Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard MEGAPACK®. Josephine Tey
That’s why I asked you about Mrs. Ratcliffe just now. I want a woman’s opinion to help me—an unbiased woman’s opinion.”
“Well, if you want my candid opinion, I think the woman is a fool.”
“Oh? You don’t think she’s clever, deep down?”
“I don’t think she has a deep down.”
“You think she’s just shallow? But surely—” He considered.
“Well, you asked me what I thought, and I’ve told you. I think she’s a shallow fool.”
“And her sister?” Grant asked, though that had nothing to do with the investigations.
“Oh, she is different. She has any amount of brain and personality, though you mightn’t think so.”
“Would you say that Mrs. Ratcliffe would commit a murder?”
“No, certainly not!”
“Why not?”
“Because she hasn’t got the guts,” said Miss Dinmont elegantly. “She might do the thing in a fit of temper, but all the world would know it the next minute, and ever afterwards as long as she lived.”
“Do you think she might know about one and keep the knowledge to herself?”
“You mean the knowledge of who was guilty?”
“Yes.”
Miss Dinmont sat looking searchingly at the inspector’s impassive face. The lights of station lamps moved slowly over and past it as the train slid to a halt. “Eridge! Eridge!” called the porter, clumping down the deserted platform. The unexpectant voice had died into the distance, and the train had gathered itself into motion again before she spoke.
“I wish I could read what you are thinking,” she said desperately. “Am I being your fool for the second time in one day?”
“Miss Dinmont, believe me, so far I have never known you do a foolish thing, and I’m willing to take a large bet I never shall.”
“That might do for Mrs. Ratcliffe,” she said. “But I’ll tell you. I think she might keep quiet about a murder, but there would have to be a reason that mattered to herself overwhelmingly. That’s all.”
He was not sure whether the last two words meant that that was all that she could tell him, or whether it was an indication that pumping was to cease; but she had given him food for thought, and he was quiet until they ran into Victoria. “Where are you living?” he asked. “Not at the hospital?”
“No; I’m staying at my club in Cavendish Square.”
He accompanied her there against her wish, and said good night on the doorstep, since she would not be persuaded to dine with him.
“You have some days of holiday yet,” he said, with kindly intention. “How are you going to fill them in?”
“In the first place, I’m going to see my aunt. I have come to the conclusion that the evils one knows are less dreadful than the evils one doesn’t know.”
But the inspector caught the glint of the hall light on her teeth, and went away feeling less a martyr to injustice than he had for some hours past.
Chapter 17
SOLUTION
Grant was disconsolate. His radiance was dimmed as the Yard had never known it dimmed. He even snapped at the faithful Williams, and only the surprised hurt on that bland pink face recalled him to himself for a little. Mrs. Field blamed it unconditionally on the Scots: their food, their ways, their climate, and their country; and said dramatically to her husband, after the manner of a childish arithmetic, “If four days in a country like that makes him like this, what would a month do?” That was on the occasion when she was exhibiting to her better half the torn and muddy tweeds that Grant had brought back with him from his foray in the hills; but she made no secret of her beliefs and her prejudices, and Grant suffered her as mildly as his worried soul would permit. Back in the everyday routine and clearing-up arrears of work he would stop and ask himself, What had he left undone? What possible avenue of exploration had he left untravelled? He tried deliberately to stop himself from further questioning, to accept the general theory that the police case was too good to be other than true, to subscribe to Barker’s opinion that he had “nerves” and needed a holiday. But it was no use. The feeling that there was something wrong somewhere always flowed back the minute he stopped bullying himself. If anything, the conviction grew as the slow, unproductive, tedious days passed, and he would go back in his mind to that first day, little more than a fortnight ago, when he had viewed an unknown body, and go over the case again from there. Had he missed a point somewhere? There was the knife that had proved so barren a clue—an individual thing to be so unproductive. Yet no one had claimed to have seen or owned one like it. All it had done was to provide the scar on the murderer’s hand—a piece of evidence conclusive only when allied with much more.
There was this, there was that, there was the other, but all of them stood the strain of pulling apart, and remained in their separate entities what they had been in the pattern of the whole; and Grant was left, as before, with the belief, so strong and so unreasonable that it amounted to superstition, that the monogrammed brooch in Sorrell’s pocket was the key to the whole mystery; that it was shouting its tale at them, only they could not hear. It lay in his desk with the knife now, and the consciousness of it was with him continually. When he had nothing to do for the moment he would take both it and the knife from the drawer and sit there “mooning over them,” as the sympathetic Williams reported to his subordinate. They were becoming a fetish with him. There was some connexion between the two—between the offering that Sorrell had made to a woman and the knife that had killed him. He felt that as strongly and distinctly as he felt the sunlight that warmed his hands as he played with the objects on the table. And yet both his own reason and that of others laughed at the idea. What had the brooch to do with the affair! Gerald Lamont had killed Sorrell with a small Italian knife—his grandmother had been Italian, and if he hadn’t inherited the knife he had probably inherited the will to use one—after a quarrel in a queue. On his own showing he resented Sorrell’s departure from Britain, leaving him jobless and more or less penniless. Sorrell had had the money to pay for his passage, but had not offered it. And on his own showing he had not known that Sorrell had given him any money until two days after the murder. Where did a pearl monogrammed brooch come into that? The little silver-and-enamel knife was a pièce de résistance in the case—a prince of exhibits. It would be photographed, paragraphed, and discussed in every house in England, and the little crack on its boss handle would hang a man. And all the time that pearl brooch, which would not appear in the case at all, glowed a silent and complete refutal of all their puny theories.
It was utterly ridiculous. Grant hated the sight of the thing, and yet he went back again and again to it as a man does to a mocking mistress. He tried “shutting his eyes”—his favourite resort in a difficulty—and either distracted himself with amusement, or buried himself in work for long periods at a time; but always when he opened his eyes again it was the brooch he saw. That had never happened before—that he had opened his eyes again and seen no new angle in a case. It was borne in on him that either he was obsessed or he had reached the last angle in the case—the vital one—and that it told him nothing; it was there for him to read, and he did not know how to.
Suppose, he would think, just suppose that the murder was an emissary’s work after all, and not the result of the quarrel in the queue, what type of person would an emissary be? Not one of those nearest the murdered man, certainly. But no one else had had access to the queue except the policeman, the doorkeeper, and Lamont. Or had there been another who had made his escape unnoticed? Raoul Legarde had gone, and Lamont had gone, without attracting notice—the one because the queue was self-absorbed, the other because it was absorbed in the murder. Was it possible that there had been still another? He reminded himself how indifferent to their surroundings the various witnesses had proved themselves to have been. Not one of them had been able to give an adequate account