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

"I know. Don't you worry, Miss West. You let Carter take you home and sleep this off till he calls for you in the morning."

"But Mrs. Erskine—those horrible men—Mrs. Erskine—"

"She's quite safe now. Watts is in the cabin. I shall stay with her, and when Carter has seen you safely into Madame Secret's hands at my hotel—she's plenty of empty rooms—he'll join me, and between us Mrs. Erskine will be well taken care of, don't you think so yourself?"

Christine could not think yet. Her mind could only give out the impressions made on it while it was still working normally before she had taken the drug. She drank some more coffee at Carter's urgence.

"Are we making for Californie? Surely we ought to be there by now."

"Californie, eh? Why Californie?" asked Pointer.

"Mrs. Erskine's friend—no, not a friend,—a man she knows—a detective—lives there. We're taking Rob's letter to him—he's very clever, or something..."

"You found Robert Erskine's letter when you went to tea at the villa, didn't you?"

In vain Carter gave the Chief Inspector a look not to worry Christine just now. Pointer thought it did her as much good to exercise her brains as her lungs, once he saw that she was physically up to the exertion.

"Yes. Has she told you? Oh, thank Heaven you both came."

Carter could keep silence no longer.

"Christine, darling, who gave you that stuff to drink?"

"I didn't drink it. She moved her arm as though it pained her. I—"

"What happened when you got back at seven?" asked Pointer.

Christine struggled bravely to answer, and what with the coffee and brandy, and her own desire to speak, the effort grew easier after the first broken gasps.

"At seven? Oh, yes, something had upset the household. There didn't seem to be any servants—we had to wait on ourselves—and when we got to the garage Pierre wasn't there—Mrs. Erskine had counted on getting away unnoticed—by ourselves. But Mr. Clark heard us talking and dragged it out of her that we were off for Californie. So he insisted on our letting him drive us there down to a launch his wife and the major were waiting in and going to Californie by water. I felt horrid when I stepped on board. If only I could have drawn back I would, but I couldn't leave Mrs. Erskine. Besides, I wanted to see the affair cleared up as much as she did, only I sure hated coming on this yacht. I leant over the rails here and refused to go into the cabin where the others went to play bridge. I seemed to suddenly see us two or perhaps three—I don't know about Mrs. Clark—I wondered what sort of people they all really were, for I felt that Mrs. Erskine distrusted them, too, since she knew about those letters. I began to think about Rob. Next Mr. Clark came away from the engine over there and the major came out of the cabin. They stood on both sides of me, and Mr. Clark made some remark about the view. And all of a sudden I felt frightened. Jack, what I would have given to have had you there!"—Jack pressed her arm—"I stepped back from between them, but Mr. Clark—to think that I used to rather like him—caught me and held me tight while the major ran something hard into my arm. It hurt frightfully, but Mr. Clark held me with my face pressed right into his shoulder so that I couldn't make a sound, and when he left me go and went to the engine again, the major stood in front of me and laughed."

"He won't laugh next time he sees you, and as for Clark—" Carter spoke slowly between his teeth.

"I thought of Mrs. Erskine alone in the cabin—and of her revolver. I got into the cabin somehow, though my feet seemed to be made of lead, I remember her helping me to a chair, and asking what was the matter, and the next thing I heard was your voice, Jack, from miles and miles away calling to me."

Pointer thoughtfully stepped away for a moment to glance into the cabin. Mrs. Erskine, whose eyes were half open, made him a feeble sign, but he only shook his head with a gesture that implied there was no hurry, and made Christine go over the details of the afternoon again.

At the landing stage Watts helped Mrs. Erskine into a taxi, and drove her off to the villa. Pointer himself, Mrs. Clark, and the men of the party walking to the police station close at hand, while Carter took Christine to the Chief Inspector's hotel, where a sympathetic maid and landlady diagnosed her case as an attack of seasickness and helped her to bed. Carter left her door reluctantly, he would have liked to stand on guard all night after what had so nearly happened, but a confidence in Pointer was beginning to reassure him where it was a question of that police-officer's orders. At the villa he found the servants flitting uneasily about, like bats. They connected all these strange goings on with the loss of the emerald pendant and were in secret mutiny. Carter was asked to join Monsieur Pointer in the drawing-room, where he found only Mrs. Erskine lying on the chaise-lounge looking very ill, and Watts.

Pointer was just laying down a packet of legal-looking papers on the table beside her.

"Here they are. Will-forms taken from the major's pocket. If you don't understand their significance, Madame; but I see you do"—for Mrs. Erskine was staring with dilated eyes at them. "It would have taken some persuasion doubtless to make you sign away your fortune to any one of your three friends, but—as I think you know—they would have ways of persuading you, and whether the will would have been valid wouldn't have interested you, once you had followed Miss West to the bottom of the Mediterranean. It would have been so easy to connect the two 'accidents.' Miss West overbalanced, and you falling over in an effort to save her. True, your friends might have had a few awkward questions to answer; but, after all, the French courts will decide on the question of the attempted murder of Miss West, that's none of my business for the moment." Pointer took a step forward—"This is my real reason for being here tonight. Janet Fraser, you are detained, pending an extradition order, for the murder of Robert Erskine, and for the embezzlement of the Erskine funds under false pretenses for over seventeen years. It's my..."

There was a shriek from the woman to whom he was speaking. She sprang to her feet and looked around her as if demented, as indeed she was by the shock—for the moment.

"The devils! They've sold me! After all the money they've squeezed from me they've sold me in the end. Sold me!"

She screeched, arching her back and advancing in a horribly feline sidle.

"What else did you expect?" Pointer asked imperturbably. "But it's my duty to warn you that anything you say may be used against you."

"My God, Mrs. Erskine!" Watts murmured, while Carter felt as though the solid floor had opened under his feet.

The woman sank back on the sofa, and struggled for self-possession. "I'm drugged—I don't know what I'm saying—I drank some morphia—we all did—just to taste it for once, you know"—she was mouthing and grinning horribly—"and it's quite taken my senses away."

"Neither you nor Mrs. Clark got much of the stuff into your systems," Pointer said in his hard official voice; "when you two heard me on deck you each jabbed a needleful into your arms, but half of it came out again. Your wrists were all wet to the touch."

Yet as a matter of fact it was just this small amount of morphia, irritating instead of calming as a larger dose would have been, which had thrown and was throwing off its balance the cold, calculating brain of the woman whom Pointer knew was not Mrs. Erskine.

"I don't know what you're talking about." She tried again to steady her flighty wits. "Ask Mr. Russell who I am."

Carter, who was listening still as a man in a dream, saw now why the Chief Inspector had begun as he did. He had thrown the woman off her guard by fear and rage. Unstrung by the growing strain of the investigation into Robert Erskine's murder, by the morphia taken, by the revelation of how near she herself had been to the end of all things at the hands of her accomplices, she could not recover her poise, try for it as she might. Like some tight-rope walker over an abyss, she made a desperate effort to save herself even when she was already all but falling headlong. "Mr. Russell met me scores of times before my husband's death as well as since."