Chapter NINE: The Ring of Stella Nelson

He came into the hall.

“Where are the servants?” he asked.

“The butler is pacifying the women, sir.”

“Send for him,” said Andy shortly.

The butler had heard nothing. His master had sent the servants to bed early. He had said that he would put out the lights and lock up. He often did this, so the butler did not see anything unusual in the order.

“Has he had any visitors this evening?”

The man hesitated.

“I couldn’t say for certain, sir. I heard voices once. I came down for a candle, and I thought I heard him talking.”

“To whom?”

“Well, sir,” hesitated the man, “as far as I could judge, it was to a lady.”

“Did you recognise her voice?”

“No, sir.”

“What time was this?”

“Between half-past ten and eleven.”

“Did you hear no shot?”

“No, sir. Something woke me up; it may have been that. Cook says she heard a sound like a door creaking loudly. She came and woke me up. She didn’t wake me up immediately she’d heard the sound, but lay shivering in bed thinking it was burglars. Then she got up and knocked at Mr. Merrivan’s door, and, as he didn’t answer, she came to me. That’s how I discovered Mr. Merrivan, sir.”

“When you went into the room were the windows open or closed?”

“They were closed, sir.”

“Is there any other way out beside the front door?”

“Yes, sir. There’s a way out through the kitchen and there’s another way out along the rosery path which Mr. Merrivan uses himself.”

The doors leading to both these exits were barred and bolted, and Andy returned to the room where the murder had been committed. He noticed something peculiar about the carved Chinese cabinet. The door did not seem to fit, and, pulling it open, it came away in his hand. Then he understood the utility of the cabinet. Inside was a steel safe, which was also open. A bunch of keys dangled from the lock. He pulled open this door, to discover that the safe was empty. Then in the fireplace he saw a heap of burnt papers. Part of the heap was still smouldering red, and carefully he extracted such unburnt scraps as remained. He rescued a little leather-covered diary which had only been partly consumed, and this he placed carefully on a piece of paper.

“Nobody is to touch those ashes, you understand, sergeant?”

“I understand, sir.”

Andy examined the windows. Those in the front of the house were secured and had not been tampered with. He tried the windows at the rear, and, as he had expected, one of them was unfastened.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the sergeant. “Did you see the letter?”

“The letter?” said Andy. “No, where?”

“The butler found it on the floor by the desk. He tells me he picked it up and put it under a heap of papers on the desk. He has just remembered that. He said he thought it was a letter Mr. Merrivan had been reading just before he was killed.”

Andy searched the desk and drew forth from beneath a heap of accounts and unanswered letters a sheet of yellow notepaper. The calligraphy was cramped and of that style which is known as back-hand, and is usually used by people who seek to disguise their handwriting.

The first words arrested Andy’s attention. He sat down in the swing chair. The letter ran:

“I have given you a chance. You have failed me. You must bear the consequence. If in twenty-four hours you do not agree to carry out your promise, look out! This is final. I have been patient too long.”

It was signed “A. S.” “A. S.” He looked up at the ceiling. “A. S.” Abraham Selim! There was a postscript.

“A trusted friend of mine will put this under your door.”

Andy folded up the letter and put it into his pocket-book as Dr. Granitt came in.

“Well?”

“Very bad,” said the old doctor, shaking his head. “Oh, yes, he’s dead all right; been dead for an hour, I should think. Just lift his head, Dr. Macleod. Yes, there’s the wound. The thoracic aorta is severed and the fourth dorsal vertebra smashed by the same bullet. You may say he has been killed twice. Bad, very bad.”

“Do you notice anything peculiar about him, Dr. Granitt?”

“No,” said the other, looking down with a professional eye at the dead man.

“Look at his boots.”

The old man obeyed, and raised his eyebrows.

“Good lord, he’s got a pair of labourer’s boots on!”

They were thick, unshapely articles, the kind that agricultural labourers wear, and they were yellow with dried mud. The doctor looked and shook his head.

“You won’t want me any more, Macleod?”

“No, I don’t even think we shall want you at the coroner’s enquiry unless they wish to call corroborative evidence.”

“Thank heaven for that,” said the doctor. He had all the general practitioner’s horror of court proceedings, with their time-wasting protractions.

“I’m frightfully busy just now. Hardly a night I’m not called up by anguished husbands—a very prolific people, the people of Beverley.”

