“What with?”
Nash said:
“The ladies round here usually carry large sizes in handbags. No saying what mightn’t be inside it.”
“And then stabs her through the back of the neck and bundles her into the cupboard? Wouldn’t that be a hefty job for a woman?”
Superintendent Nash looked at me with rather a queer expression.
“The woman we’re after isn’t normal—not by a long way—and that type of mental instability goes with surprising strength. Agnes wasn’t a big girl.”
He paused and then asked: “What made Miss Megan Hunter think of looking in that cupboard?”
“Sheer instinct,” I said.
Then I asked: “Why drag Agnes into the cupboard? What was the point?”
“The longer it was before the body was found, the more difficult it would be to fix the time of death accurately. If Miss Holland, for instance, fell over the body as soon as she came in, a doctor might be able to fix it within ten minutes or so—which might be awkward for our lady friend.”
I said, frowning:
“But if Agnes were suspicious of this person—”
Nash interrupted me.
“She wasn’t. Not to the pitch of definite suspicion. She just thought it ‘queer.’ She was a slow-witted girl, I imagine, and she was only vaguely suspicious with a feeling that something was wrong. She certainly didn’t suspect that she was up against a woman who would do murder.”
“Did you suspect that?” I asked.
Nash shook his head. He said, with feeling:
“I ought to have known. That suicide business, you see, frightened Poison Pen. She got the wind up. Fear, Mr. Burton, is an incalculable thing.”
“Yes, fear. That was the thing we ought to have foreseen. Fear—in a lunatic brain….
“You see,” said Superintendent Nash, and somehow his words made the whole thing seem absolutely horrible. “We’re up against someone who’s respected and thought highly of—someone, in fact, of good social position!”
III
Presently Nash said that he was going to interview Rose once more. I asked him, rather diffidently, if I might come too. Rather to my surprise he assented cordially.
“I’m very glad of your cooperation, Mr. Burton, if I may say so.”
“That sounds suspicious,” I said. “In books when a detective welcomes someone’s assistance, that someone is usually the murderer.”
Nash laughed shortly. He said: “You’re hardly the type to write anonymous letters, Mr. Burton.”
He added: “Frankly, you can be useful to us.”
“I’m glad, but I don’t see how.”
“You’re a stranger down here, that’s why. You’ve got no preconceived ideas about the people here. But at the same time, you’ve got the opportunity of getting to know things in what I may call a social way.”
“The murderer is a person of good social position,” I murmured.
“Exactly.”
“I’m to be the spy within the gates?”
“Have you any objection?”
I thought it over.
“No,” I said, “frankly I haven’t. If there’s a dangerous lunatic about driving inoffensive women to suicide and hitting miserable little maidservants on the head, then I’m not averse to doing a bit of dirty work to put that lunatic under restraint.”
“That’s sensible of you, sir. And let me tell you, the person we’re after is dangerous. She’s about as dangerous as a rattlesnake and a cobra and a black mamba rolled into one.”
I gave a slight shiver. I said:
“In fact, we’ve got to make haste?”
“That’s right. Don’t think we’re inactive in the force. We’re not. We’re working on several different lines.”
He said it grimly.
I had a vision of a fine far-flung spider’s web….
Nash wanted to hear Rose’s story again, so he explained to me, because she had already told him two different versions, and the more versions he got from her, the more likely it was that a few grains of truth might be incorporated.
We found Rose washing up breakfast, and she stopped at once and rolled her eyes and clutched her heart and explained again how she’d been coming over queer all the morning.
Nash was patient with her but firm. He’d been soothing the first time, so he told me, and peremptory the second, and he now employed a mixture of the two.
Rose enlarged pleasurably on the details of the past week, of how Agnes had gone about in deadly fear, and had shivered and said, “Don’t ask me,” when Rose had urged her to say what was the matter. “It would be death if she told me,” that’s what she said, finished Rose, rolling her eyes happily.
