Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 1, 1960

Roy Vickers The Yellow Jumper

One of the Department of Dead Ends stories, the most brilliant series of “inverted” detective stories of our time... Roy Vickers, by his authenticity of photographic detail, achieves almost complete suspension of disbelief, and with it the factual fascination of Great English Trials...

The execution of Ruth Watlington sent a shudder through respectable, middle-class Britain. If she had in some way repudiated her upbringing, by becoming a crook or a drug-addict, or a “bad woman,” it would have been more comfortable all around. As it was, her exposure created the suspicion that the impulse to murder is likely to seize almost anybody who has enough animal courage to see it through. It was not even a crime passionnel, although scented hair, moonlight playing on running water, and a wedding became subsidiary factors — particularly the moonlight on the running water.

This is in no sense a love chronicle; but we must for a moment concern ourselves with the romantic vaporings of poor Herbert Cudden, the mathematical master at Hemel Abbey, a girls’ boarding school in Devonshire. At eight-thirty on May 2, 1934, a week before the summer term opened, he was alone in the empty schoolhouse putting the finishing touches to his syllabus. His thoughts kept sliding to a young, modern-languages mistress, Rita Steevens, who had come, fresh from the University, two terms ago.

An under-vitalized man, he had been astonished at his own boldness in proposing marriage to her, still more astonished when she accepted. Incidentally, he had been very grateful to his friend and colleague, Ruth Watlington, for inviting Rita to share her cottage.

Daydreaming of this young woman, he visualized her in the dress in which he had last seen her. Now, if he had simply remembered that she had looked delightful in whatever she was wearing, it would have been better for his own peace of mind in later years. He was not the kind of man who understands women’s dress. Nevertheless, he happened to visualize Rita in what women call a pinafore dress, though he did not know the term. He visualized a pale green, sleeveless dress with a sleeved underbodice of yellow — the dress that was eventually produced at the trial after the police had, as it were, walked clean over it without seeing anything in it but the bloodstains.

So much for the dress. As for the moonlight — the full moon, which on that day rose at six thirty-seven in the afternoon, was already tinging the dusk when Cudden crossed the campus and dropped the syllabus in the letter box of the headmistress’s house.

Skirting a playing-field, he crossed a spuriously antique bridge over the Brynn, a sizeable trout stream of an average depth of a dozen inches, with many a deep pool which made it dangerous to children, though the swift current would generally carry them to safety. Feeling his thirty-six years as nothing, he very nearly vaulted the stile giving on to the wood — part of the school estate — that ran down the side of the hill to the village of Hemel, where most of the teaching staff were accommodated.

He was wearing a mackintosh. A man of many small anxieties, he nearly always carried a mackintosh. Presently he turned off the track, to Drunkard’s Leap — a pool in the Brynn some ten feet in breadth and some forty feet deep. When Rita was half-an-hour overdue he lit a cigarette. When the cigarette was finished he was not impatient. He sat down on an old bench like a park seat.

As he did so the centre plank fell out.

“Funny! The screws must have rotted out of the bracket.” He ran his hand along the bench, noticed, without interest, that the bracket itself was no longer in position. Rita was later than usual.

The stream, tumbling over rocks into the pool, threw up a spray, and for the first time he saw a rainbow of moonlight. He must remember to point it out to Rita. Below the rainbow, the moon shimmered on the turbulent surface of the pool, so that the pool itself seemed to be made of liquid moonlight.

So he described it to the Coroner — liquid moonlight. Then, he said, a light cloud crossed the moon so that the rainbow and the shimmer faded out. Instead, a diffused glow enabled him to see beneath the surface of the pool. And a few feet beneath the surface of the pool, below the current, he saw Rita Steevens.

For some seconds, he supposed, he gazed at the staring eyes, at the hair lightly swaying, as if stirred by a sluggish breeze. Then the cloud passed, and he could again see nothing but the shimmering surface of the pool.

He shaded his eyes, lurched to and fro, trying to escape from the angle of light. He grabbed the loose beam of the bench, intending to bridge the rocks of the waterfall to get a new angle, but he stumbled, cutting his hand on a splinter of the beam, which splashed into the pool and was carried away.