Andy saw him out of the house and went back to the death-chamber to conduct a more thorough examination. He worked away from the body, and began with the window through which the murderer must have come. Here he had a complete confirmation of his theory. There were three dusty footprints on the settee, which was covered in black poplin and showed the print of shoes, two lefts and a right. They were very, very small, no bigger than a woman’s, though the heel was broader. They might have been the marks of a woman’s house-shoes—the butler had heard a woman’s voice. The window was unbolted and moved up easily and noiselessly. He found nothing until he came to the writing-table. It was a broad pedestal desk in black oak. It looked an antique; a man like Merrivan would hardly have imitation Jacobean furniture.

There were two drawers on either side, and one of these—the lower and the nearest to the window—was open. It looked as though it had been opened by Merrivan as he sat in the swing chair. Andy pulled it out still further, and the glitter of gold caught his eye. It was a woman’s dress ring—a thin hoop of gold with five small emeralds set at intervals.

He frowned. He had seen that ring before. Where? He knew, but he fought off an admission that he knew. It was Stella Nelson’s ring. He had seen it on her engagement finger in the post office, and had felt a momentary pang of disappointment, the pang that all men feel when they see a pretty woman is not for them.

He stared at the little hoop in the centre of his palm, turned it over, and put it into his pocket closing the drawer.

Now he began to search about the desk and underneath.

Again he was rewarded. He picked up a tiny box, leather-covered. It was a jeweller’s ring case, and it was empty. He did not trouble to fit the ring to the slot in the white velvet. A ring of any size would fit. There was a step in the passage, and he slipped the case into his jacket pocket.

The newcomer was the local inspector, an important man, very naturally anxious to extract whatever kudos was to be had from the conduct of the case.

He said it was a “very bad business.” It was curious how people always said that on these occasions.

“I’ll take over charge here, Mr.—um—Macleod,” he said.

“Certainly,” agreed Andy, “but you must definitely instruct me in writing not to conduct any further investigation.”

At this the inspector hesitated.

“I daresay we can work together, Mr. Macleod. I’ve got on the ’phone to the chief constable and he told me to notify headquarters.”

“We’ll work together if I am in charge,” said Andy. “You shall have all the credit that is going, inspector. Leave me to find the murderer.”

“I don’t want any credit. But I’m sure you’ll see me right, Mr. Macleod. What do you want me to do?”

Andy gave his instructions and in half an hour the body was removed. Later the inspector came to him with information.

“Mr. Pearson heard the shot; it woke him up, he said. He came over just as the butler made the discovery. The shot came from the orchard at the back of Merrivan’s house.”

Andy listened incredulously.

“From the orchard? Impossible. He was shot at close range. The waistcoat is scorched and blackened.”

“But one of the maids heard it, too—the hysterical one. We’ve got her calm now, and she swears she heard the shot. The window of her room overlooks the orchard. She was awake, too; the knocking on the butler’s door had awakened her.”

“But the butler didn’t hear it?”

“He was on his way downstairs by then,” explained the officer.

Andy scratched his nose irritably.

“Merrivan was dead by then and the safe rifled. It must have taken at least four minutes to find the keys, open the safe—no, that is impossible. The butler must have made a noise of some kind—knocked a chair over probably.”

“But Mr. Pearson wouldn’t have heard that.”

Andrew was silent.

“Neither would he,” he confessed.

It was getting light now, and he passed out through the kitchen into the garden. It was very still and solemn, and the fresh morning air tasted indescribably sweet.

The orchard lay beyond the truck garden. You followed a cinder path through a wooden gate and came to row upon row of fruit trees, the lime-washed trunks showing whitely in the dawn light.

Before this the path frayed to an end in coarse grass.

Andy peered left and right, but saw nothing until he had passed the first line of trees, and even then, so much a part of the shadows was it that he did not see the huddled figure by the tree-trunk for some time. He was dead, shot square through the heart.

Andy went back to the house and summoned the inspector.

“There is a second body in the garden,” he said, “and, if my eyesight is not at fault, he should be an old acquaintance of yours.”

The police officer accompanied him to where the dead man lay.

“I know him, a man named Sweeny,” he said. “He was in Mr. Merrivan’s service and was discharged for stealing. So he was the murderer; first shot Mr. Merrivan and then came out here and shot himself!”

“Where is the revolver?” asked Andy quietly.

The inspector searched the ground about, but without success. The grass was quite short and had been grazed over (Andy afterwards found that sheep had been admitted to the orchard that week), and there was no possible hiding-place for the weapon.

“There has been a struggle here,” said Andy of a sudden. “Look at the turf! Three scars where the heel of somebody’s boot has tried to get a foot-hold, and——Go and bring the butler, inspector, will you please.”

Andy waited until he was out of sight, then walked quickly to the next tree and picked up something from the ground. It was a black silk scarf—the scarf that Stella Nelson had worn when she came to the gate two nights before.

