ cried Eleanor, warming to one of her favourite subjects. ‘The lower classes have no forethought! Mabel became quite impertinent. I was obliged to pull her up very sharply.’

‘Do you
never
take aspirin, Miss Bing?’ pursued the inspector. ‘When did you purchase the last amount of it?’

‘I am at a loss to understand your interest in the subject, inspector,’ observed Eleanor coldly, ‘but, since you ask, I will tell you that I purchased the last bottle of aspirin tablets——’ She pulled at a gold chain, which, in defiance of feminine fashion of the moment, she wore suspended round her neck, and which terminated in a large flap-pocket in her house-frock. A small, black, stiff-covered book came into view. She consulted it, and then gravely announced: ‘On May 15th I bought a bottle containing fifty aspirin tablets at the chemist’s in Wavertree.’

‘And you’ve purchased none since?’ the inspector persisted.

Eleanor returned the little book to its place, pursed her lips, shrugged her shoulders, and, ignoring the inspector entirely, asked: ‘More coffee, Bertie?’

Carstairs and the inspector returned to the garden.

‘Well, sir,’ said Boring at last, when they had
traversed the gravel path round the lawn, ‘what do you make of her?’

‘I think she has forgotten she went to Miss Clark’s room that night with the poker,’ answered Carstairs deliberately.

‘Forgotten she went there?’ The inspector was incredulous.

Carstairs smiled ruefully and nodded.

‘You see, it was fairly obvious,’ he said, ‘that your questions about the aspirin touched no responsive chord in her mind.’

‘Or else she’s deeper than you think, sir,’ the inspector pointed out. ‘It’s wonderful how some of these people refuse to give themselves away, you know.’

‘Yes,’ admitted Carstairs, ‘that is true, I think. All the same, I had a good deal of experience during the war in interrogating people. I speak German, and so I was given the job of interviewing German prisoners, and I learned to detect, almost infallibly, whether a man was concealing anything from me. Now, I watched Eleanor Bing very closely while you were speaking to her, and I feel certain that your questions irritated her simply because she considered them pointless.’