Dorothy Fielding - Chief Inspector Pointer's Cases - 12 Golden Age Murder Mysteries

Mrs. Tangye seemed to have done some quick work on her return from Tunbridge Wells. Monday must have been a full day. Items:

Trunk packed, and sent off.

Husband quarrelled with, and apparently sent off too. Temporarily at least.

Will sent for.

There was a precipitancy, an urgency, about her actions which had struck him from the first.

He found Mary Eden, the friend with whom Mrs. Tangye seemed to have spent this last Sunday afternoon which the Chief Inspector thought so important, to be a quiet young woman of around thirty. She looked very self-possessed. He also thought that she looked as though she were steeling herself for an ordeal, as she turned towards him when he was shown into the drawing-room of her flat.

As for Miss Eden, the Chief Inspector was a surprise to her. In his quiet manner. In the kind of good looks which nature had given him. He did not resemble in the least the Scotland Yard detectives of fiction, she thought. He reminded her a little of her brother, the finest amateur cricketer in England. Such splendid physical fitness generally meant a brain to match in her opinion, and always meant tireless energy.

Something in her glance made Pointer think—and rightly—that she regretted having given him the interview at all.

"I hope you won't think me troublesome when I ask—in Mr. Wilmot's stead—to see the letter that Mrs. Tangye wrote you after her return from Tunbridge," was Pointer's opening.

The hazel eyes fixed on his did not waver. Rather they steadied.

"Letter?" Pointer had an impression that Miss Eden would have liked to tell a lie, but either dared not, or would not.

"Just so. We know she sent you one," bluffed Pointer. There was a pause. Miss Eden turned her face still more away from him.

"I'm afraid I didn't keep it. But I'll look for it afterwards, if you like, and send it on to Mr. Wilmot. I see his address is here—"

Pointer had used Wilmot's card with a pencilled line introducing himself only by name.

"Why does he wish to see it?"

"I believe the Insurance Company want to be sure of the hour when it was posted." He explained vaguely. "When did you receive it?"

"By the first post Monday morning," she said, after a slight pause.

That was what Pointer would have expected had any such shock taken place at Tunbridge as would adequately explain Mrs. Tangye's action of Monday and Tuesday. Judging by her appearance, she was not a woman to take counsel about her actions, he thought. He would expect her to make up her mind as to what she would do on the way back from Kent, write about it to her friend—for Miss Eden was a very close friend, all the reports showed—and then act on her own initiative.

He looked at Miss Eden with that quiet, pleasant glance of his that seemed to see so little, and saw so much.

She was on the alert now for questions about that letter. He knew as well as though he could read her mind that every defence was up, plenty of rounds ready, and no possibility of getting past her unnoticed. She had been taken by surprise when he had opened with the letter. But she was ready now. So that, throughout the rest of the interview he learnt nothing but the barest of facts. That Mrs. Tangye had arrived for lunch. That the two had gone to the orchid-show about three and left at five.

"Did you meet any one you knew down there?"

"Mrs. Tangye has no friends down there, and I know very few people in Tunbridge," was the evasive reply.

"But Mrs. Tangye was seen with—" Pointer spoke hesitatingly. "Perhaps she wasn't with you all the time," he added as a bright afterthought.

"All the time," Miss Eden said in a low voice. She was an exceedingly poor liar.

There was a short silence.

"Did she enjoy the show?"

"Not very much," Miss Eden spoke slowly, "it gave her a headache. Glasshouses are stuffy things at best, aren't they? Perhaps she got overtired." Her lip quivered as she finished.

"Oh? Wilmot thought you walked to the station afterwards?"

Again there came a little pause, then, "Mrs. Tangye fancied the air would do her headache good. So I told the car to go on to the station and wait for me there."

"Enclosed car?"

Miss Eden nodded.

"Partition between the driver and the other seats?"

Miss Eden's eyes darkened. After a second she said briefly, "No. But really these questions seem to me rather wide of the mark..."

"Just part of the regular routine. Mr. Wilmot wants me to cover as large an amount of obvious ground as possible," Pointer reassured her. Asked about Oliver Headly, she relaxed for the first time. She grew natural. She had never liked Oliver, she said at once. His was one of those rare natures which, even when quite young, showed no trace of softness, of any thing but self-seeking.

She thought that his cousin had not heard from him since he left England years ago. She agreed, however, that, in spite of everything, a certain amount of family feeling for her only relative might have remained in Mrs. Tangye's heart.

Pointer seemed very interested in getting a description of Oliver. He listened closely though apparently casually. "Striking appearance? Easy to recognise again if one met him suddenly?"

"Oh, unmistakable. But we think he must have died abroad—after all these years without a sign of life."

Miss Eden looked at the clock.

"What would you say was the most outstanding characteristic of Mrs. Tangye? Of her attitude to life I mean?" Pointer asked thoughtfully.

Miss Eden pondered.

"She had so many all about equal qualities," she murmured. "There was pride—the right kind of pride which one might call self-respect. And there was directness—she was a very direct woman. There was a way she had of dwelling on the past...Once she had lost a thing, she valued it higher than anything she owned; but, otherwise her's was a strong character."

And on that the interview ended.

Pointer had a most useful, though bulky, stud on one of the gloves which he never wore. Properly handled, it yielded a roll of tiny films the size of a pea, which could be enlarged into very useful portraits. Armed with these one of his detective-inspectors would be able to comb the show early to-morrow, and also the town. On Tuesday afternoon Mrs. Bligh was supposed to have been at her club. A woman detective was sent to try that out, by means of a bribe, and a substituted waitress.

Pointer drove off, feeling that to-morrow should bring some useful facts to light. But facts alone never solved any puzzle.

He ran over the events chronologically as he made for his rooms.

Friday night, Mr. and Mrs. Tangye had been at a dinner and a dance. Both apparently on the best of terms with the world and each other. Saturday morning all went as usual. In the afternoon Mrs. Tangye had attended a matinee with friends and gone on to a cheerful tea. Tangye had left about ten in the morning for his Norfolk week-end. Pointer had called up his host over the telephone, and had been told that the stockbroker had spent all the time shooting wildfowl, until he left after lunch on Monday. Yet Tangye only owned two suitable guns, and neither of them had been taken down from their rack in his den. The dust on them had told Pointer as much, and the answers by the maids to a casually put question of his had proved it.

The Chief Inspector considered the visit to Norfolk as very hypothetical. Yet Tangye's friends were standing behind him solidly. And they were all men of good position. Here was no criminal clique. Pointer thought that if they backed his story up as they had done, it was because they knew quite well that he had spent the week-end, or at least, some of it, in company with a lady. With Mrs. Bligh probably. With the writer of that note—possibly—that Olive had seen Mrs. Tangye reading.