Читать книгу The Silk Stocking Murders - Anthony Berkeley, Anthony Berkeley - Страница 10

IT was with no definite plan in his mind, or even suspicion, that Roger jumped into a taxi and caused himself to be conveyed to Sutherland Avenue. All he knew was that here was mystery; and where mystery was, there was something in his blood that raised Roger’s curiosity to such a point that nothing less than complete elucidation could lower it. The affairs of Janet Manners had, he acknowledged readily, nothing whatever to do with himself, and it was very probable that their owner, had she been alive, would very much have resented the poking of his nose into them. He appeased his conscience (or what served him on these occasions for a conscience) by pretending that his real object in making the journey was to acquire positive proof that Unity Ransome really was Janet Manners before he wrote to Dorsetshire. He did not deceive himself for a moment.

His taxi stopped before one of those tall, depressed-looking buildings which line Sutherland Avenue, and a tiny brass plate on the door-post informed him that Miss Carruthers lived on the fourth floor. There was no lift, and Roger trudged up, to find, with better luck than he deserved, that Miss Carruthers was at home. Indeed, she popped out of a room at him as he reached the top of the stairs, for the flat had no front-door of its own.

Chorus-girls (or chorus ladies, as they call themselves nowadays) are divided into three types, the pert, the pretty and the proud, and of these the last are quite the most fell of all created beings. Roger was relieved to see that Miss Carruthers, with her very golden hair and her round, babyish face, was quite definitely of the pretty type, and therefore not to be feared.

‘Oh!’ said Miss Carruthers prettily, and looked at him in dainty alarm. Strange men on her stairs were, it was to be gathered, one of the most terrifying phenomena in Miss Carruthers’ helpless young life.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Roger, suiting his smile to his company. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but could you spare me a few minutes, Miss Carruthers?’

‘Oh!’ fluttered Miss Carruthers again. ‘Was it—was it very important?’

‘I am connected with The Daily Courier,’ said Roger.

‘Come inside,’ said Miss Carruthers.

They passed into a sitting-room, the furniture of which was only too evidently supplied with the room. Roger was ensconced in a worn armchair, Miss Carruthers perched charmingly on the arm of an ancient couch. ‘Yes?’ sighed Miss Carruthers.

Roger came to the point at once. ‘It’s about Miss Ransome,’ he said bluntly.

‘Oh!’ said Miss Carruthers, valiantly concealing her disappointment.

‘I’m making a few enquiries, on behalf of The Courier,’ Roger went on, toying delicately with the truth. ‘We’re not altogether satisfied, you know.’ He looked extremely portentous.

Miss Carruthers’ large eyes became larger still. ‘What not with?’ she asked, her recent disappointment going the same way as her grammar.

‘Everything,’ returned Roger largely. He crossed his legs and thought what he should be dissatisfied with first of all. ‘What was her reason for committing suicide at all?’ he demanded; after all, he was more dissatisfied with that than anything else.

‘Well, reely!’ said Miss Carruthers. And then she began to talk.

Roger, listening intently, was conscious that he was hearing an often-told tale, but it lost none of its interest on that account. He let her tell it in her own way.

Uny, said Miss Carruthers (‘Uny’! mentally ejaculated Roger, and shuddered), had absolutely no reason in the world for going and doing a thing like that. None whatsoever! She’d had a slice of real luck in stepping into a London show straight away; she was always bright and cheerful (‘well, as happy as the day is long, you might say,’ affirmed Miss Carruthers); everybody liked her at the theatre; and what is more, she was marked out by common consent as one who would go far; it was generally admitted that the next small speaking part that was going, Uny would click for. And why she should want to go and do a thing like that—!

In fact, Miss Carruthers could hardly believe it when she came in that afternoon and saw her. Hanging on the hook on the bedroom door, she was, with her stocking round her neck, and looking—well, it very nearly turned Miss Carruthers up just to see her. Horrible! She wouldn’t describe it, not for worlds; it made her feel really ill just to think of it.—And here Miss Carruthers embarked on a minute description of her unhappy friend’s appearance, in which protruding eyeballs, blue lips and bitten tongue figured with highly unpleasant prominence.

Still, Miss Carruthers was by no means such a little fool as it apparently pleased her to suggest. Instead of screaming and running uselessly out into the street as, Roger reflected, three-quarters of the women he knew would have done, she had the sense to hoist Janet somehow up on to her shoulders and unhook the stocking. But by that time it was too late; she was dead. ‘Only just, though,’ wailed Miss Carruthers, with real tears in her eyes. ‘The doctor said if I’d come back a quarter of an hour earlier I could have saved her. Wasn’t that just hell?’

