Trent's Last Case (7 page)

The inspector leaned forward thinking, his large hands clasped before him. 'No,' he said at last. 'Of course there's no help in that theory. I rather expect we have some way to go before we find out why a man gets up before the servants are awake, dresses himself awry, and is murdered within sight of his house early enough to be cold and stiff by ten in the morning.'

Trent shook his head. 'We can't build anything on that last consideration. I've gone into the subject with people who know. I shouldn't wonder,' he added, 'if the traditional notions about loss of temperature and rigor after death had occasionally brought an innocent man to the gallows, or near it. Dr. Stock has them all, I feel sure; most general practitioners of the older generation have. That Dr. Stock will make an ass of himself at the inquest, is almost as certain as that tomorrow's sun will rise. I've seen him. He will say the body must have been dead about so long, because of the degree of coldness and rigor mortis. I can see him nosing it all out in some textbook that was out of date when he was a student. Listen, Murch, and I will tell you some facts which will be a great hindrance to you in your professional career. There are many things that may hasten or retard the cooling of the body. This one was lying in the long dewy grass on the shady side of the shed. As for rigidity, if Manderson died in a struggle, or laboring under sudden emotion, his corpse might stiffen practically instantaneously; there are dozens of cases noted, particularly in cases of injury to the skull, like this one. On the other hand, the stiffening might not have begun until eight or ten hours after death. You can't hang anybody on rigor mortis nowadays, inspector, much as you may resent the limitation. No, what we can say is this. If he had been shot after the hour at which the world begins to get up and go about its business, it would have been heard, and very likely seen too. In fact, we must reason, to begin with, at any rate, on the assumption that he wasn't shot at a time when people might be awake; it isn't done in these parts. Put that time at 6.30 A. M. Manderson went up to bed at 11 P. M., and Martin sat up till 12.30. Assuming that he went to sleep at once on turning in, that leaves us something like six hours for the crime to be committed in; and that is a long time. But whenever it took place, I wish you would suggest a reason why Manderson, who was a fairly late riser, was up and dressed at or before 6.30; and why neither Martin, who sleeps lightly, nor Bunner, nor his wife heard him moving about, or letting himself out of the house. He must have been careful. He must have crept about like a cat. Do you feel as I do, Murch, about all this; that it is very, very strange and baffling?'

'That's how it looks,' agreed the inspector.

'And now,' said Trent, rising to his feet, 'I'll leave you to your meditations, and take a look at the bedrooms. Perhaps the explanation of all this will suddenly burst upon you while I am poking about up there. But,' concluded Trent in a voice of sudden exasperation, turning round in the doorway, 'if you can tell me at any time, how under the sun a man who put on all those clothes could forget to put in his teeth, you may kick me from here to the nearest lunatic asylum, and hand me over as an incipient dement.'

CHAPTER V

Poking About

There are moments in life, as one might think, when that which is within us, busy about its secret affair, lets escape into consciousness some hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well with him?—not the feverish confidence of men in danger of a blow from fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is at hand in some great or fine thing. The general suddenly knows at dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent mounted the stairway outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty of achievement. A host of guesses and inferences swarmed apparently unsorted through his mind; a few secret observations that he had made, and which he felt must have significance, still stood unrelated to any plausible theory of the crime; yet as he went up he seemed to know indubitably that light was going to appear.

The bedrooms lay on either side of a broad carpeted passage, lighted by a tall end window. It went the length of the house until it ran at right angles into a narrower passage, out of which the servants' rooms opened. Martin's room was the exception: it opened out of a small landing half-way to the upper floor.

As Trent passed it he glanced within. A little square room, clean and commonplace. In going up the rest of the stairway he stepped with elaborate precaution against noise, hugging the wall closely and placing each foot with care; but a series of very audible creaks marked his passage.

He knew that Manderson's room was the first on the right hand when the bedroom floor was reached, and he went to it at once. He tried the latch and the lock, which worked normally, and examined the wards of the key. Then he turned to the room.

It was a small apartment, strangely bare. The plutocrat's toilet appointments were of the simplest. All remained just as it had been on the morning of the ghastly discovery in the grounds. The sheets and blankets of the unmade bed lay tumbled over a narrow wooden bedstead, and the sun shone brightly through the window upon them. It gleamed, too, upon the gold parts of the delicate work of dentistry that lay in water in a shallow bowl of glass placed on a small, plain table by the bedside. On this also stood a wrought-iron candlestick. Some clothing lay untidily over one of the two rush-bottomed chairs. Various objects on the top of a chest of drawers, which had been used as a dressing-table, lay in such disorder as a hurried man might make. Trent looked them over with a questing eye. He noted also that the occupant of the room had neither washed nor shaved. With his finger he turned over the dental plate in the bowl, and frowned again at its incomprehensible presence.

The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams, were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up a picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the first light of dawn, glancing constantly at the inner door behind which his wife slept, his eyes full of some terror.