Had Agnes given no hint of what was troubling her?
No, except that she went in fear of her life.
Superintendent Nash sighed and abandoned the theme, contenting himself with extracting an exact account of Rose’s own activities the preceding afternoon.
This, put baldly, was that Rose had caught the 2:30 bus and had spent the afternoon and evening with her family, returning by the 8:40 bus from Nether Mickford. The recital was complicated by the extraordinary presentiments of evil Rose had had all the afternoon and how her sister had commented on it and how she hadn’t been able to touch a morsel of seed cake.
From the kitchen we went in search of Elsie Holland, who was superintending the children’s lessons. As always, Elsie Holland was competent and obliging. She rose and said:
“Now, Colin, you and Brian will do these three sums and have the answers ready for me when I come back.”
She then led us into the night nursery. “Will this do? I thought it would be better not to talk before the children.”
“Thank you, Miss Holland. Just tell me, once more, are you quite sure that Agnes never mentioned to you being worried over anything—since Mrs. Symmington’s death, I mean?”
“No, she never said anything. She was a very quiet girl, you know, and didn’t talk much.”
“A change from the other one, then!”
“Yes, Rose talks much too much. I have to tell her not to be impertinent sometimes.”
“Now, will you tell me exactly what happened yesterday afternoon? Everything you can remember.”
“Well, we had lunch as usual. One o’clock, and we hurry just a little. I don’t let the boys dawdle. Let me see. Mr. Symmington went back to the office, and I helped Agnes by laying the table for supper—the boys ran out in the garden till I was ready to take them.”
“Where did you go?”
“Towards Combeacre, by the field path—the boys wanted to fish. I forgot their bait and had to go back for it.”
“What time was that?”
“Let me see, we started about twenty to three—or just after. Megan was coming but changed her mind. She was going out on her bicycle. She’s got quite a craze for bicycling.”
“I mean what time was it when you went back for the bait? Did you go into the house?”
“No. I’d left it in the conservatory at the back. I don’t know what time it was then—about ten minutes to three, perhaps.”
“Did you see Megan or Agnes?”
“Megan must have started, I think. No, I didn’t see Agnes. I didn’t see anyone.”
“And after that you went fishing?”
“Yes, we went along by the stream. We didn’t catch anything. We hardly ever do, but the boys enjoy it. Brian got rather wet. I had to change his things when we got in.”
“You attend to tea on Wednesdays?”
“Yes. It’s all ready in the drawing room for Mr. Symmington. I just make the tea when he comes in. The children and I have ours in the schoolroom—and Megan, of course. I have my own tea things and everything in the cupboard up there.”
“What time did you get in?”
“At ten minutes to five. I took the boys up and started to lay tea. Then when Mr. Symmington came in at five I went down to make his but he said he would have it with u
s in the schoolroom. The boys were so pleased. We played Animal Grab afterwards. It seems so awful to think of now—with that poor girl in the cupboard all the time.”
“Would anybody go to that cupboard normally?”
“Oh no, it’s only used for keeping junk. The hats and coats hang in the little cloakroom to the right of the front door as you come in. No one might have gone to the other cupboard for months.”
“I see. And you noticed nothing unusual, nothing abnormal at all when you came back?”
The blue eyes opened very wide.
“Oh no, inspector, nothing at all. Everything was just the same as usual. That’s what was so awful about it.”
“And the week before?”
“You mean the day Mrs. Symmington—”
“Yes.”
“Oh, that was terrible—terrible!”
“Yes, yes, I know. You were out all that afternoon also?”
“Oh yes, I always take the boys out in the afternoon—if it’s fine enough. We do lessons in the morning. We went up on the moor, I remember—quite a long way. I was afraid I was late back because as I turned in at the gate I saw Mr. Symmington coming from his office at the other end of the road, and I hadn’t even put the kettle on, but it was just ten minutes to five.”
“You didn’t go up to Mrs. Symmington?”