Police at the Funeral

Chapter 24 Audience

Great-aunt Faraday, seated among the pillows in her enormous Louis XV bed, might easily have been its original owner, in her fine Brussels night bonnet and rose-coloured quilted silk jacket. She sat bolt upright, as usual, her hands folded on the linen.

Mr Campion stood before her at the foot of the bed. He had done his best to repair his appearance, but he still looked deadly tired, and there was, of course, no disguising the black eye.

'Andrew,' said Mrs Faraday. 'How very remarkable. And yet, how extremely likely. Sit down, young man, and tell me all about it.'

Campion brought a little gilt chair from the other side of the room and set it so that he sat looking at the old lady over an expanse of embroidered counterpane. Mrs Faraday beckoned him closer.

'On my left side, if you please,' she said. 'Although I never confess it, I am slightly deaf in my right ear.'

Campion did as he was told, and when he had settled himself to her satisfaction she spoke again.

'I can understand it perhaps even better than you can,' she said. 'Andrew was a very extraordinary man. He was insane, of course, in a very strange and terrible way. I do not care for the modern psychologists, so I cannot tell you the new names for the old disorders, but you have only to look at Andrew's bedroom to see that he was not normal, and that he would go to any length, at whatever discomfort to himself, to inflict a little pain upon others. But it is not for me to tell you. Let me hear the whole story from the time that this explanation first occurred to you.'

Campion, who was nearly exhausted but still valiant, composed his thoughts, and putting them into the shortest possible words, did exactly as she told him.

'You put me on to it,' he said, 'when you gave me that letter from Miss Lisle-Chevreuse to read. Until then I was floundering. I knew that there was some great obvious explanation right under my nose, but I couldn't see it. The Inspector, with his straightforward methodical procedure, made me feel ashamed. He was getting somewhere, however slowly; while I was fluttering round in circles.

'Then I read that letter, and it seemed to me to be a piquant piece of irony that the lady should have written to Andrew practically accepting what must have been an offer of marriage at the very time that he was lying dead in the River Granta. She had answered immediately, therefore he must have written to her on the day of his death. Then there was the bookmaker's cheque and Andrew's unusually heavy plunge. Frankly, I suspected them.'

Mrs Faraday nodded. 'I understand,' she said. 'Go on.'

'It then occurred to me,' said the young man slowly, 'that all the evidence which pointed so strongly to Andrew's death being by murder was of this dramatic and sensational kind--the half-finished letter, the body bound with the window-cord which was so easily identifiable. It was as though fate had suddenly become theatrically minded.'

'Quite,' agreed Mrs Faraday.

Campion continued. 'Once having arrived at that point,' he said, 'it was natural, of course, to suspect that fate of being human, and since the only person who could have manufactured the evidence was Andrew I began to suspect him.' He paused and looked at the old lady gravely. 'I could not at first imagine the mind of a man who, having decided to kill himself, would yet go to the time and trouble of preparing death-traps for those he left behind. But neither could I imagine the mind of a man who could write a whole book for the purpose of annoying those with whom he lived. I felt he might get the idea, but the writing of a book is a long and tedious business, and the man who carried such a thing through was obviously no ordinary person.'

At the mention of Andrew's book a chilly light had come into Mrs Faraday's eyes.

'Andrew was an odious creature,' she said. 'More odious even, I think, than George. But Andrew, having more brains, was a better dissembler and less of an animal.'

'Then there was Julia,' said Mr Campion diffidently. 'You convinced me that she was not a suicide. Then Joyce and I discovered the patent medicine, and it was obvious how murder could have been done. The arrangement of the capsules in the zigzag paper made it possible for the murderer to ensure that the attempt upon his victim would take place upon any future date he cared to choose. Since Julia only took one capsule a day, he had only to count the days and replace one of the capsules with his poisonous compound.

'Joyce had previously told me that Andrew was a man who enjoyed prying into other people's affairs, and it dawned upon me that this idiosyncrasy of Julia's would be just the sort of secret he might light upon. He probably knew already that Kitty took the tea in every morning, and it would be obvious to him that this idea gave him an excellent chance of destroying Julia, whom he loathed, and of casting a most unwarrantable suspicion upon the unfortunate Kitty.' He paused to take breath. 'When I reached this point in my calculations I was helpless. I felt you ought to leave the house, and I am afraid the police will insist upon that now, for a time at least. You see, I thought that if I was right there was no telling where these death-traps would end. Naturally I could make no accusation until I was sure, and at that point I had no proof of any sort.

