Stephen finished his reading and looked round at his audience. Anne, from her foot-stool, was regarding the carpet with an air of intense concentration. Martin was making notes with a stubby pencil on the back of an old envelope. He continued to do so for some moments after Stephen’s voice had ceased, and then looked up.
“May I have a look at the blighter’s plan of the course, Stevie, old son?” he asked.
Stephen handed him the plan, and Martin gave it a cursory glance through his thick spectacles.
“Thanks,” he said, giving it back. “Well, we’ve got all the doings now, haven’t we? I plump for Davitt, myself. Room next door and all, he’d have heard the girl knock on your guv’nor’s door. Then all he had to do was to pop out and bung the stuff in the tea-pot. It’s an open and shut case, I think. Don’t you think so, Annie?”
Anne said, without looking up:
“There seem to have been a lot of odd people in that hotel. What about Vanning and Parsons? Parsons was a bad sleeper—he may very well have had Medinal with him. And then there are the Joneses—”
“Nothing odd about them. Just a couple out loose on the spree. It would have been much odder if there hadn’t been a pair like that in a country hotel at the week-end. No, put your shirt on Davitt, the man of mystery, first favourite in the murderer’s stakes. What do you say, Steve?”
“I think you will be making a great mistake if you start theorizing at this stage,” said Stephen pedantically. “To begin with, you have got to consider all the evidence, and not simply what I have just read you.”
“But that is all the evidence, ain’t it?” said Martin.
“Not entirely. There are two other matters which may have some bearing on the problem. To begin with, here is a bit of ancient history which Mother told me the other day. Rather a nasty bit of history, I’m afraid.”
He bit his lip and coloured slightly.
“Come on, Steve, don’t be shy!” Martin guffawed. “Out with the old family skeleton!”
Stephen related, as briefly as he could, the gist of the letters which his mother had shown him two days before.
“I may add,” he concluded, “that Mother’s guess turned out to be perfectly right. I have been to Somerset House, and there is no doubt that the woman in question is this same Frances Annie March.”
During the recital, Anne remained silent, still apparently in contemplation of some private problem of her own. Martin, however, was regrettably vocal. His appreciation of Mr. Dickinson’s lapse was quite unrestrained in its expression.
“Who’d have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” was his final comment on the disclosure. “That’s Shakespeare, or something like it. But seriously, Steve, does this get us any forrarder? Unless you’re going to say that Frances Annie and the injured Richard are really Mrs. Whatnot-Blenkinsop and her son. Is that what you’re after?”
“At the moment I’m merely after facts,” said Stephen stiffly. “That happens to be one of them. Now here’s another. Perhaps you’ll think it more important. There was someone in the hotel that night whom Father thought he recognized.”
He repeated what he had learned from the inspector of the man whose appearance had interrupted their conversation in the lounge. Martin showed little interest.
“That doesn’t cut much ice with me,” was his verdict. “Lots of chaps make mistakes like that. Only the other day I slapped a bloke on the back in the street, and it turned out I didn’t know him from Adam. Most embarrassing. Besides, if this fellow was somebody staying in the hotel, why should your father have only seen him that once and not before or after? It was probably just a local who had blown in for a drink.”
“Or,” said Anne slowly, “or it was somebody who didn’t want to be seen again. Somebody who had ordered a meal downstairs and changed his mind when he saw that Father was in the place. Mr. Jones, in fact.”
“Um,” said Martin, visibly impressed. “Um!” He relit his pipe and said no more for a moment or two. “All the same,” he added, after reflection, “I still think Davitt is the man. With Jones as runner-up, perhaps. But I don’t for the life of me see why a fellow should want to take a girl with him on a murdering expedition. I’m dam’ sure I shouldn’t—not even you, Annie.”
“Perhaps—” Anne began, but Stephen interrupted her.
“This is getting us nowhere,” he said impatiently. “We haven’t a ha’porth of evidence to put before the Insurance Company to convince them that any of these people are guilty of the murder. All we have shown so far is that, as Anne says, there were an odd lot of people in the hotel. Also that there was an opportunity for somebody to put an overdose of Medinal in the tea-pot before it reached Father. And that’s not enough, by a long way.”
“Perfectly right,” said Martin. “No use wasting time gassing about these chaps. We’ve got to follow them up and try to find out something about them. This is where the sleuthing starts. Give us our marching orders, Steve.”
“To begin with,” said Stephen, “we’ve got some addresses to go on. Two of them are in London—Davitt and the Joneses. Then there are the Howard-Blenkinsops in Lincolnshire, and the Carstairs at Brighton. Vanning’s address we don’t know, except that he’s somewhere in London, and Parsons is somewhere in Midchester. Presumably we could get at him through his club.”
“If my club porter gave my address to a casual inquirer, I’d have his hide off,” Martin observed parenthetically.
“When we find Parsons, we can find Vanning,” Stephen went on. “If he is willing to help us, which he may very likely not be.”
“Need we bother about these people?” Martin asked. “When we’ve got Davitt and Jones sticking out a mile? It seems to me obvious that these other chaps couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”
“It is anything but obvious,” Stephen retorted. “I agree that we know nothing about them at all. That doesn’t mean we ought to leave them out of account altogether. As for Parsons and Vanning, there is one very significant fact about them, which you seem to have overlooked.”
