Читать книгу Chief Inspector Pointer's Cases - 12 Golden Age Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding - Страница 16

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"IS Mrs. Erskine in any danger, too?" Watts ventured in an aside as the boat cut through the smooth water.

"In very grave danger, indeed, I fancy."

"And shall I still keep an eye on him?"

"Him" was Carter, staring ahead of the two police-officers.

"You won't need to, after tonight," was the oracular reply.

"There she is!" Carter called suddenly. "There's the large steam launch you described."

He was right. It was the Hirondette, the boat that Mrs. Clark had hired. Pointer, once he knew that she was the one they wanted, hardly glanced at her: his eyes were fixed on a black stretch of water, beyond a projecting arm of land, which lay sombre and unlit. "Catch her up before she reaches that."

"The 'Devil's Sock,' as our smugglers call it? Bien. We shall do it."

And they did. The launch when hailed stopped instantly.

"Who is it?" called Clark's breezy voice, in his bad French. "Anything wrong? Can we help?"

The police cutter closed up. In the light of its electric lamps the face talking to them changed suddenly, the jaw slackened, the eyes darted furtively from the police-boat to the pleasure craft about, who were watching the meeting with curiosity.

"It's all right, Mr. Clark," the Chief Inspector answered civilly as he mounted the ladder swiftly, followed by Carter and Watts. "Only Miss West is most urgently wanted, and we heard that she had gone out with you in the swiftest launch in Nice, so I borrowed a police-cutter." He had opened the door of the little cabin as he spoke. Carter would have pushed in first if the other's sheer bulk had not prevented it. As for Watts, a glance from Pointer made him wait outside.

In the unusually large and airy cabin sat the three other occupants of the villa and Christine. The women lay back in their chairs with closed eyes as though asleep; only Major Vaughan blinked evilly at them.

"Christine!" Carter fell on his knees beside her. "Christine!" He shook her gently. "She's unconscious. Give me some brandy—some coffee." His gaze swept the table doubtfully.

Pointer said something over the rail, and a man stepped up on to the deck.

"Here is the surgeon. He'll soon tell us if anything serious is the matter."

The doctor rolled up Christine's eyelid, felt her pulse, and poured her out some brandy from his flask. He looked at a coffee-tray on the table, smelt the coffee, tasted it, and added his brandy to a cup of the steaming beverage. "She'll be all right with as much of that as you can get her to drink."

He bent over the other two women. "Same here. Opium den, eh?" He whispered to Pointer, who nodded.

A French sergeant of police stepped in, curled his moustache fiercely, and made a few notes in a book.

"You will all accompany me to the police-station for inquiries on arrival in the harbor."

The major cackled softly.

"Why? The ladies would try a little dose of my Eastern friend. I told them beginners should go slow."

"Il n'y' a pas d'explications!" snapped the Frenchman, seating himself between the two men, while Watts lounged against the door. Christine opened her eyes drowsily,' and closed them after a look of infinite relief as she saw Carter's face bending over her. Another sip or two, and she was able to stagger outside, and supported by Carter and the doctor walk up and down in the fresh air.

"Where's Mrs. Erskine—Mrs. Erskine's in danger," she suddenly babbled after her second cup. "And I thought I saw Mr. Pointer—"

"Here I am, Miss Christine," came the cheery answer as the Chief Inspector relieved the doctor, who returned to the cabin to look after the other two ladies.

"Oh, Mr. Pointer!" Christine clutched the cup he held out to her dizzily.

"I—there's a letter Mrs. Erskine has which Rob never wrote—someone's deceived her all these years. He never wrote any of them." She tried to speak coherently. Pointer pressed her arm soothingly.

"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."

"He was easy to hoodwink. It was his father who had known the real Mrs. Erskine well, the younger Russell had only seen her a couple of times as a lad. But your aunt by marriage, Mrs. Fraser, of Glasgow, would only too gladly swear to you any time, as will other relations. She seemed to think that your death stopped the pressing home of some claim against you about the illegal sale of a cottage of hers. She sent me your photo..."

The woman in the white wig, and artificially shaped eyebrow, bit her grey lips.

"You are Janet Fraser, of Murry Street, Glasgow. You were engaged as a companion by the late Mrs. Erskine some fifteen years ago, after having been an unsuccessful actress for over six years. You joined her near St. Jean de Luz, and went on with her to Bayonne, where she was taken with a paralytic stroke the same night and was removed to the hospital. She died a few days later without recovering consciousness. The doctor in charge of the hospital mistook you for the mistress, and you kept up the deception. He has identified the photo of Janet Fraser—your photo without that wig on, and without that shaved peak to one eyebrow. The hotel people at Bayonne and the sisters at the hospital have also identified it. Mrs. Erskine lies buried in the churchyard there under your name. We are getting an order for her exhumation under the pretext of having her body taken to Scotland. Her identity can easily be proved by a couple of operations she had had. You assumed her name, forged her handwriting—which was a very easy one to copy. You continued to enjoy her income, until chance gave your secret away to Mrs. Clark, at that time Mabel Baker, your companion."