'Then there was this question of William's hand. You have heard how that happened. But William was under the impression that someone or something had stabbed at him. That threw my conjectures out altogether. It was not until George arrived yesterday and said that he had actually seen Andrew die that I realized that there was a chance of ever proving my theory at all.'

Great-aunt Caroline's little black eyes were fixed on the young man's face, and he marvelled at the calmness with which she accepted the extraordinary story he was unravelling.

'George mentioned a second witness,' Campion went on slowly, 'and that gave me my strongest hope. As soon as that sign appeared on the library window I guessed that someone from outside, probably a tramp, was trying to communicate with someone he believed to be inside the house. William had said that he saw George in the company of a tramp on the day of Andrew's death. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time because...'

A grim smile spread over the old lady's face. 'Because poor William is apt to describe any ill-dressed person as a tramp,' she said. 'Yes, I quite see that. Go on.'

'Well,' said Mr Campion, 'last night it was obvious that this mysterious person was not in communication with George because George had been in retirement for the past few days. It was also obvious that the tramp was in the vicinity of this house, so I pinned my hope on the supposition that the tramp was watching this house, had seen George arrive and would attempt to get into touch with him during the night. It was a wild chance, but I sat up waiting for him, and he came. Then I interviewed him.'

'So I see,' said the old lady, glancing sharply to Mr Campion's injured eye. 'I am really very grateful to you.'

'I considered it a privilege,' said Campion gallantly.

The black eye flickered and a faint smile spread over the little ivory face.

'You have many more brains than is usual in your family,' said Mrs Faraday. 'And yet you have a great deal of their charm. It is hardly fair. You had a lot of trouble with this person?'

'Not so much as he had with me,' said Mr Campion modestly. 'By a series of vulgar methods, which I won't describe, I persuaded him to tell me the more pertinent of his experiences--a most extraordinary yarn. It seems that this man--his name is Beveridge, an example of work-house humour, he tells me--entered Cambridge with George on the Saturday before Andrew's death. Beveridge had known George for some time, and seems to have had an immense admiration for him.'

'There was a flashy quality about George,' said Mrs Faraday unexpectedly. 'I can understand him being a triton among minnows. Go on.'

'On Sunday morning,' Campion continued, 'these two were seen by the members of the household who went to church by car reeling down the Trumpington Road. This, according to Beveridge, was intentional upon George's part, and was calculated to annoy William and Andrew--William especially, for whom George seems to have had an extraordinary dislike. Later, however, at about eleven o'clock when the hostelries opened, George and Beveridge became genuinely merry, but not actually drunk. Anyhow, according to Beveridge, and it sounds credible, they saw William and Andrew walking down Trumpington Road and were going to cross the road to accost them when the cousins turned off down the new road. Beveridge and George followed at a discreet distance, and when the others stopped to argue and William turned back alone they actually spoke to him. But William, who must have been in the throes of his attack, stared at them vacantly and wandered on. George was startled by this, according to Beveridge, and they continued their pursuit of Andrew, very probably with the idea of getting money out of him.

'When they reached the meadows and were about fifty yards behind him in the mist, Andrew began to behave very peculiarly, and George, guessing that something was afoot, began to go carefully, shadowing him instead of attempting to overtake him. Beveridge's explanation is not very lucid, but apparently what happened was that Andrew suddenly disappeared once he had crossed the foot-bridge. They could not see very well, naturally, and they were hurrying on to find him when he suddenly reappeared, bearing a coil of rope in one hand and something they could not see in the other. They had only just time to take refuge behind a large clump of osiers, practically on the river-bank, and Beveridge swears that neither he nor George had any idea of what was happening until Andrew's bowler hat came skimming through the mist, landing almost at their feet.

'The next thing they made out was Andrew's shadowy figure standing on the bridge parapet over the stream. He was stooping down. Beveridge says he thought he was tying up his shoes, although he knows now that he was tying his feet together. He then took a gun from his side pocket and, according to Beveridge's story, before they fully realized that they were seeing a fellow-man committing suicide, there was an explosion, and he pitched forward into the stream, throwing up a shower of water which actually splashed them.'

Mrs Faraday, who had been listening to this recital with her eyes downcast, now looked up.

'But I understood that Andrew's hands were bound,' she said.

