MRS SAUNDERSON proved to be a fragile, tiny little person, twenty-six-or-seven years old, with black hair and huge brown eyes and a general air of helplessness and appeal. Roger recognised her type the instant she opened her drawing-room door and came forward to greet them, and his soul rejoiced; he was quite sure that he knew the way to go about charming out of Mrs Saunderson any information which she might have to impart.
‘Miss Purefoy,’ she said in a soft little voice. ‘How do you do? So good of you to come round.’
‘Awfully kind of you to let us, Mrs Saunderson,’ Sheila said briskly. ‘May I introduce Mr Sheringham?’
‘Mr Roger Sheringham!’ murmured the lady, fixing her big eyes on Roger’s face with a rapt expression. ‘This is an unexpected treat.’
‘Very kind of you to say so, Mrs Saunderson,’ returned Roger cheerfully, as he shook hands. Very, very gently he pressed the small fingers; very, very gently the pressure was returned. Roger smiled to himself; he was certain of his ground now.
‘Do please sit down, won’t you?’ Mrs Saunderson implored.
‘Well, I’ve got to be pushing along, unfortunately,’ Sheila explained. ‘Mr Sheringham wants to stay and have a chat with you, if you’ll let him, so I won’t interrupt.’
‘If you would be so exceedingly kind—!’ Roger murmured, fixing a look of admiration on the little lady almost indecent in its sheer blatancy.
‘Kind?’ she said softly, dropping her eyes modestly beneath Roger’s ardent gaze. ‘The kindness is all on your side, Mr Sheringham.’
‘Then I’ll be getting along,’ said Sheila, who had been watching this exchange with the liveliest interest; she spoke with some reluctance.
Roger gave her no encouragement to stay. ‘Very well, Sheila!’ he said, and held open the door for her. As she passed he favoured her with a slight wink. The wink was intended to say, ‘How about this for a bit of acting?’
Sheila returned the wink, but it is doubtful whether she quite understood its purport. Her first words to Alec when she met him outside were blank enough. ‘Well, what’s going to happen in there God alone knows,’ said Miss Purefoy with startling frankness. ‘The ghastly woman’s started holding hands with him already, and Roger’s sitting there with a face like a sick cat about to produce kittens!’ A remarkable tribute to Roger’s powers of dissimulation, no doubt, but one that it would certainly have filled him with pain and sorrow to overhear.
Roger was a cunning man. He knew that it would not be the least use with a lady of Mrs Saunderson’s brand to approach his objective with any degree of directness. The most important thing in Mrs Saunderson’s life was clearly Mrs Saunderson; anything else was only of purely relative interest in so far as it reacted upon the main theme. If Mrs Saunderson was required to divulge her knowledge of the inner history of the Bentley case, then the first requisite was to suggest delicately that the one and only real interest in that case, as far as Roger was concerned, was the part which she herself had played in it, the feelings it had caused her to experience and the way in which her personality had influenced the whole course of events. And to work up to that state of things a good deal of preliminary ground-work was necessary. If you’re going to do a thing at all do it heartily, was Roger’s motto.
He proceeded to manœuvre himself and his temporary hostess on to the same deep couch which stood out from the wall on one side of the fireplace. Not very much manœuvring was required.
‘It’s extraordinarily good of you to let me come and see you, Mrs Saunderson,’ Roger opened the ball.
The lady’s eyes swam at him. She was wearing a soft clinging frock of black georgette, and she certainly did look undeniably attractive. It was equally certain that she had had every intention of looking attractive.
‘Oh, Mr Sheringham!’ she said. ‘If you only knew how I adore your books!’
Good, thought Roger to himself. Wonder if she’s ever read any of ’em! Aloud he replied earnestly, ‘Do you really like them? I am so glad.’ His tone conveyed the impression that, whatever he might have thought before, now at any rate he knew that his books had not been written in vain.
