Black Widow. S. Fowler Wright
working upwards, which experience had taught him to be the more profitable direction in which to dredge for the gold of truth in the channels of muddles, errors, and lies beneath which he was accustomed to find it so deeply buried, commenced with the gardener’s boy.
He was one slow of words, but of a perpetual grin. His lack of fluency was further impeded by the fact that, when Inspector Pinkey interviewed him, he was sucking a very large sweet. He said that he had heard the shot, and had commenced to run to the window in the anticipation—perhaps hope would not be an unfair word—that “somethin’ was up.” He had been called back by Mr. Bulger, and had reluctantly continued weeding until Mr. Gerard had appeared from the window and questioned him as to having seen anyone come out previously. Had he done so? No—no one. Except, of course, Mr. Gerard. How long after the shot was fired? Quite a time. Five minutes? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps not. Quite a time. Mr. Gerard had come straight to him to know whether he had seen anything. Then he had gone on to question Mr. Bulger.
This was the tale he had told before. There seemed no reason to doubt it, nor to hope that further questions would lead to any additional discovery.
The Inspector, determined that no possibility should be overlooked, found some difficulty in considering him as a candidate for the position of murderer. A boy’s prank? Suppose he had discovered the weapon, so carelessly left in that unlocked drawer, during some lawless exploration of the vacant study?
Suppose he had hidden when Sir Daniel entered, and shot him from behind? He was short enough to have to fire upward at Sir Daniel’s head. Suppose he had only meant to frighten him, firing up into the air? Suppose.… The Inspector reminded himself again of the relative importance of fact and theory; and these theories approached the absurd.
The character given to Sir Daniel did not suggest that his gardener’s boy would be likely to play jokes with revolvers behind his ear. The Inspector looked at the cheerful, vacuous face, with its working jaws, as the sweet came back from the cheek in which it had been deposited for the exigencies of conversation, and the idea that he had deliberately shot Sir Daniel seemed too fantastic for further consideration. Still, if Lady Denton be put aside, he had been nearest to the scene of the tragedy. It was an explanation at least physically possible.
The Inspector’s trained keenness of observation was inclined to perceive a suggestion of nervousness behind the obtuse screen of that perpetual grin. He knew that the country man or woman, with an appearance of slow stupidity, can often conceal thought or emotion far more successfully than his less stolid brother of the town. The boy had a reputation for slipping away from his work. He must have his own ideas, his own dreams of evil or good, through the long slow hours in which he pulled weeds from the garden path.
“Now, Tommy,” he said, “tell me this. Did you run round to the kitchen, or go away for anything else just for a few minutes, so that anyone could have gone in at the study window, or gone out, without you seeing him, when Sir Daniel was shot? If you did that you needn’t be afraid that you’ll be blamed by Bulger or anyone else if you tell the truth, and you may save a lot of trouble all round.”
The boy looked at him for a few seconds before replying, and the Inspector had an uneasy doubt that he was considering the expediency rather than the truth of the admission that he had been invited to make.
It would be of little assistance to the solution of the problem if the boy should make a false statement that he had left the drive, under the impression that he would be pleasing those in authority, or from whom his employment came.
But the Inspector was spared the embarrassment of that doubt, for, after his pause of silence, the boy shook his head in denial.
“How,” he asked, “could I ’a’ done that, with Mr. Bulger a-lookin’ on all the time? You can arst him, if you like.” And then, with a burst of convincing logic: “How could I ’a’ heard the bang, if I warn’t here?”
Inspector Pinkey recognized his defeat, and strolled on to interview the gardener, a rheumatic ancient, who received him in the steaming heat of the cucumber house, and appeared quite willing to converse on any subject, comparatively indifferent to the fact that his deafness frequently resulted in his remarks having little relation to those which were addressed to him.
However, by tact and patience, the Inspector finally obtained, in addition to some information respecting the domestic habits of cucumbers, and Mr. Bulger’s opinion of Hitler (which was not high), the information he sought.
It appeared that the gardener had been trimming the sides of the drive, working toward the house, and therefore in Tommy’s direction. He had kept a vigilant eye upon him, having too many previous experiences of his errant temperament to be careless in that respect.
His deafness did not prevent him from perceiving very quickly the implication of the Inspector’s curiosity, which he appeared to regard as of a highly humorous complexion. He chuckled long over the idea of Tommy venturing into the study to make an end of his employer. “You be the fair limit, you Lunnon chaps,” he said, in appreciation of so good a jest, and long afterwards, when the somewhat discomfited Inspector had endeavoured to lead the conversation in other directions, he broke into a new cackle of laughter, and remarked as though confidentially to the cucumber he was tending: “They be the limit, they be.”
The Inspector left at last, having obtained Mr. Bulger’s opinion (for what it was worth) that, if Tommy had succeeded in leaving his post, his objective would have been the kitchen, not the study, and that his desire had not been for his employer’s conversation, but for that of Mabel, the kitchen maid, who was, to Tommy at least, a more attractive member of the community. But Mr. Bulger was emphatic that he had gone nowhere at all. The only time that he had shown symptoms of flight, Mr. Bulger had called him back, and that occasion had been shortly followed by Mr. Gerard’s appearance, and was evidently that on which his curiosity had been roused by the sound of the fatal shot.
Mr. Bulger also expressed a decided opinion (which the Inspector was to find general throughout the domestic staff) that Sir Daniel had shot himself, in doing which he had shown a sound idea of his own value. Mr. Bulger pointed out that this was one of the points in which man was superior to the animal, and still more to the vegetable kingdom, there being fruit trees of indifferent bearing which Lady Denton was unwilling to condemn to the axe, of which there was too little hope that they would make an end of themselves in the same way.
The Inspector was also informed, in the course of a long metaphor of considerable complexity but unmistakable meaning, that it is meritorious to stir the soil either for the insertion of a seed potato or the removal of the resulting crop, but that the disturbance of dirt when you have nothing useful to sow, or profitable to reap, may be a less pardonable activity.
It was a reflection which came at times to his own mind, as it must come to all but the most obtuse of those who minister to the blind and cruel impartiality of the law. He was aware of the conventional, and perhaps sufficient, reply; but he knew that it is difficult to state it briefly in convincing words, and—to a deaf man—he let the case go by default, and walked round to the kitchen to see what, if anything, might be learned there.
It is no mean tribute to his tact and adroitness that he was able to overcome the latent hostility with which his investigation was regarded—doubtless in their mistress’s interest—by the domestic staff. By these qualities patiently exercised, he was able to obtain a willing repetition of tales which had been fully told more than once before, and it was no one’s fault that they did no more than confirm the narrative and conclusions which he had had from Superintendent Trackfield on the previous day.
If the servants had any doubt of how Sir Daniel had died, it was evident that it was one that they were not disposed to develop, even in their own minds; nor was their loyalty to their mistress shaken thereby. Sir Daniel, their answers assumed, if they did not assert, had died by his own hand, and if the cook did not actually add “and a good thing too,” it was evident that she would have assented willingly to that proposition. Yet the Inspector had no difficulty in eliminating her as an alternative to the supposition of Lady Denton’s guilt. Had Sir Daniel been banged on the head with a flat iron in one of the back passages, it might have been a more doubtful