Campion nodded. 'That's where he was so clever. They were bound. That is to say, there was a piece of rope tied round each wrist. If only the body had been found sooner we might have wondered at the fact that they were still not tied together, but after being so long in the water it seemed only natural to suppose just what Andrew wanted us to suppose--that the cord had broken some considerable time after death.'

'Very ingenious,' said the old lady. 'And typical of a certain kind of insanity. I think Andrew was an ingenious man without being clever. All through his life he ruined his chances by mistaking this gift of ingenuity for intelligence. He lost his money in a scheme which looked ingenious, and yet would never have deceived a really intelligent investor.' She nodded to herself. 'He was always an odd, bitter creature,' she said, 'and the older he grew the more of a misogynist he became. Finally, he was attracted by the more specious of the modern psychologists, whose explanations appealed to him. About a year ago I disinherited him for an offence which was quite unforgivable, and I fear that this may have driven him to think of suicide, for now I come to consider it he had certainly very little to live for. His violent anti-social mania, coupled with this diabolical ingenuity, probably drove him to consider these appalling crimes which he had not the courage to commit if he remained alive.'

'But,' said Campion, unable to restrain the question which had worried him from the beginning, 'where is the satisfaction in a crime like this? He left these traps, we know, but if he were dead, what fun could he get out of their success?'

Mrs Faraday pursed up her lips. 'It is an illustration,' she said, 'of a certain type of mentality which you, as a healthy-minded being, may find it difficult to grasp. However, you must take it from me; Andrew had one extraordinary defect. He was so mentally short-sighted that he was not capable of foreseeing the most ordinary consequences of his actions other than the immediate effect at which he was aiming. I think his insanity lay largely in the possession of this peculiar blind spot.'

'But he planned these murders so cleverly,' protested Mr Campion.

'Yes,' said Mrs Faraday. 'But if you come to consider his plan as a whole, it was extraordinarily ragged and inconclusive. He set out to devise a colossal scheme that would bring death and disaster to this whole household, and to a certain extent he was successful. Yet consider it coldly, as I am afraid I do. His own death was designed to throw suspicion on William, Julia's death upon Kitty. How ridiculous! Why should William and Kitty decide upon independent murders within a few days of one another? Each of these diabolical ingenuities of Andrew's might have succeeded alone, but taken together they weaken each other. Then this elementary death-trap for William in the bookcase. Andrew does not seem to have made up his mind whether he wished William hanged or poisoned. His whole mind was taken up with the ingenuities of his crime; that is why he was only successful in the primary stages which are unfortunately ineradicable. Moreover,' she continued, speaking slowly and gently as though Campion were a child, 'and this, I think, is a very significant point, while Andrew was planning his crime he had the sensation of knowing that the house and everyone in it was in his power. Once the crimes were committed he would be in danger of being hoist with his own petard.'

She paused and regarded him shrewdly.

'Yes, I understand,' he said. 'And yet, how nearly the whole thing failed at the beginning. His most important ingenuity miscarried, you see, the ingenuity of the gun.'

'Of course,' said Mrs Faraday, 'I interrupted in the middle of your story. You were telling me that Andrew's body had just fallen into the water.'

'Yes,' said Mr Campion, jerking his mind back with an effort to the more concrete facts of the history, a feat which presented no difficulty to the remarkable old lady sitting propped up among the pillows. 'Beveridge says that he and George rushed forward on to the bridge. They peered over the parapet and just made out Andrew's body slipping slowly down the river. They were debating what they should do, thinking that it was just an ordinary case of suicide, when George noticed something caught under the parapet on the opposite side of the narrow bridge. He picked it up and found to his astonishment that it was a heavy Service revolver, through the stock-ring of which a piece of fine cord had been knotted. He pulled in about twelve feet of this cord from the river and discovered tied on the other end a long cylindrical weight from a grandfather clock.'

'The opposite side of the bridge?' inquired Great-aunt Caroline.

'Yes,' said Campion. 'Directly across the footway from the parapet on which Andrew had stood. He had hung the weight over the bridge, you see, so that after he had fired and the muscles of his hand had relaxed the gun would be jerked out of his hand and across the bridge into the river on the other side, thus preventing any chance of the gun being found with the body and giving the show away.'

'And yet the revolver caught,' observed the old lady. 'How?'

