I GOT MOTHER TO bed by ten o’clock, putting her book and her glasses on the table beside her, along with her folded clean handkerchief and her glass of water. Her prayer book, of course, always lay there. And as I did it I wondered about Miss Emily next door. What was she feeling that night, after all her years of service? Was she utterly lost? Or was there some sense of relief from the demands of that petulant and querulous old woman, with the stick by her bed with which to summon Emily remorselessly, day or night?
She had built herself no life at all, had Emily, save for her incessant reading, her trips to the library for books. Margaret was different. She had a life of her own, slightly mysterious but very real. She dressed carefully, went out—to concerts, to the theater now and then. It was even rumored that she had a small group where she played bridge for infinitesimal sums of money; something of which the Crescent disapproved on principle, although it bought lottery tickets at hospital fairs without compunction.
When at last I went back to my room I was still wondering. Not only about Emily and Margaret; about all our women. Save Helen Wellington, none of us lived interesting or even active lives. It was as though our very gates closed us away. The men went out, to business, to clubs, to golf. They came back to well-ordered houses and excellent dinners. Even old Mr. Lancaster had a club, although he rarely went there. But the women! I remembered a call I had made on Helen Wellington shortly after she married Jim.
“What do you do, all of you?” she asked. “You’ll got twenty-four hours a day to fill in.”
“We have our homes, of course. You’ll find that we consider them very important.”
“And that’s living? To know how many napkins go into the wash every week?”
“We manage. It isn’t very exciting, of course. It was harder when I first came back from boarding school, but I’m used to it now.”
“Used to it! At twenty! That’s ridiculous.”
And because she too was young I had told her about having to let down my skirts before I came back for each vacation—that was when skirts were very short—and turning them up laboriously as soon as I reached the school again. She had thought it so funny that she had screamed with laughter. But I wondered that night if it was really funny at all.
“Twenty,” she had said, “and they’ve got you. Well, they’ve never get me.”
And perhaps it was as a result of those reflections that I took a book that night and went down to the library.
By years of custom, on nights when Mother has gone to bed early I have sat in my room with the door open, in case she might need something. Now I went down and turned on all the lamps. Not the few we ordinarily use, but all of them. And it was into this blaze of light that, at ten-thirty, Annie showed Inspector Briggs.
He came in, pinching his lip thoughtfully, and with a faintly deprecatory smile.
“Sorry to bother you again, Miss Hall.”
“That’s all right. I’m interested, naturally, if that word is strong enough. That’s a good chair, Inspector.”
He sat down, remarking that the night was cold and the room warm; and then said rather abruptly that he had dropped Jim Wellington at his house on his way in.
“I thought you’d like to know,” he said, rather too casually.
“I can’t see why you took him in the first place,” I said.
“Well,” he replied, smiling again, “the police aren’t miracle workers. They are only a hard-working plodding lot at the best, and the fact that we’ve released Wellington doesn’t mean so much at that. The plain fact is that we’ve got a fair case against him now, but nothing to take before a jury. There’s a difference, Miss Hall!”
“And you’ve come here for help?”
He shook his head cheerfully.
“No,” he said. “I hadn’t meant to come here at all, but I saw the lights, and you’re an intelligent young woman and as near to a witness as we’ve got. I’d like to know, of course, what you dropped on the pavement last night and went back for, but I suppose you won’t tell me, eh?”
“My handkerchief.”
“You would swear to that, on the witness stand. Under oath?”
I was silent, and he nodded.
“You see what we’re up against,” he said. “I’ll not try to bully you. Whatever it was, you’ve probably destroyed it anyhow. But it’s just possible that that sort of silence can send the wrong person to the chair. You might think it over. Our man thinks it was an envelope of some sort.”
And when I still said nothing, he went on:
“We’ve followed up Daniels, the street cleaner you spoke of. Nothing doing there, no blood, no indications whatever, no police record. He’s a quiet man, rather eccentric, living alone on a street behind the hospital. Has lived where he is for the last ten years with no interruptions. Got a bit of shrapnel in his leg in the war. Seems to have volunteered early in spite of his age, and not to have asked for any compensation since. Rather likeable chap, but reticent. Better than his job, I imagine, although he doesn’t say so. In these times a man takes what he can get.”
“So, because you like him, you would rather suspect Jim Wellington! Is that it?”
He grinned.
“Well,” he said, “you see this shrapnel lamed him. He might have climbed a pillar of that porch, but he’d need two arms and two legs. And I don’t see him carrying the axe in his teeth.”
I had to confess that I had not noticed that the man was lame.
“I suppose nobody ever really sees a street cleaner,” I said. “You just take them for granted.”
He nodded absently; he had already eliminated Daniels from his mind.
“These two women over there, the daughters. They are Mr. Lancaster’s stepdaughters, I understand.”
“Yes. I suppose they really should be called Talbot; but they were quite small when their mother married again. They have always used Mr. Lancaster’s name. The Talbots didn’t like it much at first, I’ve heard.”
After that he asked me once more to go over what I had seen the afternoon before, both inside and outside the Lancaster house. He was particularly interested in my entrance when Margaret and I helped Emily inside.
“Mr. Lancaster was in the library?”
“Yes. Lying back in a leather chair with his eyes closed.”
“Can you remember what he said?”
