CHAPTER XXVII.Mr. Sheringham Hits the MarkRoger did not reappear until the car was at the front door and the other members of the party already making their farewells on the steps. His leave-taking was necessarily a little hurried; but perhaps this was not altogether without design. Roger did not feel at all inclined to linger in the society of Lady Jefferson.He shook hands warmly enough with her husband, however, and the manner of their parting was sufficient to assure the latter, without the necessity of any words being spoken on the subject, that his confidences would be regarded as inviolate. The taciturn Jefferson became almost effusive in return.Arrived at the station, Roger personally superintended the purchase of the tickets and deftly shepherded Mrs. Plant into a non-smoking carriage explaining that the cigars which he and Alec proposed to smoke would spell disaster to the subtleties ofParfum Jasmine. A short but interesting conversation with the guard, followed by the exchange of certain pieces of silver, ensured the locking of the door of their own first-class smoker.“And so ends an extremely interesting little visit,” Roger observed as soon as the train started, leaning back luxuriously in his corner and putting his feet on the seat. “Well, I shan’t be sorry to get back to London, on the whole, I must say, though the country is all very well in its way. I always think you ought to take the country in small doses to appreciate it properly, don’t you?”“No,” said Alec.“Or look at it in comfort from the windows of a train,” Roger went on, waving an appreciative hand towards the countryside through which they were passing. “Fields, woods, streams, barley——”“That isn’t barley. It’s wheat.”“—barley, trees—delightful, my dear Alexander! But how much more delightful seen like this in one charming flash, that leaves a picture printed on the brain only to give way the next instant to another equally charming one, than stuck down in the middle, for instance, of one of those fields of barley——”“Wheat.”“—of barley, with the prospect of a ten-mile walk in this blazing sunshine between you and the next long drink. Don’t you agree?”“No.”“I thought you wouldn’t. But reflect. Sunshine, considered from the purely æsthetic point of view, is, I am quite willing to grant you, a thing of——”“Whatareyou talking about?” Alec asked despairingly.“Sunshine, Alexander,” returned Roger blandly.“Well, for goodness’ sake stop talking about sunshine. What I want to know is, have you got any farther?”Roger was evidently in one of his maddening moods.“What with?” he asked blankly.“The Stanworth affair of course, you idiot!” shouted the exasperated Alec.“Ah, yes, of course. The Stanworth affair,” Roger replied innocently. “Did I do that bit well, Alec?” he asked with a sudden change of tone.“What bit?”“When I said, ‘What with?’ Did I say it with an air of bland innocence? The best detectives always do, you know. When they reach this stage of the proceedings they always pretend to have forgotten all about the case in hand. Why they do so, I’ve never been able to imagine; but it’s evidently the correct etiquette for the job. By the way, Alec,” he added kindly, “you did your part very well. The idiot friend always shouts in an irritated and peevish way like that. I really think we make quite a model pair, don’t you?”“Will you stop yapping and tell me whether you’ve got any farther with Stanworth’s murder?” Alec demanded doggedly.“Oh,that?” said Roger with studied carelessness. “I solved that exactly forty-three minutes ago.”“What?”“I said that I solved the mystery exactly forty-three minutes ago. And a few odd seconds, of course. It was an interesting little problem in its way, my dear Alexander Watson, but absurdly simple once one had grasped the really vital factor in the case. For some extraordinary reason I appeared to have overlooked it before; hence the delay. But don’t put that bit in when you come to write up the case, or I shall never land the next vacancy for a stolen-crown-jewels recoverer to an influential emperor.”“You’ve solved it, have you?” Alec growled sceptically. “I seem to have heard something like that before.”“Meaning Jefferson? Yes, I admit I backed the wrong horse there. But this is a very different matter. I’ve really solved it this time.”“Oh? Well, let’s hear it.”“With the greatest pleasure,” Roger responded heartily. “Let me see now. Where shall I begin? Well, I think I’ve told you all the really important things that I managed to elicit from Mrs. Plant and Jefferson, haven’t I? Except one.” Roger dropped his bantering manner with startling suddenness. “Alec,” he said seriously, “that man Stanworth was as choice a scoundrel as I’ve ever heard of. What I didn’t tell you is that he gave Mrs. Plant three months in which to find two hundred and fifty pounds for him; and hinted that if she hadn’t got it already, a pretty woman like her would have no difficulty in laying her hands on it.”