'Beveridge says the cord became imprisoned between two stones,' Campion explained. 'George seems to have taken in the situation at a glance. Beveridge says he thought there were money-making possibilities in the knowledge of such a secret. Of course, he dared not risk carrying the gun away, but if it remained where it was Andrew's death would be no secret. George was a little drunk at the time, and recklessness seems to have been his strong point. He picked up the gun and the weight and, winding the cord round them, like a child's skipping-rope, remarked--so Beveridge says--"Always make it more difficult!" Then he whirled the bundle round his head and pitched it as far as he could up into the trees on the other side of the river. The missile was naturally extremely heavy, so that it did not go very far, but the cord became unwound in mid-air and the whole thing caught in the branches of an elm, about half a dozen yards from the bank. The weight, being the heavier, pulled the gun up into a crotched branch where it stuck, as black as the wood itself, while the weight hung down on the cord in the thick ivy which covers the trunk. Your chauffeur, Beveridge and I found it at five o'clock this morning when we went down to look for it. No wonder the police didn't spot it. It took us about half an hour when we knew where it was.'

'Very clever,' said Great-aunt Caroline. 'Of Andrew, I mean. That clock weight fell down in the middle of dinner on the Saturday before he disappeared. He must have taken it immediately. I remember he went out late that night.' She was silent for some moments, staring in front of her, her eyes narrowed, her hands folded peacefully on the coverlet. 'I suppose you wonder why I kept Andrew in the house after disinheriting him?' she remarked suddenly. 'But I think I was justified. I had one distressing relative who was liable to blackmail me for small sums at any moment in George. I did not wish to create another in Andrew. Although he had no hold of any kind over me, you understand,' she remarked. 'I wished to be spared the possibility of unpleasant scenes. Besides,' she added, fixing Campion sternly, 'you may have noticed that I have a certain amount of authority over everyone under my roof. I was wrong about Andrew. I should have realized he was mad.'

She stirred restlessly among her embroidered pillows.

'Tell me,' she murmured pathetically, 'is it really necessary for me to leave this house while the place is ransacked by inquisitive policemen? Poor Hugh Featherstone will do me the honour of inviting me to his home, I know that; but I am old and do not want to leave my beautiful bedroom, which gives me a sense of well-being every time I look at it.'

Campion glanced round the magnificent period apartment. It was a wonderful room.

'I am sorry,' he said regretfully. 'But a thorough search must be made. You never know in a case like this; consider the unfortunate George. That was a sheer accident.'

'Yes,' said Great-aunt Caroline, suddenly grave, 'he was poisoned with cyanide, wasn't he? That must have been just wanton wickedness on Andrew's part.'

'That was ingenious too,' said Mr Campion. 'We were amazed at first, because, you know, cyanide has such a very distinctive smell. In the ordinary way you would think no man in his senses would get as far as putting it into his mouth by mistake. Cyanide, or prussic acid, is one of the most deadly poisons. People have died from the fumes of it, I believe. Fortunately, however, in George's case, the explanation was quite obvious. There was a pipe-rack on Andrew's dressing-table. I noticed it myself when Joyce and I were examining the room. It contained five extremely filthy blackened pipes and very good new one, a temptation to any man. I don't know if you have noticed,' he added, 'the way a man picks up a pipe and sucks it vigorously to make sure the stem is clear? It's a sort of involuntary movement.'

'I have,' said Great-aunt Faraday. 'A very disgusting habit. I dislike tobacco in any form and in a pipe particularly.'

'Well,' said Mr Campion apologetically, 'a pipe is practically the only thing a man puts straight into his mouth. This new pipe in Andrew's rack had a vulcanite mouthpiece which unscrewed. The wooden part of the stem of the pipe was practically filled with finely powdered cyanide. The Inspector thinks there was probably some piece of easily removable fluff or wool sticking out of the actual mouthpiece, which a man would naturally flick out with his fingers. This obstruction was sufficient to keep the smell of the cyanide in the pipe. A few charred fragments of tobacco in the bowl served the same purpose. After removing the wool, or whatever it was, and knocking out the ash, the natural impulse would be to put the pipe in the mouth and suck vigorously. George must have fallen straight into the trap. I don't know who Andrew intended it for, but I fancy he thought of the idea--another ingenuity--and could not resist trying it. He does not seem to have liked anyone, though it is certainly to his credit that, as far as we know, he made no attempt upon you or Joyce.'

'How could he hurt us more than by leaving us with this chaos?' Great-aunt Caroline said acidly. 'Andrew was not clever, but he had intuitions. If Marcus had been of my generation--delightful boy though he is--he might have thought twice about marrying a girl who had been involved in such a public scandal, however innocently. But times are changing rapidly. I don't think Andrew realized that.'

