WE DO NOT OVERSLEEP in the Crescent, no matter what our nights have been, and as I think I have said, we breakfast downstairs. Mother was better that next morning, Saturday, and we were still at the table when Miss Margaret came over and through the French door into the dining room.
She was shrouded in black, even to her hat with its crêpe-edged veil, and although it was not yet nine we knew she was ready for the ordeal of the inquest. She had come to ask if Holmes could or would stay in the house while they were all gone.
“It will be safe enough,” she said, “and I have never left the house empty. You see we all have to go, even the maids.”
“Of course, Margaret,” Mother agreed. “Although I’d as soon put a rabbit on guard. Still, if you want him—Certainly. Louisa can go with the Daltons although why she should want to go at all I cannot understand.”
Emily, Margaret said, was still asleep and not well. She had been in a sort of daze for the last two days, and she would not rouse her until the last minute. Upon which Mother insisted on ordering some creamed chicken prepared and sent over later, and by going back to speak to Mary left us alone for a minute or two.
I can still see Margaret suddenly throwing back her veil and bending toward me.
“Tell me something, Louisa,” she said in a low voice. “Just what did you see on our roof last night?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It looked like a man, on his hands and knees.”
“On his hands and knees!” she repeated, astonished. “Just crawling about, you mean?”
“He seemed to be that way so he could get to the edge; for safety. Or so I thought.”
“And when he got to the edge?”
“I thought he looked over, into the gutter.”
“You didn’t dream all this?”
“I hadn’t even been to bed, Miss Margaret,” I said.
“At two in the morning?” Her keen eyes searched my face, and I felt myself coloring.
“I’ve been worried. Naturally.”
That seemed to satisfy her, for she drew down her veil again and nodded.
“Jim, of course. Well, Louisa, I wish you’d keep it to yourself. The servants are ready to bolt at any minute anyhow. And you may be wrong. By the time I’d got Father’s revolver, and Emily and I got to the cedar room, the trap was fastened and the ladder where it belongs. I’ve convinced Emily that you had a nightmare, so it would better rest at that. I wouldn’t even talk to her about it. Or to anybody.”
And of course I agreed.
Perhaps in writing all of this I have left out too much of the excitement our murder had caused; have said too little of the curious crowds which were held back at the gate by a uniformed policeman, but which had discovered Euclid Street and No Man’s Land, and had periodically to be driven out of the latter; have ignored the press, bored and in the summer doldrums and so now in a state of hysterical excitement. And it is possible too that I have underestimated the local importance of the Crescent families.
Every city I dare say has its group of old families which in their day have written the local history. In time they pass out of the social columns and into the obituary; indeed sometimes they have to die to be remembered. Nevertheless, the names still are important, and even their ordinary deaths are news.
Now in one of these families had occurred a savage and shocking murder, and since the crime both press and people had shown not only curiosity but a very real pride in us. We discovered to our own surprise that we were the last stand of fashionable exclusiveness, that we were among the few survivors of an earlier and more formal age, that even royalty was more accessible, and that our rare invitations were eagerly sought by all the nouveaux riches of the town!
And that propaganda had had its result by the time our various cars started out that Saturday morning. There was a large crowd outside our gates as I drove out with the Daltons, and downtown in the city proper police reserves had had to be called out to control the masses who had gathered to see the grieving family arrive for the inquest.
I had not been prepared for all this, and to add to my discomfort the ride was constrained and painful. Bryan Dalton had barely spoken, devoting all his attention to the car and now and then running a finger around his immaculate collar as though it choked him. And Mrs. Dalton, beside me in the rear seat and looking pale and drawn, had chattered all the way; not so much to me as at him.
“Of course, Louisa,” she said. “You know and I know that no lunatic did this thing. It’s my opinion it was thought out and worked out to the last second of time. And who could do that?”
“I haven’t an idea,” I replied dutifully.
“Well, think about it! It had to be someone who knew all about that house, didn’t it?”
“You can’t mean a member of the family!”
“I didn’t say that,” she said sharply. “There are other ways of finding out. And even with all this money gone she must have left something. Those two women ought to be well fixed.”
That was the only time Mr. Dalton spoke, and he spoke without turning his head.
“You might say to my wife that I regard this talk about money just now as execrably bad taste.”
She laughed her small frozen laugh.
“I would be interested to know when Mr. Dalton ever before regarded any talk about money as in bad taste,” she said.
All in all, I was glad when we had reached the building, passed through a barrage of camera men and the aisle made for us by the police, and into the building itself.
It was my first experience of an inquest, and I had never even seen a coroner before. This one turned out to be rather a hortatory person, who explained to us and to the six men of the jury that a coroner’s inquest is a preliminary inquiry, that it corresponds in many ways to an examination before a magistrate, and that testimony is taken under oath.
“What we shall want here today,” he said to the jury, “is a truthful statement from all witnesses so that you may render a verdict in accordance with the facts.”
