Death Framed in Silver, page 21
From the nearest telephone booth she rang up the Yard. Inspector Headcorn was not in, so she left a message putting him in possession of the latest facts. This done she went home, consoled by one thing only, the knowledge that Elsie was alive.
She arrived to find her own telephone ringing like mad. As she expected, the voice over the wire was Bream’s. A startled exclamation greeted her first words, and following it came a volley of questions.
“So you think it was a booby-trap set for the other girl and you walked into it?”
“I’m bound to think it,” answered Diana bitterly. “I think, too, that seeing me instead of Miss Ackland took the wind out of her sails.”
“Tell me exactly what happened. Don’t miss out anything.”
Diana did so.
“And I can tell you this,” she finished, “that woman’s more frightened than she was before. Her whole manner showed it. Doesn’t that look as though I’ve been right about her all along? She’s guilty, Mr. Bream! Now I’ve seen her I haven’t a doubt of it.”
There was a non-committal grunt and a short silence.
“And so she’s done another bunk?”
“She has. I couldn’t see very well, because it was dark, and the railings were between, but she had something with her that looked like a bag.”
Another silence. Then:
“I’ll hike along up there now, just in case your Yard friend steals a march on me. I must get at that landlady. Bit of double-crossing there, I fancy.” The speaker paused, and took a subtly altered tone as he asked: “See here, whom else have you told about this?”
“No one. I’ve not had a chance.”
“Then take a tip from me and keep quiet about it. Don’t mention it till I give you leave. Understand?” She gave her promise and rang off. As she undressed she went over the puzzling events in her mind, trying to grasp their whole meaning, and wondering if she would have been wiser to take different tactics with Elsie. Vaguely she felt she had been given a valuable opportunity and muffed it, but looking back she did not see how she could have behaved otherwise. At the time, she had been banking on the remorse which, even now, she found it hard to believe was not a real, actuating force in Elsie’s conduct. The impression of having witnessed a terrible conflict was still strong upon her. She could swear that in Elsie she had seen her own wretchedness mirrored, with the addition of self-torture and personal fear. Why else had Elsie called herself a coward?
It was perhaps an hour after her return that she heard a car stop below and the house doors open and close. Blundell was back from the public dinner he had been attending. At once she felt impelled to go down and tell him of her experiences, but with one foot out of bed she remembered Bream’s injunction. Uncle Nick would have a more urgent reason than most to want Elsie cornered and cross-examined in the witness-stand. It might mean saving him a cool thousand at least in counsel’s fees if her part in this came out; but Uncle Nick by blundering in now might wreak havoc. No doubt that was Bream’s idea in cautioning her to keep quiet. Best wait till morning and see if any further development had occurred.
Very early she was wakened by sounds outside. Springing to the window she saw the big car, with Gaylord driving, and Blundell getting into it with a look of agitated purpose. Even as she speculated on the meaning of this the telephone rang, and snatching off the receiver she heard a strange male voice.
“Is that Miss Diana Lake?” it asked gruffly. “Living at Number Six, Queen’s Close, Kensington? Right! I’m speaking from King’s Cross Station. There’s a parcel waiting for you at the luggage office. It will be delivered to you in person if you come along with proper means of identification. The claim ticket’s left with the station-master. If you’ve got such a thing as a passport, better bring it with you.”
What could it mean? With trembling haste Diana got into her clothes, and not stopping for breakfast took a taxi to King’s Cross. She found the station-master, who, satisfied that she was indeed Miss Lake, handed over a slip of paper. Three minutes later she was holding a heavy, flat paper parcel tied with string and sealed with big blobs of red wax. On it was her name and address, typed, and, also typed, at the lower corner, were the underscored words: “PRIVATE. OPEN WHEN ALONE.”
Instantly, with a wild fluttering of her pulse, she knew that only Elsie could have sent her this parcel. She began to see reason in the busy click of keys which had followed her into the night and afterwards filled her restless dreams. The Ladies’ Cloak-room offered seclusion. Into it she hurried, turned her back on the attendant who was putting out clean towels, and laying her burden on the window-sill broke open the seals. Inside the wrappings was a cardboard box, on top of which lay a letter, again typed, and without signature. She tore it open and read:
“I had to get rid of you. To the other girl I might have spoken, but not to you. In the first place, you would not have believed me; in the second . . .”
Here several words were heavily inked out.
“Be that as it may, see what you can make of the enclosed, which is all I have to go on, so help me God, and whether I’m right or wrong it’s worthless in my hands. I’m out of it. I’m going now where neither you nor the police can find me to drag me back. One thing more. If you’ll be guided by me—which you won’t—you’ll show this only to the lawyers and any others who are dealing with the case.”
Without the least notion of what to expect, Diana ripped off the lid of the box, stared down, and grew limp with disappointment. Old newspapers! Nothing more. One after another she turned them over. Copies of the Evening Banner and other, mostly popular sheets, with dates running back for perhaps eight weeks, comprised the whole contents. A cursory glance showed her not one marked passage. Once again she saw herself cheated.
