“It’s not what I’d call a tidy case myself, Chief.”
It was Inspector Jenkins speaking. He was Macdonald’s favourite colleague at the Yard and had worked with him on many cases: the two men, perhaps because they were a foil to one another, made a very strong combination in the detecting line. Jenkins was a typical member of London’s middle classes: he might have passed as a tradesman—a prosperous grocer or licensed victualler, a hotel keeper, or a wholesaler in men’s clothing—something cheerful, bonhomous and sociable. Although he had a very able brain, an excellent memory, and a natural shrewdness which was invaluable in his job, Jenkins contented himself with what he called “low-brow” jobs. He knew exactly what were his own limitations—and intellectual conversations he put outside his own capacity. Not that Jenkins was averse from talking: he was an excellent gossip and a good raconteur, a great success in the saloon bar, and he had a capacity for getting himself liked and trusted by the most diverse people because he had a sympathetic way with him and was honestly, enormously interested in human nature. “He was a real treat to talk to,” he had said of more than one notorious criminal. “If only he’d had the sense to keep on the rails there’s no end to what he mightn’t have done.”
Jenkins was getting stout now and distinctly bald—he was well over fifty, but he moved lightly and easily, with a swiftness surprising in a man of his weight, and his muscular powers had never been greater, though he said sadly that his wind wasn’t what it was when he did his morning exercises. Jenkins was a married man, with a wife as plump and sensible as himself, and a son who had just achieved a degree in engineering at Glasgow University. Jenkins was always telling Macdonald to get married before he got “too set in his ways”—advice to which Macdonald responded with a cheerful grin and the retort that it takes all sorts to make a world, and he didn’t want the additional worry of what would happen to his widow when he was out on some wild-cat job when anything might happen.
“Not what I’d call a tidy case in my own mind, Chief—though you’ve got enough to satisfy any jury,” said Jenkins. “A jury wouldn’t hesitate, I’d lay my money on that—and I’ve had a bit of experience with juries,” he added with his deep, whole-hearted chuckle.
“Damn the jury!” responded Macdonald cheerfully, scraping away carefully at an old and much-prized briar. (His addiction to a pipe had led Jenkins to nickname the Chief Inspector “Stanley B.”—an appellation which Macdonald, as a lifelong Liberal with left-ish tendencies, duly resented.) “Twelve fools are twelve times as foolish as one fool,” went on the Chief Inspector thoughtfully, and Jenkins pulled his large ear.
“Are they? What about twelve wise men?” he inquired, and Macdonald retorted,
“No one alive has ever seen twelve wise men in agreement—because you never get twelve in company. Twelve fools are a commonplace. Twelve wise men would be a phenomenon.”
Jenkins chuckled again. “Well, whether any jury’d ever agree that you and I are wise men, I’m not so sure—but putting our heads together, what do we make of it? This Mrs. Anderby—there’d been a lot of talk about her. I don’t reckon the gossip was what you’d call manufactured: that’s to say, it wasn’t worked up by a single person, going round being malicious. It was fairly general. I know. I’ve been in every saloon bar in Oasthampstead, and for a small town it’s got a very pretty variety of pubs. I’ve been to a bun fight with the congregationalists and to a church social. I’ve palled up with the district nurse and got matey with most of the chemists. I’ve even had my missis down for the week-end and got her to go to a mothers’ meeting and the Pre-Natal Welfare Clinic, where I couldn’t very well go myself.”
Macdonald’s gravity broke at last but he only signified it by asking, “Why not? I’d say you’d got a splendid bedside manner—however, all a man could do, you’ve done.”
“Yes,” replied Jenkins. “What’s that bit out of Shakespeare? ‘I dare do all that may become a man. Who dares do more, is none’.”
“Admitted,” said Macdonald. “Assuming that attendance at the clinic would have been unbecoming in you, what did your missis report?”
“There you are,” said Jenkins. “Now you see the point of being married. My missis says the gossip’s all right. Every old cat in the town with a tongue to wag wagged it good and hard after old Chenner’s will was read. Alice passed the gossip as the real thing. It beats me why it didn’t get to the constabulary at the time. That chap Lynch is a widower, that’s the trouble. Never gets the spicy bits. Now about this story that there was a police inquiry—which there wasn’t. Some bloke went round pumping Chenner’s old servant before he died—not afterwards. Funny thing that—unless it was the old chap who wanted to dispute the will afterwards. I can’t get any description of him, except that he had black hair and was quite the gentleman.”
