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

"What?" Vardon certainly looked horrified, incredulous, amazement. "Mrs. Tangye buried?"

"Didn't you read of the case in the papers, sir?" Haviland asked. He pointed to one lying on the couch beside him. "Here's the whole story, and a bit more—for about the third time in The Flashlight."

Vardon snatched at it, and seemed to read it through breathlessly from beginning to end. It was an account of the funeral, and a last dishing up of the manner of her death.

"What an awful thing!" he dropped it to the floor and faced them with his eyes still distended. "I never even glanced at a sheet yesterday or to-day. Been too busy. And to think I heard the newsboys calling out 'Twickenham Inquest' yesterday, and never even stopped to buy a copy."

"Too busy?" Haviland repeated questioningly.

"I'm off to Patagonia day after to-morrow. Decided rather suddenly to return. Takes some work to get your things on board at such short notice."

Vardon picked up the paper again, and again seemed to read the column through, shaking his head here and there.

"What a shocking fatality! I must telephone at once—" he began. Then he seemed to really see the two strangers for the first time since one of them had handed him the paper.

"And may I ask to whom I'm talking? To what I owe this call?"

"It's about your ticket, sir." Haviland said slowly, "about one of the notes you paid for it. Where did you get them?"

"Is there something wrong with the notes? Do you mean that they're bad?" Vardon's face whitened. "Then I can't—what do you mean?" he finished hurriedly.

"Do you mind telling us where you got them? I'm afraid it's rather a serious business."

"In what way? Mrs. Tangye, the lady whose dreadful death is in that paper, gave me them last Tuesday afternoon—day before yesterday in my rooms at Fulham. The very afternoon on which it seems that she shot herself. She's backing me in a new venture of mine. But for God's sake, don't tell me these notes are no good! Why, I've cabled my partner! If I've let him in for—"

"They're genuine enough, as far as we know, sir. There's nothing of that kind the matter, I believe. Mrs. Tangye's executors couldn't account for their whereabouts, and we've been asked to trace them. I suppose you have some agreement, something in writing?"

"Naturally I have. I should rather think so! It's upstairs. I'll fetch it. I take it you are from her solicitors?"

"That's it, sir," Haviland nodded.

Left alone, the two police officers relaxed their tension. Vardon had made a good impression. Five minutes went by.

"Better go on up and lend a hand, Brown," Haviland suggested to the Inspector. "He looks to me like a chap who would need help with his packing."

A moment later a stony-faced Brown slipped in again, and holding the door shut behind him, gasped: "He's bolted!"

"Impossible!" Haviland sprinted up beside the other as though he had some infallible recipe for collecting the absent.

But Vardon had gone. He had walked out of the hotel immediately with his suitcase, nodded rather breathlessly to the hall porter, turned a corner, and vanished. As all rooms were pre-paid no one had spoken to him.

The two police officers said little. There are some things for which speech is too limited.

"He fits everything!" Haviland said tensely, as very white about the gills, he reported what had happened to Pointer later in the afternoon. Haviland had cause to look pale. Scotland Yard does not tolerate many blunders. But Pointer knew only one unpardonable offence. That was untrustworthiness.

"Yes, sir! He fits in right enough."

Haviland waited miserably for compliments on his brilliant handling of the case. None came.

"Shall I get out a warrant for his arrest?" he ventured to ask, very much doubting whether he would be entrusted with it. "Though he's sure to make for abroad. An artist must know many a port where he can lie hid. South America, too!"

There was still another painful point for Haviland to trot out.

"He owns some sort of a box-camera. So they told me at his rooms in Fulham. It isn't with the suitcase, nor yet with the luggage he's sent to the boat."

Pointer sat awhile thinking.

"Got your car below? Good. I'll speak to Wilmot over the 'phone," he did so, telling him briefly of what had happened, and asking him to wait for Haviland who would bring him back to the Yard in his police "non-stoppable."

When Wilmot arrived, Pointer suggested a line of action on the part of the newspaper man, to which Wilmot consented after a little pressing.

Then Pointer turned to Haviland, and sketched to that slowly-reviving officer, how and where the next step should be taken.

Pointer himself was just back not only from the "breakfast" but from Mrs. Tangye's funeral. It had been a more than usually melancholy affair. The knowledge that Scotland Yard was in some way concerning itself with her death made the wildest rumours run.

While there, however he had met a lady who had travelled up with Mrs. Tangye on her return from Tunbridge Wells. By chance getting into the same compartment at Ashford. She had found Mrs. Tangye suffering from a bad headache. Mrs. Tangye had referred to the orchids, and said that the heat had been too much for her. She had sat with closed eyes apparently suffering very much, till they reached town, where she had refused her companion's offer of a lift in her car, and had taken a taxi.

So Pointer's doubts were solved as to whether whatever it was that had caused what he called the cleavage in Mrs. Tangye's life, had taken place at or after Tunbridge.

If it had taken place on Sunday at all, it had apparently been while with Miss Eden.

Pointer's eyes were on that young woman a good deal during the funeral. She avoided Tangye. He avoided her.

At the funeral too, Pointer had met Philpotts the Rugby farmer. He looked an honest, elderly man. Philpotts scoffed at the idea of Mrs. Tangye having had any intention of going where pounds, shillings, or even pence, mean nothing.

"She gave way on the fences, but she stuck to her point about the timber," he repeated several times, half admiringly, half grudgingly. Pointer had brought the talk around again to Mrs. Tangye. The farmer's knowledge of her early days added nothing new, any more than did his few recollections of her cousin. Philpotts's own alibi of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, which Pointer obtained by many indirect turns of the talk, was unverifiable.

Sunday afternoon he claimed to have spent with his wife in Westminster Abbey. The same time on Monday had been earmarked for the National Gallery, and Tuesday, after four, had seen them either gazing at the shops, or in one of the large tea-rooms where identification is impossible.

"It's queer," Pointer said now, when talking him over with Haviland and Wilmot, after he had finished detailing his plan about Vardon, "how few of the people connected with Mrs. Tangye can be located last Tuesday between four and six. Mrs. Bligh, is so far, the sole person who is definitely vouched for by several, unbiased, witnesses. She really did play bridge at her club from before four until after six."

"What would you have?" Wilmot asked raising an eyebrow. "How many more points do you want to prove that there's no crime here? By the way, how about the man you sent down to Tunbridge with the family portrait-album?"

"Which unfortunately did not contain a picture of Oliver Headly. There seems to be none extant of him. But Watts has just reported. No one in the show itself can identify any of the faces. There was a huge crowd on Sunday. Some minor royalty present. But outside, just by the gates, he found a tobacconist who recognised Tangye as having bought a box of vestas from him in the early afternoon last Sunday. That's our only haul."