He related that he shouted at himself as if he were some one else. “Pull yourself together, man! You were dazzled by the moonlight, and you’ve had an hallucination. You were thinking of Rita, and beginning to fear she had met with an accident, and you visualized your fear. How could she be sort of standing up under the water like that?”

He half-believed it. The other half sent him scurrying from the pool down the track to the village. “Check up at the cottage anyway,” he muttered. “Better not mention the hallucination — make people laugh. It’s partly that damned syllabus. Anxiety complex!”

Fortunate that Ruth Watlington’s cottage was so near! At the end of the track through the wood, he did not vault the stile; he took it slowly, regaining his breath, coming to terms with his panic. A hundred yards of scrub, then the. cottage, built at right angles to the lane that wound its way to the village. Slowly across the scrub.

Already he could discern the wicket gate of the cottage garden. And there — a dozen feet away — were the yellow sleeves, the pale green dress, grey-white in the moonlight. He bounded forward. As he snatched her in his arms his nostrils were filled with the scent he had never perceived on any other woman — the scent of gardenia.

“Oh, my darling — thank God — had a ghastly hallucination! Thought I saw you standing up drowned — in Drunkard’s Leap.” Her head was resting on his shoulder. The scent of gardenia spurred him — he could have vaulted innumerable stiles. “Speak, Rita, darling!”

“But I’m not Rita!” cried Ruth Watlington. “What on earth is the matter with you, Herbert?”

He swung her round so that she faced the moon.

“It must be this dress,” she said. “Rita wore it once and didn’t like it, so I took it off her hands.”

He gaped at her, his senses in a vacuum in which his one clear impression was the scent of gardenia, almost as sharp as when, but a moment ago, her head had lain on his shoulder.

“I thought the hallucination, or whatever it is, was about me, and you seemed hysterical, or I wouldn’t have—”

“Then perhaps it wasn’t hallucination!” he gasped. “Where is Rita?”

“By now she’s at Lynmouth, where she is spending the night with her cousin, Fred Calder, and his wife. They’ve got a bungalow there. Mr. Calder rang up before Rita came in. She had just time to catch the eight-fifty bus. She asked me to phone you, which I did. Effie Cumber — one of the kitchen-maids, in case you don’t know — took the message. I told her you’d be in your classroom. But, I’m afraid I forgot till about nine.”

“I left a little before nine. Then Rita never went near Drunkard’s Leap!” He laughed at his own fear, though it wasn’t a wholesome laugh. “Yet — it was horrible! I can’t believe it wasn’t real.”

“Well, come in first and tell me all about it. I’ve got a bottle of brandy for emergencies. I think you have been overworking on that syllabus... Oh, you’ve cut your hand — it’s bleeding. I’ll try and bind it up for you, though I’m very bad at anything to do with blood.”

“It’s nothing. Must have cut it when I fell down.”

He followed her into the sitting-room of the cottage, stopping in the hall to hang up his mackintosh.

As is known, he stayed there for about an hour, leaving before eleven, slightly fuddled with brandy. Ruth’s purpose was to delay investigation. No police system, however scientific, could be expected to solve the riddle of why she should want to create the delay. The pool was obviously useless as a permanent hiding place. Once she had made her getaway, as she had, it would not have mattered to her if the police had found the body a few minutes later.

Nor did anybody attribute any special importance to Herbert Cudden’s assertion that, in mistaking Ruth for Rita, he was misled not only by Rita’s dress, but also by Rita’s perfume. Yet Ruth Watlington was convicted — thanks to Detective Inspector Rason of the Department of Dead Ends — for no other reason than that she had put on the dead girl’s dress and worn her perfume.

After a stiff brandy, Herbert gave Ruth details of the now supposed hallucination.

“But the pool is forty feet deep!” objected Ruth. “If there had been a body under the surface it would have been at the bottom, and you couldn’t have seen it without a strong searchlight.”

“I know. But one does not think of things like that at the time.”

He told her about it all over again, and then, his fear banished, they talked about Rita in general, an absorbing topic to both. This conversation has been grossly misunderstood by the commentators, who said that it revealed Ruth as an hysteric titillating her own terror by talking about the woman she had just murdered. Her showing him her scrapbook of babies’ photographs was stigmatized as the height of hypocrisy — alternatively as indicating a depth of morbid cruelty which would almost justify a plea of insanity.

