Anthony Berkeley - The Silk Stocking Murders

The other four daughters were aged respectively twenty-four, seventeen, fourteen and twelve, and with the eldest, Anne, Roger found himself almost immediately on terms of good friendship. She was one of those capable girls whom the emergency seems so often to produce; and unlike most capable girls, she was good to look upon as well. Not so pretty as Janet had been, perhaps, but in a way more beautiful, and built in miniature; and her air of reposeful efficiency (not the assertive efficiency which most capable women possess) Roger found extremely attractive. Making his mind up with his usual rapidity during lunch, he sought an opportunity after the meal was over to take her aside, and, under pretext of admiring the garden in its garment of budding spring, proceeded to tell her the whole story.

If Anne was shocked, she scarcely showed it; if she was much upset, she concealed her feelings. She merely replied, gravely: ‘I see. This is extraordinarily good of you, Mr Sheringham. And thank you for telling me; I much prefer to know. I quite agree with your conclusions, too, and I’ll do anything to help you confirm them.’

‘And you can?’ Roger asked eagerly.

Anne shook her small head. She was small all over, delicately boned, with small, rather serious features set in a small, oval face. ‘At the moment,’ she confessed, ‘I don’t see that I can. Janet knew plenty of men round here, of course, and I can give you a list of the ones she knew best, but I’m quite sure that none of them could be at the bottom of it.’

‘We could at any rate find out which of them had been in London since she went up there,’ Roger said, loath to abandon the line on which all his hopes were now pinned.

‘We could, of course,’ Anne agreed. ‘And we will, if you think we should. But I’m convinced, Mr Sheringham, that it isn’t here that we must look for the cause of my sister’s death. When she left here she hadn’t a care in the world, I know. Janet and I—’ Her voice faltered for a moment, but recovered immediately—‘Janet and I were a good deal more than sisters; we were the most intimate of friends. If she’d been worried before she left here, I’m certain she would have told me.’

‘Well,’ said Roger, with more cheerfulness than he felt, ‘we’ll simply have to see what we can do; that’s all.’

The upshot was that Roger spent a very pleasant weekend in Dorsetshire, saw a great deal of Anne, who, to his great delight, did not seem to have the faintest wish to discuss his books with him, and returned to London on the Monday apparently not an inch nearer his objective. ‘Though a weekend in Dorsetshire in early April,’ he told the lady in the office as he paid his hotel-bill, ‘is a thing no man should be without.’

‘Quate,’ agreed the young lady.

Roger strolled down to the station. He had made a point of mentioning to Anne the time of his train, in case anything cropped up that she might want to communicate to him at the last moment. As he walked on to the platform, he looked up and down to see if she were there. She was not.

With a sense of disappointment which he could not remember having experienced for at least ten years, and of which he became instantly as near to being ashamed as Roger could concerning anything connected with himself, he made his way to the bookstall and bought a paper. Opening it a few minutes later, his eye at once caught certain headlines on the centre page. The headlines ran as follows:

ANOTHER SILK STOCKING TRAGEDY

SOCIETY BEAUTY HANGS HERSELF

LADY URSULA GRAEME’S SHOCKING FATE

‘This,’ said Roger, ‘is becoming too much of a good thing.’

SEATED in the train, Roger began to peruse the account of Lady Ursula’s death. Now that it had to deal with the daughter of an earl instead of an obscure habituée of night-clubs, the story had been allotted two full columns on the centre page, and every detail, relative or not, that could be hastily scraped together had been inserted. Briefly, the facts were as follows.

Lady Ursula had left her home in Eaton Square, where she lived with her widowed mother (the present Earl, her eldest brother, was in the Diplomatic Service abroad), shortly before eight. She dined with a party of friends at a dance-club in the West End, where she stayed, dancing and talking, till about eleven. She then began to complain of a headache and tried to induce one of the others to accompany her for a little run in her car; the rest of the party refused, however, as it was raining and the car was an open two-seater. Lady Ursula then left the club, saying that she would go for a run alone to blow her headache away, if no one would accompany her.

At half-past two in the morning a girl called Irene Macklane, an artist and a friend of Lady Ursula’s, returned to her studio in Kensington from a party in a neighbouring studio and found Lady Ursula’s car outside. She was not surprised at this, as Lady Ursula was in the habit of calling on her friends at the most unusual of times of the day and night. On going inside and calling, however, she could at first see no sign of her.

The studio had been made out of the remains of some old stables, and spanning its width in the centre was a large oak beam, some eight feet above the ground, in the middle of which, on the underside, was a large hook, from which Miss Macklane had hung an old-fashioned lantern. This lantern contained an electric light bulb which was connected by a flex to a light-point farther down the room. On turning the switch at the door, Miss Macklane was surprised to see the lantern light upon the floor some distance away from the beam instead of in its normal position. She lifted it up and was then horrified to see Lady Ursula hanging in its place from the hook in the beam.

The details of her death corresponded almost exactly with those of Janet’s and the other woman’s. An overturned table lay on the floor a few feet away, and Lady Ursula had made use of one of the stockings which she was wearing at the time; the leg from which she had taken it was bare, though the foot still wore its brocade slipper. A loop had been formed by tying the extreme ends of the stocking together, this had been passed over Lady Ursula’s head, the slack twisted round three or four times, and a tiny loop at the end slipped over the hook. She had then apparently kicked the table away and met her death, like the other two, from slow asphyxiation.

The note she had left for Miss Macklane, however, was a little more explicit than those of the others, though its wording gave scope for conjecture. It ran:

I’m so sorry to have to do this here, my dear, but there’s simply nowhere else, and mother would have a fit if I did it at home. Don’t be too terribly furious with me!

U.

There followed a eulogistic account of Lady Ursula, ‘by a friend,’ expatiating on her originality, her lack of convention and her recent engagement to the wealthy son of a wealthy financier. Whether it was the engagement, or her determination at all costs to be original, that had led Lady Ursula to dispense with a life with which, as she was in the habit of informing her friends, she had for many years been bored stiff, the writer obviously found some difficulty in avoiding.

Roger put the paper across his knees and began absently to fill his pipe. This was, as he had commented, too much of a good thing. It was becoming a regular epidemic. Fantastic pictures floated across his mental vision of the thing becoming a society craze, and all the debutantes suspending themselves in rows by their own stockings. He pulled himself together.

The real trouble, of course, was that this did not square with the article he had written before leaving London. It upset things badly. For though the unknown habituée of night-clubs might have possessed the predisposition to suicide about which he had expatiated so glibly, he was quite sure that Lady Ursula Graeme did not. And from what he knew about the lady, even apart from the friend’s article upon her, he was still more sure that, if by any strange chance she had decided to do away with herself, she would most certainly not imitate the method of an insignificant chorus-girl and a wretched little prostitute. If she were to imitate anybody it would be in the grand manner. She might cut an artery in a hot bath, for instance. But far more probably she would evolve some daringly unconventional method of suicide which should ensure her in death an even greater publicity than she had been able to attain in life. Lady Ursula, in short, would set the fashion in suicide, not follow it.