“That’s an odd business,” mused Macdonald, and Jenkins went on in his cheerful way,
“There’s a lot that’s odd. The person who scotched the gossip was old Anderby himself. Funny, when you think it out. The reverend told his mothers’ meeting he’d advise Nurse Pewsey to bring an action. That pulled them up. They didn’t fancy lawsuits. The gossip died down—until Mr. Anderby died and then, by heck, it started again. I reckon Mrs. Anderby got a few anonymous letters—a few more than that one you found under Oasthampstead weir. Enough to give her the jitters. Well, there you are. They’ve dug up poor old Chenner and found it was hyoscine sent him off. Hyoscine . . . That’s the stuff they use in some of this twilight sleep business, isn’t it? Just the ticket for a maternity nurse. Yes. She must have lost a few night’s sleep while Oasthampstead was yapping its head off about her.”
Macdonald was sitting frowning over his pipe, and Jenkins went on in his best official manner,
“Now how do we stand? Here was Mrs. Anderby who’d been talked about a tidy lot, one of whose profitable patients died of hyoscine poisoning—though no one knew that until you made the H.O. dig the poor old chap up—and her husband just died of a heart attack. Did he, Chief?”
“Yes. He did, confound you,” said Macdonald. “If you think old Parston’s likely to make a mistake in one of his fulldress P.M.s, you out-Thomas me, and that’s saying a lot. I know all the jibes about liars and damned liars and scientific experts, but I still believe in Parston. If he says Anderby died of heart failure, then he did die of it. It’s true he’d been dosed with a new heart stimulant called cardiasol, but he did not die of cardiasol. He died of heart failure.”
Again Jenkins chuckled. “Funny world, isn’t it?” he said. “The reverend died of heart failure—and all this stink and that nosey chap Grendon being bumped off—all unnecessary. Just heart failure! Where were we? Mrs. Anderby gets anonymous letters: Major Grendon goes and sees her. Like his nerve, and she a newly bereaved widow too—and then Grendon dies, so he can’t up and say his bit, whatever it was, and then Mrs. Anderby throws her hand in.”
“Yes. After all that—she throws her hand in,” burst out Macdonald indignantly. “That’s what I can’t swallow. Why did she—if she did . . .”
Jenkins groaned. “Oh, my hat!” he exclaimed. “You don’t mean to say you still believe that deceased isn’t Mrs. Anderby? What about the missing molars and the stopped canines, and the way her shoes fit and her clothes fit? Honestly, Chief, I think you’re being obstinate. Admitted, we haven’t got absolutely conclusive evidence, but we’ve got almost overpowering probability.”
“All right. We’ve got Mrs. Anderby drowned in the Avon, and Mrs. Anderby’s attaché case with threatening anonymous letters in it from under Oasthampstead weir, and Dr. Chenner with hyoscine in his remains, and Mr. Anderby with traces of cardiasol in his remains—where are we?”
“Suicide, Chief. She’d murdered three men and she’d got an anonymous letter telling her more or less that a statement was being laid before the police which would cause them to exhume her last two victims. Ask any jury. They’d tell you pretty soon—especially with that letter you found in her bag.”
“Letter, my eye!” said Macdonald. “That was the sort of letter any bereaved person might write—with apologies to bereaved persons. If I were on your jury, I should still argue. What did she go and set fire to that repository for if she was going to commit suicide and leave a confession in her husband’s Bible? Doesn’t make sense. The only point in burning up Mrs. Anderby’s possessions was to make it more difficult to identify Mrs. Anderby and to trace her old friends who might have known something about her. If Mrs. Anderby is alive, I can see the sense of a lot of things which have been happening. If she committed suicide, I can’t. You see, she’d got away with it to all intents and purposes. Grendon was the menace: Grendon knew something—and Grendon’s dead. What were the chances of a verdict against Mrs. Anderby in the matter of Grendon’s death? Absolutely nil because we had no concrete evidence to prove that Mrs. Anderby ever went near Brook’s house that night. As you and I know, it’s not enough to prove that she had the opportunity to go there: it’s essential to prove that she did go there, and the proof doesn’t exist. And, in spite of all that, you want me to believe that she walked out of the boarding house at ten-thirty on Saturday morning, went about ten miles cross-country to a very little known backwater, and chucked herself in under an overhanging tree. It’s a most eccentric way of behaving, to my mind.”
Jenkins nodded. “Yes. As I said to start with, it’s not a tidy case. You’ve got some damned odd exhibits too. That temperature chart.”
