THE end of the walk saw Roger restored to a somewhat more reasonable frame of mind. Severely as he was accustomed to castigate any claim on the part of others to an artistic temperament (holding as he did that this was even more of a palpable pose than to prate of writing for mere writing’s sake), he was certainly to some extent himself the possessor of this inconvenient accessory. His infrequent reactions from his usual mood of frivolous complacency were, when they did occur, violent and murky.
His disposition was naturally buoyant, however, and it was not long on this occasion before the vehemence with which he had blamed himself for the palpable state of Sheila’s feelings began to abate. His thoughtless pretence of a mock-flirtation had done nothing more after all than bring matters to a brief and fleeting climax; and though he was still distressed at the idea that the child might for the moment have imagined any hint of seriousness underlying his nonsense, his sense of proportion soon returned. Just as the flapper of the days before the war had vented her calf-love and her instinctive sense of hero-worship upon her favourite matinée idol, so must Sheila in nature have somebody to idolise in secret and spin dreams around in her small white bed at night. Roger was a trifle embarrassed that her choice should have fallen upon himself, for he liked Sheila and enjoyed the frank and easy camaraderie into which they had fallen so quickly. He made up his mind to treat her exactly as he had done for the last twenty-four hours and show not the faintest suspicion that everything might not be as it appeared on the surface.
Nevertheless, as Alec left him outside Mrs Saunderson’s gates it was with distinct reluctance that he made his way up to the front door and rang the bell. The difference between Mrs Saunderson and Sheila Purefoy was the difference between black lingerie in a scented boudoir and small brogue shoes on an open moor; and Roger never had cared much about black lingerie.
It was nearly half-past seven before he got back to the house in the High Street. He looked into the empty drawing-room, then ran up the stairs to Alec’s room, where he found that gentleman brushing his hair with a good deal of earnest attention in front of his dressing-table mirror.
‘Hallo, Alec; I’ve found out one thing,’ he began abruptly. ‘Don’t ask me how I did it, or I shall burst into tears; a detective’s life must be a singularly hard one. But I’ve brought something back with me for my trouble.’
‘You have? Good! What is it?’
Roger dropped into an armchair beside the dressing-table. ‘Bentley had been carrying on an intrigue with Mary Blower!’
Alec whistled. ‘Had he, by Jove! That looks nasty.’
‘For us, you mean? But Mrs Bentley didn’t know about it—or as far as the Saunderson’s information is, she didn’t.’
‘She didn’t, eh? Well, what do you make of that?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Roger confessed, lighting a cigarette. ‘These are the facts, as far as I can make them out. Bentley (who, though a rat, appears to have been somewhat of an amorous rat; this wasn’t his first affair by any means, according to the omniscient Saunderson)—Bentley had been playing about with the girl and then chucked her; Mrs Bentley had her suspicions, if nothing more, and gave her the sack; she demanded protection from Bentley, who told her quite plainly to go to the devil; in the correct way her love turned to loathing, but she didn’t go to the devil; instead, she took some pains to send Mrs Bentley there. And that’s the story. Mary Blower wept it all out on Mrs Saunderson’s shoulder after Mrs Bentley’s arrest. Nobody else knows a thing about it.’
‘Humph! This seems to complicate matters.’
‘It does; it throws discredit on all Mary Blower’s evidence, you see. She hates both the Bentleys like poison, so we can’t believe a word she tells us about them. And there’s another thing. Mrs Bentley knew that her husband had been unfaithful to her before she herself embarked on this Allen affair. She told Mrs Saunderson so. Isn’t it amazing—these women seem to have no decent reticence at all! They yap to their friends about the most intimate details of their married lives—things a man would sooner be burnt alive than tell to his very best lifelong pal. It does make me rather sick. Still, it has its uses for budding detectives, I must say.’
‘Now don’t go off the deep end about women again,’ Alec admonished. ‘Stick to the point. What does all this suggest to you? That Mary Blower poisoned Bentley herself?’