Wholeheartedly Roger agreed that it was. ‘But how very curious that she should have done it just when you might have been expected back at any minute,’ he remarked. ‘It couldn’t be,’ he added, stroking his chin thoughtfully, ‘that she expected to be saved, could it?’

Miss Carruthers shook her golden head. ‘Oh, no I’d told her I wasn’t coming back here, you see. I was going to tea with a boy, and I said to Uny not to expect me; I’d go straight on to the theatre. Well, now you know as much about it as I do, Mr—Mr—’

‘Sheringham.’

‘Mr Sheringham. And what do you imagine she wanted to go and do it for? Oh, poor old Uny! I tell you, Mr Sheringham, I can hardly bear to stay in the place now. I wouldn’t, if I could only get decent digs somewhere else, which I can’t.’

Roger looked at the little person sympathetically. The tears were streaming unashamedly down her cheeks, and it was quite plain that, however artificial she might be in other respects, her feeling for her dead friend was genuine enough. He spoke on impulse.

‘What do I imagine she did it for? I don’t! But I tell you what I do imagine, Miss Carruthers, and that is that there’s a good deal more at the back of this than either you or I suspect.’

‘What—what do you mean?’

Roger pulled his pipe out of his pocket. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked, gaining a few seconds. He had to take a swift decision. Should he or should he not take this fluffy little creature into his confidence? Would she be a help or a hindrance? Was she a complete little fool who had had a single sensible moment, or was her apparent empty-headedness a pose adopted for the benefit of the other sex? Most of the men with whom she would come in contact, Roger was painfully aware, do prefer their women to be empty-headed. He compromised: he would take her just so far as he could into his own confidence without betraying that of others.

‘I mean,’ he said carefully, as he filled his pipe, ‘that so far as I’ve been able to gather, Miss Ransome was not the sort of girl to commit suicide—’

‘That she wasn’t!’ interjected Miss Carruthers, almost violently.

‘—and that as she did so, she was driven into it by forces which, to say the least, must have been overwhelming. And I mean to make it my business to find out what those forces were.’

‘Oh! Oh, yes. You mean—?’

‘For the moment,’ said Roger firmly, ‘nothing more than that.’

They looked at each other for a moment in silence. Then Miss Carruthers said an unexpected thing.

‘You belong to The Courier?’ she asked, in a hesitating voice. ‘You’re doing this for them? You’re going to publish everything you find out, whether—whether Uny would have liked it or not?’

Roger found himself liking her more and more. ‘No!’ he said frankly. ‘I am connected with The Courier, but I’m not on it. I’m going to do this off my own bat, and I give you my word that nothing shall be published at all that doesn’t reflect to the credit of Miss Ransome—and perhaps not even then. You mean, of course, that you wouldn’t help me, except on those terms?’

Miss Carruthers nodded. ‘I’ve got a duty to Uny, and I’m not going to have any mud slung at her, whether she deserves it or not. But if you’ll promise that, I’ll help you all I can. Because believe me, Mr Sheringham,’ added Miss Carruthers passionately, ‘if there’s some damned skunk of a man at the bottom of this (as I’ve thought more than once there might be), I’d give everything I’ve got in the world to see him served as he served poor old Uny.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ Roger said easily. The worst of the theatre, he reflected, is that it does make its participants so dramatic; and drama in private life is worse than immorality. ‘We’ll shake hands on that bargain.’

‘Look here,’ said Miss Carruthers, doffing her emotional robe as swiftly as she had donned it, ‘look here, I tell you what. You wait here and smoke while I make us a cup of tea, and then we’ll talk as much as you like. And I have got one or two things to tell you,’ she added darkly, ‘that you might like to hear.’

Roger agreed with alacrity. He had often noticed that there is nothing like tea to loosen a woman’s tongue; not even alcohol.

In a surprisingly short time for so helpless-looking a person, Miss Carruthers returned with the tea-tray, which Roger took from her at the door. They settled down, Miss Carruthers poured out, and Roger at last felt that the time was ripe to embark on the series of questions which he had really come to ask.

Miss Carruthers answered readily enough, leaning back in her chair with a cigarette between lips which even now must occasionally pout. Indeed, she answered too readily. Nevertheless, from the mass of her verbiage Roger was able to pick a few new facts.

In the main her replies bore out the brief account of her evidence at the inquest, though at very much greater length, and Miss Carruthers dwelt upon her theory that her friend was ‘a cut above the rest of us, as you might say. A real lady, instead of only a perfect one.’ To Roger’s carefully worded queries as to any indication of Unity Ransome’s real identity, Miss Carruthers was at first vague. Then she produced, in a haphazard way, the most important point she had yet contributed.

‘All I can say,’ said Miss Carruthers, ‘is that her name may have been Janet, or she might have had a friend called Janet, or something like that.’

‘Ah!’ said Roger, keeping his composure. ‘And how do you know that?’

