Macdonald considered the document spread out before him for some time. Its dramatic quality was of small interest to him, though his first thought had been, “Is this a confession—or an accusation?” His main preoccupation was, “How did this paper get here?”
He found a book which was signed “Emma Pewsey,” with a few lines of verse beneath the signature, and another which had the name “Emma Anderby” in the same handwriting, and compared the scripts with the writing of the patient’s name on the chart. The handwritings were identical in Macdonald’s judgment, though the angular old-fashioned letters were common enough among women of Mrs. Anderby’s age. The block capitals of the word “Hyoscine” might, or might not, have been written by the same hand.
After some little consideration, Macdonald went out into the hall again and rang the bell once more. Miss Driver reappeared, her face composed again now, set in its usual hard lines, and he asked her to come into the sitting room.
“Will you tell me how this Bible came into your possession, please?” he asked, and she replied with her former hard abruptness,
“I took it from this room when I tidied up after Mrs. Anderby had gone away. I knew that Mr. Anderby had prized the book. He read it daily and I did not like to see it lying neglected.”
“Did you examine the paper inside the flap of the front cover?”
“No. I do not pry into other people’s papers. I simply took the book and put it with my own Bible upstairs.”
Despite her self-control, Macdonald could see that she was shaken: her breathing was uneven, her limbs rigid with the effort of keeping still. There was a moment of dead silence, and then he took a sheet of notepaper from the writing table and said:
“Would you kindly write two names on this—Emma Pewsey and Emma Anderby.”
“Why?” She shot out the word furiously, and he replied,
“In order to compare your handwriting with Mrs. Anderby’s and avoid confusion over a certain document I have found. There is a pen on the writing table.”
She got up and went and seated herself at the writing table. The pen shook in her hand as she wrote, and the writing on the sheet she handed to Macdonald was so shaky as to be almost illegible.
“Thank you,” he replied. “Perhaps you would let me have another specimen of your handwriting as well—written when you were feeling more like yourself.”
For answer, she unlocked a drawer below the writing desk and took out an account book.
“That is filled with my own handwriting,” she said.
“Thank you.” Macdonald glanced at a few neatly written sheets—the writing had nothing in common with Mrs. Anderby’s—and then he said, “I am investigating a very difficult problem, Miss Driver. I should be very glad of your help, if you would be willing to give it.”
She sat silent, her mouth tight shut, her eyes staring beyond him into the garden.
“I wish you would give me your opinion of Mrs. Anderby,” he went on. “You had her living in this house for some weeks, and you knew her previously in Oasthampstead. What opinion had you of her?”
“I don’t indulge in opinions,” she retorted. “I leave them to the gossips of the neighbourhood. I earn my living by keeping a boarding house. Mr. and Mrs. Anderby were good customers. They paid their bills. They were not unreasonable in their complaints. Naturally they grumbled occasionally. Everybody grumbles. I have no further opinion to give about either of them.”
“Yet your opinion of—or respect for—Mr. Anderby was strong enough to make you take his Bible to your own room because you did not like to see it neglected.”
“Certainly—I respected him. He was a very good man.”
“Well—that’s an admission of opinion, isn’t it?” said Macdonald, a half-smile on his face. “Would you say the same of Mrs. Anderby?”
“I know very little about her. She was a good nurse, according to the doctors she worked for. She was generous to charities. She was tidy and methodical in the house.”
“Those are statements, not opinions,” he said. “When you found that she did not return here what did you think?”
“I hoped she would not come back.”
The terse sentence had a concentrated venom behind it, but Macdonald went on placidly: “You have already made a statement that you know nothing relevant to Mrs. Anderby’s disappearance, so we need not go into that, but I should like to know this: since you hoped that she would not come back, to what did you attribute her absence—accident or design?”
“To neither. She had gone—that was all which concerned me. For the rest, I am only too anxious to be rid of all this bother. You police—you don’t care anything about the trouble you cause. I have worked hard to make this place pay. It’s my living. My clients don’t leave me legacies when they go away—because they don’t like living in a house infested with police.”