“Yes. That temperature chart,” agreed Macdonald thoughtfully. “We have found the firm who supplied it—Bardon & Welling’s. They supplied all Nurse Pewsey’s professional stuff. That chart was one of a lot sold two years ago—there was a flaw in the printing and they can place it. No one could have obtained a similar one today. Our chart is one similar to charts sold to Nurse Pewsey when she was nursing Dr. Chenner. The handwriting on it is hers, so far as the experts can say. The temperature markings are consistent with those in a pneumonia case. In fact, the overpowering probability is that the sheet is just what it pretends to be—the chart filled in by Nurse Pewsey when she was nursing Dr. Chenner. Owing to the passing of time, and general smearing, it is impossible to get a clear set of fingerprints from it. Well—taking the thing at its probability value, can you produce any reason why Nurse Pewsey should have kept that sheet for two years, written ‘Hyoscine’ on it, and then have left it for us to find in her husband’s Bible?”
“Search me,” said Jenkins ruefully, and then brightened up a bit, adding, “but you’ve got to admit that murderers do some of the most unreasonable things: inconsistent things. That’s how we catch them. Human nature’s got a lot to say in the matter—and human nature works queer tricks, especially among folk who’re given to religion.”
Macdonald’s eyebrows went up: “Come, come! I’m surprised to hear you say that, Jenkins, and you a churchwarden.”
“I know what I’m talking about, you see,” said Jenkins. “I’ve known more than one criminal who’d ‘got religion,’ as they say, and thought God was guiding them in what they did. Seems to me, Mrs. Anderby may have been one of that sort: imagined her course of action was suggested to her by ‘divine guidance’—and she kept that temperature chart as a reminder of the day revelation broke on her and she saw her way clear. Nothing impossible in that, as we both know. You can’t judge a murderer by the same standard you judge other people—not one of these calculating murderers, anyway. Their minds have taken a wrong turning.”
There was silence between the two men—they were talking in the Chief Inspector’s room in New Scotland Yard, and Macdonald gazed out over London’s river at full tide, a view he never tired of. Perhaps he had had a greater affection for it than ever since the night he had plunged into the river from St. Thomas’s Embankment and been very nearly drowned. He felt that in measuring his strength against Thames, he had got on to special terms with it.
“What does the A.C. say?” put in Jenkins. “Is he satisfied with the obvious explanation?”
“Of course he is. Delighted. Reckons we’ve got a true bill and the case is settled. Talked a lot about ‘the incidence of probability,’ and said there was hardly a chance in a thousand that the body in the river wasn’t Mrs. Anderby’s, in spite of the way the fishes and voles had done their best to destroy the evidence.”
“Nasty carnivorous things, fishes,” said Jenkins. “I was saying so to my missis—and she told me to shut up. Quite upset her. Of course the A.C.’s right in his assessment of the probables as far as Mrs. A. is concerned. The wish is father to the thought in one way. He wants you to get busy on that job with the ‘Special’ branch and leave this Penharden business as settled. As I told you, any jury would lap it up if the facts were put straight before them. First, the gossip about Nurse Pewsey, and the list of her patients who had died and left her legacies. Second, the results of the P.M. on old Chenner after exhumation. Third, Anderby’s death of heart failure—probably hastened by nicely calculated doses of cardiasol to bring on palpitations. Fourth, Grendon’s nosey-Parker conduct and his death. Finally—anonymous letters and Mrs. Anderby dropping her bundle—and choosing the river. Nice and straightforward.”
“Very nice,” agreed Macdonald. “Now for a few discrepancies. Who sent those ‘spirit’ messages—and why?”
“The old girl at The Rowan Tree,” replied Jenkins promptly. “She’s bats, anyway. She may know a bit more than she’d any business to know—but no jury’d convict her of anything more than noseyness. She probably knows quite a lot she hasn’t told you. If you went the right way to work she’d probably admit that she did see Mrs. Anderby going out at midnight when Grendon was popped off. As for the attaché case under Oasthampstead weir, it’s quite likely Miss Austin put it there herself—especially if she’d been writing anonymous letters to Mrs. Anderby. She couldn’t get the case open because she hadn’t the keys, and it was a good, strong case. She put it in the river instead and then went a bit exhibitionist and sent those ‘spirit’ messages. What’s the matter with that?”
“Really, Jenkins, for a man with a really philanthropic temperament, you have got the very lowest estimate of human nature of any man I know. Youth and innocence or old age and innocence, they’re all the same to you—matter for a study in the pathological.”
“Maybe. I’ve seen too many rum happenings in our calling to take anybody at their face value,” said Jenkins. “You can’t deny we’ve struck a rum lot of people just in this little town of Penharden. Your Miss Driver, now—if she hadn’t been making jam in the kitchen that morning, I’d have been suspicious of her. Very suspicious indeed. Miss Austin strikes me as more than a bit fishy, and that man Brook is a fair study. Beats me how any man has the courage to go to him for treatment.”
