The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding

There was no question at the inquest, or before it, of foul play. To say that there was no sign of a struggle, hardly did justice to the ordered neatness of the room and the dead woman. She wore at neck and wrist fine lace frills which would have torn at a touch. The very material of her new gray velvet frock was as spotless and smooth as when she had slipped into it after lunch. The bullet fitted the revolver. The only finger-prints on the butt were those of the dead woman. Apart from these facts, Mrs. Tangye was the last person to sit tamely in a chair and let any one press a weapon against her breast, as the blackened frock, as well as the autopsy, showed must have been done. She was a good shot. She had once in France put a bullet through a drunken Annamite's foot with most unrattled precision.

      The chair on which she was found was a fragile, gilt affair which she favoured for making tea. Any struggle, and over it would have gone. It was not so much as scratched. Behind her stood a none too firmly placed electric stand-lamp. It too would have crashed very easily. On the table beside her lay a china bell-push. The bell was in perfect order, and had not been rung.

      Nothing was reported missing. Her purse lay in her handbag with over five pounds in it on a chair in the room. The French windows were said to have been found locked from the inside. The servants were certain that no one could have entered the house unnoticed between four, the hour when Florence, the parlour-maid, had brought in the tea-things and seen her mistress alive, and six, when she had made the terrible discovery.

      No sound of a shot had been heard, and yet the revolver bore no marks of a silencer. It was thought that it must have gone off when some noisy vehicle was passing.

      All the friends of Mrs. Tangye with whom the police had been able to get into touch agreed that she had seemed in the best of spirits, and that the suicide was out of the question.

      She was thirty-five, and even the gossipy circle could not hint at any entanglement on her part.

      Yet Haviland, the Twickenham police Superintendent, did believe that it had been a case of suicide. For on the day before her death Mrs. Tangye had sent off a large trunk of clothes to the Salvation Army leaving out for herself only the garment she was wearing. And yesterday, the fatal day, she had spent some hours destroying all her private papers.

      "What on earth do you mean, Pointer?" Wilmot, the third man, asked curiously. "I've seldom listened to duller evidence. But I suppose I'm prejudiced. Naturally, as a newspaper man, I had hoped for something more worth while, more—"

      The door flew open. A young man dashed in. Nodded to Wilmot and Haviland. Shot a discreet glance at Pointer. Seated himself in front of a battered typewriter in one corner, and began a spirited imitation of a machine-gun in action.

      Pointer looked at him.

      It was a pleasant glance, and Newnes was one of the youngest reporters on the Staff of the Daily Courier, but he interpreted it correctly.

      "Let me see to-morrow's sun rise!" he pleaded. "I was the first person called in by Mrs. Tangye's maid, you know. And this is my last will and testament concerning her. You needn't caution me to print nothing without permission. I'm more than discreet. I'm dull."

      The men laughed.

      "Perhaps you wouldn't mind telling your story again. I wasn't at the inquest." Pointer settled himself in a chair.

      Newnes, like all his craft, minded nothing but exclusion. He began at once:

      "Yesterday afternoon, about six, I had just strolled over Richmond Bridge, when a maid rushed out of one of the big houses screaming, 'A doctor! Help! Help! She's dead!'

      "Behind her in the doorway stood another woman, who called to the first to 'Come back, Florence! Come back at once!'

      "I thought if 'she' was dead, I couldn't do much harm. So I said 'Hold on. I'm half a doctor. Let's see what's wrong.'

      "'She's killed herself. Oh, she's dead! Come in and see what you can do for her, sir. Oh, the poor mistress!'

      "I took her by the arm and walked her back to the door again, where the other woman, who turned out to be Mrs. Tangye's companion, was still standing. I explained that I had been a medical student (I didn't add that it was only for two months) and that perhaps I could do as well as anybody. 'Quite as well.' She said as coolly as you please: 'There's been an accident. Mrs. Tangye has shot herself. I think no one ought to go in till I've telephoned to the police. Better give that hysterical girl something to quiet her meanwhile.'

      "I pointed out that as she and the maid had both been in the room, I might be permitted a look at the lady. Possibly something could be done of after all. She nodded towards a door. I opened it, and stepped in. I heard her ring up the police station as I did so. There, beside a tea-table in a deep recess, sat a handsome, well-dressed woman with her head sunk on her breast. She looked about thirty. She was quite dead. Her cheek, which I took care to do no more than touch, was icy. A revolver..." He proceeded to describe what he had seen:

      "While I was making my notes, the Superintendent arrived. He—"

      "Many thanks." Pointer held out his hand. "If anything turns up that the papers can be usefully told, you shall have the first hint. And now—sorry, you know, but police-routine—"

      Newnes made no protest. In a large town, a man is a reporter, not by the grace of God, but of the police.

      Wilmot came under quite another heading. His discretion, like his position, was not a mere promise, but a well established fact. For several years, he and his articles had been the helpers of the law. For Wilmot was that much abused definition, a criminologist. And a great one.

      "The ploughman homewards plods his weary way." He watched from the window Newnes' reluctant turning of the corner. "And now, may merely mortal man inquire what has brought one of the Big Four of the New Scotland Yard upon the scene?"

      Pointer drew out his pipe. "When there's anything odd about the actions of three people connected with a case in town which ends in a death, or rather begins in one, some man from the Yard is sure to drop in sooner or later. Merely as a matter of routine."

      "Odd about three people, sir?" Haviland repeated aghast.

      "Let me see," Wilmot murmured. He loved riddles. "There's Mrs. Tangye for one of course. She didn't shoot herself every day to be sure. But the other two?"

      "There's her companion," Pointer said tranquilly.

      "Whom you credit with occult powers. A fashionable but quite unexpected attitude."

      "How else was this Miss Saunders able to tell so quickly, and so certainly that her employer was dead?" The Chief Inspector filled his pipe, while Haviland listened spellbound. "As the evidence stands, Miss Saunders says that she had barely got back, and was taking off her things in her room upstairs when she heard the maid call out. That, mind you, is the first sign she had that anything was wrong in the house. Now, the parlour-maid says that after one shriek—when she found her mistress sitting cold and still in her chair—she darted from the house in a blind panic. Your Mr. Newnes, who strikes me as an accurate observer, and is, of course, trained to notice carefully, says that he saw Miss Saunders standing in the doorway—already certain, that Mrs. Tangye is dead—when the maid rushes towards him. The maid screams for help. She's natural, however incoherent. The companion composedly tells him there's nothing to be done. If she really only came out of her room when she heard the girl below, it's not easy to understand how she could have been so positive, from one hurried glance, that Mrs. Tangye was past all aid. It looks as though she knows more than we do, about the whole affair. As if, supposing her to have been out at all, she had gone into the room where Mrs. Tangye was, immediately on her return, and found her dead, before going on upstairs."

      "What! Without saying a word to any one!" Superintendent Haviland was a married man. Pointer was not. The police officer thought that this was a bachelor's idea of feminine powers.

      "And the visitor who vanished into thin air," Haviland went on, "do you mean Mrs. Cranbourn, sir, for your third person? The lady whose coming at six led to the discovery of the body?"

      "Just so. Mrs. Cranbourn. But for her having been expected—that