‘It’s in a prayer-book of hers. I only came across it the other day. Would you like to see it?’

‘I would,’ said Roger.

Obligingly Miss Carruthers ran off to fetch it. Returning, she opened the book at the fly-leaf and handed it to Roger. He read: ‘To my dear Janet, on her Confirmation, 14th March 1920. “Blessed are the pure in heart.”’ The writing was small and crabbed.

‘I see,’ Roger said, and took a later opportunity of slipping the book into his pocket. Miss Carruthers had definitely established the main point, at any rate.

He directed his questions elsewhere. Like Miss Carruthers, Roger had been struck with the idea that there might be a man behind things. He dredged assiduously in his informant’s mind for any clue as to his possible identity. But here Miss Carruthers was unable to help. Uny, it appeared, hadn’t cared for boys. She never went out with one alone, and would seldom consent to make up a foursome. She said frankly that boys bored her stiff. So far as Miss Carruthers knew, not only had she no particular boy, but not even any gentlemen-friends.

‘Humph!’ said Roger, abandoning that line of enquiry.

They sat and smoked in silence for a moment.

‘If you wanted to commit suicide, Miss Carruthers,’ Roger remarked abruptly, ‘would you hang yourself?’

Miss Carruthers shuddered delicately. ‘I would not. It’s the very last way I’d do it.’

‘Then why did Miss Ransome?’

‘Perhaps she didn’t realise what she’d look like,’ suggested Miss Carruthers, quite seriously.

‘Humph!’ said Roger, and they smoked again.

‘And with one of the stockings she was wearing,’ mused Miss Carruthers. ‘Funny, wasn’t it?’

Roger sat up. ‘What’s that? One of the stockings she was actually wearing?’

‘Yes. Didn’t you know?’

‘No, I didn’t see that mentioned. Do you mean,’ asked Roger incredulously, ‘that she actually took off one of the stockings she was wearing at the time, and hanged herself with it?’

Miss Carruthers nodded. ‘That’s right. A stocking on one leg, she had, and the other bare. I thought it was funny at the time. On that very door, it was; and you can still see the screw-mark the other side. The screw I took out, of course. I couldn’t have borne to look at it every time I came into the room.’

‘What screw?’ asked Roger, at sea.

‘Why, the screw on the other side of the door, that she fastened the loop to.’

‘I don’t know anything about this. I took it for granted that she’d done it on a clothes’-hook, or something like that.’

‘Well, I wondered about that,’ said Miss Carruthers, ‘but I expect it was because the hook in the bedroom was too low. And a stocking’d give a good bit, wouldn’t it?’

Roger was already out of his chair and examining the door. ‘Tell me exactly how you found her, will you?’ he said.

With many shudders, some of which may have been quite real, Miss Carruthers did so. Janet, it appeared, had been hanging on the inside of the sitting-room door, from a small hook on the other side, which had been screwed in at the right angle to withstand the strain. The stocking round her neck had been knotted together tightly at the extreme ends. As far as one could gather, she must have placed it like that loosely round her neck, then twisted the slack two or three times, and slipped a tiny loop on to the hook on the further side of the door, over the top. She had been standing on a chair to do this, and she must have kicked the chair violently away when her preparations were complete, with such force as to slam the door to, leaving herself suspended by the little hook that was now completely out of her reach, so that she could not rescue herself even had she wished. This was an obvious reconstruction on the two facts that Miss Carruthers had found the door shut when she arrived, and an overturned chair on the floor at least six feet away.

‘Good God!’ said Roger, shocked at this evidence of such cold-blooded determination on the part of the unfortunate girl to deprive herself of life. But he realised at once that this version did not square with his theory of panic-stricken impulse. Panic-stricken people do not waste time adjusting things to such a nicety, screwing in hooks at just the right height and leaving every trace of thoughtful deliberation; they simply throw themselves, as hurriedly as possible, out of the nearest window.

‘Didn’t the police think all this very odd?’ he queried thoughtfully.

‘No-o, I don’t think they did. They seemed to take it all for granted. And after all, as Uny did kill herself, it doesn’t matter much how, does it?’

Roger was forced to agree that it didn’t. But when he took his leave a few minutes later, to write that letter to Dorsetshire which must now put things beyond all hope, he was more than ever convinced that there was very, very much more in all this than had so far met the eye. And he was more than ever determined to find out just exactly what it might be.

The thought of that happy, laughing kid of the snapshot being driven into panic-stricken suicide had inexpressibly shocked him before. The thought of her now, driven into a deadly slow suicide, prepared with such tragic method and care, was infinitely more horrible. Somebody, Roger was sure, had driven that poor child into killing herself; and that somebody, he was equally sure, was going to be made to pay for it.