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

"I pointed out that as she and the maid had both been in the room, I might be permitted a look at the lady. Possibly something could be done of after all. She nodded towards a door. I opened it, and stepped in. I heard her ring up the police station as I did so. There, beside a tea-table in a deep recess, sat a handsome, well-dressed woman with her head sunk on her breast. She looked about thirty. She was quite dead. Her cheek, which I took care to do no more than touch, was icy. A revolver..." He proceeded to describe what he had seen:

"While I was making my notes, the Superintendent arrived. He—"

"Many thanks." Pointer held out his hand. "If anything turns up that the papers can be usefully told, you shall have the first hint. And now—sorry, you know, but police-routine—"

Newnes made no protest. In a large town, a man is a reporter, not by the grace of God, but of the police.

Wilmot came under quite another heading. His discretion, like his position, was not a mere promise, but a well established fact. For several years, he and his articles had been the helpers of the law. For Wilmot was that much abused definition, a criminologist. And a great one.

"The ploughman homewards plods his weary way." He watched from the window Newnes' reluctant turning of the corner. "And now, may merely mortal man inquire what has brought one of the Big Four of the New Scotland Yard upon the scene?"

Pointer drew out his pipe. "When there's anything odd about the actions of three people connected with a case in town which ends in a death, or rather begins in one, some man from the Yard is sure to drop in sooner or later. Merely as a matter of routine."

"Odd about three people, sir?" Haviland repeated aghast.

"Let me see," Wilmot murmured. He loved riddles. "There's Mrs. Tangye for one of course. She didn't shoot herself every day to be sure. But the other two?"

"There's her companion," Pointer said tranquilly.

"Whom you credit with occult powers. A fashionable but quite unexpected attitude."

"How else was this Miss Saunders able to tell so quickly, and so certainly that her employer was dead?" The Chief Inspector filled his pipe, while Haviland listened spellbound. "As the evidence stands, Miss Saunders says that she had barely got back, and was taking off her things in her room upstairs when she heard the maid call out. That, mind you, is the first sign she had that anything was wrong in the house. Now, the parlour-maid says that after one shriek—when she found her mistress sitting cold and still in her chair—she darted from the house in a blind panic. Your Mr. Newnes, who strikes me as an accurate observer, and is, of course, trained to notice carefully, says that he saw Miss Saunders standing in the doorway—already certain, that Mrs. Tangye is dead—when the maid rushes towards him. The maid screams for help. She's natural, however incoherent. The companion composedly tells him there's nothing to be done. If she really only came out of her room when she heard the girl below, it's not easy to understand how she could have been so positive, from one hurried glance, that Mrs. Tangye was past all aid. It looks as though she knows more than we do, about the whole affair. As if, supposing her to have been out at all, she had gone into the room where Mrs. Tangye was, immediately on her return, and found her dead, before going on upstairs."

"What! Without saying a word to any one!" Superintendent Haviland was a married man. Pointer was not. The police officer thought that this was a bachelor's idea of feminine powers.

"And the visitor who vanished into thin air," Haviland went on, "do you mean Mrs. Cranbourn, sir, for your third person? The lady whose coming at six led to the discovery of the body?"

"Just so. Mrs. Cranbourn. But for her having been expected—that point only came out just now at the inquest—"

"No, sir. As a matter of fact I mentioned her name here, in the report I sent in last night." Haviland bent over the sheets.

"It's not the visitor's name. It's the fact that she was expected. Known to be coming..."

"Coming by a boat-train," Pointer spoke slowly, with a curious look in his eyes, "so the parlour-maid says she was told by her mistress. No boat-train could get in in time enough to let Mrs. Cranbourn have four o'clock tea with Mrs. Tangye at Riverview. Then why was it ordered at four? And Florence was not to bother to come in again until Mrs. Cranbourn should come." Pointer looked down at his boot-tips meditatively.

"Getting into touch with Mrs. Cranbourn should clear up many difficulties! But even as it is, what became of her?"

"Florence—that's the parlourmaid—thinks she hurried off without waiting, when she saw what had happened. Natural enough under the circumstances." Haviland spoke rather stubbornly.

"But where to? Which way did she go? Straight on up to Heaven? Remember, Newnes saw only the running maid, the standing Miss Saunders, and no one else. You arrived before he left, and found no sign of her."

"When you put it like that, it sounds odd, for a fact." Haviland bit his lip.

The caller had not been seen since. It was believed that she must have slipped away in the general confusion. The Coroner, though he regretted her absence, did not think that her evidence would have been of more use than that of the numerous other friends available. For she had not found Mrs. Tangye alive. Mrs. Cranbourn was a barrister's widow, living in Malaga, and was unknown to the maid by sight. The police had had a cable from the consul there, saying that the lady had left the town a week ago.

"Her visit seems a big trump in Tangye's hand—it certainly points to accident rather than suicide," Wilmot murmured.

Haviland grunted, non-committally.

"Why don't you believe Mrs. Tangye's death an accident, Haviland?" Pointer asked.

"How could it have been one, sir? Apart from the fact of the trigger working uncommon stiff, the safety-bolt acts perfectly, and Mrs. Tangye was used to that particular revolver. Then look at the tearing up of her papers, and the packing off of her duds."

"Tangye explained that, you know," Wilmot reminded him.

"But Mrs. Tangye wasn't going abroad for Another month. And why not leave her papers? To my mind, her desk and her wardrobe were as good as a signed confession that she had made away with herself."

There was a short silence.

"Personally my belief hasn't been changed by the verdict," Haviland murmured after a pause, "though it ends the case as far as we are concerned."

"Unless, of course you, sir—" he turned to Pointer and left the sentence unfinished.

"Any special reason you know of which isn't given in the reports for her to've killed herself?" was his only answer.

"Well, there's Mrs. Bligh. She's just left for Cannes this morning. Colonel's widow. Lives in Cadogan Square. Belongs to a very smart set. She and Mr. Tangye..." Haviland's tone was full of meaning. "The fact is, though there's nothing to prove it, I think Mrs. Tangye got wind of the affair, and got fed up. Lost her grip of things, and decided to end it all."

"If every woman whose husband goes off the rails at times were to shoot herself, the surplus of females over males in the British Isles would soon be a thing of the past," Wilmot pointed out dryly. Haviland grinned, but stuck to his guns.

"I don't pretend I mayn't be wrong. As a matter of fact, I've got two headings in my notebook, same as you say you have in your head, Mr. Wilmot, and I enter things accordingly. Most of 'em, so far, go on both pages. I can't think you'll want me to add another headline, sir."

Haviland finished with his eyes on Pointer. The Chief Inspector was skimming through the life story of the dead woman.

"Mable Headly. Only child of the Rev. Charles Headly, rector of Over Wallop for twenty years, and Nether Wallop for thirty," he read out.