Whereas the truth is that if Ruth had been a hypocrite she would never have committed the murder. “The schoolmarm who beat Scotland Yard” would have had, short shrift if the police had been able to grasp that, though she was capable of murder, she was not capable of insincerity, cruelty, or greed.

At the time of the murder, Ruth was thirty-seven; would have been physically mistakable for thirty if she had not affected a certain dowdiness of dress. She was trim and springy, athletic without a touch of thickness. A truth about herself that she did not know was that the right touch here and there would have converted her into a more than ordinarily attractive woman. When she was sixteen, a boy of her own age had kissed her at a party, to her own satisfaction. Three days later she overheard the boy laughing about it to another boy. There was a loutish reference to her own over-estimation of her charms.

The incident distressed her sufficiently for her to confide in her young stepmother, for whom, in defiance of tradition, she entertained a warm affection. It did not occur to her that Corinne Watlington, who was only seven years older, might be sexually jealous.

“Men are rather beastly, you know,” explained Corinne Watlington. “They lure you on with flattery and then laugh at you. It’s as well to be on guard, or you may find yourself humiliated where you least expect it.”

Ruth did not want to be humiliated, so she went on guard — so effectively that the young men of her generation dubbed her a prude and a cod fish, and left her out — which made her manner more brusque than ever.

Following Corinne’s advice, Ruth concentrated on a career. She won a scholarship to Oxford, generously resigning the bursary, as her mother had left her some two hundred pounds a year. She represented the University in lacrosse, tennis, and fencing. She took honors in history and literature, doing so well that she was invited to read for a Fellowship, but declined, as she wished to teach the young. She was appointed to Mardean, which was then considered the leading school for girls.

When she was twenty-seven she found herself thinking too intensively about one of the classical masters. In her emotion there was no echo of the boys at the parties. Indeed, she hardly thought directly of the man himself. She thought of herself in a house, just large enough, with a very green lawn on which very young children — hers — were playing. Somewhere in the background, giving substance and security to the dream, was the classical master.

Ruth resigned her appointment. She went to Paris; not being analytical, she did not know why she spent six months as a volunteer worker in a creche. But the babies here were vaguely unsatisfactory, and she started the new school year at Hemel Abbey, a praiseworthy but indistinguished replica of Mardean on a less ambitious scale.

Here began that rare association with Herbert Cudden which baffled the romantically minded commentators. From the first she was able to talk to Herbert without any artificial coldness. From a different angle he found something of the same restfulness in her, for he had always been self-conscious with other women. Ruth, obviously, would never expect him to make love to her. There sprang up, hardly a deep friendship — rather an intimate palliness utterly intouched by romance.

In her first year she bought Wood Cottage. A few weeks after she had settled in she cut the first of the baby pictures from a magazine. In six months, when she had cut another dozen, she began to paste them into a scrapbook. During the years that followed the number of pictures grew. There was nothing secret about it. She would snap village babies with her Kodak, explaining that she was fond of pictures of babies, though they were so difficult to take. All the same, she never showed the scrapbook to anybody until she showed it to Herbert on the night of the murder.

Herbert used the cottage almost as a club. He came at routine times, always to lunch on Wednesdays and Sundays. She allowed him to pay half the cost of the food and a few pence over in part payment of the village woman who prepared it. Thus nearly nine years slipped by before Rita Steevens came and changed Ruth’s perspective.

One evening, when the pupils were away for the halfterm weekend, Ruth met Herbert and Rita together, and was astonished by the look she surprised in Herbert’s eyes. For a second she had seen him young, vigorous, commanding — definitely among “the men” — in Corinne’s sense of the word. An hour later he came to the cottage and told her, as a great secret, that he had fallen in love with Rita. Ruth expressed sincere delight. A new, inner life was opened to her. At first Rita was cold, almost suspicious. She accepted Ruth’s offer to share the cottage with indifference, bargaining shrewdly over her share of the expenses.

By the end of the term she had fielded and was accepting Ruth as mentor and general benefactor.

Ruth was determined — one might say fiercely determined — that life should give to Rita what it had denied to Ruth. She positively groomed those two for each other, and without a single black thought of malice. In her dream life, Ruth had already elected herself an honorary auntie.