“Meaning?”
“Simply this. Parsons booked both rooms. The room he booked for Vanning was the room that, as it turned out, Father slept in. It was next door to his own. Can we be sure that Parsons knew of the change? Father had something sent up to his room last thing at night. So did Vanning—do you remember the report says he was surprised to hear next morning that he had got up and had breakfast?—isn’t it quite possible that he poisoned Father by mistake, thinking—”
“Thinking that a pot of tea was a bottle of whisky, I suppose,” Martin interrupted with a horse laugh.
“If you’re going to make a silly joke of the whole thing—” said Stephen crossly.
“I’m not, really, old man. I think it’s all too frightfully subtle for words. Just exactly what you called getting us nowhere just now.”
At which point the tension was mercifully relieved by the gong sounding for lunch.
In the afternoon the conference was resumed in a quieter mood.
“Obviously, we want to start with the nearest people,” said Martin. “That is, Davitt and Jones. First question: Do we try our own hand or get Elderson to do the dirty work for us?”
“We employed Elderson only because I didn’t want to be seen at Pendlebury,” said Stephen. “So far as the start of our inquiry goes, I think we should keep it in our own hands. We can fall back on him if the business looks like getting beyond us.”
“Right. Second question: What line exactly do we take? I mean, it’s all very well to talk about making inquiries, following people up and so forth, but unless you’re a bobby, you can’t just go to a chap’s house and say: ‘Oh, Mr. So-and-so, I’m told you were staying at Pendlebury the other day. Did you by any chance happen to murder an old gentleman called Dickinson while you were there, because if so, I want your blood?’ At least, I don’t see myself doing it.”
“I propose to use my own common sense in the matter, and take whatever line seems best in the circumstances. I certainly don’t intend to interview any of these people directly, until I have found out something about them, unless there’s absolutely no other line of approach.”
“I see—just nose around a bit, make oneself sweet to hall porters and landladies and so forth. Then get an interview by pretending you want to sell something, or that you’re a long-lost brother from Fiji, or something of that sort. It ought to be rather a lark. Now, third and last question: Do we go out in a pack after the stuff, or do we split up, one lion to a Christian, so to speak?”
Anne broke her silence to say: “For goodness’ sake, Martin, don’t let you and Stephen go out on this business together. You know you’d simply be bickering the whole time.”
“I think we had better see what we can do individually, to start with, at any rate,” said Stephen. “We can join forces later if necessary.”
“I dare say you’re right. It’ll save time, too. Then all we have to do now is to split up our quarry. Can I have first stab at Davitt? After all, I spotted him first.”
“I’d rather thought of trying Davitt myself first,” said Stephen at once.
“But hang it all, he was my selection! Look here, give me Davitt and you can have the Joneses, both of them.”
“I think,” Stephen answered very quietly, “that I’d better have Davitt, if you don’t mind.”
“Toss you for it!”
“You are a hopeless pair of idiots,” said Anne wearily. “Look here, I’ve got it all worked out for you. Stephen will begin with Davitt and Martin with Jones. Then if neither of those leads to anything, Martin will drive me down to Lincolnshire and I shall see what can be done with Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop. She sounds as if she might amuse me, and anyway that will be a woman’s job. While we are doing that, Stephen can go down to Brighton to find out what he can about Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs. We can leave Parsons to the last, because Midchester is such a long way off. Now for Heaven’s sake go away and get on with it, and try not to make greater asses of yourselves than you can help.”
“Thanks for these kind words,” said Martin. “But what about you, Annie? Aren’t you going to come along with me and help stir up the Joneses?”
“No, I am not. I’ve got other things to do here.”
“What other things?”
“It doesn’t seem to have occurred to either of you that the quickest way to find Vanning’s address may be simply to look him up in the telephone directory. It’s an out-of-the-way name, and it oughtn’t to take long to make a list of all the Vannings. Then we can try them out and see if we can spot the right one.”
“Not a bad idea, that,” said Martin. He squinted at her for a moment and then added: “That’s not all, Annie. You’ve got something else up your sleeve.”
“I never said so.”
“What is it?”
“Just something that occurred to me, that’s all. Something very obvious, really, but not at all pleasant. I want to think it out.”
“Well, you might give a fellow an idea—”
“Oh, why can’t you let me alone!” she flashed out suddenly, and then, as suddenly, her anger evaporated. “I’m sorry, Martin, but this business has really got me down.”
“Of course, old girl, I understand,” Martin said. He patted her shoulder clumsily. “I vote we get going straight away,” he said to Stephen.
“We’d better keep a record of what we’re doing,” Anne remarked.
She went to the desk and, taking a piece of paper, wrote down the list of names from Elderson’s list, leaving a space opposite each which it was hoped would be filled by the details ferreted out by each investigator. When she had done so, she sat for a moment staring at her own work.
“Funny, that!” she murmured.
“What is funny?” asked Stephen.
“Nothing. Only . . .” She came out of her abstraction suddenly. “Oh, do get out, both of you!”
They went, Stephen silently shrugging his shoulders at his sister’s moods and fancies, Martin apparently unimpressed, and humming under his breath what he conceived to be the tune of “We’ve Got to Keep Up with the Joneses.”