CHAPTER IV.
Nobody came forward to identify the dead woman. The inquest elicited the following facts.
Shortly after one o’clock on January 8th, a well-dressed woman with a slight foreign accent had entered the offices of Messrs. Butler and Park, house-agents, in Knightsbridge. She explained that she wanted to rent or purchase a house on the Thames within easy reach of London. The particulars of several were given to her, including those of the Mill House. She gave the name of Mrs. de Castina and her address as the Ritz, but there proved to be no one of that name staying there, and the hotel people failed to identify the body.
Mrs. James, the wife of Sir Eustace Pedler’s gardener, who acted as caretaker to the Mill House and inhabited the small lodge opening on the main road, gave evidence. About three o’clock that afternoon, a lady came to see over the house. She produced an order from the house-agents, and, as was the usual custom, Mrs. James gave her the keys of the house. It was situated at some distance from the lodge, and she was not in the habit of accompanying prospective tenants. A few minutes later a young man arrived. Mrs. James described him as tall and broad-shouldered, with a bronzed face and light grey eyes. He was clean-shaven and was wearing a brown suit. He explained to Mrs. James that he was a friend of the lady who had come to look over the house, but had stopped at the post office to send a telegram. She directed him to the house, and thought no more about the matter.
Five minutes later he reappeared, handed her back the keys and explained that he feared the house would not suit them. Mrs. James did not see the lady, but thought that she had gone on ahead. What she did notice was that the young man seemed very much upset about something. “He looked like a man who’d seen a ghost. I thought he was taken ill”.
On the following day another lady and gentleman came to see the property and discovered the body lying on the floor in one of the upstairs rooms. Mrs. James identified it as that of the lady who had come the day before. The house-agents also recognized it as that of “Mrs. de Castina”. The police surgeon gave it as his opinion that the woman had been dead about twenty-four hours. The Daily Budget had jumped to the conclusion that the man in the Tube had murdered the woman and afterwards committed suicide. However, as the Tube victim was dead at two o’clock, and the woman was alive and well at three o’clock, the only logical conclusion to come to was that the two occurrences had nothing to do with each other, and that the order to view the house at Marlow found in the dead man’s pocket was merely one of those coincidences which so often occur in this life.
A verdict of “Wilful Murder against some person or persons unknown” was returned, and the police (and the Daily Budget) were left to look for “the man in the brown suit”. Since Mrs. James was positive that there was no one in the house when the lady entered it, and that nobody except the young man in question entered it until the following afternoon, it seemed only logical to conclude that he was the murderer of the unfortunate Mrs. de Castina. She had been strangled with a piece of stout black cord, and had evidently been caught unawares with no time to cry out. The black silk handbag which she carried contained a well-filled notecase and some loose change, a fine lace handkerchief, unmarked, and the return half of a first-class ticket to London. Nothing much there to go upon.
Such were the details published broadcast by the Daily Budget, and “Find the Man in the Brown Suit” was their daily war-cry. On an average about five hundred people wrote daily to announce their success in the quest, and tall young men with well-tanned faces cursed the day when their tailors had persuaded them to a brown suit. The accident in the Tube, dismissed as a coincidence, faded out of the public mind.
Was it a coincidence? I was not so sure. No doubt I was prejudiced—the Tube incident was my own pet mystery—but there certainly seemed to me to be a connection of some kind between the two fatalities. In each there was a man with a tanned face—evidently an Englishman living abroad, and there were other things. It was the consideration of these other things that finally impelled me to what I considered a dashing step. I presented myself at Scotland Yard and demanded to see whoever was in charge of the Mill House case.
My request took some time to understand, as I had inadvertently selected the department for lost umbrellas, but eventually I was ushered into a small room and presented to Detective Inspector Meadows.
Inspector Meadows was a small man with a ginger head and what I considered a peculiarly irritating manner. A satellite, also in plain clothes, sat unobtrusively in a corner.
“Good morning,” I said nervously.
“Good morning. Will you take a seat? I understand you’ve something to tell me that you think may be of use to us”.
His tone seemed to indicate that such a thing was unlikely in the extreme. I felt my temper stirred.
“Of course you know about the man who was killed in the Tube? The man who had an order to view this same house at Marlow in his pocket”.
“Ah!” said the inspector. “You are the Miss Beddingfeld who gave evidence at the inquest. Certainly the man had an order in his pocket. A lot of other people may have had too—only they didn’t happen to be killed”.
I rallied my forces.
“You don’t think it odd that this man had no ticket in his pocket”?
“Easiest thing in the world to drop your ticket. Done it myself”.
“And no money”.
“He had some loose change in his trousers pocket”.
“But no notecase”.
“Some men don’t carry a pocket-book or notecase of any kind”.
I tried another tack.
“You don’t think it’s odd that the doctor never came forward afterwards”?
“A busy medical man very often doesn’t read the papers. He probably forgot all about the accident”.
“In fact, inspector, you are determined to find nothing odd,” I said sweetly.
“Well, I’m inclined to think you’re a little too fond of the word, Miss Beddingfeld. Young ladies are romantic, I know—fond of mysteries and such-like. But as I’m a busy man——”.
I took the hint and rose.
The man in the corner raised a meek voice.
“Perhaps the young lady would tell us briefly what her ideas really are on the subject, inspector”?
The inspector fell in with the suggestion readily enough.
“Yes, come now, Miss Beddingfeld, don’t be offended. You’ve asked questions and hinted things. Just say straight out what it is you’ve got in your head”.
I wavered between injured dignity and the overwhelming desire to express my theories. Injured dignity went to the wall.
“You said at the inquest you were positive it wasn’t suicide”?
“Yes, I’m quite certain of that. The man was frightened. What frightened him? It wasn’t me. But some one might have been walking up the platform towards us—some one he recognized”.
“You didn’t see any one”?
“No,” I admitted. “I didn’t turn my head. Then, as soon as the body was recovered from the line, a man pushed forward to examine it, saying he was a doctor”.
“Nothing unusual in that,” said the inspector dryly.
“But he wasn’t a doctor”.
“What”?
“He wasn’t a doctor,” I repeated.
“How do you know that, Miss Beddingfeld”?
“It’s difficult to say, exactly. I’ve worked in Hospital during the war, and I’ve seen doctors handle bodies. There’s a sort of deft professional callousness that this man hadn’t got. Besides, a doctor doesn’t usually feel for the heart on the right side of the body”.
“He did that”?
“Yes, I didn’t notice it specially at the time—except that I felt there was something wrong. But I worked it out when I got home, and then I saw why the whole thing had looked so unhandy to me at the time”.
“H’m,” said the inspector. He was reaching slowly for pen and paper.
“In running his hands over the upper part of the man’s body he would have ample opportunity to take anything he wanted from the pockets”.
“Doesn’t sound likely to me,” said the inspector. “But—well, can you describe him at all”?
“He was tall and broad-shouldered, wore a dark overcoat and black boots, a bowler hat. He had a dark pointed beard and gold-rimmed eyeglasses”.
“Take away the overcoat, the beard and the eyeglasses, and there wouldn’t be much to know him by,” grumbled the inspector. “He could alter his appearance easy enough in five minutes if he wanted to—which he would do if he’s the swell pickpocket you suggest”.
I had not intended to suggest anything of the kind. But from this moment I gave the inspector up as hopeless.
“Nothing more you can tell us about him”? he demanded, as I rose to depart.
“Yes,” I said. I seized my opportunity to fire a parting shot. “His head was markedly brachycephalic. He will not find it so easy to alter that”.
I observed with pleasure that Inspector Meadow’s pen wavered. It was clear that he did not know how to spell brachycephalic.