A little before six on the night of the murder, while Rita was visiting in the village, Calder had rung to ask Rita to catch the eight-fifty bus — the last — and spend the night at Lynmouth. As the bungalow had no telephone, Calder would meet the bus on the chance of Rita coming. Ruth said she would deliver the message if Rita returned in time.

But when Rita came in, shortly after seven, Ruth did not deliver the message. It was the only occasion on which she treated Rita improperly — her selfish motive being that, living by deputy in Rita, she wanted Rita to meet Herbert as arranged. Also, she had just completed her plans for the wedding present, and wanted to tell Rita, and enjoy her surprise.

“You aren’t meeting Herbert until nine,” she said some time later. “Let’s go and sit up at the pool. It’s such a lovely night, and I’ve heaps to talk about. I’ll disappear before Herbert comes.”

“Righto! This skirt is a bit floppy about the hips. D’you think my suede belt would go with it?”

“It would be just right. I hoped you would wear it.”

Ruth, herself dowdy, had become the arbiter of dress. Ruth had designed the pinafore dress of pale green with the underbodice of yellow and had it made by a London-trained woman living in semi-retirement as the village dressmaker. Ruth added: “What do you think of my new jumper?”

“That yellow would clash horribly with the yellow of my pinafore frock,” said Rita. “And the collar looks stuffy. You’re better at dressing me than yourself. I wonder why. Ruth — why is it?”

“I suppose because I wish I had been like you when I was your age.”

Rita felt resentful without knowing why as they set out together, reaching Drunkard’s Leap before eight.

“Mind darling, you’ll tear your frock!” There was light enough for Ruth to notice that the iron bracket of the bench had worked loose. “The screws have rusted away. They ought to have been painted. I’ll tell Miss Harboro.” Ruth tugged the bracket and it came clean away, a flat iron bar three feet long with a right angle turn of three inches. She leaned it against the bench so that the estate handyman would see it. They sat down, and Ruth turned the conversation in the direction of her wedding present.

“You and Herbert — your heads are in the clouds, as they ought to be. You haven’t thought, for instance, where you’re going to live, have you?”

“Oh, Herbert’s looking round for something. He likes that sort of thing. And if he can’t find anything, there are lots of furnished rooms in the village.”

Though it was barely dusk, the full moon shimmered on the surface of the pool. It was a lovely spot, thought Ruth, for Herbert and Rita to meet.

“Furnished rooms are all right when you are single — awful when you’re married.” Ruth paused, enjoying her moment. “You’re going to have Wood Cottage.”

“But — d’you mean you’re leaving Hemel and want to get rid of it?”

“No, dear, I don’t mean that. I mean I want you to have it. I shall take Mrs. Cumber’s two rooms, and you needn’t worry about me. I shall be quite comfortable.”

Rita was not worrying about Ruth’s comfort. She was feeling that, notwithstanding innumerable small benefits, there was rather too much Ruth in her life. Again came that undefined resentment that had welled up during their dress-talk.

“But, Ruth — of course, it’s awfully kind of you to offer to sell it to us, as I know you like it, but I doubt whether Herbert could afford—”

“Darling, there’s nothing to afford I It’s my little wedding present. I was in Barnstaple this morning, and fixed the title deeds and the rest of it with a solicitor. It’s all settled bar formalities. You can talk it over with Herbert tonight.”

“I simply don’t know what to say!” Rita’s voice was sulky. “Ruth, dear, don’t you see it’s impossible! You’re only a little bit better off than we are, and — it’s accepting too much.”

What did it matter how much she gave them. Their life was hers. Her life would be fulfilled in the lives that were to come.

“Darling, it’s not a matter of giving a present that costs a lot of money. It’s a matter of sharing happiness. You know what a lot you and Herbert mean to me. And we’ve got to look ahead. In a year’s time there may not be only the two of you to consider.”

For a moment Rita was fogged.

“Do you mean we might have a baby?”

“Of course I do!” Ruth laughed happily. Rita laughed too, but a different kind of laugh.

“But I shan’t be having any babies.”

“One shouldn’t say that — it might turn out to be true.” It was no more than a mild reproof. Then sudden fear clutched at Ruth. “Rita, there’s nothing wrong with you physically, that way, is there?”