Macdonald could have laughed had her voice been less bitter. The idea of “infesting” a place amused him, but there was nothing amusing about the harsh bitterness of the woman who faced him. Her vindictiveness was tragic—he realized that. Here was no trivial resentment but a burning hatred which nearly consumed her. He went on,
“I am very sorry that you are suffering on account of this inquiry—but it has to go on. I must ask you if you are the person who takes in letters and parcels from the postman in the mornings?”
“Yes. As a general rule. The letters go in the box, of which I keep the key. I am generally about before breakfast, and I answer the postman’s knock—if he does knock.”
“So it was you who took in a parcel for Mrs. Anderby on the last morning she was here?”
“Yes. There was a parcel for her.”
“Do you remember the writing in which it was addressed?”
“No. I have no recollection of it.”
“Not even if it was written in ordinary handwriting or addressed in block capitals?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Was the parcel tied up in brown paper or other coloured paper?”
“I don’t remember. I have looked in the kitchen—there is no paper with Mrs. Anderby’s name on it.”
“Did Mrs. Anderby have breakfast in her own room that morning?”
“No. I charge extra for meals served in bedrooms.”
Macdonald was almost amazed at the vindictiveness which underlay that simple statement. Miss Driver continued: “Breakfast is served from eight till nine. There is an extra charge for meals served later than the scheduled times. Mrs. Anderby appeared for her breakfast at five minutes to nine.”
“Were her letters and parcel sent into her room?”
“No. They were put on her table in the dining room.”
“If she left paper and string on the table, what would have been done with them?”
“They would have been burnt in the kitchen stove. I have told you—I do not believe in hoarding. You can see the kitchen. I do the cooking myself—and I am a tidy person.”
“I can tell that. This house is admirably tidy,” returned Macdonald. “Once again, I am sorry to bother you, but I must ask to see any of your residents who might have noticed Mrs. Anderby’s parcel while it was on her table in the dining room.” He allowed himself a smile at that. “People are inquisitive all the world over,” he said. “It will be odd if nobody remembers that parcel.”
She darted him a quick look.
“You can see who you like. You know that. The police always do what they like—irrespective of trouble caused to other people.”
“I am sorry that you should think so badly of us,” rejoined Macdonald. “Inspector Lynch struck me as a very considerate man. Had he been less considerate, the results might have been better. Meantime, will you tell me what visitors are in the house at the present moment?”
“Miss Austin and Mrs. Grace. Both old women. Both given to imagining things. Do you want to see them here?”
“No. In the dining room, please.”
Miss Driver got up and walked out of the room without further comment. Macdonald followed her, locking the door of the room as they left. He followed Miss Driver across the hall and into a white-walled dining room. It had blue curtains, a blue carpet, and blue and white mats on the little dark oak tables. Big earthenware pots of Barnstaple pottery stood on the mantel and the wide windowsills, filled with delphiniums and Canterbury bells, and there were bowls of Mrs. Sinkins Pinks on each table, so that the room was fragrant with their scent. An unusually nice dining room, thought Macdonald, and unusually well kept.
Miss Driver waited until he was inside the room: then, saying abruptly, “I will send them to you,” she left him.
Macdonald strolled to the window and stood with his back to it surveying the room. One table, at the farther end, had no flowers upon it. Was that Mrs. Anderby’s table, he wondered?
A moment later a small white-haired lady entered the room: she looked so frightened that Macdonald said promptly, “Please don’t be frightened! I’ve got nothing alarming or distressing to ask you. Just very ordinary little questions about very ordinary things.”
She looked up at him and smiled back. “Oh, thank you! I’m afraid I’m very silly, but I’ve never had to answer police questions before, and I’m so afraid I shall get muddled up and answer all wrong, and get sent to prison for perjury. You see, I’ve such a dreadfully bad memory, and I know I do contradict myself, so you’ll make allowances, won’t you?”