Yet why had the sender taken such elaborate precautions? Surely Elsie must be in earnest if she stayed her second flight long enough to perform this task? In earnest—or else mad. Insanity would account for everything. Anyhow, by now the woman was far away, lost as she knew so well how to lose herself. But for that red scar on her throat, one would say—
“But no! That’s not her intention. I simply can’t believe she’d have the courage to take her life, not after last night. She must be found. This time she shan’t escape.”
Bundling up the parcel, Diana went straight to the Temple. Michael Hull had not arrived, and when after twenty minutes he did appear she was too engrossed in her own thoughts to notice he was disturbed in his manner. In his private office she poured out her story.
“And these newspapers are all she’s given me. While I’ve waited for you I’ve studied them line by line, and if there’s anything in them I’ve not found it. What do you make of it?”
Now the odd expression in Hull’s eyes struck her. Was this pity again?
“I’m sorry you had to wait,” was the slow response. “I was detained by another item of news. Apparently you don’t know yet that during the night Number Seventeen Floyd’s Square was broken into by the police. Elsie Dilworth was found in her bedroom, which was sealed up and filled with gas. She was stone dead—by her own hand.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Suicide? I don’t—that is, I can’t—believe it.”
Diana’s throat was parched. She had to swallow to get the hoarseness out of her voice.
“She was alone in the house,” said Hull. “It was certainly suicide.”
“What else was found?” she whispered. “Any note, any—” She could not utter the word confession, but her companion understood.
“Nothing. What you have there is all the light we seem likely to have on the event.”
Diana smoothed the letter she had crumpled in her hand. She was thinking that once before in this same room she had seen a door slam in her face, as surely as the real door had done last night. Now again it had happened, and this time there would be no reopening it. She pointed to the two sentences: I’m out of it. I’m going now where neither you nor the police can find me to haul me back.
“Then that was what she meant?” she asked dryly.
Hull read the whole letter through, made cautious sounds. Before he had finished, power to reason flowed back into Diana’s numbed brain.
“It’s—queer. If she really had the intention of killing herself, why not hand me these papers instead of getting me off the premises and writing me a letter? Did you hear me say she’d tried once to cut her throat? She was too cowardly to finish the job. Doesn’t that all go to prove—”
She broke off, turning towards the door, which had suddenly been opened by a clerk. It seemed that Mr. Bream was in the outer office. Hull nodded and said, “Show him in.”
The little agent, paler than usual, looked subdued and thoughtful. Diana met him with a swift, “Was it suicide? Are you sure?”—but his reply was roundabout. Beginning with his own arrival at Floyd’s Square, he described how he had found Inspector Headcorn and a sergeant already there, pounding at the door.
“We began to think the place was empty. Then we smelled gas. The window up there didn’t fit tight enough to keep it all in. We borrowed a ladder and got inside the front bedroom, though the gas was enough to knock you over. Full on—and she was lying, in a brown cloth coat, close up against the gas fire, her head in a sort of cowl made of wrapping-paper. She’d been dead a good half-hour—maybe longer.”
Diana watched him with horror in her eyes, seeing the picture vividly. Hull inquired if there had been any evidence of a previous struggle.
“None, and no marks of any kind on the body, except the healed wound on the throat Miss Lake noticed. There was a typewriter on the table. She hadn’t packed her bags, and there was no food about. We examined all her belongings, but didn’t find anything to rouse a moment’s query.”
“And the owner of the house?”
“Still away. The milkman told us she’d taken her boy and gone to Dulwich for a couple of days.” Bream paused, glanced at Diana, and continued: “We got Mr. Blundell up to make a formal identification. He declares he hardly knew her, what with her hair cut short and dyed black, and her general starved appearance. It seemed a decided shock to him. He found in her purse two of his keys on a ring—the ones she’d hung on to—and a latchkey to the house, though we don’t know, naturally, how she came by it. There’s a good bit to nose out, but I don’t imagine it will alter after the doctor’s verdict.”
The barrister gestured towards the pile of newspapers on his desk.
“I’d better tell you what took the victim out last night,” he said, and gave a brief résumé of Diana’s latest experience.
“What!” exploded Bream, his pale eyes blazing. “Here, let me look!”
He pounced upon the papers, thumbed them over. “Humph!” he muttered disappointedly. “Seems the same lot I saw in her room the one other time I was there. They are the same—with a few additions. Anything in ’em?”
“It’s a bit premature to say positively. Oh, I say! Miss Lake!” Hull started up with concern. “Here, let me get you some brandy!”
With a shaky laugh she warded him off.
“I’m all right, thanks. I suppose it’s this shock, and the fact that I’ve had no breakfast.”
“I’ll send out for coffee. Meanwhile, there’s a couch in the file-room through there. Bream, will you look after her? And when she’s feeling better you and she might have a thorough go at these papers. I’ll study them later.” Coffee, quickly fetched, steadied Diana’s nerves, and in company with Bream she set to work, once more feverishly determined to wrest some secret from what, to outward seeming, was simply and solely a batch of out-of-date print. In the midst of the task she stopped to ply the agent again with questions.
“You see, it’s the stone wall, just as it was before. Every chink closed up. First we had that Indian, now it’s Elsie. Two suicides. I suppose there’s no chance of proving anything different?”
