Solar Pons Versus the Devil's Claw

Twenty-Three: A DEMON AT BAY

All secrecy was now abandoned and I followed Pons’ racing torch across the frozen ground. He was keeping up a tremendous pace despite the difficult terrain and I temporarily lost him through the encroaching mist until we were skirting the ancient graveyard where such terrible events had begun. By the time I had caught up with him, he was ringing the bell at the front door of Yeoman’s. The flustered housekeeper, in night clothes, eventually opened the door.

“Quickly, woman!” Pons said grimly. “I must see your mistress at once!”

“But she is in bed, sir.”

“I think not,” said Pons, brushing peremptorily past her. “Tell her to come down here or we will have to go up.”

“There is really no need, gentlemen,” said the calm voice of Sarita Peters.

She had opened the drawing room door to let a crack of light across the shadowy hall. She wore a dark dress and her face was white and strained, but she was in complete control of herself.

“Do come in, though I have no idea why you should make this brutal intrusion into a widow’s grief.”

Pons smiled sardonically as we followed her into the big room I recalled from our previous visit. I just had time to see that the lady’s damp overcoat and a dark scarf of the same material were lying across the arm of a chair and that the polished leather boots she wore bore traces of damp.

“You have been out, I see,” said Pons, sitting down at her abrupt gesture which included both of us.

She bit her lip.

“I went for a short walk. I could not sleep under these terrible circumstances.”

“I think not,” Pons continued.

He had noticed a metal instrument shaped like a trowel which was protruding from one of Mrs Peters’ overcoat pockets.

“A little night gardening, perhaps? Or were you intending to continue the masquerade of The Devils’ Claw?”

Sarita Peters whirled like a tigress and went to stand by the fireplace with quick, jerky movements. She looked like a cornered beast as she glared back at my companion. The elaborate combs of her high-piled coiffure glinted in the light of the lamps, echoing the fiery glitter of her eyes. I have seldom seen such a magnificent or menacing sight as this superb woman brought to bay but fighting back with all her strength, I had little inkling of Pons’ allegations and suspicions or how he had arrived at them, but I gazed open-mouthed at the titanic battle that was commencing to rage between these two well-matched opponents.

“I do not know what you mean, Mr Pons. And I must ask you and Dr Parker to leave my house.”

“It is not your house, Mrs Peters,” said Pons calmly, lighting his pipe and puffing contentedly as he surveyed his opponent over the glowing bowl.

“Smoke by all means,” Sarita Peters said sarcastically. “You have my permission.”

Pons inclined his head ironically.

“I repeat that this is not your house, Mrs Peters. And it never will be now that Mr Mulvane has Simon Hardcastle’s original will.”

I knew this to be incorrect but was staggered to see the effect it had on this cornered woman. Her eyes narrowed to pinpoints and she clawed at the air with her disengaged hand while she used the other to grip the mantelpiece until her knuckles showed white.

“I presume you have the document you induced the wretched Hardcastle to sign, turning over all his estate and possessions to you and your late husband. But it will be of no use to you with at least one murder to your credit and being an accessory to another. It is a great pity that your lover, Vincent Tidmarsh, is dead, or he would have been able to corroborate most of my suppositions.”

“So!”

She drew in her breath with a venomous hiss and looked at me with madness in her eyes.

“So you shot him, Dr Parker?”

I shook my head.

“No, Mrs Peters. I fired in the air to frighten. He fell to his death over the low battlements.”

Her figure seemed to crumple and I thought she was going to fall into the red embers of the fire and Pons went forward to her assistance but she threw him off roughly and sat down on the arm of an easy chair. Pons walked back toward me and surveyed her impassively, puffing blue streams of smoke from his pipe toward the ceiling.

“You are within a hair’s-breadth of a hempen rope, Mrs Peters, so I advise you to be more co-operative. Things will go better for you if you do so.”

She shot him another look of hatred.

“Never! I will deny everything. You have no proof…”

“But the circumstances are overwhelming. Let me just put some of the facts to you. Suppose, for a moment, that a fiery and beautiful woman was tired of her husband and of living on another man’s estate. Her husband, Andrew Peters, though outwardly a fine organiser and efficient manager of old Simon Hardcastle’s affairs, was deeply in debt to bookmakers, owing to his addiction to gambling on the turf.

“His wife was the prime mover in hatching a scheme to get the old man in her clutches. With her husband’s collusion she convinced Simon Hardcastle that she was in love with him. But to avoid scandal they used the old family vault for their assignations, a place where nobody had been for years. She and her husband revived an ancient local legend of The Devil’s Claw. A tramp died in the woods of natural causes and Peters used an obsolete nineteenth-century gardening tool to make strange indentations in the ground round the body. I know this is so because I purchased an identical tool at an ironmonger’s in Chalcroft, from their old stock in the cellar, and I have no doubt that Peters found it entirely suitable for your purpose.”