“Good God!” Alec breathed.“He even went farther than that and offered to introduce her to a rich man out of whom she would be able to wheedle it, if she played her cards properly. Oh, I tell you, shooting was much too easy a death for friend Stanworth. And the person who did it ought to be acclaimed as a public benefactor, instead of being hanged by a grateful country; as he certainly would be, if all this had got into the hands of the police.”“You can hardly expect the law to recognise the principle of poetic justice for all that,” Alec objected.“I don’t see why not,” Roger retorted. “However, we won’t go into that at present. Well, to my mind there were two chief difficulties in this Stanworth business. The first one was that at the beginning there didn’t seem to be any definite motive for killing him; and afterwards, when we’d found out about him, there were far too many. All those people in the house, Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, Lady Stanworth, the butler (who, by the way, appears to be a murderer in a small way already, as I gather from Jefferson; that was the hold which Stanworth had over him)—all of them had every reason to kill him; and the case began to take on the aspect not so much of proving who did it, but, by a process of elimination, of finding out who didn’t. In that way I managed eventually to dismiss Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, and Lady Stanworth. But besides the people actually under our noses in the house, there were all the others—goodness only knows how many of them!—of whose very existence we knew nothing; all his other victims.”“Were there many of them, then?”“I understand that Stanworth’s practice was a fairly extensive one,” Roger replied ironically. “Anyhow, I was able to narrow down the field to a certain extent. Then I began to go over once more the evidence we had collected. The question I kept asking myself was—is there a single item that gives a definite pointer towards any certain person, male or female?”“Female?” Roger repeated surprisedly.“Certainly. In spite of everything—the footprint in the flower bed, for example—I was still keeping before me the possibility of a woman being mixed up in it. It didn’t seem altogether probable, but I couldn’t afford to lose sight of the bare possibility. And it’s lucky I did, for it was just that which finally put me on the right track.”“Good Lord!”“Yes; I admit I was slow in the up-take, for the fact had been staring me in the face the whole time, and I never spotted it. You see, the key to the whole mystery was that there was asecondwoman in the library that night.”“How on earth do you know that?” Alec asked in consternation.“By the hair we found on the settee. I put it away in the envelope, you remember, and promptly forgot all about it, assuming it to have been one of Mrs. Plant’s. It struck me suddenly in the garden just now that it wasn’t anything of the sort; Mrs. Plant’s hair is very much darker. Of course that opened up an entirely new field for speculation.”“Good Lord!”“Yes, it is rather surprising, isn’t it?” Roger continued equably. “That set my brain galloping away like wildfire, I need hardly tell you; and five minutes later the whole thing became absolutely plain to me. I’m a little hazy about some of the details, of course, but the broad lines are clear enough.”“You mean you guessed who the second woman was?”“Hardly guessed. I knew at once who she must be.”“Who?” Alec asked, with unconcealed eagerness.“Wait a bit. I’m coming to that. Well, then I began to put two and two together. I’d got a pretty shrewd idea already of the personal appearance of the man himself.”“Oh, it was a man then?”“Yes, it was a man right enough. There was never any doubt that a man must have done the actual killing. No woman would have been strong enough for the struggle that must have taken place. Stanworth was no weakling, so that gives us the fact that the man must have been a strong, burly sort of person. From the footprint and the length of those strides across the bed he was evidently both tall and largely built; from the clever way in which everything was left he must have been possessed of a fund of cunning; from the manner in which he left that window fastened behind him it was clear that he was thoroughly accustomed to handling lattice windows. Well, what does all that give us? It looked obvious to me.”Alec was staring intently at the speaker, following every word with eager attention. “I think I see what you’re getting at,” he said slowly.