Minute for Murder Page 8

  Stood, unexpecting, unconscious. She spoke not of obligations,

  Knew not of debt,—ah, no, I believe you, for excellent reasons.”

  “Listen to this, Blount,” said Nigel, and read the passage aloud.

  When he had ended, the Superintendent smacked his bald head. “Oh, dear me, dear me. Don’t like him. An egotist. A bad case of negativism. Won’t take the plunge. Wants to eat his cake and have it. T’ck, t’ck, t’ck.”

  “He’s honest about himself, though.”

  “Egotists often are. They can afford to be. I mean, they take so much credit for the being honest that it quite obscures for them the unpleasant picture of themselves the honesty has revealed. But this isn’t getting us any forrader.”

  “I’m not so sure. Here’s a book Jimmy Lake gave Nita only a few days ago. Either he or she has marked this passage with a query and—hello, what’s this?”

  Nigel was holding the book closer to his face. He went over to the window, beckoned to Blount, pointed out to him a faint pencil-mark he had not noticed before in the margin against the last few lines of the poem:

  “A capital ‘A ’,” said Nigel. “Could stand for Alice. The complacent Alice Lake, who doesn’t hold Jimmy to his married obligations. Just read the passage again, Blount, and see how neatly the ‘she’ in it fits Mrs. Lake—the unexacting woman who doesn’t hold her husband to anything; who, when he comes in his ‘pitiful rôle of evasion’, meets him calmly, takes no notice of his embarrassment, says nothing of any debt he owes her. Incidentally, the ‘he’ is not a bad picture of Jimmy, either. I should imagine he’s pretty hard to nail down, you know, in affairs of the heart.”

  “What you’re telling me,” said Blount slowly, “is that a man doesn’t murder his mistress when he has a complacent wife.”

  “Exactly. Or suppose this exclamation mark in the margin is ironical, on the other hand. Suppose Alice Lake is in fact extremely jealous and has been kicking up a fuss, and behaving altogether unlike the woman in the poem. Well, a man may murder a jealous wife because she stands in his way, but——”

  “—But he only murders his mistress if she has been carrying on with someone else, or driving him potty with her demands?”

  “And does this pleasant domestic scene look as if Nita was flighty? No. She’d obviously settled down to be a home from home for Jimmy.”

  The telephone rang, and Blount went to answer it. After a brief conversation, he put back the receiver. “They’ve done the autopsy,” he said. “The container was not in the body. That seems to dispose of the possibility of suicide. There was just a bare chance she might have swallowed the thing after biting it, though that way it’d have been difficult to account for the traces of poison in her cup.

  “Where on earth did the container get to, then?”

  “Well, either Mr. Ingle threw it out of the window, or——”

  “Or one of your searchers slipped up.”

  “I can’t think that possible,” said Blount, a little stiffly. “I admit that, from my point of view, the personal search was rather a formality. After all, the last thing a murderer would do, after breaking the container into a cup, is to keep it on his person. He only had to drop it anywhere in that big room, and there was plenty of time for him to do it, after you’d told them there’d have to be a personal search as well as before. But still, I don’t believe my people could have made a mistake.”

  “It seems to me you’re in a proper jam. Means: any one in the room had it. Opportunity: any one in the room had it, unless Mrs. Lake is telling the truth when she says she saw the container on the desk a minute before the girl was killed. So you’re left with Motive.”

  “Quite a classical case of bricks without straw,” said Blount dryly. “That’s why you’ve got to come in on it. You’re in a far better position than the police to work on the Motive angle.”

  Nigel, standing by the mantelpiece, gazed at the threadbare woolly rabbit.

  “I’m not sure I won’t change my mind,” he said at last. “I don’t like all this—this pathetic home-making broken up. What about Kennington’s movements the day before the crisis? And Nita’s?” he asked abruptly.