I suppose the jury had already seen the body, for one or two of them looked rather white. And the formality of identification took only a moment, Doctor Armstrong doing this for the family.
After that the medical examiner was called, to testify as to the nature of the injuries. These he said had consisted of five blows with an axe, any one of which must have rendered the victim unconscious immediately. Most of them had been delivered on the right side of the head, but there was one which had struck the neck, and severed both the carotid artery and the jugular vein.
He considered it unlikely that the dead woman had survived the first blow, or had suffered any pain whatever; this I suppose for the benefit of the family.
The jury was then shown a map of the Crescent, and a detailed plan of the Lancaster house. And following that came the first witness, Emily Lancaster, who had discovered the body.
I do not think Doctor Armstrong had wanted Miss Emily to go on the stand at all. She had insisted, however, and after giving her some aromatic ammonia in water he helped her to her place. There was a murmur of sympathy as she took the stand, and a breathless silence while in a low voice she gave her testimony.
As to the time, she was absolutely certain.
“I have lived by the clock for so many years,” she explained. Otherwise her story was as before, save that she added something to what the police already knew. This was that while she was partially dressed she had again heard a sound from the direction of her mother’s room, and that she had then opened the door into the hall, but heard nothing and went back to her dressing.
“What was the nature of the sound?”
“It was—I can hardly say. Maybe a door closing, or a chair being overturned.”
“It did not occur to you to investigate further?”
“No. I listened and everything was quiet.”
They let her go at that. She looked so ill that even the coroner seemed moved to pity. And after that the rest of us followed along with our stories, Margaret, Eben, myself—highly nervous, Mrs. Talbot, the house servants, and the police. Testimony was offered that the house was carefully locked that day, and was still found locked after the crime. Details of the search throughout the house for bloodstains of any sort brought the crowd to the edges of their chairs, only to sit back when it was learned that none whatever had been found. The events of that afternoon were carefully detailed for the jury, Lydia Talbot’s brief call, her sister-in-law’s longer one, her departure with Mr. Lancaster at three-thirty, and the careful locking of the front door behind them.
I looked around the room. In the rear and standing I could see Mr. Dean and in a corner, looking more interested than anxious, was Helen Wellington. Mrs. Dalton had hardly moved since the inquest began, while on the other side of me her husband was restless and clearly uneasy.
The crowd, avid for sensation, was growing restless when at last Peggy, the Lancasters’ housemaid, was called, and the first stir came when she told her story of seeing Mr. Lancaster return some five minutes after he had left with Mrs. Talbot.
It stunned us all, including the old man himself. I saw him draw himself up, and then subside into a chair again. Yet when he was finally called he made rather a better explanation than we had expected.
“I had hoped to say nothing about this,” he said, straightforwardly enough. “But since it is known—My wife and I had had an argument that morning. When I left the house I was still irritated, but on thinking it over I decided to go back and apologize. After all, she was a sick woman, and after so many years of marriage—”
His voice broke.
“Did you see her when you returned?” asked the coroner, smoothly.
“No. Everything was quiet, and I decided she was asleep. So I went out again. I was not in the house two minutes.”
“Did you go up the stairs?”
“I did not.”
“Can you tell us just what you did do?”
“Easily. I walked into the hall, decided my wife was asleep, decided as it was hot to leave my gloves on the hall table, and having done so went out again.”
“That is all?”
“Absolutely all.”
“Now, Mr. Lancaster, will you tell us what this controversy with your wife was about? I’m sorry, but it may have some bearing on this inquiry.”
“It was a family matter.”
“Can’t you be more explicit than that?”
He hesitated.
“I can be entirely explicit,” he said at last. “It concerned the amount of gold and currency she kept in the house. I considered it, among other things, highly dangerous. In these days of crime—”
“It was not until you had left the house that you thought of that?”
“I had thought of it all along. But as I left the house with Mrs. Talbot she spoke of it. She is here. You can ask her if you like.”
“Had there been any other reason for this anxiety of yours? As I understand it, this hoarding had been going on for some months.”
It seemed to me that he hesitated again.
“No particular reason, no. My daughter Emily had claimed once or twice to have heard someone on the roof at night.”
“So, as I understand it, you decided to go back and urge that the money be placed in a safe place, and then changed your mind?”
“Precisely that, sir.”
“Are you certain that the front door was locked behind you when you left?”
“Absolutely certain. In view of what was worrying me, I tried it after I had closed it. It was locked.”
The remainder of his testimony referred largely to the events of the earlier part of the day, which I have already given. To my surprise and the disappointment of the crowd the matter of the chest and its contents was dropped for the time.
I know now that the police, working with the coroner, had determined to limit the inquiry as much as possible to the actual events of the day and particularly of the afternoon of the murder. Then too there may be rules as to evidence given before a coroner which eliminated the chest, save as it actually bore on the movements of certain people on that day. At the best I can only give my recollection of the questions and answers, but I think I have been fairly accurate.
And then at last Jim Wellington was called and sworn.