“I thought you would,” said Roger cheerfully. “Of course there were other things that clinched it. The disappearance of that footprint, for instance. Thatmusthave been done by somebody who knew what he was doing. And somebody who heard me say that I was going to fit every male boot in the house into the mark, you remember. Of course it was that which made me so sure at first about Jefferson, because I jumped to the conclusion that it must have been Jefferson whom we saw edging out of the library door. After that I more or less had Jefferson on the brain.”“I did my best to put you off that track,” said Alec with a slight smile.“Oh, you did. It wasn’t your fault that I clung to him so persistently.”“I tried hard to stop you putting your foot in it, if you remember.”“I know. And I daresay it’s lucky you did. I might have put things a good deal more plainly to him, with extremely awkward results, if you hadn’t dinned it into me so hard.”“Well,” Alec said slowly, “what are you going to do about it, now you’ve presumably got at the truth at last?”“Do about it? Forget it, of course. I told you my views just now, when I said the man who killed Stanworth ought to be acclaimed as a public benefactor. As that is unfortunately out of the question, the next best thing is to forget as diligently as possible that Stanworth did not after all shoot himself, as everybody else believes.”“Humph!” said Alec, gazing out of the window. “I wonder! You’re really sure of that?”“Absolutely,” said Roger with decision. “Anything else would be ludicrous under the circumstances. We won’t discuss that side of it again.”There was a little pause.“The—the second woman,” Alec said tentatively. “How were you able to identify her so positively?”Roger drew the envelope out of his breast pocket, opened it, and carefully extracted the hair. He laid it across his knee for the moment and contemplated it in silence. Then with a sudden movement he picked it up and threw it through the open window.“There goes a vital piece of evidence,” he said with a smile. “Well, for one thing, there was nobody else in the house with just that particular shade of hair, was there?”“I suppose not,” Alec replied.There was another silence, rather longer this time.Then Roger, glancing curiously across at his companion, remarked very airily:“Just to satisfy my natural curiosity, Alec, why exactlydidyou kill Stanworth?”
Roger did not reappear until the car was at the front door and the other members of the party already making their farewells on the steps. His leave-taking was necessarily a little hurried; but perhaps this was not altogether without design. Roger did not feel at all inclined to linger in the society of Lady Jefferson.
He shook hands warmly enough with her husband, however, and the manner of their parting was sufficient to assure the latter, without the necessity of any words being spoken on the subject, that his confidences would be regarded as inviolate. The taciturn Jefferson became almost effusive in return.
Arrived at the station, Roger personally superintended the purchase of the tickets and deftly shepherded Mrs. Plant into a non-smoking carriage explaining that the cigars which he and Alec proposed to smoke would spell disaster to the subtleties ofParfum Jasmine. A short but interesting conversation with the guard, followed by the exchange of certain pieces of silver, ensured the locking of the door of their own first-class smoker.
“And so ends an extremely interesting little visit,” Roger observed as soon as the train started, leaning back luxuriously in his corner and putting his feet on the seat. “Well, I shan’t be sorry to get back to London, on the whole, I must say, though the country is all very well in its way. I always think you ought to take the country in small doses to appreciate it properly, don’t you?”
“No,” said Alec.
“Or look at it in comfort from the windows of a train,” Roger went on, waving an appreciative hand towards the countryside through which they were passing. “Fields, woods, streams, barley——”
“That isn’t barley. It’s wheat.”
“—barley, trees—delightful, my dear Alexander! But how much more delightful seen like this in one charming flash, that leaves a picture printed on the brain only to give way the next instant to another equally charming one, than stuck down in the middle, for instance, of one of those fields of barley——”
“Wheat.”
“—of barley, with the prospect of a ten-mile walk in this blazing sunshine between you and the next long drink. Don’t you agree?”
“No.”
“I thought you wouldn’t. But reflect. Sunshine, considered from the purely æsthetic point of view, is, I am quite willing to grant you, a thing of——”
“Whatareyou talking about?” Alec asked despairingly.
“Sunshine, Alexander,” returned Roger blandly.