‘Pamela, in your new one—I thought that was a wonderful character. How miraculously you understand women, Mr Sheringham! You seem to see right into our very souls!’
I do, Roger agreed complacently; and nasty, shallow, smudgy little souls some of ’em are. He said, ‘What a delightfully appreciative reader you are. Yes, I must admit that women do have a very strong attraction for me—some women.’ And his expression added clearly, ‘Of which number you, madam, are most indubitably one.’
‘And how beautifully you write about love!’ continued the lady in a rapt voice. ‘Really, the love passages in your books make me simply thrill. I seem actually to be living them with the girl herself. You must have been a very great lover, Mr Sheringham!’
Good Lord, ran Roger’s thoughts, she’s making the pace all right. Well, it’s no good me being slow on my cues. ‘At any rate I always know at very first sight whether a woman is going to attract me or not,’ he replied softly.
Mrs Saunderson dropped her eyes. ‘Always?’
‘Always!’ said Roger firmly. And that was the first round.
‘Of course you’ve heard about our terrible affair in Wychford, Mr Sheringham?’ said the lady, changing the subject with a little flutter of discretion.
Roger had been waiting for this. ‘Yes, I have; and that’s why I’m here, Mrs Saunderson—not only in Wychford, but in your drawing-room. I’ve read, of course, of the exceedingly plucky way in which you did your duty about—about those fly-papers after the servant had told you of them.’
‘I only did what I thought to be right,’ murmured the lady modestly.
‘Exactly!’ cried Roger with much warmth. ‘But how extraordinarily difficult it is at times to do what is right. And nobody could have been in a more awkward predicament than you. With remarkable intuition you realised even then (correct me if I’m wrong) that all was not as it should be; but instead of sitting on your suspicion, as an ordinary person might have done, you acted with energy and initiative. In fact one would hardly be wrong in saying that the whole subsequent course of events was entirely due to your care and foresight on that occasion. It was admirable—really admirable.’ For I judge, Roger thought to himself, that this small person prefers it on a trowel; on a trowel, therefore, she shall certainly have it.
Mrs Saunderson bridled charmingly. ‘Oh, Mr Sheringham, I think you—surely you exaggerate just a little bit, don’t you?’
‘Not the tiniest bit in the world!’ Roger assured her untruthfully. ‘It was a most remarkable piece of work. And the fact of the matter is,’ he added with calculated candour, ‘that I felt I simply couldn’t rest until I’d made your acquaintance and seen for myself what sort of a woman we all have to thank for having brought this dreadful crime to light.’ For, if a trowel, why not a shovel? A shovel, after all, is the more capacious instrument.
‘Oh, Mr Sheringham! This is really quite overwhelming. And—and now you have seen her, is it permitted to ask what you think of her?’
‘That reality for once actually surpasses anticipation,’ Roger replied promptly, discarding the shovel and employing a pail. And that was Round Two.
Once again the lady led off. ‘Are you—oh, are you going to put us all into a book, Mr Sheringham?’ she asked ecstatically. ‘Is that why you’ve come to see me?’
‘I’m certainly going to put you into a book, Mrs Saunderson, if you’ll let me. Or should I say, write a book round you!—May I?’
‘Do you really find me as—as interesting as all that?’ Mrs Saunderson turned her head modestly away but allowed her hand to drop from her lap on to the couch between them. Roger promptly closed his own over it.
‘It isn’t so much what I find you; it’s what you are. Do you mean to say you don’t know how interesting you are? Yes, and fascinating too! Do you mind if I put you into a book?’
‘N-no,’ faltered the little lady artistically. ‘If—if you really want to.’ And again her slender fingers tightened in an almost imperceptible squeeze.
Roger thanked her with gratitude; he had every intention of putting her into a book. End of Round Three.
It was Roger’s turn to open the sparring. ‘I wonder if you’d do me a very great favour, Mrs Saunderson—tell me the whole story in your own words. Would you?’