  “Kennington is covered from the moment he got back to London till 10.30 that night. He left the War Office at 10.20. A War Office car took him to Claridge’s, where he went straight up to his room. All that is checked. He couldn’t have met Miss Prince before then. He claims he went to bed. At any rate, the night porters say he didn’t go out again. Now for Miss Prince. She left the Ministry at 6.30. Came straight back here. About 6.40 she came in and told Mrs. Humble—that’s the caretaker—she’d be having a visitor later and not to bother when the bell rang—she’d open the front door herself. Shortly after eight, Mrs. Humble heard someone let himself in. This, it appears, was Mr. Lake. He volunteered himself that he went to Dickens Street then, intending to spend the night here, but Nita Prince seemed out of sorts and not very welcoming, so he left about nine o’clock, returned to the Ministry, worked late, and slept there. Mrs. Humble assumed he must have been the visitor Miss Prince had referred to. So, when the front-door bell rang, a little after eleven o’clock, she came upstairs to answer it. But she heard Miss Prince running downstairs, so she just poked her head round the door between the basement staircase and the hall. She saw Miss Prince open the front door and let a woman in.”

  “A woman!” exclaimed Nigel.

  “Uh-huh. She couldn’t see this woman very clearly—there’s only a dimmed electric light in the hall; but she thinks she might be able to recognise her again. Well, Mrs. Humble went to bed. She was awoken by her dog barking; it barks whenever any one goes out or comes in. She heard the front door closing. She looked at her alarum clock. It was ten minutes to one. And the dog only barked four times that night—for Mr. Lake’s arrival and departure, and for the second visitor’s ditto. So she didn’t have any other visitors.”

  Nigel pondered this for a moment. The second visitor: Nita’s girl friends surely would not in the normal way call so late. And why should she so obviously have wished to get rid of Jimmy Lake before this visitor arrived—unless she had something to say to her which she didn’t want Jimmy to hear? And, the day after, Nita was murdered. As if in response to Nigel’s next thought, Blount remarked:

  “Mrs. Humble did say that the visitor—the woman—was small—not so tall as Miss Prince, anyway.”

  “Have you questioned Alice Lake yet about it?”

  “I’m expecting her here”—Blount looked at his wrist-watch—“in five minutes or so. I rang up her house early this morning, as soon as I’d had my chat with Mrs. Humble.”

  “She made no objection to coming here?”

  “None at all. Mrs. Humble will bring her up. If she recognises her, she’ll nod to me. If she isn’t sure, she’ll shake her head.”

  “H’m. Quite a moment. As far as it goes.”

  Nigel turned back to the bookshelf. No, Nita Prince’s education did not seem to have included the novels of Alice Kennington; they were too satirical for her taste, perhaps; too satirical, perhaps, even for Jimmy. If Alice was at all like the novels she wrote under her maiden name, one could understand why Jimmy had taken up with the so very human Nita, the old-fashioned home-girl-at-heart Nita.

  “You took all their fingerprints, I suppose?”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” replied Blount. “No one objected. Except Billson, who seems to object to everything on principle. But he came round presently. And my fingerprint chap went all over these rooms last night. We’ll know the results about midday. Of course,” he added grimly, “ladies are apt to wear gloves when they pay social calls.”

  “No glasses or things lying about?”

  “Mrs. Humble washed everything up yesterday morning. Just Miss Prince’s breakfast things, she said. If either of the visitors had a drink, Miss Prince must have washed up the glasses herself. Not much to drink, anyway. A bottle of gin and some lime juice in the kitchen cupboard. That’s a
ll.”

  A few minutes later the bell rang, and footsteps were heard coming up the steep stairs. The sitting-room door opened. Alice Lake stood there, glancing at them a little timidly. Just behind her was a slatternly-looking woman, grinning from ear to ear and nodding her head vigorously at the Superintendent. Blount’s face was quite impassive; but his brow knitted in momentary vexation when Major Kennington stepped into the room after his sister.

  “I hope I’m not de trop, my dears,” he said brightly, “but Alice felt she needed moral support.”

  “Just so,” said Blount. “That’s quite all right. I’m sorry to have dragged you along here, Mrs. Lake, but it was simpler. Do sit down, won’t you?”