“Certainly not!” The girl bridled. “But there’s no need to have all that bother if you don’t want to — and I don’t want to. I’m not the type. And I loathe babies anyway — yells and mess and bother!”

Ruth had the sensation that her body had taken control of her mind. She heard her own voice from outside herself and thought it sounded scrawny and venomous.

“Is it fair to Herbert — to rob your marriage of all meaning?”

“Oh, be your age, Ruth! That belongs in a tuppenny novelette. And I find it a rather disgusting topic, if you don’t mind.”

One may say that the twentieth-century Ruth Watlington looked on while that part of her that was a thousand ages older than history obeyed a law of its own. Without her conscious volition, her muscles stiffened and she stood up. In her arms and thighs was an odd vibration, as if the corpuscles of her blood were colliding.

She heard the iron bracket whistle through the air — then heard a thud, and another. After a timeless period she felt herself going back into her body, understanding that an iris shutter in her brain had contracted until she had been able to see only one thing — that babies were a rather disgusting topic.

The iris was expanding a little. In the reflected moonlight she could see that the bench was glistening with blood. Rita had fallen from the bench and was lying, still.

“I seem to have killed Rita!” She giggled vacuously. “I wonder what Herbert will say!” Her iris expanded a little more. She became vaguely aware of an urgency of time. She looked at her wrist watch, but had to try again and again before she could concentrate enough to read that it was half-past eight. Then it was easy to remember that Herbert would be there at nine.

“I’d better put Rita in the pool. When Herbert comes to the cottage I can break it to him gently. But dead bodies float, don’t they? Oh well, we’ll manage something just for an hour or so!” The iron bracket was ready to her hand.

There was blood at the angle of the bracket. She shuddered with a purely physical revulsion, wiped the bracket on the grass. She worked the short end of the bracket under the suede belt, then rolled the body into the pool near the waterfall. In spite of her care, there was a smear of blood on her left hand. Struggling against nausea she washed it off. The moonlight did not reveal that there was also a smear of blood on the sleeve of her yellow jumper.

In the walk back to the cottage something approaching normality returned, and she realized what she had done. She had no thought of concealment, once she had told Herbert. She would then tell the police that she had killed Rita, but she would not tell them why, and they could not make her.

As she crossed the scrub to the cottage she heard the church clock chiming nine. Perhaps Herbert had finished his work. She hurried into the cottage and rang the school. A kitchenmaid answered. “Will you please go to Mr. Cudden’s classroom, and tell him that Miss Steevens is sorry that she cannot keep her appointment.”

She turned on the reading lamp. Again came nausea as she saw a smear of blood on the sleeve of her yellow jumper — a smear half the size of the palm of her hand. She whipped off the jumper. She took it to her room, dropped it in the laundry basket, and put it out of her mind.

She had no moral shrinking from what she had done. She even felt a certain exultation, tinged with an unease which had nothing to do with fear of the hangman. She took it for granted that her own life was, in effect, at an end, and this gave her an immense freedom.

She went into Rita’s room. It held a faint fragrance of unknown flowers. Spread on the bed was the light green dress and the yellow bodice.

“Oh, I wish I had been Rita!”

She took off all her clothes, put on Rita’s. Last, the yellow bodice and the light green dress. Then a spot of Rita’s scent on her hair and the merest dab behind the ears.

“I do look nice! What a pity! It’s only waste. I wonder what was wrong with me?”

Downstairs and into the air. Her life’s history floated before her. Rita’s clothes helped her to review her past from the angle of a young woman who had no fear that men would lure her on with flattery and then laugh at her. She was actually thinking of the classical master when Herbert’s arms closed round her. For a moment she let her head rest on his shoulder, then realized that he had mistaken her for Rita.

The need for personal explanation shattered the mood in which she had wanted to break the news to him. Besides, she saw now that it would save him so little that she was entitled to think of herself. Tomorrow, when they found the body, life for her would end. Tonight she would enjoy an hour of his soothing friendliness for the last time.