The woman sat dumbly, looking at Pons with smouldering eyes.

“He used an old folk tune which was whistled when the wife had assignations in the graveyard. If there was danger the gate was opened, making a screaming noise. After the murder the husband smashed the padlock to make it look as though it were the work of strangers. The wife used the term Angel, when writing letters regarding their assignations, unsigned we must assume. This was in order to keep up the pretence that the husband knew nothing of the liaison.

“Now we come to the night of the murder. They had an oil stove for warmth, as the vault was perfectly dry, and I caught the particular odour of paraffin and hot metal when I inspected the scene. It was overlaid by the faint traces of a woman’s perfume. The one you are wearing now, Mrs Peters. In addition Mr Mulvane had seen both stove and camp bed before he was struck down. You used the camp bed for your lovemaking, and I saw the four sets of scratches the metal legs had made — many of them — through repeated use. Then you both undressed and made love by the light of an oil lantern.”

“Good heavens, Pons!” I could not help exclaiming. “How disgraceful!”

Pons held up a finger, an ironic smile on his lips. He turned back to the crushed figure of Sarita Peters, and continued his discourse in the same calm, even tones.

“That night you had finally got him to sign the estate over to you. This is pure surmise, I agree, but it fits all the indications and will no doubt be confirmed when you come to trial. Old Hardcastle had outlived his usefulness. As you were preparing to dress, you killed him, Mrs Peters, in a most cold-blooded and diabolical manner!”

“It is a lie!”

“I think not,” Pons said.

He was at her side in an instant and to my astonishment plucked at the luxuriant mass of her hair. Something glinted in the lamplight as she tried to claw him away. Pons had a smile of triumph on his face as he turned back to me, so that I could see the long, thin steel blade, which had something like a brightly coloured bead at the end.

“A hatpin, Pons!”

“Hardly, Parker. But something of the sort. A very special one, no longer found in Europe. Six inches long, as you can see, once common in South America, I believe, to hold the thick coils of Latin ladies’ hair or to keep a mantilla in place. The hair was pulled back into a bun and the pin used to secure it, as in the case of Mrs Peters.”

He turned back to the crushed figure if the woman, who had resumed her seat on the chair arm.

“You stabbed him in cold blood, Mrs Peters, with this instrument I am holding, or one remarkably like it. It went in under his armpit, piercing his heart and killing him instantly. Unfortunately for you and your husband, Mulvane chose that night to investigate the mysterious happenings in the graveyard. Your husband came down into the vault to warn you. It was a desperate situation and you had only a short time to drag the body behind one of the funeral monuments, and turn down the lamp. As your employer came into the vault your husband sprang on him from behind and felled him with a heavy blow to the skull. He was lucky he was not killed.

“You then had all the time you needed. You dressed the corpse of old Simon Hardcastle before rigor mortis set in, though you both forgot to pierce his clothing with the pin, a vital omission as it turned out. Because of the freezing cold the wound had bled very little which was why it was not as first realised that the victim had been stabbed. You then cleared out the vault and made all good, dragging the body of Hardcastle into the graveyard and depositing the unconscious Mulvane nearby. As an added piece of Grand Guignol your husband produced a watering can from somewhere and walked backwards out of the vault leaving wet ‘claw marks’ with the gardening tool on the floor until they disappeared on the bitterly cold ground outside.”

“Brilliant, Pons!” I said.

He brushed away the remark.

“I have had a good deal of time to think about the circumstances. Am I right, Mrs Peters?”

She turned burning eyes upon him.

“You are a devil, Mr Pons!”

“Perhaps, but I have not quite finished. I cannot prove it but now you had the will your thoughts turned to the fact that a complete fortune was better than half. Much better. You needed a strong confederate for that, whom no-one would suspect; someone who had no connection with the estate. That was where Tidmarsh came in. You had obviously formed a liaison with him. You had grown tired of your husband and took another, better-looking lover.”

“You cannot mean it, Pons!” I protested.

“I do mean it, Parker,” he said gently. “This pretty rogue — who stands out even among the prize collection of scoundrels who came within the unfortunate Mr Mulvane’s orbit — was quick to seize his opportunities. He first pushed Peters into that icy pond and when that failed, the loving wife tried to induce pneumonia by leaving the window of the sick man’s room open, before Tidmarsh mounted the stairs to the wretched husband’s room and administered the poison. By appearing at the window, Parker, you obviously thwarted his plans and gave him a fright at the same time.”