  Nigel was familiar with the spectacle of Superintendent Blount putting a witness at ease. The courtly, considerate manner; the Pickwickian jollity; the appearance of slight obtuseness. He had seen clever people fall for it—seen them relax, and a consciousness of intellectual superiority creep into their faces or their words: Ah, yes, not so very formidable after all, I think I can twist him round my fingers all right. And Nigel had seen such people sadly discomfited. Alice Lake is a clever woman, he thought, quietly surveying her from the window-seat, while Blount worked his confidence trick. A clever actress too—that is, if she was in this room two nights ago—glancing around her with just the right suggestion of curiosity and faint embarrassment, as if to say, “So this is where she and Jimmy lived.” And an attractive woman, in her severe, composed sort of way. Nigel eyed her small, neat profile; the hair brushed up from the back in the neo-Edwardian manner; the delicate features—long, thin, slightly retroussé nose, ironical mouth, waxen little ears; the black coat and skirt and frilled white silk blouse, small feet and white-gloved hands; so crisp and cool compared with most London women after six years of war.

  “—Yes, I’m afraid there’s no doubt the puir lassie was murdered,” Blount was saying in his most avuncular tones. “T’ck, t’ck, a sorry business. Now I’m sure you’ll understand, Mrs. Lake, how much depends on your evidence.”

  Alice Lake raised her plucked eyebrows, said nothing.

  “That point about the poison container still being on the desk when you said it was—barely a minute before Miss Prince took her cup away to her own table. You’re quite sure it was?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite sure.”

  “No possibility that it could have been used already, and put back there? Could you see all of it, or only a bit of it? It was lying beside your husband’s calendar, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. I could see it all. Of course, I don’t know how different it’d have looked if it had been used.”

  “Oh, you’d have noticed the difference all right,” Charles Kennington put in. “They’re fragile, brittle things. It’d have been broken right across.”

  “Just so,” said Blount. “Your evidence clears your good husband, you realise.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Mrs. Lake replied coldly. “And it happens also to be true. I’m not lying to protect any one, I can assure you. I’m not made that way.”

  “My sister is a madly Victorian girl,” said Charles. “She really believes that Truth must always prevail. The blue-stocking type.”

  “Do be quiet, Charles,” said Alice impatiently.

  Blount proceeded. “But of course your evidence does not clear you. You were within easy reach of the poison container and Miss Prince’s cup.”

  “I realise that too,” said Alice. Nigel chalked it up to her—whether a good mark or a bad, he was not sure—that she did not point out how unlikely it would be for a murderer to have volunteered so readily so dangerous a piece of information.

  Blount tickled the tip of his nose.

  “You would not, in any case, have any strong impulse to protect your husband?”

  “Oh, but I might indeed. I’m extremely fond of Jimmy. Just because I let him live his own life——”

  Charles Kennington sighed, rolled up his eyes, lifted his hands theatrically. Alice’s policy of laisser-faire was clearly a matter of disagreement between them.

  “—Yes, Charles, live his own life, it doesn’t mean that I am indifferent to him. But there’d have been no point in his poisoning that girl, don’t you see? Therefore, no point in my trying to shield him.”

  “Quite so,” said Blount, with an approving nod. “Now had your husband given any indication to you recently that his affair with Miss Prince was petering out, or that she was—e’eh—not playing straight with him? Some other man, perhaps?”

  “Oh, indeed no. In fact, a month or two ago, he sounded me about divorce. In his rather circuitous way.” Alice Lake smiled faintly. “I suppose she’d been nagging at him a bit. I can quite understand. It couldn’t have been altogether a satisfactory life for her, all this” —her gloved hand made a slight gesture at the top floor of No. 19 Dickens Street.

  “Well, now, this is most interesting. And what did you say?”

  “I told Jimmy if he must, he must. I told him I’d be terribly upset,” her high, cool voice continued, “but he must make up his own mind—I wasn’t going to do it for him. If you want to know, I’d say he dashed straight along here and told her he couldn’t press a divorce on me, it would break my heart.”

  Blount blinked a little. “That’s exceedingly frank, Mrs. Lake. And Miss Prince wouldn’t accept the situation? And that’s why she wanted to see you, to have a private talk about it?”

  “A private talk?”

  “Yes, when you came here the other night.”

  Mrs. Lake’s green eyes opened wide. “But—there must be some mistake. I’ve never been here in my life before.”