Trent shivered, and to fix his mind again on actualities, opened two tall cupboards in the wall on either side of the bed. They contained clothing, a large choice of which had evidently been one of the very few conditions of comfort for the man who had slept there.

In the matter of shoes, also, Manderson had allowed himself the advantage of wealth. An extraordinary number of these, treed and carefully kept, was ranged on two long low shelves against the wall. No boots were among them. Trent, himself an amateur of good shoe-leather, now turned to these, and glanced over the collection with an appreciative eye. It was to be seen that Manderson had been inclined to pride himself on a rather small and well-formed foot. The shoes were of a distinctive shape, narrow and round-toed, beautifully made; all were evidently from the same cast.

Suddenly his eyes narrowed themselves over a pair of patent-leather shoes on the upper shelf.

These were the shoes of which the inspector had already described the position to him; the shoes worn by Manderson the night before his death. They were a well-worn pair, he saw at once; he saw, too, that they had been very recently polished. Something about the uppers of these shoes had seized his attention.

He bent lower and frowned over them, comparing what he saw with the appearance of the neighboring shoes. Then he took them up and examined the line of junction of the uppers with the soles.

As he did this, Trent began unconsciously to whistle faintly, and with great precision, an air which Inspector Murch, if he had been present, would have recognized.

Most men who have the habit of self-control have also some involuntary trick which tells those who know them that they are suppressing excitement. The inspector had noted that when Trent had picked up a strong scent he whistled faintly a certain melodious passage; though the inspector could not have told you that it was in fact the opening movement of Mendelssohn's Lied ohne Worter in A Major.

He turned the shoes over, made some measurements with a marked tape, and looked minutely at the bottoms. On each, in the angle between the heel and the instep, he detected a faint trace of red gravel.

Trent placed the shoes on the floor, and walked with his hands behind him to the window, out of which, still faintly whistling, he gazed with eyes that saw nothing. Once his lips opened to emit mechanically the Englishman's expletive of sudden enlightenment. At length he turned to the shelves again, and swiftly but carefully examined every one of the shoes there.

This done, he took up the garments from the chair, looked them over closely and replaced them. He turned to the wardrobe cupboards again, and hunted through them carefully. The litter on the dressing-table now engaged his attention for the second time. Then he sat down on the empty chair, took his head in his hands, and remained in that attitude, staring at the carpet, for some minutes. He rose at last and opened the inner door leading to Mrs. Manderson's room.

It was evident at a glance that the big room had been hurriedly put down from its place as the lady's bower. All the array of objects that belong to a woman's dressing-table had been removed; on bed and chairs and smaller tables there were no garments or hats, bags or boxes; no trace remained of the obstinate conspiracy of gloves and veils, handkerchiefs and ribbons, to break the captivity of the drawer. The room was like an unoccupied guest-chamber.

Yet in every detail of furniture and decoration it spoke of an unconventional but exacting taste. Trent, as his expert eye noted the various perfection of color and form amid which the ill-mated lady dreamed her dreams and thought her loneliest thoughts, knew that she had at least the resources of an artistic nature. His interest in this unknown personality grew stronger; and his brows came down heavily as he thought of the burdens laid upon it, and of the deed of which the history was now shaping itself with more and more of substance before his busy mind.

He went first to the tall French window in the middle of the wall that faced the door, and opening it, stepped out upon a small balcony with an iron railing. He looked down on a broad stretch of lawn that began immediately beneath him, separated from the house-wall only by a narrow flowerbed, and stretched away, with an abrupt dip at the farther end, toward the orchard. The other window opened with a sash above the garden-entrance of the library. In the farther inside corner of the room was a second door giving upon the passage; the door by which the maid was wont to come in, and her mistress to go out, in the morning.

Trent, seated on the bed, quickly sketched in his notebook a plan of the room and its neighbor. The bed stood in the angle between the communicating-door and the sash-window, its head against the wall dividing the room from Manderson's. Trent stared at the pillows; then he lay down with deliberation on the bed and looked through the open door into the adjoining room.

This observation taken, he rose again and proceeded to note on his plan that on either side of the bed was a small table with a cover. Upon that furthest from the door was a graceful electric-lamp standard of copper connected by a free wire with the wall. Trent looked at it thoughtfully, then at the switches connected with the other lights in the room. They were, as usual, on the wall just within the door, and some way out of his reach as he sat on the bed. He rose, and satisfied himself that the lights were all in order. Then he turned on his heel, walked quickly into Manderson's room, and rang the bell.

'I want your help again, Martin,' he said, as the butler presented himself, upright and impassive, in the doorway. 'I want you to prevail upon Mrs. Manderson's maid to grant me an interview.'

'Certainly, sir,' said Martin.

'What sort of a woman is she? Has she her wits about her?'

'She's French, sir,' replied Martin succinctly; adding after a pause: 'She has not been with us long, sir, but I have formed the impression that the young woman knows as much of the world as is good for her—since you ask me.'

'You think butter might possibly melt in her mouth, do you?' said Trent. 'Well, I am not afraid. I want to put some questions to her.'