When she had made him believe the hallucination theory, she indulged in the child’s game of make-believe — “Let’s pretend” — that things were as yesterday, and that she had not murdered Rita. She nearly told him about her gift of the cottage, but it would have meant discussion, and she wanted to ask him a question. As the minutes passed the question became more and more important to her. The answer, if it were the right one, would help her to face the gallows with a calm mind.

“Have another brandy.”

“Just a little one, and then I must hop off. Another thing Rita wants to do when we’re married—”

She shirked putting the question to him directly. She produced her scrapbook to help her approach. The whole of the first page was taken by one ebullient baby who had advertized a milk food. Herbert grinned and turned the pages. “Ah, I used to know one just like that — same expression and everything! And when they look like that, they grab your nose if you get too close. This is a jolly book. Why have you never shown it to me before?”

“Herbert, are you and Rita going to have babies?”

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t. I’ve got a bit in the stocking, and so has she.”

“Oh, I am glad!” There was a turbulence in her that he must have sensed.

“And I’m glad you’re glad. Ruth, dear, you can scream for the village policeman if you like, but I’m going to kiss you.”

When he kissed her, Ruth knew what it was that had been wrong with her. She also knew that to talk of robbing a man of fatherhood did not belong in a tuppenny novelette.

“I’m only thirty-seven; there’s still time,” she told herself when he had gone. Murder could never be justified, and she would never so deceive herself. But a form of atonement for having taken life seemed to be open to her.

On the following morning, at about seven-fifteen, Herbert Cudden’s landlady took his shoes out of doors with a view to cleaning them. It was, in a sense, unfortunate for Scotland Yard that Police-Sergeant Tottle happened to amble by on his bicycle.

“Good morning, Mr. Tottle. Your George’s garden is a credit to the family. Oo! You don’t ’appen to have had a nice murder, I suppose? Look at these!”

She held up the shoes. The rim of the sole and the back of one heel was caked with dried blood.

“Don’t you touch ’em until I’ve seen ’em,” barked the sergeant.

“Don’t be silly! I was only joking — it can’t be human blood. They’re Mr. Cudden’s. As if—”

The sergeant took the shoes and examined them.

“Take me up to his room,” he ordered.

When he had succeeded in waking Herbert Cudden, the latter’s reactions were, from the police point of view, ideal.

“Oh, my God!” It was almost like a woman’s scream. “I shall go mad.” He leaped out of bed, thrust Wellingtons over his pyjamas. “You’d better come with me, Sergeant. Give me those shoes.”

“Here, what’s it all about, Mr. Cudden?”

“Oh, shut up, please! I must see Miss Watlington at once, or I tell you I shall go mad. Hang on to the shoes if you like, but come with me.”

Ruth was startled into wakefulness by hearing her name called while Herbert and the sergeant were still fifty yards from the cottage. She was in her dressing gown and at the doorway almost as soon as they were.

“That hallucination!” Herbert was out of breath. “Blood on my shoes — show them to her. Look! It wasn’t hallucination, Ruth. Rita was murdered on the bank and thrown in. We must drag Drunkard’s Leap.”

“Will one of you please explain—”

“Oh, all right then! I’ll tell you.”

It was Herbert who poured out the tale of the previous evening’s experiences, of his discussion with Ruth, and the reasons for their joint conclusion that he had suffered an hallucination.

“Then as I understand it, after what you’d seen, or what you only thought you’d seen, you came to this cottage, and — is this your mackintosh by any chance?”

The mackintosh was hanging on a peg in the hall. The sergeant pulled it out fanwise. The whole of the seat and part of the back were covered with congealed blood.

“How did that blood get there? On your mackintosh and on your shoes?”

“It must be her blood. That must have been done when I flopped on to the bench.”

“And what’s the matter with your hand that you’ve got that bandage?”

“Oh, hell to these footling questions! Sergeant, for heaven’s sake, do something! Can’t you see that she has been murdered?”

The sergeant had never handled murder. This was unlike any he had read about. For one thing, the suspect was directing the investigation!

While Tottle, at Ruth’s suggestion, was ringing the Lynmouth police to find out whether Rita had spent the night at Calder’s bungalow, Ruth went upstairs to dress.

On a hanger on the door was the yellow underbodice. She put it in her wardrobe. Over a chair hung the pale green sleeveless dress. As she picked it up, she caught her breath. At the back, a little above the waistline, was a distinct blood stain. For a moment she had a sense of eerieness, as if blood would meet her everywhere. Then she remembered.