  Major Kennington rose from the arm of her chair, on which he had been sitting, and went to stand with his back to the fireplace. He glanced from Alice to Blount, in a quick, amused way, as though they were duelling over some abstract subject.

  “Come now, Mrs. Lake,” said Blount. “I have a witness who saw Miss Prince let you in at the front door just after eleven o’clock two nights ago.”

  “But that’s nonsense,” she replied sharply. “I was in bed then, in my own house.”

  “Can you—e’eh, prove that, Mrs. Lake?”

  “I don’t expect so. Let me see. Well, my husband rang me up at 10.30 to say he’d be working late at the Ministry and sleeping there. But, no, I suppose I can’t. I was alone in the house.”

  “Who is this informant of yours?” asked her brother in the embarrassed pause.

  “Mrs. Humble. The caretaker here.”

  “Could we not have a word with her? Identities are sometimes mistaken.”

  “Surely.” Blount rang down to the basement on the speaking-tube. Presently Mrs. Humble arrived, grinning, panting and dishevelled.

  “Is this the lady you saw Miss Prince let in two nights ago?” Blount asked.

  “’Sright. Didn’t yer see me nod. That’s ’er.”

  “You’re quite sure you couldn’t be mistaken?” Blount asked carefully.

  “I’ope I’as the use of me eyes still,” said Mrs. Humble, bridling. “Same ’eight. Same peekong little fice. A real lady, I says to myself. That’s ’er all right, all right, take my ruddy oath.”

  “Did you notice how she was dressed?” asked Charles Kennington.

  “Black three-quarter length coat, ever so chick. White blouse. White kid gloves.”

  “What kind of a hat was I wearing?” asked Alice.

  “Get on with you, m’m! As if you didn’t know! One of them ’alo ’ats, black straw, awiy from the fice.”

  There seemed no more to be said. Blount told the woman she could go. But, when the door closed behind her, Mrs. Lake quietly remarked:

  “I’m afraid it must be a case of mistaken identity, Superintendent. You see, I never wear hats. Don’t possess one. Any one will tell you.”

  The Superintendent took it very well. Clucking, beaming, massaging his bald head, he said:

  “Well now, t’ck, t’ck, t’ck, that just shows one can
’t be too careful. Very smart of you, Mrs. Lake, that question about the hat. Capital. Capital. Puts the lid on it, as you might say.” He chuckled, with the Scotsman’s ripe appreciation of his own witticisms. “It seems you must have a double, Mrs. Lake.”

  Nigel spoke up for the first time since the visitors had arrived.

  “Charles,” he said. “When we met in Jimmy’s room yesterday morning, Nita said to you, ‘You do look different in uniform.’ Implying she’d seen you recently not in uniform. You said, in your letter to Jimmy, that you’d been doing one of your female impersonation turns to catch Stultz. You are the same height as your sister, and resemble her closely in features. Don’t tell me she has yet another double.”

  Charles Kennington had buried his face in his hands during this démarche. He now looked up at them all again, fizzing with laughter.

  “Oh, my!” he giggled. “Oh, what an exposure! My ‘peekong little fice’! Too humiliating! British Major masquerades as female—I knew it would get me into trouble with the police one day.”

  “What is all this about? Do pull yourself together, Charles,” said his sister sharply.

  “Homo sum,” Charles replied. “Meaning, of course, ‘I am the one.’ Yes, I will come clean. Mea maxima culpa.”

  This was his story. Nita had rung him up at lunch-time the day he arrived in London. She had been very distressed, and said she must see him alone. He told her he would have to be at the War Office till late in the evening. So it was arranged that he should come to her flat that night, when he had got away from the War Office.

  “But why dress up to do it?” asked Nigel.

  It seemed that Nita had been terrified lest he should be recognised coming into the house. The caretaker, she had said, was a fearful busybody: she’d spread it around that Nita was receiving gentlemen visitors at midnight.

  “I told her that was all nonsense. But the poor girl was in such a taking that—well, it suddenly occurred to me that I had my female toilette with me, so why not wear it? Put her mind at ease. Might even cheer her up. So I hared back to Claridge’s when my conference was over, and changed and made up and got a taxi to here.”