The woman seemed to collapse more and more as he spoke. Now she tried to pull herself up once more.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she whispered, with a voice which was but a ghost of itself.

He stopped. "Now, look here. You can deny everything, of course, but it won't help you any; and meanwhile these others, the Clarks and the major, who, I don't doubt, are as deep in it as yourself, who've battened on you for all these years, may get off scot-free, and in any case won't get much more than a few months. Do you want that?"

Her haggard eyes opened and shut themselves convulsively, her throat worked, but she forced back the words by an effort which was visible.

"Wait—I'll go on. Robert Erskine came to England. You poisoned him to prevent his discovering the fraud. For he would have known his mother. You could not hope to always receive him in twilight as you did Mr. Russell or anyone who had ever met the real Mrs. Erskine. You wrote your letters to him as forbidding as possible in order to prevent his wanting to come to Europe and see you. But you made your big mistake when by your miserliness you only sent him one thousand pounds of the money he asked for. The whole of the five thousand would have kept him in Canada. Carter here is ready to swear that the one thousand which you finally sent him was the only money Robert Erskine ever received from you. Those letters you showed me in Paris were all forgeries. That was why you 'lost' them. You got him to supply you with a box of his stationery when you heard that he was sailing for England. The discarded box is in our possession. Unfortunately for himself, he told you that he was coming over, though he did not tell you on what business, as he had never referred to business matters with you. He gave you the name he intended to use, and you sent a letter to meet him on the boat's arrival in which you wrote of your joy at the thought of seeing him, and that he was to telegraph you as soon as he had found a hotel. He kept that letter among his papers in a safe. Otherwise you would have destroyed it as you did all the other papers in his room. But to go back, for I want you to see that there are no gaps. As soon as you knew his hotel, you flew over to England and took a room in the same house, by good luck—as you thought—getting a room very near his. You passed under the name of Mrs. Willett. You painted, padded, darkened your eyes with belladonna, and had a wig arranged to look as like a portrait of Mrs. Clark which you had with you as possible. The firm who supplied you with it, and the eyebrows meeting over the nose, kept a copy of that photo, as they always do, to safeguard themselves in case of dissatisfaction. I found an eyebrow box in the attic which bore the name of the shop."

"The others planned it. They egged me on. They were all in it!" burst out, as though in spite of herself, from the woman. "They said it was the only way."

"Very likely they did, but, you see, I have no proofs of that. All I can prove is that when you found Robert Erskine's acquaintance impossible to make, that medicine bottle of his gave you your chance. You changed the last but one dose for a deadly solution of morphia, obtained how I can't think..." Pointer knew perfectly, but he wanted her to speak, and she did.

"No, no, no! I never did such a thing!" The sane part of her brain was fighting the drugged part which wanted to babble.

"Oh, yes, you did."

"If I did, I got it from that sneering, drug-sodden fiend Vaughan."

"Robert Erskine drank the poison. When it was acting,—I take it you listened at the door—you entered his room, locked the door, unscrewed the back of the wardrobe, fastened the bolt on inside, and dragged the armchair up to it. You're a tall woman and a strong one, but you must have had some difficulty with his body before you got it safely bundled in..."

The woman turned livid.

"...with your letter to the manager in the pocket. Next you laid in some things of his which you thought would bear out your 'phone about his having gone into the country, screwed the back on again, pushed the wardrobe into position, emptied the medicine bottle on to the balcony, filled in the cough mixture again, and went through all his belongings. His bag you fastened inside a larger bag..."—This last was guess-work, but he saw by her terrified eyes that he had been right.—"Wearing Major Vaughan's shoes, you crept down the back stairs into the street. You had already oiled the lock and opened it at noon. When you had disposed of your bag, and exchanged the shoes for your own, you waited in the theatre and took a taxi back to the hotel. When you heard the arrival of the police—your door was ajar, we noticed—you put on his shoes again, and crept out on to the balcony to peer in through the blind, as you had done once before when Mr. Beale was in the room. You had intended to reach France Saturday night, but the storm which raged made flight out of the question. Even the channel boats did not go. Besides, once you knew the body had been found, you waited on to see what would happen. The telegrams which I sent Mrs. Erskine here were received and answered by Mrs. Clark. You flew to Paris, using her passport, and back again the same day after the interview with Russell and me, an interview which you were expecting and had prepared for after catching sight of Mr. Russell at the hotel."