“That was done when Herbert put his arm round me before I bound up his hand.”

She dropped the dress into the laundry basket — on top of the bloodstained yellow jumper. She looked down at them, trying to assess their danger to herself. Then she shrugged her shoulders, and went on dressing. She had an almost superstitious belief that if destiny intended her to atone for her crime it would protect her from the police.

By ten they had found the body in Drunkard’s Leap, its position explained by the fact that the iron bracket had jammed between two outcrops of rock some eight feet below the surface. By mid-day the county police were in the village in force. Detailed statements were taken from Cudden and Ruth, covering everything, even including Ruth’s visit to her solicitor to arrange for the conveyance of the cottage to Herbert Cudden and his wife. The police took away for microscopic analysis Herbert’s mackintosh and shoes and Ruth’s yellow jumper and the pale green sleeveless dress. The analysis revealed that the blood on Herbert’s garments had been exposed to the air for at least half an hour before it had adhered — which bore out his statements about the times of his movements.

Analysis of the skirt and jumper showed that the blood was newly shed when it had adhered — which bore out the joint statement that Herbert mistook Ruth, outside the cottage, for Rita and pawed her, after he had cut his hand by the pool.

The Coroner’s jury would have censured Herbert for his over-readiness to believe he had experienced an hallucination had not Ruth generously insisted that the blame, if any, should be wholly hers. The Court returned a verdict of murder against person or persons unknown.

The school term opened in a somewhat strained atmosphere. True that only three of the hundred and fifty pupils were withdrawn on account of the scandal. But there was an unhealthy interest in the events. The headmistress explained that poor Miss Steevens had been killed by a madman who did not know what he was doing — a theory that was helped by a Press attempt to link the case up with a maniac murder in the North of England.

Ruth let the backwash of the murder splash round her without giving it her attention. Scotland Yard rented all available rooms in the village inn. As there were apparently no clues they used the dragnet, checking the movements of every man within twenty miles and every automobile that could have been used. They would apply to Ruth now and again, mainly for information about the dead girl’s habits.

In three weeks they packed up, leaving a pall of suspicion over the whole countryside. In due course the mackintosh and the shoes, the pale green sleeveless dress and the yellow jumper, minutely documented, were sent to the Department of Dead Ends.

Herbert’s visits to the cottage became more frequent. At first he would sit in silence, assured of her sympathy. In time Ruth loosened his tongue and let him talk himself out of his melancholy.

The strong forces in her nature which had produced the brainstorm at Drunkard’s Leap were now contracted upon the purpose with which she had successfully drugged her conscience. Herbert Cudden was overwhelmed by those forces at the moment of her choosing — which was as soon as the summer term ended.

Again we are not concerned with the detail of the methods by which that formidable will induced a transference to Ruth of the emotion which Herbert had felt for Rita. It suffices to say that it happened according to her plan. They could write to the headmistress after the ceremony, she said, but they need not announce their marriage until the autumn term. As they particularly wished to avoid newspaper publicity they would be married by registrar in the East End of London.

This can hardly be called a tactical blunder on Ruth’s part because, as far as the police were concerned, she had exercised no tactics. She did not know that a great many persons who wish to marry more or less in secret, particularly bigamists, regularly hit on that same idea. So the East End registrars invariably supply the police with a list of those applicants who obviously do not belong to the neighborhood.

They each took a “suitcase address” and applied for a seven-day license. Detective-Inspector Rason received the notice on the second day.

“Oh! So it was a triangle after all!” he exclaimed without logical justification. “And now they’re getting married on the quiet. That probably means that they cooked up all the hallucination stuff together. Anything they said may have been true or may not.”

He took out the yellow jumper, the pale green sleeveless dress, and the mackintosh, which, with the iron bracket, was the only real evidence he had. In the garments there was no smell of gardenia.

“But Herbert said the dress Ruth was wearing was Rita’s dress and that it smelt of gardenia. Well, it doesn’t! Perhaps the scent has worn off in three months. Better put a query to the Chemical Department.”

He had difficulty in finding the proper form, still more difficulty in filling it out. So instead, he sought out his twenty-year-old niece.