‘Certainly,’ purred his victim, gently withdrawing her hand. ‘Right from the very beginning?’
‘From the time that you came into it,’ Roger amended gallantly. He knew the beginning.
By no means loath, Mrs Saunderson complied. She told him how her hair stood on end, how the marrow froze in her bones, how she could hardly bring herself to believe the conclusions she had leaped to, how she never got a wink of sleep for three whole nights, how she had cried and cried when she thought of that poor Mrs Allen (of course she is a lot older than her husband, one must admit that; and not very good-looking now; and her temper isn’t all that it might be—one must be fair; but that’s no excuse for a man, is it? But then, Mrs Bentley was French, you see), and how she had known—oh, ages ago that Jacqueline had something queer about her—a sort of look, you know, when she didn’t know anybody was watching her; oh, it was difficult to describe, but Mrs Saunderson had felt right from the beginning that she wasn’t the sort of person you could, well, trust exactly. All these things she told him, and many, many more; but now and then, by accident, a fact did manage to leak out as well. Roger let her talk, listening with an expression of almost painful sympathy and looking (had he but known it—that is, if we are to take Sheila’s word for it) like a sick cat in an interesting condition.
‘How extraordinarily vivid you make it all!’ he declared when the lady had killed off Mr Bentley, post-mortemed him, arrested his wife and shed tears into his grave. ‘I almost feel that I’ve actually lived through the scenes you’ve been describing. What an extraordinary character Mrs Bentley must be!’
‘Oh, she’s a monster, Mr Sheringham! There’s simply no other word for it, I’m afraid. A monster!’
‘A monster!’ Roger repeated with admiration. ‘Absolutely le mot juste. But tell me, Mrs Saunderson, what is her explanation of all these things? She must have had some excuses for them, surely. She doesn’t sound to me as if she were a stupid woman.’
‘Stupid? No, indeed she isn’t. Anything but! She’s full of most dreadful deceit and cunning.’
‘Yes, that’s just what I should have said. But these things she did—they don’t sound cunning at all; they sound really stupid. So I suppose she must have some very clever explanation up her sleeve?’
‘Oh, she’s got plenty of explanations, no doubt,’ Mrs Saunderson sniffed. ‘Jacqueline would have. But you can take it from me that there’s nothing in them, Mr Sheringham. They’re just lies. Silly, stupid, vulgar lies.’
‘Oh, quite,’ Roger said soothingly. ‘They—they must be, mustn’t they? But do you happen to know what they are? It would be so interesting to me, as a student of psychology, to know what a person like that would say to try and explain away the inexplicable. Did you ever hear her make any attempt to do so?’
‘Oh, dear, yes! Plenty of times. But she didn’t take me in, I can assure you.’
‘That I can quite believe,’ Roger said, trying hard to prevent the excitement he was feeling from showing on his face; he had hit the right trail with a vengeance! ‘But what sort of thing could she say? About the Bovril, for instance. How on earth could she give any reasonable excuse for that?’
But here came an unexpected check. Perhaps Roger had been indiscreetly eager; but whether it was that the lady felt the centre of interest to be in danger of shifting too far from herself or whether she didn’t, she certainly proceeded to pull it back again with a jerk.
‘Oh, you mustn’t ask me anything about that, Mr Sheringham,’ she said demurely. ‘That’s part of my evidence, you know, and I’ve been specially warned that I mustn’t say a single word about that to anybody.’
‘Quite right,’ Roger approved warmly, concealing his disappointment. ‘Oh, quite right, of course.’
He decided swiftly on his next move. That this was only a temporary set-back he felt sure; Roger had too good an opinion of himself to doubt that, with sufficient time and patience, he could cozen out of this ridiculous little person anything on which he had really set his heart. But in the meantime he must walk warily; a false move might delay matters very badly. He would administer a little stimulant in the way of studied indifference and see whether that would precipitate matters.