“Well, for goodness’ sake stop talking about sunshine. What I want to know is, have you got any farther?”
Roger was evidently in one of his maddening moods.
“What with?” he asked blankly.
“The Stanworth affair of course, you idiot!” shouted the exasperated Alec.
“Ah, yes, of course. The Stanworth affair,” Roger replied innocently. “Did I do that bit well, Alec?” he asked with a sudden change of tone.
“What bit?”
“When I said, ‘What with?’ Did I say it with an air of bland innocence? The best detectives always do, you know. When they reach this stage of the proceedings they always pretend to have forgotten all about the case in hand. Why they do so, I’ve never been able to imagine; but it’s evidently the correct etiquette for the job. By the way, Alec,” he added kindly, “you did your part very well. The idiot friend always shouts in an irritated and peevish way like that. I really think we make quite a model pair, don’t you?”
“Will you stop yapping and tell me whether you’ve got any farther with Stanworth’s murder?” Alec demanded doggedly.
“Oh,that?” said Roger with studied carelessness. “I solved that exactly forty-three minutes ago.”
“What?”
“I said that I solved the mystery exactly forty-three minutes ago. And a few odd seconds, of course. It was an interesting little problem in its way, my dear Alexander Watson, but absurdly simple once one had grasped the really vital factor in the case. For some extraordinary reason I appeared to have overlooked it before; hence the delay. But don’t put that bit in when you come to write up the case, or I shall never land the next vacancy for a stolen-crown-jewels recoverer to an influential emperor.”
“You’ve solved it, have you?” Alec growled sceptically. “I seem to have heard something like that before.”
“Meaning Jefferson? Yes, I admit I backed the wrong horse there. But this is a very different matter. I’ve really solved it this time.”
“Oh? Well, let’s hear it.”
“With the greatest pleasure,” Roger responded heartily. “Let me see now. Where shall I begin? Well, I think I’ve told you all the really important things that I managed to elicit from Mrs. Plant and Jefferson, haven’t I? Except one.” Roger dropped his bantering manner with startling suddenness. “Alec,” he said seriously, “that man Stanworth was as choice a scoundrel as I’ve ever heard of. What I didn’t tell you is that he gave Mrs. Plant three months in which to find two hundred and fifty pounds for him; and hinted that if she hadn’t got it already, a pretty woman like her would have no difficulty in laying her hands on it.”
“Good God!” Alec breathed.
“He even went farther than that and offered to introduce her to a rich man out of whom she would be able to wheedle it, if she played her cards properly. Oh, I tell you, shooting was much too easy a death for friend Stanworth. And the person who did it ought to be acclaimed as a public benefactor, instead of being hanged by a grateful country; as he certainly would be, if all this had got into the hands of the police.”
“You can hardly expect the law to recognise the principle of poetic justice for all that,” Alec objected.
“I don’t see why not,” Roger retorted. “However, we won’t go into that at present. Well, to my mind there were two chief difficulties in this Stanworth business. The first one was that at the beginning there didn’t seem to be any definite motive for killing him; and afterwards, when we’d found out about him, there were far too many. All those people in the house, Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, Lady Stanworth, the butler (who, by the way, appears to be a murderer in a small way already, as I gather from Jefferson; that was the hold which Stanworth had over him)—all of them had every reason to kill him; and the case began to take on the aspect not so much of proving who did it, but, by a process of elimination, of finding out who didn’t. In that way I managed eventually to dismiss Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, and Lady Stanworth. But besides the people actually under our noses in the house, there were all the others—goodness only knows how many of them!—of whose very existence we knew nothing; all his other victims.”
“Were there many of them, then?”
“I understand that Stanworth’s practice was a fairly extensive one,” Roger replied ironically. “Anyhow, I was able to narrow down the field to a certain extent. Then I began to go over once more the evidence we had collected. The question I kept asking myself was—is there a single item that gives a definite pointer towards any certain person, male or female?”
“Female?” Roger repeated surprisedly.