“Margaret asked him who had told him, and he said Eben. Then she asked him if he had been upstairs, and he said no. She went out to get him a glass of wine, and then he asked Emily if it was she who had found Mrs. Lancaster, and if she had heard anything.”
“What did she say to that?”
“She said that she was dressing with her door closed, and that when she ran to tell Margaret, she was running a shower. That about all, Inspector. It was not until after he got the wine that he asked about the money.”
“Oh, he asked about the money?”
“Not in so many words. He asked if anybody had looked under the bed. Then Miss Emily remembered the gold, and she sat up and asked him if that was what he thought. He said: ‘What else am I to think?’”
The Inspector considered this for some little time.
“Then, in your opinion, all these people acted as people would normally act, under the circumstances?”
“I don’t know what is normal in such circumstances, but I should think so.”
“Shocked, rather than grieved, eh?”
“Perhaps. I really don’t know.”
“You didn’t think Miss Margaret rather cool?”
“She is always like that, Inspector.”
“And you yourself, you have no suspicions whatever? Now listen, Miss Hall. A particularly brutal murder has been committed. This is no time for scruples. People are not sent to the chair on suspicion anyhow. It takes a water-tight case before any jury imposes a death sentence, and they don’t do it easily even then. It’s a pretty serious matter for any group of men to send another one to the chair.”
I shivered, there in that warm room.
“I’ve thought of nothing else since it happened, Inspector. I am being as honest as I know how when I tell you that I simply cannot conceive of anyone I know killing that poor old woman.”
“Not even for money?”
“Not even for money. And as to that, you know as well as I do that money went before the murder. Unless you are willing to believe that somebody had time to break into that house, kill Mrs. Lancaster, open the chest, put the bags on the roof, drop them to the ground and carry them to a car which nobody saw—even Eben or myself—all in about fifteen minutes.”
He smiled again, and resumed his thoughtful pinching of his lip.
“And also carried into the house those bags of lead weights. Don’t forget them! And, now we’re on them, what about those weights, Miss Hall? They’re used for other purposes, of course, but in the main I believe they’re used in women’s clothes. Now, you’re a woman. Suppose you wanted a lot of them. How would you go about it?”
“I haven’t an idea. Try a wholesale house, maybe.”
He nodded.
“Or several wholesale houses,” he added. He looked at his watch and got up. “Well, it’s a queer case. Generally speaking, an axe is a man’s weapon. Women run to pistols if they have them and are in a hurry; and to poison when they have time and opportunity. If anyone in that house had wanted to do away with the old lady, why not poison? Nobody would have been surprised at her death, I gather; or suspicious, either.”
I remember all that, although I was listening with only half my mind. What he had said about scruples had aroused something in me. All the Crescent, I knew, regarded the police with distaste and resentment. It would tell as little as it could, and yet expect them to solve the crime. It was not fair. And people were not sent to the chair on suspicion.
I had to make my decision quickly, for the Inspector was ready to go. The gold piece, found not far from the rear of Jim’s house, I decided to keep to myself. The glove also, although I was soon to realize that in that I had committed an error so grievous that even now I wake up at night to think about it. But the Daltons were different.
Then and there I told him about the night before.
He listened with fascinated interest, and I saw that he lifted his head suddenly when I repeated Mr. Dalton’s speech on the path: “It’s sheer madness, Laura. With all these policemen about.” And her reply, that she did not care, and the more the better. He seemed irritated too that they had reached the woodshed without the officer on guard at the back discovering them; although I pointed out that the Lancaster planting had been expressly devised to conceal the shed. But it was over the last words that he pondered for some time.
“Well, what have you found?”
“I know what I’m after. That’s something.”
And over Mr. Dalton’s odd and angry explanation: “If you’d been any sort of wife to me.” And her statement that the police couldn’t hold her, not for a minute.
“Intimating of course that we could hold him,” he said pinching his lip again. “Well, that’s interesting to say the least. You’re sure she said them?” ‘I’ll find them’?”
“Absolutely certain.”
“And young Talbot suspects Peggy of knowing something! Well, she could have got an impression of the lock to the chest, that’s sure. When was it that Talbot saw Mr. Dalton around the shed?”
“Early yesterday morning. The morning of the crime.”
“And what was Talbot doing there himself?”
“He was looking for a lost golf ball. Both he and Mr. Dalton often practice short shots back there.”
The Inspector got up and held out a large capable hand.
“Thank you,” he said. “I know this hasn’t been easy. But if Dalton is mixed up in this it’s time we knew it. I’ll keep you out of it, of course. They needn’t know who overheard them. We’ve got to remember too that it may be only a jealous woman, hot on a trail of nothing more than a letter or two! I suppose you don’t know why they live the way they do? Not speaking and all that?”
“There may have been somebody else. But that’s years ago, of course.”
“It takes a jealous woman to hold a grudge, Miss Hall. They seem to get some sort of a kick out of it. But one thing’s sure: she wasn’t jealous of old Mrs. Lancaster!”
He said only one more thing that night that I recall, and that was partly to himself.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is about the key to that chest. The only object in doing away with it would seem to be to gain time; for an escape, maybe, or to get rid of the gold. But nobody connected with the case so far has apparently made a move to do either!”
From which I gathered that perhaps we were all being more closely watched than we suspected.