Withdrawing into his own corner of the couch he proceeded to talk firmly upon such matters of impersonal interest as entered his head, to the lady’s patent bewilderment and concern.
He was just completing a wordy examination into the causes of unrest among the native population of Southern Nigeria, when the expected result of his diplomacy came to pass.
‘Have you met Mrs Allen yet, Mr Sheringham?’ his companion asked irrelevantly.
‘Mrs Allen?’ Roger repeated with a careless air. ‘No, I haven’t. I was thinking of going to call on her tomorrow afternoon. Now, about this question of totem-worship, Mrs Saunderson, has it ever struck you how very short-sighted the authorities are in not permitting the natives to—’
‘Oh, just excuse me one minute, Mr Sheringham! You will stay and have some tea, won’t you?’
‘May I really? I should simply love to, of course. But I’m afraid I’ve been boring you dreadfully for the last half-hour.’
‘Oh, not at all. I’m—I’m most interested in the poor natives of Southern Iberia. So—so quaint. If you wouldn’t mind just ringing the bell on the other side of the fireplace! Oh, thank you so much.’
‘Why did you ask if I’d met Mrs Allen?’ Roger remarked as he resumed his seat.
‘Oh, well, I just wondered, you see. Of course she doesn’t know nearly so much about this terrible affair as I do, you know.’
‘No?’
‘Oh, no. You see, after she found out that dreadful news about her husband, she hardly went there any more. She couldn’t bear to see Jacqueline again, naturally.’
‘That was just about twenty-four hours before Mr Bentley died, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, less. No, Mrs Allen wasn’t there at all when the nurse gave us the bottle of Bovril. It wasn’t till we’d had to shut Jacqueline in the spare room after Mr Bentley’s death that his brother sent for her to come and make another witness when we decided to make that search.’
‘I see,’ Roger said with a little smile. A point to Mrs Saunderson certainly.
There was a discreet knock at the door.
‘Come in!’ said the lady. ‘Oh, Mary, will you bring tea, please. And I’m not at home if anybody calls.’
They talked on indifferent subjects till the tea had been served. Then Roger reverted to a point which his companion’s last remark had raised in his mind.
‘Mrs Allen wasn’t in the house after dinner that evening at all, then?’ he asked. ‘The evening before Mr Bentley died, I mean.’
‘Oh, yes. I was forgetting. She did come in once for a few minutes, while the nurse was having her dinner downstairs. She came to see Mr Bentley.’
Roger pricked up his ears. ‘To see Mr Bentley, did she? Now I wonder why she did that.’
‘I think it must have been about something to do with Mrs Bentley and her husband, because she wanted to see him alone. Do have one of those little cakes, won’t you? They’re really quite nice. Yes, I was sitting with him at the time while the nurse was downstairs, and Mr Alfred Bentley brought her up and asked me to leave her alone with him.’
Roger took two of the little cakes in his excitement. ‘Would that have been about—about an hour before he was taken so ill that evening?’ he asked as calmly as he could.
Mrs Saunderson wrinkled her white forehead rather delightfully. ‘Yes, it would have been; just about. Let me see, the nurse must have come downstairs at eight o’clock or so, because I remember that Mr Alfred Bentley and I had just finished our dinner as the clock struck on the dining-room mantelpiece.’
‘And she asked you to take her place upstairs?’
‘Yes, you see, after what we’d found out that day, Mrs Bentley wasn’t allowed to be alone with him for a single minute.’
‘But Mrs Bentley was alone with him while the nurse was going downstairs?’
‘Oh, no; she wasn’t in the room then. Besides, Mr William Bentley was there. He came down when I went up.’
‘I see. And then Mr Alfred Bentley brought up Mrs Allen and you and he went down again?’
‘Yes. Oh, Mr Sheringham, even then I knew something was going to happen! Quite plainly. I’m supposed to be psychic, you know. It’s from my mother’s family; they’re Scotch. Quite often I feel something dreadful is going to happen, long before it does. It’s so terribly uncanny. You can’t understand, if you’re not psychic yourself, how—’
‘But I am!’ Roger told her with perfect gravity.