“You might suggest to the jury that Brook had a doctor-complex, and made it his mission in life to bump-off as many orthodox practitioners as possible. He’d got away with two—and then realized that when Grendon and the Anderbys got into the habit of calling on Lee Gordon some evidence popped up which wasn’t to Brook’s liking—so exit a trio.”
“Yes. I’m not denying you could work up something on those lines—but it isn’t as sound as the line we’ve worked out,” said Jenkins. “Anyway, what’s the final decision? You’ve had one adjournment of the Anderby inquest. You can’t hold the thing up indefinitely unless fresh evidence comes in.”
“I’ve got a week,” said Macdonald. “If I don’t get my facts before then I’m stymied. We can’t hold witnesses up indefinitely for one thing, and Max Brook is going back to the States. He’s had a very good job offered to him in the College of Osteopathy where he graduated, and I can’t keep him hanging about indefinitely. Lee Gordon has had a cable from his firm in the East Indies. He wants to get a move on—and Falkland’s been invited to go as consultant to some chap in Virginia who’s launching an important building scheme. Again, I’m not justified in holding him up.”
“By heck! All three of them! That’s funny,” cogitated Jenkins, and Macdonald nodded.
“Very funny—but in each case the reason for going abroad is open and aboveboard.”
“Still—I call it damned funny,” said Jenkins, and Macdonald nodded.
“Damned inconvenient, from one point of view. In Brook’s case, it’s natural enough. He felt his business was ruined by Grendon’s death—and he’s not far wrong. He won’t be getting any patients in that house in a hurry. Falkland says frankly that he’s so fed-up with this Anderby business that he’s only too glad to accept a chance to get out of the country for a bit and have a complete change of thought. Lee Gordon is an inveterate globe-trotter. He’s always travelling around somewhere. He came over here to see young Trant settled in, and now he’s anxious to get back to his own business. His anxiety on that account is accentuated by the fact that he believes that he heard Mrs. Anderby’s voice talking to him over the telephone, and he doesn’t like the idea. I can’t make out if he believes that it was a spirit message which he heard, or that he believes Mrs. Anderby is still alive and will have a shot at him next.”
Jenkins studied Macdonald’s face. “Do you really believe that she’s still alive, Chief—and that she shoved someone else into the river, dressed in her own clothes?”
“I can only say that the hypothesis is not impossible,” rejoined Macdonald. “It’s no use saying that we have got the body identified beyond doubt because we haven’t. One of the curious things about this case is the difficulty of getting hold of anybody who knew Mrs. Anderby intimately. For the last few years previous to her marriage she had been living by herself, a lonely sort of life apparently, because she was generally disliked. A surprising number of people seem to have disliked her and she had no intimate friends. Her acquaintances say that it was her loneliness which appealed to Mr. Anderby. He was sorry for her and his sympathy eventually led him into matrimony.”
“That’s another point in favour of the suicide theory,” said Jenkins, but Macdonald retorted,
“There, I don’t agree with you. On the assumption that Mrs. Anderby is responsible for three murders for her own profit, it’s foolish to argue that fear of loneliness led her to suicide. Fear of the hangman may have done so—but fear of the hangman has led murderers to fresh excesses to avoid the result of past ones. In which connection I might point out that the only intimate friend Nurse Pewsey ever had, so far as we can make out, cannot be found. She was a woman named Anne Salcombe—a nurse, of Mrs. Anderby’s own age, and resembling her in build and general appearance. Anne Salcombe once lived in London, but we have failed to trace her since she left her lodgings in Hampstead a year ago.”
Jenkins was silent, his rubicund face creased in frowns.
“It’s a possibility,” he said slowly, “a very nasty possibility. You’ll have to get that inquest adjourned again—but if you’ll ever prove anything, I very much doubt.”
“I don’t,” said Macdonald with, “but it may take a long time to do it. If Mrs. Anderby is alive, we’ll get her somehow.”
“Look here: on the assumption that she’s alive, why did she send those ‘spirit’ messages?—and if she sent them, why didn’t she put the right place into her message? Why mention Oasthampstead weir at all?”
“You can get a variety of explanations along those lines,” replied Macdonald. “The right place wasn’t mentioned because it wasn’t desirable to have the body found too soon. The sender of the message hoped for two things: one, to keep the police busy dragging the River Pen. Two, to incriminate Falkland, Brook or Lee Gordon by instigating one of them to go poking around under Oasthampstead weir and being discovered in the process. On the other hand, it’s possible to adopt your argument that Miss Austin sent the messages, having previously thrown the attaché case in the river. The phone messages were both sent between eight o’clock and nine o’clock in the morning. Miss Austin has recently taken to fruitarianism and sometimes breakfasts off an orange in her room, going for walks to commune with her spirits ‘while the dew is fresh upon the grass’.”