She was silent for some moments, and Mr Campion began to wonder if his audience was at an end, but presently he became aware that she was looking at him speculatively.

'Mr Campion,' she said, '--I have grown used to that name, I quite like it--I have said that George blackmailed me. I think enough of you not to want you to believe that I have anything in my family of which I am ashamed. I shall tell you about George.'

There was something in her tone which told Mr Campion that he was being greatly honoured.

'George,' said Great-aunt Caroline, 'was the son of my husband's brother Joseph.' The little black eyes grew hard. 'A despicable character, and a disgrace to his family. This person was shipped off to the colonies many years ago. He returned with a certain amount of money and a wife. They lived in Newmarket, quite near us, you see. She was a peculiar-looking woman and of a very definite type, which we in those days chose to ignore. They had a child, a girl, and when that child was born the rumours that had been rife about the mother, were proved beyond a doubt. By some horrible machination of heredity the stain in the woman's blood had come out.' She lowered her voice. 'The child was a blackmoor.'

Mr Campion had a vision of the painful stir in a Society of sixty years before.

Great-aunt Caroline stiffened. 'They left, of course, and the disgraceful business was hushed up. But to my own and to my husband's horror, although the first child died, these criminal people had a second. That child was George. You may consider,' she went on after a pause, 'that I am foolish in remembering, in feeling it so strongly, but George bears our name and he is always threatening to reveal his half-caste blood, of which he is not in the least ashamed. I admit there is no stain in our side of the family, but people are malicious and notoriously careless in working out relationships, and--a touch of the tarbrush! It is unthinkable.'

As she sat up stiffly, her high lace bonnet adding to her dignity, Mr Campion understood what it was that she considered worse than murder. He said nothing. He felt very honoured by her confidence.

Presently she went on. 'That is why I am afraid poor Joyce may have given a strange impression by her attitude towards George. You see, she knows this story. Considering her to be by far the most intelligent person of my household, I explained the matter to her in case, in event of my death, the story should come as a shock to her. There, young man, you have the whole explanation.'

Campion hesitated. There was still one point which was bothering him.

'Mrs Faraday,' he said, 'you told me a week ago that you were sure that William was innocent. But you couldn't have known about Mrs Finch at the time. Forgive me, but how were you sure?'

He feared for one terrible moment that she might be offended, but she looked up at him, a half-humorous smile playing about her mouth.

'Since you have done so much deduction yourself, young man,' she said, 'my reasoning should appeal to you, simple as it is. You may have noticed hanging in the hall downstairs an old panama hat with a turned-up brim. That hat belonged to Andrew. Since you know William, it will not strike you as absurd that this hat was a bone of contention between him and Andrew. Little things may please little minds; they also annoy them. I have known Andrew sulk for a whole day because he had seen William pottering in the garden in that old hat, and William insisted upon wearing it whenever he could get hold of it simply because he liked to be contrary. Andrew did not like the panama worn in the garden, so William always put it on to go out there. Now, when Andrew disappeared, and during the ten days in which he was still missing, William wore this hat in the garden every day. I could see him from my window pottering among the flower-beds, where he does a great deal of damage, they tell me. But after Andrew's body was discovered, although I have seen William several times in the garden, he has never worn the old panama, but has appeared in his own grey trilby, a thing I have never seen him wear in the garden before in my life. I understood the repugnance he felt for the panama. There is a primitive strain in us all, which makes us a little afraid of the clothes of the dead. So you see, I knew that Andrew's death had come as a surprise to William.'

Campion looked at her admiringly. 'I think you're the cleverest woman I've ever met,' he said.

The old lady gave him her hand. 'You are a very good boy,' she said. 'I don't want you to desert me for a little while yet. I shall be very much out of my element in Hugh Featherstone's great barn of a house. You never knew his wife, did you? Such an unyielding, academic soul. I always felt her beds might be hard. Then there'll be the reporters again. There'll have to be an inquest on George.'

Her appeal was gracious and ineffably feminine.

'I shall stay,' he said. 'You can leave it all to me.' She leant back among her pillows and sighed faintly. Campion, assuming that the interview was at an end, rose and made for the door. Great-aunt Caroline's fine clear voice came to him from the depths of the great pink and gold bed.

'Heredity is a very extraordinary thing,' it said. 'I have always thought that I was a much more intelligent person than your grandmother, dear Emily.'