The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding

master's over-coat pockets. This last Saturday, just before dinner. He had left his top-coat behind that he usually wears down to his office. And Mrs. Tangye pulled out a letter and stood reading it. Short note it was. She folded it up, and stood tapping the floor with her foot before she put it into her handbag and went on into the dining-room with a toss of her head that as good as said she had made up her mind to something—" Olive stopped, as though she had said too much.

      No pressing could get her to supply the name of any woman from whom the letter might have come. Obviously she did not know it. And to the rest of the questions put her, she could only bear out what her sister had already told them. She too had never heard Mrs Tangye refer to any living member of her family.

      Miss Saunders stepped in to say that the undertakers' men were coming, and that Mr. Tangye would be obliged if they need not know that the police were in the house. They would be some time. Half an hour probably. Pointer turned ostentatiously to Wilmot.

      "Let's go for a stroll," that figure-head suggested. "We can come back and finish afterwards."

      CHAPTER 3

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      THE three men walked towards the river in silence for some minutes. A soft, sibilant murmur came from the water which had lost its lights now, and lay hidden in mist. It seemed to Pointer to be chanting "Accident—Suicide—Murder? Accident—Suicide—Murder?" under its breath.

      Any of the three might still be the word that would fit the puzzle which the Chief Inspector intended to solve. Haviland turned to the newspaper man.

      "Well, whether accident or suicide, we hand it over to you now, Mr. Wilmot. Unless the Chief Inspector thinks otherwise, of course. I suppose the case is closed, as far as the police are concerned? Olive seems to've got hold of the right tip. That letter that she saw Mrs. Tangye reading must have been the last straw. As a matter of fact, I said we should find that something of that kind had happened."

      Pointer lit his pipe.

      "The footsteps that stopped," he spoke the words as though they pleased his ear. "Sounds like one of your own articles, Wilmot."

      Wilmot turned a meditative eye on the Chief Inspector, "Nice head-line. But I make a point of never misleading my public."

      This time it was Pointer who looked his question.

      "Well, even if they ever existed, which I very much doubt. Tangye may have run down from town hoping to make his peace with his wife. Say that there was a row on Monday which made him skip dinner at home." Both Wilmot's listeners nodded. Each had already said that to himself. "He may have gone into the garden after her. It would cost me my reputation to raise hopes of a dramatic development, and then have it fizzle out into father's list slippers."

      "You think it will?"

      Wilmot did not reply for a second. Had they found anything which suggested foul play? Honestly, as far as he could see, they had not. But what about Pointer? His were the eyes that counted in this search.

      "What does the Counsel for the Prosecution say?" Wilmot asked instead of replying.

      "That when you talk of suicide—"

      "Or accident. I'm afraid I think that's only too possible," Wilmot said pensively.

      "Or accident. You forget the butter under Mrs. Tangye's wedding rings," Pointer spoke very seriously.

      "You overwhelm me with confusion, so I had!" Wilmot spoke in mock consternation. "Is this the sort of rock on which a police inquiry is built? I've no idea how that mysterious process begins. Do you inventory the butter on her finger solemnly under the heading of 'Clues of which the Police are in Possession'?"

      "No, no!" Haviland laughed in his turn. "The fact is, we haven't found even the ghost of such a thing as a clue which points to a crime, have we, sir?"

      "And where there's no clue there's no crime?" Wilmot queried.

      "Whose steps stopped in the garden?" Pointer asked. "Tangye would have come on in, if they had been his. At least, so it seems to me. Why was her left hand so buttery that it left such clear prints on her revolver and yet none on her fork?"

      Haviland turned to him quickly.

      "You spoke before of her prints on the Webley as being odd, sir? In what way, in fact?"

      "I can tell better when I have studied the enlargements," was the evasive reply.

      There was a short silence. This was different from theorising beforehand. The Chief Inspector was looking over the fields. Was the Hark, Hallo! coming? It all lay with the young man leaning with folded arms on the low parapet of the bridge and staring straight before him with level, quiet eyes.

      Haviland fidgetted with a cigar. "Of course," he said dubiously, "it's a question of finding out what's essential and what isn't..."

      Wilmot gave a short laugh. "Be able to do that, Haviland, and you'll be a god, not a policeman."

      "Still, as a matter of fact," Haviland went on doggedly, "that is what has to be done."

      "And pray what is the essential fact or facts here?" Wilmot asked indulgently.

      Pointer answered for the Superintendent, "The most essential thing in, this case is to find out exactly what happened on Sunday. When the break occurred."

      "Break?"

      "Between the old Mrs. Tangye and the new Mrs. Tangye. Between the woman who went on as always, and the woman who apparently changed her habits so much."

      "She seems to've quarrelled with Tangye on Monday as usual," Wilmot reminded him.

      "True," Pointer had to smile at the other's tone. "Yet she first began then to prepare for her coming departure."

      "Safe word that. We can all meet on it," Wilmot murmured approvingly.

      "Apparently, only apparently, of course," Pointer went on, "she seems to've been her usual self till Sunday morning."

      "Till that letter she read," Haviland breathed.

      "Until she went to Tunbridge Wells at any rate. Possibly that decision itself marked the beginning of the change. For when she gets back she goes to bed. She starts next day weeding out her wardrobe; the day after she tears up her private papers. It looks to me as if something had happened down at that flower-show."

      "Sunday," Wilmot repeated meditatively. "I don't follow you there, Pointer. The break, as you call it—the breaking-point would be nearer the mark, I think—occurred in my judgment, not between two Mrs. Tangyes, but between her and her husband, and took place Monday afternoon. You say she had changed by Monday. I can't see any change before that talk or quarrel, with her husband about five in the afternoon. On Monday morning she had had her hair waved, says Florence. We know that in the afternoon, she took a vivid interest in her new evening-dress. Those preparations on which we all lay so much store, though we read them differently, only began after she had seen and talked with her husband at tea-time."

      "No, not quite," Haviland corrected, "as a matter of fact she went out and left word before five with Carter Patterson to take her trunk to the Salvation Army's old clothes department. Before her husband got home from his weekend."

      Wilmot did not know this. It altered his argument as he at once said.

      "And you think what happened on Sunday when she was away from home so important, do you sir?" Haviland asked, "More so, in fact, than the letter itself, which sent her down there?"

      "We may be able to guess the letter from what took place. But not the other way round. Was the show the sort of thing that would get into the papers, Wilmot? London papers?"

      "You mean would any reporters be sent down to Tunbridge who might be able to help us? Not one." Wilmot explained that orchid shows in country towns, even big ones like this affair, would never get beyond