Her words came tumbling out breathlessly, and Macdonald pulled forward a chair and moved it towards her. “Now don’t get worried and don’t bother about perjury. It’s a point which doesn’t arise here because you’re not on oath. I only want you to try to help me about a very small point. You remember Saturday morning—the day after Mr. Anderby’s funeral?”
“To be sure. I shall always remember that.” The little old face puckered and Macdonald was afraid that she was going to cry, and he hurried on:
“Will you tell me what time you have breakfast?”
“Breakfast?” she repeated wonderingly. “I come down at half-past eight. The dining room is nice and quiet then. All the energetic young people with work to do have their breakfasts at eight and are out of the house at half-past. My table is there in the window. So nice and sunny—and I can see the birds on the lawn.”
“Very nice—I think this is a delightful dining room,” said Macdonald, and she beamed at him.
“Is it not? Miss Driver is such a wonderful manager!—and such good taste!”
“Excellent,” agreed Macdonald. “Now about Saturday morning: do you remember coming into the dining room? Was anyone else there when you came in?”
“No . . . no. I remember quite well—Miss Austin had just finished her breakfast. I met her in the hall. The younger people had gone and poor Mrs. Anderby was not down. I said to myself, ‘She will have breakfast in bed; perhaps I might take up her letters.’ There were a lot of letters. So trying! People are very kind over a bereavement, but answering all those letters is so very wearing . . . and then I said to myself that I must not be intrusive and interfering, and I decided not to do anything.”
From Macdonald’s point of view the conversation had taken an excellent turn, and he replied: “It was very kind of you to think of taking up the letters. Now I wonder if you can remember whether there was a parcel for Mrs. Anderby that day?”
“Indeed I can! A box of roses, such beautiful flowers, as fresh as though they had just been cut! I saw her unpack them. Poor thing! She cried a little as she read the note which came with them. Not that I was staring, but from where I sit, just here, I face Mrs. Anderby’s table, and as it happened I had finished my own breakfast and I just caught sight of her face.”
“Can you tell me anything about the look of the parcel? What sort of paper it was wrapped up in, for instance?”
“Oh, yes. I did notice. It was a long box, very neatly packed, wrapped in green wrapping paper like Selfridges use, and the address was very neat, on a white label, typed.” She looked a little confused and became rather pink in the face. “I hope you won’t think I’m inquisitive. I would not dream of prying, but I just happened to notice. An old woman does notice things—quite little things like that. When I saw the parcel, I know I thought ‘Selfridges,’ and wondered if it was some of the veils Mrs. Anderby had been trying to get down here quite unsuccessfully, and then of course I saw that the label was not Selfridges. It said ‘Flowers, with care,’ but no name of any firm.”
“I’m so glad that you remembered all that. It’s most helpful to me,” said Macdonald. “You have told me about it so clearly. Now I have not asked your name. You are Mrs. Grace, are you not?”
She nodded like a bird, and Macdonald went on,
“I wonder if you can remember what happened to the wrapping paper when Mrs. Anderby had unpacked the box of flowers. Did she leave it on the table or on the floor?”
“Oh, no, indeed not. Mrs. Anderby was a very tidy person. She never left things about like I do. I am always leaving things about, and then forgetting where I left them—my glasses and knitting and newspaper; it is so stupid and so very tiresome. I remember Mrs. Anderby folded up the wrapping paper and tied the string round it, and she took the box and tissue paper and wrapping paper with her when she went back to her room. I know because I came back to look,” she continued naïvely. “It was a nice useful box, like a strong cardboard shoe box, and I thought of asking if I might have it if she did not want it—but I saw her in the hall, carrying the box away, and of course I did not like to ask for it. That was the last time I saw her. Poor Mrs. Anderby! I fear she must have lost her memory. People do lose their memories, do they not, if they suffer from a severe shock? Miss Austin says she has ‘passed over’—she means died—but I have no belief in spiritualism, and I think it very unwise to seek to penetrate such mysteries—unwise and dangerous.”