Watts shot his chief a crestfallen glance, but the woman broke out excitedly: "She lent me that passport. She helped...They all helped...They're all in it. Yes, you're right, Inspector, they knew all about it. And ever since then I've been in hell! In hell! I knew it was only a question of time before I should be killed in my turn...oh, my head...I don't mean that! I don't know what I'm saying."

"I'll just make a note of what you say about their being implicated too." Pointer drew out a block of writing paper.

She veered around again, the hatred of years sweeping away every barrier, as the wily police-officer had hoped it would. He had a full confession of the crime, written in the first person, in his pocket, only waiting for her to sign, and for that signature he was working, leaving her no time to recover that cold nerve of hers which had been temporarily broken down, but which was sure to come again later as he well knew. There was too much tension between France and England just then for extradition to be a quick matter when the crime had been committed on French soil, but with the criminal's confession safely at the Yard the police could wait in patience the law's delays.

"Stop! Write all this down." She sprang to her feet and leant heavily against the table, rocking as she stood. "Write it all out, and I'll sign it, and then we'll see if those blood-suckers get off with only a couple of months. Months! While I..."

"You'd better see a solicitor," suggested the Chief Inspector half-heartedly, but remembering the jury's passion for every advantage to be given to the criminal, as he pulled out the sheets, which were burning his fingers.

"No, no! Is that it? Let me read it over."

"If you want to sign it, just add a line at the foot to say that you have read it through and that it is correct."

"I'll put more than that in. I want to say that these three blackmailers instigated Robert Erskine's death. They told me what to do. Ever since yon Baker found me one day asleep with my wig awry she's lived on me, she and Vaughan, who was her lover at the time, and the man she calls her husband now."

"And Miss West, what were you going to do to her?" Carter spoke for the first time—he had been literally spellbound till then. "What of her?"

For a second the woman blinked at him as though hardly remembering to whom he referred.

"I'm writing that down, too. When I told them that she had discovered something wrong with the letters—letters they drafted for me, mind you they insisted on drugging her, and—and—they told me that she was to be put ashore somewhere. I thought she was to be kept till we could get away safely." Her eyes flickered uneasily, and fell to the paper.

In a fury of vengeance which burned away all thought of personal safety for the moment if only she could engulf the others deep enough, Janet Fraser wrote nearly two pages before she signed her name, with Carter and Watts as witnesses.

The Chief Inspector drew a deep breath of relief, and motioned Carter to precede him out of the room.

Janet Fraser's hand went to a little picture standing on the mantelpiece, a sketch of her father's manse. The frame was a Florentine one, and in a corner her finger pared off a tiny gilt pellet as she apparently automatically adjusted the water-color. When Pointer turned to speak to Watts she slipped it into her mouth. It was a way of escape she had prepared long ago.

"I shall be quite ready to come with you to England without waiting for an extradition order," she said quietly as she lay down on the couch again and pulled the rug up over her, "but I'm exhausted for the moment. I want a little rest."

"Very good. I'll arrange about our tickets so that we can get off by the early train if possible. I'll be back within an hour and let you know what has been settled. There will be Watts on duty outside, but I think you'll be sensible."

"Quite sensible," murmured Janet Fraser, looking him full in the face for a second, and then dropping those pale grey eyes of hers.

Carter and the Chief Inspector walked away in silence. At last the Canadian spoke.

"So it wasn't Beale after all, and Rob was murdered by that she-devil who passed as his mother because he would have given the show away! I'm glad you got her! God! I never thought I should like to see a woman arrested for murder, but I'm glad you got her! And, see here, Inspector, I do see why you weren't keen on my helping, nor Christine either: it did take a mighty keen eye—a trained one—to pick out the king-log from that jumble."

"Largely a matter of routine," muttered Pointer, lighting his pipe.

"Routine!" Carter echoed. "I suppose it was routine that lets Christine sleep safely in her bed tonight. Poor old Rob. To be done in like that...I wish to Heaven..." He was silent for a few minutes. "But how in tarnation did you get hold of—of—the truth?"

