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

"You're one of the brass-hats at Scotland Yard, they tell me," he spoke uneasily, "you chaps take crimes rather for granted. Crimes and criminals."

"Not in this case. Unless I miss my guess, we've here as clever a criminal as I've yet encountered. I need every particle of help that can be given me. If I waste my time over innocent people the real culprit may get away. Now I read—well—many things into that will. And I ask you again, was there nothing known to you in her past which Mrs. Tangye wished kept a secret?"

Vardon hesitated.

Pointer went on, "I never met her alive, but if I know anything of faces, the last thing Mrs. Tangye would have wanted would be for her murderer to get off."

"And the last thing I or any one would want. But you must be mistaken for once, Chief Inspector. You must be! Who would murder Mrs. Tangye? Tangye has been here—as you, of course, know. He tells me there's nothing missing. With the fifteen hundred pounds loaned me, every farthing's accounted for. Then why on earth should any one kill her?"

"We have our own ideas on that." At least Pointer was beginning to have the glimmering of one since reading that will. "Then at most, Mrs. Tangye only referred to that draft of a will made by her former husband,—by Branscombe,—in his last night? The draft which she burnt?"

Vardon's look of bewilderment was almost comic.

"How the dickens—how the dickens did you learn of that?"

"Routine work. But, frankly, was that the screw you intended to turn—on Mrs. Tangye?"

Vardon's face flamed.

"Ghastly expression to've used. But—well, it was. You see, my grandmother—Clive Branscombe's grandmother, too—was a Vardon. She used to always say that the land she had brought the Branscombes was to come back to us Vardons ultimately. Sir Richard Ash, Branscombe's partner, nearly got my cousin to make a will to that effect once. But Clive put it off—until he tried to draft it again, too late. As you've learnt in some miraculous way. I thought there was no one alive now who knew of that incident."

"And didn't she ask you on Tuesday not to speak of it?"

"Yes. She asked me to forgive and forget what had happened after Clive's death, and she said something which is rather terrible. In the light of what happened. 'You'll find it'll all come right—and very speedily.'"

That last was one to Wilmot, Pointer thought as he hurried off. His next interview was with Tangye. He wondered how the stockbroker would take the news of a later, altered will.

Tangye almost leaped to his feet when Pointer told him briefly that in the course of some routine work, a will of Mrs. Tangye's had been found, dated last Tuesday, leaving everything of which she should die possessed to Vardon.

"Vardon! Impossible!" he said again, as he had said before, but with a very different intonation. "Preposterous! I shall fight it! I deny its genuiness. Mrs. Tangye repeatedly told me that the money invested in the firm was to be mine on her death."

But the surprise he tried to put into his voice did not carry conviction to Pointer.

Pointer had only handed him a photographic copy. The photograph itself had been carefully locked up at Scotland Yard.

Tangye flung it on the table.

"I don't take back a word of what I said. Truth is truth. My wife told me she intended to commit suicide. You find her shot, with the revolver beneath her hand that fired the bullet. No struggle. No hint of foul play..."

"There are hints of it," Pointer put in quietly, "only hints, it's true."

"Because I don't think he killed my wife, doesn't mean that I intend to sit still and see Vardon sweep the board clean. Right's right. But one man's wrong is no man's right." Tangye was getting incoherent. "The land yes. If my wife sold a farm, and chose to let him have the money, that's nothing to me, once I know where the money was, but it was agreed, when we married, that her ten thousand—" he was off again.

Pointer had to interrupt the tenth rendering of the same motive to take his leave.

He slipped into the morning-room where Miss Saunders was generally to be found. Just now she was standing looking up at a large portrait of Mrs. Tangye on the wall. A very recent addition to the room.

"I had the enlargement done in Bond Street. Rather good, don't you think?" she asked Pointer. Without waiting for a reply she went on, "I think her picture should be about the house. I like to see it."

Anything smugger than her tone could not be imagined. Finally she took her eyes away with an almost visible effort.

"Has anything fresh turned up, Mr. Chief Inspector?"

"Yes. We've found another will of Mrs. Tangye's. Later than the one read at the inquest. Leaving everything to Mr. Vardon."

She stared at him a moment in silence. Then, compressing her lips, she swept the mantelpiece with the edge of her cupped hand.

"Leaving everything?" she finally asked.

He nodded.

"Genuine?"

"Mr. Tangye thinks not."

"But you?" she gave him a piercing look.

"We see no reason to doubt it, so far."

She made no comment. Turning, she left the room, apparently lost in thought.

Pointer went for a walk in the old Deer Park. It was a sunny afternoon; the elms and larches showing gold under a cloudless sky. There was a buoyant pulse in the wind and sun. The air on his face brought with it smells of frost, of oak leaves, of wet soil under some southern wall, of a belt of spruce to windward.

Blue was the sky overhead, blue the wet ruts underfoot, against the yellow litter of leaves on the ground. Pointer smoked and meditated. His thoughts on Tangye and Vardon first of all.

Miss Saunders, judging from her question to the stranger entering the chambers, had seemed to think that the stockbroker was having a talk with Vardon, but Tangye and Miss Saunders were by no means in each other's complete confidence.

But supposing that Mrs. Tangye's husband had been in the artist's rooms last Tuesday, what would have taken him there? Within an hour or two of his wife's terrible death.

Did Tangye know of that gift of the money—or of the will? Had he come to search the artist's rooms for them? A few discreet questions had told Pointer that Vardon was quite unaware of any search among his effects, and nothing is harder, to an amateur, than to hunt through another person's belongings and leave them as they were.

Still it was possible that the motive which had brought Tangye to the rooms, supposing him to have come, was connected with his wife's visit only a few hours before. But he had apparently taken Miss Saunders there. It might be therefore, that what he had wanted was a necessity, was a step, in somethng which he and she were to proceed to do together.

It was, of course, quite easy to disbelieve Vardon's story, and see in him the man who had joined the waiting woman and driven off. But though Pointer did not distrust simple explanations, he generally tried to make sure that no other ones were possible, before accepting them.

One thing was certain. If Tangye had left the keys on Vardon's table, he had done so unintentionally. His quick confession, or at any rate, his effort to exculpate Vardon as soon as he heard that one of the notes had been traced to the artist, showed that he was not trying to fasten any guilt on the other man. That, too, was evidently the last thing desired by Miss Saunders, but in her case, if she had made a bargain with Tangye, naturally she would not want her purchased help to seem unneeded.

Vardon's room—Mrs. Tangye's keys—Tangye—Pointer's thoughts passed on to the will. And to the new and startling idea it had given him.

Suddenly he came upon Barbara, a couple of irons under her arm, on her way home from the links. She looked careworn, he thought.

"Suppose we exchange news." He fell into step beside her in obedience to a gesture.