“If there is, I don’t know where to look for it—though I may tell you Headcorn’s every bit as anxious as we are to upset the suicide theory. I left him going over that house with a magnifying glass, but it didn’t seem very promising. No sign of a forced entrance, no odd fingerprints, no—” He left the sentence unfinished and, holding up a page of newspaper, examined it against the light.
“What are you looking for?” she asked curiously.
“Pin-pricks. There aren’t any. Now for the dates. Maybe we’ll get a clue from them.”
He noted down the dates of issue on a bit of paper, which he compared with the rough calendar composed in connection with the Somervell case.
“November first is the starting-point. Let’s see. . . . Mrs. Somervell was buried on October twenty-fifth, Dilworth informed the Home Office and left her employment on the twenty-eighth, and three days later began collecting papers. By November twelfth she’d accumulated a dozen—ten evening journals, two Sundays; and since then she’d added fourteen more. We may assume that before the first of November she was not interested in this newspaper game, despite the fact that already she’d busied herself over Mrs. Somervell’s death, and—if your idea is right—taken her first step towards getting Somervell into her power. Now what started her on this tack?”
Consulting his calendar again, he remarked that Adrian’s interview with Blundell on the subject of his inheritance took place at the Fetter Lane office on October the twenty-ninth.
“And the letter Blundell wrote him must have been dictated the day before. October the twenty-eighth was the date of two other occurrences—”
“I know,” interrupted Diana. “Elsie saw the Home Office people, and sent in her resignation. Well?”
“Now maybe we’re getting something!” cried Bream excitedly. “If we can discover what time of day that letter was dictated—that is whether it was before the lunch-hour when she paid her visit or afterwards—but surely you see what I mean?”
“I’m afraid I don’t, quite.”
“Why!” began the agent, and then, his vivacity ebbing, checked himself. “No,” he resumed, rubbing his chin. “Perhaps I’d better work on it a bit before explaining. It’s just an idea that may fizzle out. Let’s have another squint at that letter she enclosed with this rubbish.”
Carrying the dead woman’s message to the window, he examined the obliterated words with a pocket magnifying glass.
“Crossed out with ‘x’s,’ then inked on top of that. . . . Here, how’s this? ‘In the first place you would not have believed me; in the second, the mere fact of your knowing where I am would sign my death-warrant.’ I’m not certain that’s correct, and I mean to have the sentence submitted to a test; but I can almost swear to the three words fact, where and warrant.”
Diana gripped the arms of her chair. “Does that sound as though she meant to commit suicide?” she whispered. “To me it’s more like the confession we hoped for—or something very close to it.”
“Is it?” he queried dubiously. “It could mean just the same obsession of fear she seems to have been labouring under all along—possibly an unreasoning obsession. Dilworth may have been the victim of persecution mania. I fully expect the coroner’s jury to return a verdict of Suicide while of Unsound Mind, and with more sincerity than is usual.” He pointed with annoyance to the newspapers. “I ask you, what is there in all these to give any sane person the jitters?”
Diana was too sick at heart to make any reply. She, too, saw the sound sense in the view just expressed. It was with dull surprise, therefore, that she heard her companion say that all the same it would be their wisest course to keep the newspapers locked in Mr. Hull’s safe, and to speak of them to no one.
“No one,” he repeated with emphasis. “And that applies equally to what happened last night. Inspector Headcorn and I have agreed we want for the present to keep certain things strictly amongst ourselves, and away from the Press people. Understand?”
Did she? For a single instant what she saw—or fancied she saw—in the agent’s eyes sent a feeling strangely akin to an electric shock through her body. It echoed her reaction of yesterday when she had talked with Colin Ladbroke about Adrian’s queer attitude towards his own predicament. When she was by herself her breath came jerkily, and for some time she remained staring down at the litter of meaningless print, almost oblivious of her surroundings.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Blundell was not yet in his office when Bream reached there, but a telephone message from him had suspended all work while the staff conferred in awed voices over their late associate’s death. Resolving to tackle one point before attempting to solve the whole exasperating riddle of Elsie Dilworth’s behaviour, Bream put concrete questions, with results inconclusive but stimulating. He learned that Blundell dictated his letters in the morning, but that he sometimes had an additional one to give later in the day. No one remembered just what had happened in this respect on October twenty-eighth, though the young girl typist did recall that Miss Dilworth, who for several days had seemed “very queer,” had, at about three in the afternoon, come over sick and faint.
“I was in the ladies’ room on the landing, filling the kettle for tea. She came in looking ever such a bad colour. Maybe it was a liver attack, as she said; but I remember thinking it seemed more like—well, some sort of shock she’d had.”
“Have you any idea what was responsible?”
“No, and I might have been wrong. I do know Mr. Blundell begged her to go home and rest, only she wouldn’t hear of it. Yes, that was her last day at the office. Next morning she didn’t turn up.”
“Do you know what she had been doing just before she felt faint? Dictating letters, typing correspondence?”
“That I can’t say. I’d been out to buy stamps. Look, here’s Mr. Blundell just coming in. Maybe he can tell you.”