“I don’t wonder she sees spooks then,” said Jenkins. “I’m all for a good breakfast myself. For how long has she shown the fruitarian tendency?”
“Oh, for some time, intermittently. Anyone could have known of her habits in that direction. I learnt about it from the invaluable Agnes—the assistant cook. Like you, Agnes thinks Miss Austin is ‘batty,’ to use her own expression.”
“Batty or not, I’d lay a lot of money that she both sent the messages and chucked the attaché case in the river,” said Jenkins. “Also, it’s an odd thing that Miss Austin is the only witness to prove that Mrs. Anderby left The Rowan Tree at the time stated that Saturday morning.”
“Query, is kind Miss Austin helping Mrs. Anderby out?” mused Macdonald. “Now look here, Jenkins. You’ve done your part of the job well: you’ve collected all the data about the Oasthampstead gossips: you’ve got chapter and verse, so far as it goes, concerning the ‘police inquiry’—which wasn’t a police inquiry—about Nurse Pewsey and Dr. Chenner before he died, and you’re soaked in local colour, so to speak. You’ve got the evidence about P.M.s on Chenner, Anderby and Mrs. Anderby, and the report of the inquest on the body found in the Avon. Now I have made a report for my own use. I’ve put down everything that I’ve been told by Falkland, Brook, Lee Gordon, Lynch, and the people at The Rowan Tree, and I’ve put it down in detail. It’s a formidable manuscript, but I want you to read it through and consider every detail, and when you’ve read it we will compare notes again and see if we can draw any conclusions. Up till now, the whole inquiry has been coloured by either Grendon’s assumptions, or Lynch’s. Try to bring a fresh mind to it and disbelieve every previous assumption.”
“I’m all in favour of an open mind,” said Jenkins, “though it’s going to be a bit hard in this case because every bit of evidence seems to point to the obvious. The queer and seemingly idiotic parts, like the spirit messages, seem to point unmistakably to Miss Austin.”
“Who is admittedly queer, but by no means idiotic, so far as I can judge her,” replied Macdonald. “I have a feeling that she knows more than she admits, but that she won’t part with all her information. When she told me, in the first case, that Mrs. Anderby had ‘passed over,’ I got the impression that a shrewd mind was expressing itself in terms of spiritualism. Having pondered over the matter, she was convinced that the only logical explanation of Mrs. Anderby’s disappearance was that she was dead—and she stated her conclusions in the form of a spirit message. Have you ever been to a spiritualist séance, Jenkins?”
“Me? Good Lord, no! Not in my line at all. Can you see me being ‘levitated,’ Chief, or whatever they call it?”
“It’d be an impressive sight,” chuckled Macdonald. “Apart from such extremes as levitation, I don’t see why you shouldn’t acquire a bit of the jargon and go and call on Miss Austin yourself. I’ve a feeling that you might win her confidence. Perhaps she’d oblige with a few more recollections if you made friends with her.”
Jenkins looked dubious. “I’ve done some funny things in my time,” he said, “and I’ve assumed the mantle of some queer personages, but I’ve never dealt in spooks, or pretended to have dealings with the supernatural. For one thing, I don’t look the part, and I couldn’t produce the patter without looking out of character. However, I’ll think about it.”
“Do the line of honest inquirer, then,” said Macdonald. “No one can beat you at looking puzzled. I’ve seen you dig out quite a lot of information by simply looking bewildered—the world’s best-meaning mug.”
“People do react to that,” said Jenkins. “If you only look ignorant and puzzled and kind-hearted, folk do try to enlighten you in the kindest way. I’ll bear the point in mind and see if I can make contact with the old lady—but I’ll have a go at your notes first and see if I get any enlightenment. Meantime, what’s your next move?”
“I’m going to trot around like an inverted Autolycus,” replied Macdonald.
“I suppose you know what you mean,” said Jenkins resignedly. “Autolycus—wasn’t he a picker up of unconsidered trifles?”
“ ‘Snapper up,’ according to one of the Folios. Instead of picking up, I’m going to scatter: in other words, I’m offering free information to intelligent inquirers. People always ask questions—and I’m going to answer a few of the questions which I hope to provoke.”
“Yes. I’ve known that work wonders,” beamed Jenkins. “Tell ’em some spicy bits in confidence—hope for results.”
“That’s it,” said Macdonald with a grin, as he handed a pile of typescript to Jenkins.