"Well, it's a longish story. First of all, as I said, was that letter this woman wrote to Erskine which we found among the papers Beale had got hold of—she had destroyed the others, you know—asking him to let her know his address in London at once. That only bewildered me. You don't suspect a mother easily of having a hand in her son's murder, but I began to wonder whether Robert Erskine might turn out not to be her son at all. I found that that was impossible, and I began speculating a bit along the lines of the truth. A Toronto stationery box I found in her attic here made me doubt whether the letters I had taken a bit for granted, I confess, were as genuine as they looked. I had noted the water-mark, but had let them go at that, under the circumstances—my mistake that! Then—well, what with one thing and another, I got hold of a key to her safe and that unlocked her story as well, or at least the clue to it. It was this way. In the safe were a couple of the real Mrs. Erskine's old diaries, a large photo of herself, a small razor, and a couple of white wigs. Strange things for a lady to keep with her jewels, eh? The photo set me thinking. It had been constantly handled, and had a clip fastened to the top to allow of its being hung on any convenient nail. But why? Taken in conjunction with the wigs, why else than to make up like it? Then the little razor—Mrs. Erskine's queer eyebrow would fit that idea. In Janet Fraser's photo—I only got it later on, of course; didn't know of her existence then—you'll see what beetling eyebrows she has by nature. The two women were otherwise about the same size and general build. With the wig, and the eyebrow shaved to a peak in the middle, and after years of semi-invalidism, the one could easily pass herself off for the other, when there were no suspicions alert. I found in my hunt at the villa an old pill-box which gave me a Biarritz address, and went there. The rest of the story...? Well, after that it was—"

"Merely a matter of routine," suggested Carter; "but say, Chief Inspector, I'll never forget what I owe you. You saved me once when you drew Beale's fangs, and you've saved Christine tonight."

"I don't mind telling you that I never in all my life spent a worse five minutes than when I had to decide what had become of her, and knew that if I made a mistake there would be no time to put it right." Pointer spoke with feeling.

"What made you guess the river?" Carter asked in a hushed voice.

"Couldn't see what else they could do with her. It was obvious that the house had been cleared so that no one should know of her second arrival. When she had been at the villa before, she had practically no friends on this side of the Atlantic. I think they counted on that a bit. I know this coast pretty well. As Mr. Deane, I've walked it over for hours, and I couldn't call to mind any ravine or place where a body could be dropped as though from a motor accident except some spots a good way off, and where a very stiff gradient had to be climbed. The tires and the small amount of petrol were against them. There only remained the sea, for the villa itself was out of the question. What they wanted was an accident, not a body that could be found some time or other, and prove it to've been a murder."

"You jumped to the conclusion at once that her life was in danger, then?"

Pointer put his head on one side. "Well...in a murder case there generally comes a moment when a second murder seems the only way to keep the first one quiet."

The two men stopped at the Negresco, and Pointer glanced up at the purple roofs high above them.

"Don't let yourself feel too grateful, Mr. Carter. You and Miss Leslie, as was, quite tangled me up for a while. There were weeks when I felt none too sure of either of you."

"See here," Carter stopped him as he would have turned away, "I saw that man of yours—Watts—pull out a knife tonight to sharpen a pencil. My knife! I had lent it to a funny old geezer here, a Colonel Winter, who's pestered me the last fortnight, buzzing around me, and I've been kind of figuring—"

But the Chief Inspector was gone. Carter gazed after him. "Well, I guess our British police take some beating after all." And he went upstairs to write out a wire offering a reward of five thousand pounds to anyone who should first find the murderer of Robert Erskine. The wire was sent off to the Yard, after a futile effort on his part to get it dated earlier in the day. He thought it would look more natural to Pointer, but he consoled himself afterwards with the knowledge that it would have made no difference in the Chief Inspector's acceptance of the sum solely on behalf of the Police Widows' and Orphans' Fund.

When Pointer returned to the villa it was close on dawn. He and Watts looked at each other in silence a moment and then glanced away.

"A letter must have come for Mrs. Erskine late last night. I found it in the letter-box." Watts handed it to his superior.

"Any sound from in there?" asked Pointer rather tensely.

Watts shook his head, and, receiving no answer to their knock, they entered.

She was quite dead. Gone by the same way that she had sent Robert Erskine out of life. They 'phoned for a doctor, though there was no slightest chance of rousing her to life. Then Pointer glanced at the letter he held. It was from Russell and Son. He broke the seal and read:

Dear Mrs. Erskine,

I will reply to your last at full length tomorrow. This is simply to ask you to let me have all possible details as to the death of your one-time companion, Janet Fraser. Place of burial, doctor who attended her, etc. A relative of hers has died in Australia, and as next-of-kin she—had she lived—would have inherited his enormous fortune, which will now go to his more distant kin.

I note in your letter that your press for the sale of your Bell shares, against which we most strongly counsel you—

Pointer put the letter down for a moment, and looked thoughtfully at the dead woman before him.