“When you put scent on your dress, my dear, how long does the dress go on smelling of it?”

“Oh, uncle! You never put any on your dress. It isn’t good for the dress and the scent goes stale and your best friends won’t tell you. You put it on your hair and behind your ears.”

So if there had been a smell of gardenia it meant that Ruth had deliberately applied it — the other girl’s perfume!

Presently his thought crystallized. “If Ruth was really wearing Rita’s dress and Rita’s scent, Herbert is telling the truth. If not — not! Wonder how far we can check up on the dress itself.”

He searched jumper and dress for a trademark and found none. “Then the dress must have been homemade. Or perhaps the village dressmaker.”

Deciding to take a long shot he was in Hemel the following afternoon.

“Yes, I made that for the poor girl,” said Miss Amstey. “It was a present from Miss Watlington. She designed it and the yellow underbodice to wear with it, and I must say it looked very well.”

Journey from London for nothing, thought Rason. Out of mere politeness he asked: “And you made this jumper, too, to go with it?”

“No, I didn’t! That’s a cheap line — came out of a shop. Besides, it wasn’t poor Rita’s. It was Miss Watlington’s. I saw her wearing it the very day of the murder. And I must say I thought it frightful. Apart from its being made of cotton and the underbodice made of silk.”

“Then this jumper and this dress don’t go together — they belonged to different women? But you could wear the one with the other if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

“Well, you could,” admitted Miss Amstey, “but you’d look rather funny. For one thing, it has a collar. And for another, the tops of the sleeves — look, what I expect you call a ‘ridge’ here — would stick out at the sides of the dress. People would turn round and laugh.”

That left Rason with the now simple riddle of the bloodstains. The two garments worn together would produce a ridiculous effect. Yet there were bloodstains, deemed to have been made by Cudden’s hand, at the same time on both. And Herbert had identified both dress and jumper at the inquest.

Rason took it all down and got Miss Amstey to sign it.

Ruth decided that they could without impropriety arrive at the registrar’s in the same taxi carrying the suitcases that had established the legality of their address. In outward appearance she had changed. The talent for dress she had formerly exercised for another was now successfully applied to herself. In the hall of the registrar’s office, Rason accosted Herbert and introduced himself.

“I am sorry, Mr. Cudden, but I must ask you both to accompany me to headquarters. A serious discrepancy has been discovered in the evidence you gave in the coroner’s court.”

They were taken to the Chief Superintendent’s room. Three others were with him. Ruth was invited to sit.

Herbert was reminded of his evidence regarding the dress. Then the pale green sleeveless dress was handed to him.

“Is that the dress?”

“To the best of my belief — yes.” He turned it. “Yes — there’s the bloodstain.”

The yellow jumper was passed to him. After a similar examination he again answered.

“Yes.”

“Miss Watlington, do you agree that these two garments, formerly belonging to the deceased, were worn by you that night?”

“Yes,” said Ruth, though she could guess what had happened and knew that there could be but little hope.

The Chief Superintendent spoke next.

“You will both be detained on suspicion of being concerned in the murder of Rita Steevens.”

“No!” snapped Ruth. “Mr. Cudden has told the truth throughout He knows nothing about women’s clothes except their color. The color of that jumper was near enough for him to think it was the same. They were passed to him separately at the inquest”

“Ruth, I can’t follow this!” protested Herbert

“Miss Watlington is making a gallant attempt to get you out of your present difficulty,” said the Chief. “But I’m afraid it will be futile.”

“It will not be futile,” said Ruth. “Will you all remain just as you are, please, and let me go behind the Chief Superintendent’s chair. And can I have that dress?”

Behind the superintendent’s chair she whipped off her fashionable walking suit. Then she put on the jumper and the pale green sleeveless dress, struggling against her nausea.

Then, looking as ridiculous as Miss Amstey had prophesied, she stood where all could see her. The officials were awed into silence.

“Herbert, you have only to answer me naturally to clear up the whole absurd mistake. Was I, or was I not, dressed like this that night?”

“No, of course not. Your neck was bare. And you looked properly dressed. That thing doesn’t fit.”

Ruth turned to the Chief and his colleagues.

“You see, he is obviously innocent.” She added, almost casually: “I am not.”