'I will send her up immediately, sir.' The butler withdrew, and Trent wandered round the little room with his hands at his back. Sooner than he had expected, a small neat figure in black appeared quietly before him.

The lady's maid, with her large brown eyes, had taken favorable notice of Trent from a window when he had crossed the lawn, and had been hoping desperately that the resolver of mysteries (whose reputation was as great below-stairs as elsewhere) would send for her. For one thing, she felt the need to make a scene; her nerves were overwrought. But her scenes were at a discount with the other domestics, and as for Mr. Murch, he had chilled her into self-control with his official manner. Trent, her glimpse of him had told her, had not the air of a policeman, and at a distance he had appeared sympathique.

As she entered the room, however, instinct decided for her that any approach to coquetry would be a mistake, if she sought to make a good impression at the beginning. It was with an air of amiable candor, then, that she said, 'Monsieur desire to speak with me.' She added helpfully, 'I am called Celestine.'

'Naturally,' said Trent with businesslike calm. 'Now what I want you to tell me, Celestine, is this. When you took tea to your mistress yesterday morning at seven o'clock, was the door between the two bedrooms—this door here—open?'

Celestine became intensely animated in an instant. 'Oh yes!' she said, using her favorite English idiom. 'The door was open as always, monsieur, and I shut it as always. But it is necessary to explain. Listen! When I enter the room of madame from the other door in there—ah! but if monsieur will give himself the pain to enter the other room, all explains itself.' She tripped across to the door, and urged Trent before her into the larger bedroom with a hand on his arm. 'See! I enter the room with the tea like this. I approach the bed. Before I come quite near the bed, here is the door to my right hand—open always—so! But monsieur can perceive that I see nothing in the room of Monsieur Manderson. The door opens to the bed, not to me who approach from down there. I shut it without seeing in. It is the order. Yesterday it was as ordinary. I see nothing of the next room. Madame sleep like an angel—she see nothing. I shut the door. I place the plateau—I open the curtains—I prepare the toilette—I retire—voila!' Celestine paused for breath and spread her hands abroad.

Trent, who had followed her movements and gesticulations with deepening gravity, nodded his head. 'I see exactly how it was now,' he said. 'Thank you, Celestine. So Mr. Manderson was supposed to be still in his room while your mistress was getting up, and dressing, and having breakfast in her boudoir?'

'Oui, monsieur.'

'Nobody missed him, in fact,' remarked Trent. 'Well, Celestine, I am very much obliged to you.' He reopened the door to the outer bedroom.

'It is nothing, monsieur,' said Celestine, as she crossed the small room. 'I hope that monsieur will catch the assassin of Monsieur Manderson. But I not regret him too much,' she added with sudden and amazing violence, turning round with her hand on the knob of the outer door. She set her teeth with an audible sound, and the color rose in her small dark face. English departed from her. 'Je ne le regrette pas du tout, du tout!' she cried with a flood of words. 'Madame—ah! je me jetterais au leu pour madame—une femme si charmante, si adorable! Mais un homme comme monsieur—maussade, boudeur, impassible! Ah, non!—de ma vie! J'en avais pardessus la tête, de monsieur! Ah! vrai! Est-ce insupportable, tout de meme, qu'il existe des types comme ça? Je vous jure que—'

'Finissez ce chahut, Celestine!' Trent broke in sharply. Celestine's tirade had brought back the memory of his student days with a rush. 'En voila une scene! C'est rasant, vous savez. Faut rentret ça, mademoiselle. Du reste, c'est bien imprudent, croyez-moi. Hang it! Have some common sense! If the inspector downstairs heard you saying that kind of thing, you would get into trouble. And don't wave your fists about so much; you might hit something. You seem,' he went on more pleasantly, as Celestine grew calmer under his authoritative eye, 'to be even more glad than other people that Mr. Manderson is out of the way. I could almost suspect, Celestine, that Mr. Manderson did not take as much notice of you as you thought necessary and right.'

'A peine s'il m'avait regardé!' Celestine answered simply.

'Ça, c'est un comble!' observed Trent. 'You are a nice young woman for a small tea-party, I don't think. A star upon your birthday burned, whose fierce, serene, red, pulseless planet never yearned in heaven, Celestine. Mademoiselle, I am busy. Bon jour. You certainly are a beauty!'

Celestine took this as a scarcely expected compliment. The surprise restored her balance. With a sudden flash of her eyes and teeth at Trent over her shoulder, the lady's maid opened the door and swiftly disappeared.

Trent, left alone in the little bedroom, relieved his mind with two forcible descriptive terms in Celestine's language, and turned to his problem. He took the pair of shoes which he had already examined, and placed them on one of the two chairs in the room, then seated himself on the other opposite to this.

With his hands in his pockets he sat with eyes fixed upon those two dumb witnesses. Now and then he whistled, almost inaudibly, a few bars. It was very still in the room. A subdued twittering came from the trees through the open window. From time to time a breeze rustled in the leaves of the thick creeper about the sill. But the man in the room, his face grown hard and somber now with his thoughts, never moved.