“But how can you be so sure of the precise facts, Pons?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“The housekeeper would never have left that door unlocked all night. Servants are well trained and among their duties are those of checking all doors and windows at night and seeing that they are securely locked and bolted. Therefore, Mrs Peters was responsible for unlocking that side door after the housekeeper had checked it, in order that her confederate could creep in and commit murder. Unfortunately for this precious pair Peters was not quite dead and with superhuman energy was able to reach us, though he died before he was able to name the culprit. I have no doubt that Mrs Peters wrote to Hardcastle, as she knew there was a maid in the old man’s employ called Angela and that he had already made overtures to her.”

He smiled bleakly.

“Just another aspect of this danse macabre to add to the confusion.”

“All this is appalling, Pons!”

“Is it not, Parker. Many things in life are repugnant, including the ruttish inclinations of old Hardcastle. In this case the plural was singular.”

“I do not follow you.”

“It is simple, my dear fellow. A married woman with two lovers. I could not at first see where the music master fitted in. Though he was disarmingly open about The Devil’s Claw legend and the music whistled in the night, he was too open. Later I remembered that Mulvane had told us the music master did not know anything about The Devil’s Waltz when our client whistled it to him, yet it was included in his volume, relating to old folk tunes of Ireland. That was not conclusive, of course, but it did set my mind turning in that direction. He tried to throw me off but in the end he only roused my suspicions. And of course, being a colleague of Miss Masterson, he was able to glean information on what was taking place at the Manor, especially when she may have confided her worries to him.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the abject figure of Sarita Peters.

“A somewhat promiscuous lady, Parker.”

“Indeed, Pons, and more deadly than the male.”

“Aptly observed, if hardly original, my dear fellow.”

“You still have not explained why old Hardcastle was afraid to go out at night, and yet did so frequently to meet this lady.

The Ram Dass Society, Pons…”

He chuckled.

“There was no such thing, Parker. What he was really afraid of was that Peters would find out about the liaison with his wife. He could not have known that the husband condoned the affair in order to get the old man’s money. His assumed fears were also designed to keep the servants away from the graveyard at night.”

“But I saw an Indian at the stables the other day, Pons,” I insisted. “He wore a turban and was carrying a heavy suitcase.”

He chuckled again.

“I looked into that myself, Parker. I am not entirely unobservant in these matters. I made inquiries at the stable cottage and found that the man was often about Chalcroft village with others of his nationality. He was a travelling salesman who sold Oriental carpets to the estate workers!”

Pons’ face was stem as he went across to Mrs Peters.

“And now we must use your telephone, madam, in order to summon the police.”

The woman started up, her face distorted with anger and loathing. Quick as a snake she snatched up her handbag.

“You will not live to see me stand trial, Pons!” she screamed.

I saw the flash of metal and then a small nickel-plates automatic in her hand. I just had time to fire my pistol through my overcoat pocket. The explosion and the flash seemed to shatter the entire room. Sarita Peters gasped as she spun round, a scarlet stain spreading on her shoulder, the automatic bouncing across the carpet. Pons quickly put his foot on it as he lowered her to the floor. My overcoat was smouldering and I hastily removed my revolver in case the cartridges exploded. While I was beating out the little flames that had sprung up, Pons had laid Sarita Peters on the divan just as the frightened housekeeper appeared in the doorway.

“Don’t be alarmed,” I said. “There has been an accident. But you had better ring Chalcroft Police Station and get the Sergeant to come here.”

Pons turned a reassuring face toward me as I hurried to the divan.

“A mere flesh wound, I think, Parker. But your department, not mine.”

“You are right,” I said as I removed the woman’s jacket. “It is only a scratch but she has fainted with shock. A formidable woman.”

“Yes, Parker, and I would not be here but for your quick thinking,” he said. “I am most grateful.”

And he laid his hand on my shoulder briefly. I got a clean handkerchief from my breast pocket, mopped up the blood which was oozing sluggishly from the small wound and bound it round her upper arm. By this time the housekeeper had returned wearing a heavy dressing gown and slippers and I sent her for iodine and something more suitable for a bandage. When she had gone Pons looked at the beautiful face of the recumbent Sarita Peters for long moments.

“This is a woman who could have gone far if only she had not diverted her course into crime,” he muttered.

Then he crossed to the sideboard.

“Here are glasses, Whisky and a soda siphon. I think we have earned ourselves a drink this night.”

Mrs Peters stirred once or twice, but did not recover consciousness as I bandaged her on the housekeeper’s return.

Then Pons and I sat drinking in the heavy silence until we heard the sound of a car in the drive and then the impact of heavy footsteps in the gravel as they came towards the house.