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

Pointer tapped the paper thoughtfully.

It was witnessed by one, Edmund Stone, stationer, of 10 River Road, Twickenham, and Robert Murray, assistant, at the same address.

The date was last Monday. Monday! The day before the one on which Mrs. Tangye had a fatal accident, said the coroner. Committed suicide, said Tangye and Wilmot. Been murdered, said Pointer.

The Chief Inspector replaced the envelope, and sat on, staring at his patent tips that winked back at him as though they could tell him a great joke if they would. But what Pointer already knew was sufficient to keep his thoughts occupied.

No wonder the artist was nervous lest this paper should fall into the hands of the police. Here was motive, and motive sufficient some might say. Vardon, the sole legatee—fitted every step of the way now, if his story of Mrs. Tangye's visit were false—except the entrance by the French windows.

There, like some cabalistic Sign of Protection, stood the big question mark, raised by Pointer's own theory of the crime.

So long as he could not be linked with that, so long as no reason showed itself why Mrs. Tangye should have arranged for him to come secretly, Vardon could not be considered more suspect than Miss Saunders, nor than Tangye, supposing the husband to have used another man as his tool.

It was possible, quite possible, that Haviland was right, that Mrs. Tangye had been preparing to go to Patagonia with Philip Vardon, but if so, if Vardon were the criminal, then some strange reason lay behind the murder which had not been even guessed at yet. Of that the Chief Inspector felt assured. Before arresting the artist, Pointer intended to be absolutely certain of his guilt. The odds were too enormously against Vardon to permit of any other course. Here was no case of a man refusing to explain. Whether true ones, or false ones, he had a reply to every question.

Pointer gave his head an impatient shake. He wanted something that could connect up with those footsteps heard in the garden, walking stealthily behind Mrs. Tangye, stopped by, fearful of, the light.

Those footsteps still belonged to no one. Disembodied, Pointer heard them day and night. Whose were they? Vardon's? The husband's? Oliver Headly's? Or those of some still unknown, unsuspected person, some tremendously important person in Mrs. Tangye's life? They might still be anybody's. They still lay in the no-man's land between all the events.

Pointer's thoughts turned back to the will itself. The absolute deletion of her husband's name as a beneficiary, and yet the request at the foot about not withdrawing the money from his firm immediately. That little note was stranger than the will itself, Pointer thought. Supposing the latter to be genuine. He could imagine a woman leaving her fortune away from a husband with whom she had cause to be angry, with whom she was about to have a furious quarrel, but in that case, why the apparent unwillingness to inconvenience him unduly? That did not look like blind rage.

A new thought stirred in the great detective's mind. He put it on one side for the moment, and concentrated on Vardon, and Vardon's rooms last Tuesday evening.

What of him and Miss Saunders? Supposing that the evidence Pointer had just gleaned had been accurate, she had been at Fulham about eight last Tuesday evening. In other words, as soon as she could get there after the police had left Riverview. She had apparently not gone upstairs, but some one had run down and driven off with her.

Pointer called in his thoughts, which were racing too far away on a breast-high scent, and turned his car towards the stationer's, where the will form had been possibly bought, where at all events, it appeared to have been witnessed.

Table of Contents

POINTER stopped his car at the stationer's in Victoria Road. He produced his official card. Mr. Stone showed him into a little back parlour with outward calm and some inward trepidation.

He was thinking of sundry half-crowns on "certs" that came and went—chiefly went, on most days of the racing year. But Pointer was affability itself. Did Stone remember any one calling at his shop last Monday, and buying a will-form?

Stone heaved a sigh of relief. He remembered the lady perfectly. Mrs. Tangye it was, "as shot herself by accident the day afterwards." She had come in to ask where the nearest agent for Carter Patterson's could be found. He had pointed out the shop further down.

Looking around her, with the patently amiable intention of buying something, she had picked up a will-form from a pile by the door.

"Will-forms!..." The idea had seemed to go home. She had read the printed paper through, and stood a moment, as though thinking. Stone had been called to another part of the shop to help his assistant hold his own in a wordy dispute about some weekly payment, and forgot the lady. The argument was a long one, necessitating much searching of ledgers. When it was over, he saw the lady seated on a chair writing on the bottom of one of the forms. She covered what she had written with a sheet of blotting-paper and asked him and his assistant, now alone in the shop, to witness her signature, saying that what she was signing was her last will and testament. They witnessed for her, and received what Mr. Stone considered a very handsome payment for the trouble. He saw her slip the will into an envelope which she bought from him, and, after a moment's hesitation, address it to the Registrar of Wills, Somerset House, before folding it up unfastened, and putting it into her hand-bag.

His identification of the lady as Mrs. Tangye was fairly satisfactory. He had only seen her in a dusky shop, in her hat, but he remembered her name perfectly. He had remembered it when he read of her death in the paper.

"Some people say it's all nonsense about being bad luck to make your will. I dunno. My brother made his will and died the same year. And look at this case! Still of course if you mess about with loaded firearms—will or no will—you're likely to end up sudden."

Pointer saw that the man was under the honest impression, as was his assistant, that it was this will which had been referred to at the inquest. The Chief Inspector drove on his way again with another little brick added to his pile.

"'Unless Charles Tangye should pre-decease Philip Vardon,'" Wilmot read aloud again. "M-m."

"Just so," Pointer agreed, "not so much look of suicide about that proviso as there might be, eh?"

Wilmot re-fixed his eye-glass.

"Why so? My Company claims that Mrs. Tangye was staging an accident effect. This was part of the pasteboard scenery. To make a will, and then shoot herself, would look a bit obvious. That proviso is merely a stage-direction. Nothing more. And there's another thing," Wilmot went on in a thoughtful tone, "this paper knocks your idea of a romantic visitor on the head. Where's any mention in it of the chap with whom you thought she was about to decamp? Of the 'footsteps that stopped,' in other words?"

"Why, he's the only one mentioned!" Haviland struck in, "Vardon, in fact. He's deluded her into leaving him all her money, and he gets rid of her before she can spoil his plan of marrying Miss Ash."

Wilmot had to allow that this was possible.

"I wonder where Tangye comes into this." Wilmot screwed up his eyes, thinking hard. "If a crime, if, mark you both! mark you both! I have a strong inward feeling that in some way he and that woman—" he broke off and finished his cigarette in silence. "I should think this will may be a blow to him," he began again. "Cheale writes me that Tangye's hard hit by the Irish failure. That there were large commitments left on his hands."

"Tangye—Vardon. Vardon—Tangye," Haviland murmured. "And just a bit of Oliver Headly thrown in. They sort of swing to and fro. And Miss Saunders now with one, now with the other." Haviland had been puffing finger-print powder over the will. He shook it off, and then compared the result with his photographs of prints belonging to the "circle."