There was no doubt whatever. In one corner was a monogram worked in red silk, “S. N.” The scarf was torn slightly. He smelt it. He was aware that she used a perfume, an elusive scent; as delicate a fragrance as he remembered. Yes, it was Stella Nelson’s scarf beyond any doubt. He rolled it up into as small a compass as possible and pushed it into his hip pocket, realising ruefully that he was loaded up with clues, and every clue pointed to this girl as the murderer.

Yet in his heart he had no doubt. It was not her beauty or her youth that convinced him of the impossibility of Stella being a murderess. It was something within him. Perhaps, like Scottie, he was fey. He was smiling at the thought when it came to him that he no longer felt the oppression that had irritated him all the time he had been in the valley. Perhaps it was the daylight. No, he had felt that lurking shape when the sun was shining its brightest.

The inspector came back, and for appearance sake, to justify his sending the officer away, he had to submit the agitated servant to the ordeal of identifying the dead man.

“Yes, sir, that was the man that Mr. Merrivan found in the grounds this morning—yesterday morning, sir.”

“Of course!” Andy had forgotten the incident. This man Sweeny hated Merrivan. Probably he had some reason outside his natural dislike for an employer who had detected him in the act of theft.

Back in the house he gave his final instructions.

“Nobody is to be admitted. No information is to be given to the reporters beyond the bare fact that Mr. Merrivan was murdered some time between midnight and one o’clock this morning. The position of the body can be shown diagrammatically; nobody must enter the room. Motive—robbery. The man in the orchard—let them try to explain him their own way.”

He was half-way down the garden path when Arthur Wilmot dashed in at the gate. He had dressed hurriedly—his pyjama jacket showed under the lightly buttoned coat—and he was very pale.

“Mr. Macleod, is it true—my poor uncle——Good God, it can’t be!”

“I’m glad I’ve seen you,” said Andy slowly. “Yes, I’m afraid it is true. Your uncle has been killed—shot.”

“Murdered?”

He whispered the word fearfully. Andy nodded.

“But—he has no enemies——”

“Few people are murdered from enmity,” said Andy. “The only man who has threatened Mr. Merrivan’s life recently is you.”

Wilmot staggered back as if he had been struck.

“I?” he stammered. “I’ve never—did he say——?”

“He was dead when he was found,” answered Andy, “and he has not said anything to me about the matter at any time. Now, Mr. Wilmot, don’t answer in a hurry, and don’t answer at all if you’d rather not. Had you a quarrel with Darius Merrivan?”

The young man was shocked to speechlessness. He could only wag his head impotently and stare horrified at the inquisitor.

“I’ll tell you this much, that, standing outside this house a week ago, I heard you say, ‘I will kill you first.’”

Wilmot recovered his voice.

“Somebody has been telling lies about me.” His voice rose to a shout. “And I can tell you a few truths about somebody. I quarrelled with him—yes, I did! Over a girl who isn’t worth a packet of pins. Now you know. He talked about marrying her—and he’s married already. He didn’t know I knew, and I never told him. His wife ran away from him and went abroad, and they were never divorced. He was afraid to divorce her—and when he said he was going to marry——”

“Don’t shout,” said Andy sharply, “I’m not deaf. And I’m not keen on knowing any of your family troubles. I’m pretty sure you had nothing to do with the murder. Although”—he paused to give point to the next sentence—“although you are his heir and benefit by his death. Unless, of course,” he added, looking past the man but observing the understanding in his eyes, “unless you care to prove that he has a wife living. In that case his wife gets the lot. There may be a will.”

Wilmot shook his head.

“There isn’t a will,” he said in a milder tone. “I’m sorry I lost my temper, Macleod, but I’m rattled—and who wouldn’t be?”

“Who wouldn’t be?” agreed Andy.

He walked back with Arthur Wilmot and watched him into the house. The man had a charge to bring against somebody—against the girl who was not worth quarrelling about? That gave him material for thought. Had they quarrelled, these two, whom Beverley Green regarded as “practically engaged”? What hurt vanity went to the framing of those words “not worth a packet of pins”? He knew by the symptoms. The girl had wounded Wilmot’s pride, had touched him on a very raw place. And the conceit of the young man had been patent to Andy from the beginning. He had a trick of closing his eyes for a second or so when he spoke about himself and his accomplishments—a glaring advertisement of a man’s vanity.

Slowly he paced the gravel.

Should he go to the house? He looked at his watch. It was six o’clock. She would not be up. He looked dubiously at the silent house. The blinds were drawn, but she had told him that she rose at six when they had no servants. Yes, he hesitated, his knuckles raised to rap on the door. If she were about she would hear him. If she were asleep he could do no harm. He knocked, and instantly the door was opened.