‘Oh—oh, are you?’ said the lady, somewhat dashed. ‘How—how interesting!’
‘Yes, isn’t it? But I don’t know that I’ve ever felt anything so strongly as this. You felt even then that something was going to happen, did you? That’s very notable indeed. But why do you say “even then”? Weren’t you all expecting anything to happen?’
‘Oh, no!’ cried Mrs Saunderson, much heartened. ‘That’s just the extraordinary thing. We weren’t expecting anything. Right up to nine o’clock that evening Mr Bentley seemed to be quite a lot better. We all thought he was going to recover. And then that last awful attack came on quite suddenly, and he never got over it.’
‘And that started at about nine o’clock?’
‘Just about nine, yes.’
‘Was Mrs Allen still with him?’
‘Oh, no; she’d gone ages ago. She was only with him about five minutes. She was crying dreadfully, poor thing, so I had to take her into the drawing-room and try to comfort her. So horrible for her; and being so much older than her husband and not nearly so pretty as Jacqueline and everything. Horrible!’
‘Horrible!’ Roger repeated mechanically. ‘But wasn’t Mrs Bentley alone with her husband then, while you were with Mrs Allen in the drawing-room?’
‘Oh, no. Mr Alfred Bentley had gone up to bring Mrs Allen down, and he stayed with him for a few minutes till the nurse came.’
‘The devil he did!’ observed Roger under his breath, totting up in his mind the number of people who might perfectly well have fed arsenic to the unfortunate man during that critical half-hour. ‘And what time did the nurse go up again?’
‘Oh, soon after half-past eight, as far as I know,’ returned Mrs Saunderson in a voice which was unmistakably verging on boredom. ‘Another cup of tea?’
‘Thank you. Then as far as you know, Mr Bentley wasn’t left alone for a single minute between eight o’clock and half-past?’
‘As far as I know. But he may have been, mayn’t he? So many people running in and out. Anybody might have left him for a minute or two, just like I did to run down to the library and get a book.’
Roger very nearly jumped in his seat. ‘You went down to the library to get a book?’ he repeated with commendable mildness. ‘How long did that take you?’
‘Really, I haven’t the least idea. Three or four minutes, I suppose. It couldn’t matter, leaving him just that little time!’
‘Oh, of course not. I was meaning—was Mrs Bentley with him then?’
‘No,’ said the lady petulantly. ‘I told you she wasn’t. She was having her dinner downstairs with the nurse, if you really want to know.’
Roger knew he was driving her hard, but he had to ask one more question. ‘And when you got back, Mr Bentley was still alone?’
‘No, he wasn’t! The servant, Mary Blower, was with him. As a matter of fact, she was giving him a drink of lemonade; though what that matters to anybody, goodness knows. You seem very interested in all these silly details, Mr Sheringham.’
‘They’re only incidental,’ Roger replied unctuously, hastily disguising himself as a sick cat again and reaching for his shovel. ‘What really interests me is the part you played in this appalling tragedy, and the magnificent way you played it!’ Two minutes later he was lighting the lady’s cigarette for her, while she lightly rested the tip of her little finger on his hand to keep it steady. And quite possibly Roger’s hand did need steadying just then; let us be fair.
Less than a quarter of an hour afterwards he rose, despite warm protests, to go. He knew perfectly well that no more information would be volunteered that afternoon, and he did not wish to force matters. But before departing he angled for and very promptly received an invitation to tea on the following afternoon; the two words ‘Mrs Allen,’ ensured that.
‘Personally,’ observed Mr Sheringham to himself, as he turned out of the drive gates into the road and wondered which ever way he had to go, to make his way back to the High Street. ‘Personally, I think there’s the very devil of a lot to be said for the modern girl. I shall write an article for a Sunday paper about it.’