Annie Haynes - Inspector Stoddart's Murder Mysteries (4 Intriguing Golden Age Thrillers)

"Because Miss Lavinia Priestley saw the body in the chair through this window before Mr. Wilton broke in," the detective went on. "Yes, I think I can see how it was managed. But could it have been accidental? It does not look to me as if it could be. But I will just take a glance at it from the outside."

Sir Felix Skrine appeared about to speak, but the detective did not wait to hear what he had to say.

Skrine did not attempt to follow him into the garden. He waited beside his dead friend's chair, the horror and pity in his eyes deepening. Presently Stoddart came back.

"Yes; quite easy to see what they said they did," he remarked. "But I wonder who wanted to look through. That girl who was the first to say Dr. Bastow was in his chair?"

"What girl? Whom are you speaking of?" Sir Felix questioned.

"The parlourmaid," the detective answered, still looking at his spy-hole among the curtains. "She went round to the garden window when they found both doors locked and told them the doctor was in the chair. The question to my mind is, did she know she could see into the room, or was it just guess-work?"

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"Yes, the inquest is to be opened tomorrow," Miss Lavinia said tartly. "Today this detective seems to be holding a sort of Grand Inquisition of his own. For my part I shouldn't have thought such a thing was legal in England, which we used to be told was a free country, though I am sure I don't know what we are coming to."

Skrine's troubled face relaxed into a smile.

"Why should this man be allowed to treat the house as if it belonged to him?" she continued crossly. "There he sits at a table in the morning-room, his papers all spread out—ruining the polish, of course, but that is a detail—and there we have to go in to him one by one like schoolchildren and tell him what we know of last night's doings. He wouldn't even have Hilary and me in together. As if we should be likely to tell him lies."

"It is the rule," Sir Felix remarked mildly, "for the witnesses to give their evidence separately, or rather I should say the statements upon which they will be examined later on."

"I call it a ridiculous proceeding," Miss Lavinia said, turning her shoulder on him. "The servants are going in now like the animals into the Ark, only one by one instead of two by two. Of course they resent it! I don't wonder that one of them has run away."

Sir Felix pricked up his ears.

"Has one of them run away? I didn't know."

"None of us did know until just now," Miss Lavinia went on testily. "Till she was rung for and didn't arrive to answer the bell and couldn't be found. It seems she was one this officious policeman particularly wanted too. Should have taken care to have had her looked after better, I say."

"But the doors are all guarded," Sir Felix said in a puzzled tone.

Miss Lavinia snapped her fingers.

"That for your noodles of policemen. The girl put on her best clothes and walked out of the front door. The man spoke to her and she said she was a friend who had been staying the night with Miss Bastow. Your brilliant policeman beckoned a taxi and held the door open for her politely. What do you think of that?" Apparently Sir Felix Skrine did not think anything of it—apparently he was not paying any attention to Miss Lavinia's remarks. His eyes, straying over the garden, had focused themselves on the gate—the gate through which the murderer must have come.

Miss Lavinia looked at him impatiently.

"I see you haven't lost your old trick of day-dreaming, Sir Felix."

Sir Felix awoke from his abstraction with a start.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Priestley. You were speaking of the missing maidservant—is it the parlourmaid?"

"Yes, it is the parlourmaid," returned Miss Lavinia irritably. "Though why you should pitch on her I don't know. A forward-looking minx she was! Calling herself Mary Ann Taylor, which I don't believe was her name any more than it is mine. I'm not at all sure I haven't seen her somewhere before, but I can't remember where."

"She was a very good-looking woman," Sir Felix said dreamily.

Miss Lavinia opened her eyes.

"You don't mean to say that you have noticed that! I am sure I never gave you credit for even knowing that such people as parlourmaids existed. But there! It's no use deluding oneself with the idea that any man, monk or dreamer or what not, does not keep his eyes open for a pretty face."

Sir Felix did not look quite pleased.

"How is Hilary now?"

"As well as she is likely to be after having her father murdered last night, and having been catechized for goodness knows how long by a brute of a detective this morning," Miss Lavinia retorted. "At the present moment she is in the drawing-room, being consoled by her young man I presume, till his turn comes to go in."

Sir Felix frowned.

"Do you mean Wilton?"

Miss Lavinia stared at him.

"Well, of course. Anybody can see they are head over ears in love with one another."

"A boy and girl affair," Sir Felix said impatiently.

"Boys and girls know their own minds nowadays," was Miss Lavinia's conclusion.

Meanwhile in the morning-room Detective Inspector Stoddart was turning papers over impatiently. Matters were not going quite to Inspector Stoddart's liking. So far his examination of the household had not elucidated the mystery surrounding Dr. John Bastow's death at all. And yet the detective had the strongest instinct or presentiment, whatever you may like to call it, that the clue which would eventually lead him through the labyrinth was to be found amongst them.

At last, pushing the papers from him impatiently, he walked to the door.

"Jones, ask Mr. Wilton to step this way."

The policeman saluted and went off; in another minute Basil Wilton appeared.

"You want to take my statement, I understand, inspector?"

The inspector frowned.

"Yes. Rather an important one, in view of the fact that you were the last person to see the late Dr. Bastow alive."

"You are forgetting the murderer, aren't you?" Wilton questioned with a wry smile.

"I should have said the last person known to have seen the late Dr. Bastow alive," the inspector corrected himself. "I shall be glad to hear your account of that interview if you please, Mr. Wilton."

"It was short and not particularly agreeable," Wilton told him in as calm and unemotional a tone as if he had no idea how terribly the statement might tell against him in the detective's eyes. "Dr. Bastow gave me notice."

"On what ground?" The inspector's tone was stern.

Wilton paused a moment before replying.

"I cannot tell you," he said at last.

The inspector made a note in the book in front of him.

"I should advise you to reconsider that answer, Mr. Wilton."

There was silence again for a minute, and then Wilton spoke slowly:

"Well, I expect I may as well make a clean breast of it. I had proposed to Miss Bastow, and the doctor objected. My dismissal followed as a matter of course."

"Hm!"

The detective glanced through his notes. That Wilton should be angry at the rejection of his advances to the doctor's daughter and also at his dismissal was natural enough, but his anger would scarcely carry him so far as the shooting of her father. He scratched the side of his nose reflectively with the end of his fountain pen.

"How did you leave the doctor?"

"Just as usual. He was sitting in the chair in which he was found—later. As I went towards the door he made a few technical remarks about a case I was attending. Afterwards I was called out, and was away about an hour."

"Then—you found the body, I think?"

"Yes. I forced the window and got into the room," Wilton assented. "But the parlourmaid, Taylor, had previously told us that she had looked through a hole in the curtain and had seen the doctor sitting in his chair in an odd, huddled-up position. So she may be termed the first who saw the body."