Macdonald smiled at her as he got up: she was a very nice old lady, he thought, and he said,
“Thank you so much for all the help you have given me. I am very grateful. I hope that I haven’t worried you with all my questions.”
“Indeed, no! You have been so kind and considerate. I can hardly believe that you are really a policeman.”
After Mrs. Grace had twittered her way out of the room, Macdonald waited for Miss Austin to come to be interviewed. When she came in, smiling and unperturbed as ever, he wondered if such a candid, happy face could conceal a tortuous and evil mind. Miss Austin spoke to him as soon as she had closed the door.
“You need not exercise your mind as to whether I am a deceitful and untruthful old woman, Mr. Macdonald. I know you must be considering that possibility.”
He met her smiling eyes, thinking that she was, at any rate, a very good thought reader. Macdonald was skeptical about spiritualism and the results produced by spiritualist seances, but he was Scotsman enough to be aware that certain people had an extra “awareness,” a telepathic sense perhaps, which he could not explain rationally, but which he could not entirely disregard. He replied:
“In my job, Miss Austin, I have to consider as suspect all statements whose truth I cannot prove. You have made two statements—the first being that Mrs. Anderby has passed over—or died, to use the usual expression, the second that she conveyed a message to you concerning her husband’s Bible.”
“Yes—and both are quite true.”
“I don’t want to discuss the first, but I think the second needs a little clearing up,” he went on. “Now you knew that Mr. Anderby possessed this presentation Bible, and that he had it with him here because he had shown it to you.”
“Quite right,” she replied.
“I think you also knew that it had been removed from the Anderbys’ room,” he went on, “and you knew that, not through the medium of a spirit message alone, but on account of your own observation.”
“That is right in part,” she said, her voice quite tranquil. “After Mrs. Anderby went out on Saturday, I was walking in the garden by the rose pergola, where I saw you a short while ago. I saw the Bible then, lying on the bedside table. The sun was shining into the room, right across the table, and it gleamed on the red binding. Later in the day, in the evening when we were all worried about Mrs. Anderby, I saw Miss Driver come out of the room with something under her arm, wrapped in paper. I went into the garden again—it was still quite light—and the Bible was no longer on the table. That same night I knew that Mrs. Anderby had passed on. Her spirit spoke to me. She came again to me last night and gave me the message about the Bible. I understood at once. I had been thinking of her.”
She spoke very simply, with an apparent sincerity which Macdonald found it hard to disbelieve. He was sure of one thing—that Miss Austin believed Mrs. Anderby to be dead. Her whole statement was a simple enough thought sequence, deprived of its esoteric dressing. Mrs. Anderby had disappeared, therefore some accident had befallen her. The incident about the Bible was a synthesis of Miss Austin’s knowledge of Miss Driver, and of her observation of the latter’s actions—easily enough translated into a “dream message.”
“Did you know Mrs. Anderby before she came here?” he inquired, but Miss Austin shook her head.
“Only very slightly. I have only lived in Penharden a few months. I used to live with my sister in Welwyn. I was very happy here until Mr. and Mrs. Anderby came. I liked him—we all did. He was a kind and gentle man. She was hard. She disliked Miss Driver—we all felt it—and there was friction in the house.”
“Miss Austin, have you any idea who sent those roses to Mrs. Anderby?”
She shook her head.
“No. I have no idea. I don’t want to know. I fear they were sent with evil intent.”
Before he left the house, Macdonald asked a lot more questions and, when he left, he felt that more constructions than one could be placed on the action of some of its inhabitants. Mrs. Anderby, for instance, had asked for her bedroom to be changed again, probably knowing that the only alternative bed was the divan in Miss Driver’s room on the ground floor. Miss Driver had taken Mr. Anderby’s Bible from his room: it was conceivable that she had placed the temperature chart in it for Macdonald to find—but she had certainly not gone out on the morning of Mrs. Anderby’s disappearance. Miss Austin had directed Macdonald to inquire about the Bible and had told him about the arrival of the bunch of roses: her suggestion that Mrs. Anderby had taken these roses to the cemetery to place on her husband’s grave was a sound one, in Macdonald’s opinion, but her insistence on “spirit” messages he viewed with mistrust, even though he had met perfectly rational people with the same belief.