‘Not necessarily. But it does give her a motive for doing so, doesn’t it? Lord, this is getting difficult. Out of those six people on whom we’re keeping a suspicious eye, no less than four have the most excellent motives for wishing friend Bentley under the turf—to say nothing of Mrs Bentley herself.’
‘Four?’ said Alec in some surprise.
‘Why, surely. One, Mary Blower, for reasons mentioned; two, Brother William, to obtain full control of the business, out of which he considered himself to have been cheated by his father’s will, you remember—and also remembering that he didn’t know anything about Bentley’s own new will; Brother Alfred, in consequence of that new will; and Mrs Allen.’
‘Mrs Allen? How does she come into it?’
‘Well, surely that’s obvious. She’s hating nothing more in the world than Mrs Bentley. What more satisfying revenge could she have than by causing her rival to be hanged as a murderess? It would be superb.’
‘But dash it all, she couldn’t go to the length of poisoning Bentley to ensure it?’ Alec protested.
‘Wouldn’t she?’ said Roger thoughtfully. ‘I’m not too sure about that. A woman can be a pretty dreadful devil in circumstances like those, you know. And how do we know that she hadn’t got something against Bentley himself as well? Oh, yes, I think we can set her down as having a motive all right, and a strong one too. She goes down on our list of double suspects.’
‘Double suspects?’
‘Yes, opportunity and motive. There are six suspects under opportunity, and four of those crop up again under motive.’
Roger leaned back in his chair and expelled a cloud of smoke from his lungs. ‘What’s it going to turn out, Alec? Murder for gain, murder for revenge, murder for elimination, murder for jealousy, murder from lust of killing, or murder from conviction—according to a classification of motives in a most interesting book I read recently?fn1 It seems to me that murder from conviction is the only one we can definitely rule out: nobody is likely to have come to a reasoned conviction that, for the sake of humanity, Mr John Bentley had better be wiped out of existence, and then have proceeded so efficiently to act upon it. That leaves us with five possible motives to put a possible criminal to.’
‘I should think you might rule out murder from lust of killing too,’ Alec suggested.
‘Indeed and that’s just what we can’t do!’ Roger retorted with energy. ‘That’s a possibility that can never be ruled out; and the more difficult a case is, the more must just that possibility be borne in mind. Supposing the nurse had homicidal tendencies!’
‘Oh, come, I say! Be reasonable.’
‘Curse you, Alexander,’ Roger exclaimed, touched on the raw, ‘that’s precisely what I am being. You think a nurse could never suffer from homicidal tendencies or murder a patient? Then let me confound you with the case of one Catherine Wilson, who murdered no less than seven of her patients and attempted to murder several more and who was considered by the judge who tried her, as he stated privately afterwards, to be the greatest criminal that ever lived—his own words; with which, by the way, I don’t altogether agree.’
‘Humph!’ said Alec.
‘That was in 1862, and created no small stir at the time. I’m willing to grant you, if you wish to argue the point, that this wasn’t entirely murder for lust of killing, because she always induced her victims to leave money to her in their wills or made sure in other ways of becoming a gainer by their deaths; though in my opinion she was certainly a homicidal maniac as well. Still, we must classify her under murder for gain. However, consider further the case of a lady named Van de Layden, also a nurse, who between 1869 and 1885 poisoned no less than twenty-seven people and did her best to poison seventy-five others. Consider also one Marie Jeanneret who had similar impulses and became a professional nurse in order to gratify them, which she did with considerable success. Am I still being unreasonable in suggesting that it is possible for a professional nurse to be a homicidal maniac?’
‘No,’ said Alec.
‘I accept your apology,’ Roger said with considerable dignity. ‘Where were we when you disturbed the thread of my argument with your puking objections? Oh, yes. Well, murder for gain, Brother William or Brother Alfred; murder for revenge, though with complications, Mrs Allen or Mary Blower; murder for jealousy—well, I can’t quite see anybody to fit that except Allen, and as far as we know he had no opportunity; murder for elimination, Mrs Bentley; murder for lust of killing, anybody. That’s how the case stands at present.’
