JIM SEEMED CALM ENOUGH as a witness and he made—at least at first—a good impression. But there was no getting away from the fact that he had been in the house and in the room, and that he had tried to get away without this being known. Questioned on this, however, he was firm and unshaken in his statement.
Earlier in the day, he thought between eleven and twelve o’clock, he had received word from Margaret Lancaster that her father wanted to see him at four that afternoon. She gave as a reason his anxiety about the amount of gold and currency in the house, and he had agreed to go.
He had left his car at his own house and walked to the Lancasters’. As he had a key he opened the door and went in, but Mr. Lancaster was not in his library and so, having waited a few minutes, he finally decided to go up the stairs to his aunt’s room.
That must have been, he said, at four o’clock or perhaps a couple of minutes earlier.
Mrs. Lancaster’s door was slightly ajar, and everything was quiet save for Emily Lancaster talking to her bird across the hall. He pushed open the door to his aunt’s room. The shades were drawn and at first he did not notice anything wrong. Then he reached the bed and saw her.
He saw no axe or other weapon, nor did he look for one. His first thought was that the family must not see the body as it was, and he tried to draw the sheet over it. Unfortunately it lay partly on the sheet and he did not succeed. And then he added, he had grown suddenly wildly nauseated; the sight of blood had always done that to him, and of course he was horrified as well.
He had made for the downstairs lavatory in the side hall and been violently sick.
He was still there and still sick when Emily began to scream. Then his own position began to dawn on him. There was blood on him. He decided foolishly to try to slip out the side door and to get home. When he saw through the screen door that Emily was on the grass and that I was bending over her he knew it was no good; but by that time bedlam had broken out upstairs in the house, and he did not try to go back.
“I was a fool to do what I did,” he added, “but I was still incapable of consecutive thought.”
Some of all this had been question and answer, of course, but in the main he told his story directly and frankly. It was only over a question which followed that he seemed to hesitate.
“Did you hear any suspicious sounds before you went up the stairs?”
“Not sounds exactly. I thought someone was running upstairs.”
“You heard someone running?”
“Not exactly. There’s an old crystal chandelier in the hall, and it jingled as though someone were moving very fast. The prisms swing and strike each other. They did it then.”
“That was before you went up?”
“It was while I was walking back to the stairs.”
The coroner did not pursue the subject. He asked: “Were you familiar with the key to the chest?”
“Very.”
“Where did the deceased keep it?”
“On a thin chain around her neck.”
“Did you see this key when you went to the bed?”
And then Jim’s nerves broke.
“Good God, no!” he said. “Do you suppose I was thinking about a key just then?”
Peggy was recalled after that, and her statement as to when she had seen Jim on the stair landing patiently gone into.
She had come out of a guest room in the wing and was on her way to the back stairs when she saw him. She had not seen anyone else, or heard anyone running.
“In other words,” as the coroner said later on, “if Mr. Wellington is correct and someone was actually running just before he started up the stairs, then that person’s escape was cut off from three directions; from the front stairs, from the rear hall and from the back stairs leading down to the kitchen porch where two women were at work.”
It was then that one of the jurors spoke up, much, I fancy, to the annoyance of the police.
“The jury would like to inquire about the windows, Mr. Coroner. The newspapers have stated that one of the screens in the—in Mrs. Lancaster’s bedroom was found partially raised, and a flower pot was overturned. If that is the case we would like to know it. If someone entered by the porch roof, or could have done so, we should know it.”
And much to his irritation the Inspector was recalled and obliged to tell the facts. Even then there was no mention of the bloodstain on the screen or the grass on the roof, but he admitted that the screen had been found raised some four inches and the flower pot overturned. Immediately following this, however, Mrs. Talbot insisted on being recalled, and announced in her booming voice that the flower pot had been overturned when she left her sister-in-law at three-thirty that afternoon.
“Are you positive about that?”
“Certainly I’m positive,” she boomed in her big voice. “I tried to raise the screen to set it up again. But I couldn’t move it an inch. It was stuck tight.”
It was bad luck for Jim, and I felt my hands and feet growing cold. Beside me Mr. Dalton muttered: “Damn the woman! Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut?” And Mrs. Dalton heard him and gave him one of her sharp glances.
Nevertheless, the verdict when it came in was of murder by someone unknown. Whatever the police believed, clearly they had no case against Jim at that time, and I imagine the verdict gave them what they wanted, which was time. I know now of course that they had been tracing back his life for several months and had found nothing suspicious about it.
He was in debt, but not more so than any man with an extravagant wife and a limited income. He was well known to all the banks, and had so far as they could find no safe deposit boxes save his own. His dislike of Mrs. Lancaster’s gold hoarding was a matter of record. He had not speculated or been caught in the market, and his presence in the Lancaster house that day at that hour was acknowledged by the family to be the result of a summons by telephone.
But the press was disappointed by the whole procedure. It commented rather sharply of the fact that little or no mention of the chest and its contents had been made, although there seemed no doubt that the gold—it preferred to ignore the fact that part of it was not gold at all but currency—had provided the motive for the murder.
“The police admit that this gold is missing,” one paper said. “Then where is it? How much of it was there? Gold is bulky and heavy. Could the murderer have escaped with it, and if so, how?”
One enterprising journalist had figured that seventy-five thousand dollars in gold, an amount which he seemed to have guessed with uncanny accuracy, would weigh a total of two hundred and seventy-six pounds. But on that morning when the Crescent left the inquest and started home, all we knew was that Jim Wellington had won the first round in what might be a fight for his life, and that the Crescent itself had for a time at least been vindicated.
All of us saw Helen on the pavement outside. She was with another young woman, both very smartly dressed, and before they got into a car Helen had already lighted a cigarette. There was a man in the car, and he was grinning cheerfully. But I was fortunately the only one who heard what followed.
“Well,” he said, “which of them did it?”
Helen smiled back at him.
“Can you see them and still believe that Queen Victoria is dead? No verdict. If you ask me, they’re all capable of it. Given a reason, of course.”
“Such as?”
“Protection, pride, dignity—how can I tell?”
“What gets me is how you yourself overlooked that money, Helen!”
“I didn’t know it was there.”
Then they drove away.