Before he left he packed up certain things, including the Bible and the chart, and a few of Mrs. Anderby’s papers and magazines, and locked them in his car. He had discovered that Mrs. Anderby had a banking account, but her cheque book and note case and purse were presumably taken in her handbag. Inquiries had already been set on foot to discover if Mrs. Anderby had changed any cheques since her disappearance, but no reports had come in.
When he left The Rowan Tree (watched furtively by Mrs. Grace from behind a window, openly by Miss Austin from the lawn), Macdonald drove his car a short distance to a convenient parking place and then left the car and walked back to the boarding house, to the lane at the end of the garden. He wanted to walk to the cemetery and observe the road he traversed. His way took him along a footpath, turning between hedges, and a little later he turned down a sloping lane which led under a railway arch to the common on the farther side of the railway line. The lane was very quiet, running between rather tall hedges, which kept secluded the gardens of prosperous house owners. The lane did not lead to the town, but to the common, and hence by a footpath over the golf course, to the cemetery. Macdonald strolled up and down the lane for about a quarter of an hour, smoking his pipe and considering the hedges and garden gates. Nobody came by all the time he lingered, and he was justified in concluding that there was but little traffic that way. He continued his walk all the way to the cemetery, but the remainder of it, once past the railway arch, ran either by small houses close to the road or else over the open common, the path being used by a considerable number of people and in view of golfers. At one point users of the footpath had to cross the main London road: here Green Line and local buses ran frequently, and it was possible to reach Bedford, Luton, Welwyn, Watford and other busy centres of population very easily. In the event of Mrs. Anderby having “done a bolt”—to use Lynch’s expression—she would probably have avoided the direct bus routes to London (by which she could the more easily be traced, since the time of her departure was known and the buses ran at half-hourly intervals) and have taken one of the more frequent local services. Penharden, though a small town, had a network of communications with other places, and was very easy to get away from unobtrusively.
Retracing his steps, Macdonald made his way to the back of The Rowan Tree and walked along the lane to which Miss Driver’s sitting room gave such easy access, and walked to Brook’s clinic, which lay nearer to the Oasthampstead road. It took him fifteen minutes to walk, his way lying along quiet little roads. He guessed from the nature of the small houses that their owners or tenants were mainly workingfolk—probably toilers who travelled daily to London—and who probably went to bed early. Police patrols were few and far between in Penharden—the town was remarkably free from crime—and anyone could have counted on walking unnoticed from The Rowan Tree to the clinic at midnight.
Macdonald, who was always willing to use his imagination, pictured Mrs. Anderby thus walking, in her mind the description of Major Grendon’s room, given by his garrulous self, determined to carry out her grim purpose. If she had done the things attributed to her, this final effort would not be out of keeping.
Macdonald emerged at last from the narrow Thorn Tree Way and turned into the wide country road where the clinic was situated. Houses here were at ever-decreasing intervals as he approached the open country.
Brook’s grounds were surrounded by a tall hedge of macrocarpa, the garden well screened from the road. Macdonald went straight in at the wooden gate and, seeing no one about, he turned at the angle of the house to see the French window of the room where Major Grendon had slept. A man in a linen coat was digging in the garden, and he straightened himself up and stared at Macdonald with inimical dark eyes.
“Do you want the front door?” he inquired.
“Not particularly,” responded Macdonald dryly. “I want to see Mr. Brook—I gather that I am speaking to him?”
“You are.”
“Could you spare me half an hour’s talk?” He proffered a card, and as Brook studied it the Chief Inspector asked,
“Have you taken a dislike to those rose trees—or do you believe in moving them at this time of year?”
“I believe in doing what I like with what is my own,” replied Brook, as he led the way to the house.