‘Then you’ve still got Mrs Bentley under suspicion?’
‘Oh, of course; it’s no good losing sight of her.’
‘Look here,’ Alec said slowly, ‘there’s another point about her that’s occurred to me and I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention it. The motive for murdering her husband, everybody says, is her affair with Allen, isn’t it? So that she could be free. Well, it seems to me that a woman like that—a jolly sort of woman, as she looks in her photograph—wouldn’t go to that extent to get her freedom; she’d just run away from him and have done with it.’
‘But this is pure psychology, Alec!’ cried Roger with warm admiration. ‘And is Alexander also among the psychologists? Yes; but the answer to that (and you can be very sure that the prosecution will rub it well in) is that if she did that she’d lose his money, and she wanted not only her freedom but her husband’s wealth as well.’
‘Oh!’ said Alec, somewhat dashed. ‘Yes, I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Still, for all that I think you’re perfectly right. If my estimate of the lady is right, she wouldn’t care a tinker’s cuss about the money; she’d just pack up and leave him. She was on the verge of it twice, wasn’t she? How most unfortunate for her that Brother William and Mrs Saunderson were able to restrain her, poor woman!’
‘Mrs Saunderson seems to have had a finger in every one of those pies,’ observed Alec, without malice.
‘Her type is ubiquitous,’ Roger agreed absently.
For a minute or two there was silence. Alec washed his hands, dried them, inspected his hair afresh and decided the parting would not do after all; he set about manufacturing another. Roger went on smoking with a thoughtful air.
‘Aren’t you going to get ready for dinner?’ asked Alec.
‘In a minute. Alec, I came across rather an illuminating sentence in a book I was reading the other day. It was this, or something like it; “Ordinary detective yarns bore me, because all they set out to do is to show who committed the crime; what I care about is why it was committed.” See? In other words, the real interest in a murder case in actual life, the interest that keeps pages of newspaper columns filled and causes perfectly respectable citizens to let their eggs and bacon grow cold while they read and re-read them, is not the crime puzzle of the carefully manufactured detective story, but the human element which led the, quite possibly, very ordinary crime to be committed at all. There very seldom is a crime puzzle in real life, you know; yet the classical dramas of the Central Criminal Court are more absorbingly interesting than any detective story ever written. Why? Because of their psychological values. Crippen, for instance. Not a shadow of doubt as to who murdered Belle Elmore, or whether Crippen was guilty or not. But tell me the detective story that can compete with the story of that case for sheer, breathless interest.’
‘This is a puzzle all right,’ quoth Alec.
‘Oh, yes; I’m not saying you never get a puzzle in real life. Take Steinie Morrison or Oscar Slater, for instance; or Seddon and Mrs Thompson, as I was quoting to you the other day in a different connection. All of those were puzzling enough, though personally I’ve quite made up my mind, after studying the trials of the last two, what the truth was in each case.’ He paused.
‘What was the truth, then?’ Alec asked dutifully.
‘That Seddon was guilty and Mrs Thompson innocent—innocent of the actual count on which she was tried, I mean. I’m quite sure that she and Bywaters had not arranged that encounter in advance, I’m quite sure that she didn’t know murder was being done until it had been done, and I’m almost sure that Bywaters did not go out that evening with the intention of murdering; he lost first his temper and then his head, drew his knife and saw red. However, we can’t go into that now; I could talk to you on that case till midnight. No, what I mean is—don’t let’s treat this case of ours just as a story-book crime puzzle; what we’ve got to do is to remember the human element, first, last, and all the time. It’s the human element that makes the crime possible, and it’s the human element which ought to lead us to the truth.’
‘There’s certainly no lack of the human element here,’ Alec observed.