“Certainly. In spite of everything—the footprint in the flower bed, for example—I was still keeping before me the possibility of a woman being mixed up in it. It didn’t seem altogether probable, but I couldn’t afford to lose sight of the bare possibility. And it’s lucky I did, for it was just that which finally put me on the right track.”
“Good Lord!”
“Yes; I admit I was slow in the up-take, for the fact had been staring me in the face the whole time, and I never spotted it. You see, the key to the whole mystery was that there was asecondwoman in the library that night.”
“How on earth do you know that?” Alec asked in consternation.
“By the hair we found on the settee. I put it away in the envelope, you remember, and promptly forgot all about it, assuming it to have been one of Mrs. Plant’s. It struck me suddenly in the garden just now that it wasn’t anything of the sort; Mrs. Plant’s hair is very much darker. Of course that opened up an entirely new field for speculation.”
“Good Lord!”
“Yes, it is rather surprising, isn’t it?” Roger continued equably. “That set my brain galloping away like wildfire, I need hardly tell you; and five minutes later the whole thing became absolutely plain to me. I’m a little hazy about some of the details, of course, but the broad lines are clear enough.”
“You mean you guessed who the second woman was?”
“Hardly guessed. I knew at once who she must be.”
“Who?” Alec asked, with unconcealed eagerness.
“Wait a bit. I’m coming to that. Well, then I began to put two and two together. I’d got a pretty shrewd idea already of the personal appearance of the man himself.”
“Oh, it was a man then?”
“Yes, it was a man right enough. There was never any doubt that a man must have done the actual killing. No woman would have been strong enough for the struggle that must have taken place. Stanworth was no weakling, so that gives us the fact that the man must have been a strong, burly sort of person. From the footprint and the length of those strides across the bed he was evidently both tall and largely built; from the clever way in which everything was left he must have been possessed of a fund of cunning; from the manner in which he left that window fastened behind him it was clear that he was thoroughly accustomed to handling lattice windows. Well, what does all that give us? It looked obvious to me.”
Alec was staring intently at the speaker, following every word with eager attention. “I think I see what you’re getting at,” he said slowly.
“I thought you would,” said Roger cheerfully. “Of course there were other things that clinched it. The disappearance of that footprint, for instance. Thatmusthave been done by somebody who knew what he was doing. And somebody who heard me say that I was going to fit every male boot in the house into the mark, you remember. Of course it was that which made me so sure at first about Jefferson, because I jumped to the conclusion that it must have been Jefferson whom we saw edging out of the library door. After that I more or less had Jefferson on the brain.”
“I did my best to put you off that track,” said Alec with a slight smile.
“Oh, you did. It wasn’t your fault that I clung to him so persistently.”
“I tried hard to stop you putting your foot in it, if you remember.”
“I know. And I daresay it’s lucky you did. I might have put things a good deal more plainly to him, with extremely awkward results, if you hadn’t dinned it into me so hard.”
“Well,” Alec said slowly, “what are you going to do about it, now you’ve presumably got at the truth at last?”
“Do about it? Forget it, of course. I told you my views just now, when I said the man who killed Stanworth ought to be acclaimed as a public benefactor. As that is unfortunately out of the question, the next best thing is to forget as diligently as possible that Stanworth did not after all shoot himself, as everybody else believes.”
“Humph!” said Alec, gazing out of the window. “I wonder! You’re really sure of that?”
“Absolutely,” said Roger with decision. “Anything else would be ludicrous under the circumstances. We won’t discuss that side of it again.”
There was a little pause.
“The—the second woman,” Alec said tentatively. “How were you able to identify her so positively?”
Roger drew the envelope out of his breast pocket, opened it, and carefully extracted the hair. He laid it across his knee for the moment and contemplated it in silence. Then with a sudden movement he picked it up and threw it through the open window.
“There goes a vital piece of evidence,” he said with a smile. “Well, for one thing, there was nobody else in the house with just that particular shade of hair, was there?”
“I suppose not,” Alec replied.
There was another silence, rather longer this time.
Then Roger, glancing curiously across at his companion, remarked very airily:
“Just to satisfy my natural curiosity, Alec, why exactlydidyou kill Stanworth?”