‘There is not!’ Roger agreed, with something like enthusiasm. ‘Gay, jolly young wife and worrying, nagging, fussing middle-aged husband, getting on each other’s nerves no doubt and driving each other half-crazy; wife consoling herself with the bluff, hearty husband of her acidulated best friend, husband ditto with one of his own servants, a calculating, crafty wench, as I see her, knowing very well not only which side her bread is buttered but how to butter it as well—and then finding that the butter, after all, was only margarine. And then that dangerish, tigerish (catty is altogether too feeble a word), purring little hypocrite of another best friend, always about the place, always with her finger, as you said, well in the middle of each and every pie, turning to bitter, implacable enmity at the very first breath of suspicion and now holding in those little hands of hers the clue to every riddle and probably the solution of the whole puzzle. To say nothing of those two Bentleys, one hard as iron and utterly relentless, and the other pliable as india rubber but just as stubborn, and both standing to benefit incalculably by the death of a brother for whom neither of them much cared. Oh, there’s plenty of human interest here all right!’
‘Well, the public are eating it all right.’
‘Exactly. Because the circumstances are unusual as well, besides the characters of the people involved. The Bentleys are well-to do, for instance; and you very, very seldom get a murder among the well-to-do except in fiction. On the spur of the moment Constance Kent, the Ardlamont case and the various doctor-criminals are the only ones I can think of; the upper strata of society would appear to be either more civilised or more cunning. And lastly we’ve got here the pretty young wife and the husband far too old for her—the stock situation of every second penny-novelette ever published.’
‘But the sympathy isn’t with her. It’s all against her.’
‘Yes, and that’s very interesting. I don’t think it’s entirely because people think she’s guilty, you know, this tremendous feeling against Mrs Bentley; not entirely. It’s partly because she’s a foreigner, no doubt, but I think the root of it in the vast majority of cases is that curious streak of brutishness buried in the depths of practically everybody’s soul—the brutishness that nobody dares give expression to individually, but which comes out so strongly in the mass; the lust for cruelty, if you like, that prompts the incredible inhumanity of mobs and leads to lynchings and clubbing helpless people to death and ghastly outrages on women in a revolution. As far as Mrs Bentley’s concerned, the whole nation has formed itself into a mob. Mrs Bentley has been suggested to them as an object for execration, and without bothering to consider anything further the mob is clamouring that she be judicially lynched for them. The fact that she’s a woman, and a young and pretty woman at that, actually puts an edge on their delight in their own blood-lust. Lord, I’m expressing this extraordinarily badly, but you may see—Hallo, there’s the bell! I must hurry up. I’ve got to go out again after dinner.’
‘Out?’ Alec repeated in surprise.
‘Yes, curse it,’ Roger groaned. ‘Back to that wretched woman. She wanted me to stay to dinner there, but I got out of that. I must say I have hopes for this evening, high hopes; but it’s devilish hard work—and devilish ticklish work too. The least false step puts one back hours. Look here, take Sheila aside if you get the chance and see if you can wangle me a latch-key, Alec. I expect I’ll be pretty late. And try and wait up a bit for me if you can.’
Alec was successful in obtaining the latch-key, and Roger made the best apologies he could to his host and hostess for his unseemly absence. To his relief Sheila was almost normal at dinner; she greeted him cheerfully and without embarrassment, and only the almost vicious note which characterised her unmerciful twitting of him with regard to his alleged infatuation for the Saunderson gave any inkling at all that anything might be out of the ordinary with her. For once Roger was almost glad to escape from the moors to the peaceful seclusion of the boudoir.
His prophecy had been a sound one. It was past one o’clock before he staggered into the drawing-room where Alec, by the remains of a moribund fire, was waiting for him alone.
Roger struck an attitude by the door. ‘Alexander!’ he proclaimed softly. ‘I have succeeded! I have loosened the serpent’s tongue, and lo! all the wisdom of the serpent is now mine. Roger Sheringham, serpent charmer. But oh! how I’ve had to labour for it! For God’s sake give me a drink!’