He gave a short exasperated sigh.
"It's always the way. They won't come to us. They've got that deep-seated prejudice against 'being mixed up with the police.' If she'd come along and told us what was worrying her, she'd be alive today."
"Didn't she give the other women any hint?"
"No, or so Rose says, and I'm inclined to believe her. For if she had, Rose would have blurted it out at once with a good many fancy embellishments of her own."
"It's maddening," I said, "not to know."
"We can still guess, Mr. Burton. To begin with, it can't be anything very definite. It's got to be the sort of thing that you think over, and as you think it over, your uneasiness grows. You see what I mean?"
"Yes."
"Actually, I think I know what it was."
I looked at him with respect.
"That's good work, Superintendent."
"Well, you see, Mr. Burton, I know something that you don't. On the afternoon that Mrs. Symmington committed suicide both maids were supposed to be out. It was their day out. But actually Agnes came back to the house."
"You know that?"
"Yes. Agnes has a boyfriend - young Rendell from the fish shop. Wednesday is early closing and he comes along to meet Agnes and they go for a walk, or to the pictures if it's wet. That Wednesday they had a row practically as soon as they met. Our letter writer had been active, suggesting that Agnes had other fish to fry, and young Fred Rendell was all worked up. They quarreled violently and Agnes bolted back home and said she wasn't coming out unless Fred said he was sorry."
"Well?"
"Well, Mr. Burton, the kitchen faces the back of the house, but the pantry looks out where we are looking now. There's only one entrance gate. You come through it and either up to the front door, or else along the path at the side of the house to the back door."
He paused.
"Now I'll tell you something: That letter that came to Mrs. Symmington that afternoon didn't come by post. It had a used stamp affixed to it, and the postmark faked quite convincingly in lamp black, so that it would seem to have been delivered by the postman with the afternoon letters. But actually it had not been through the post. You see what that means?"
"It means," I said slowly, "that it was left by hand, pushed through the letter box some time before the afternoon post was delivered, so that it should be among the other letters."
"Exactly. The afternoon post comes around about a quarter to four. My theory is this: The girl was in the pantry looking through the window (it's masked by shrubs but you can see through them quite well) watching out for her young man to turn up and apologise."
I said, "And she saw whoever it was delivered that note?"
"That's my guess, Mr. Burton. I may be wrong, of course."
"I don't think you are... It's simple and convincing - and it means that Agnes knew who the anonymous letter writer was."
Chapter 5
"Yes." Nash said. "Agnes knew who wrote those letters."
"But then why didn't she -?" I paused, frowning.
Nash said quickly, "As I see it, the girl didn't realize what she had seen. Not at first. Somebody had left a letter at the house, yes - but that somebody was nobody she would dream of connecting with the anonymous letters. It was somebody, from that point of view, quite above suspicion.
"But the more she thought about it, the more uneasy she grew. Ought she, perhaps, to tell someone about it? In her perplexity she thinks of Miss Barton's Partridge who, I gather, is a somewhat dominant personality and whose judgement Agnes would accept unhesitatingly. She decides to ask Partridge what she ought to do."
"Yes," I said thoughtfully. "It fits well enough. And somehow or other, Poison Pen found out. How did she find out, Superintendent?"
"You're not used to living in the country, Mr. Burton. It's a kind of miracle how things get around. First of all there's the telephone call. Who overheard it on your end?"
I reflected.
"I took the call originally. I called up to Partridge."
"Mentioning the girl's name?"
"Yes - yes, I did."
"Did anyone overhear you?"
"My sister or Miss Griffith might have done so."
"Ah, Miss Griffith. What was she doing up there?"
I explained.
"Was she going back to the village?"
"She was going to Mr. Pye first."
Superintendent Nash sighed. "That's two ways it could have gone all over the place."
I was incredulous. "Do you mean that either Miss Griffith or Mr. Pye would bother to repeat a meaningless little bit of information like that?"
"Anything's news in a place like this. You'd be surprised. If the dressmaker's mother has got a bad corn everybody hears about it! And then there is this end. Miss Holland, Rose - they could have heard what Agnes said. And there's Fred Rendell. It may have got around through him that Agnes went back to the house that afternoon."
I gave a slight shiver. I was looking out of the window. In front of me was a neat square of grass and a path and the low prim gate.
Someone had opened the gate, had walked very correctly and quietly up to the house, and had pushed a letter through the letter box. I saw, hazily, in my mind's eye, that vague woman's shape. The face was blank - but it must be a face that I knew...
Superintendent Nash was saying:
"All the same, this narrows things down. That's always the way we get 'em in the end. Steady, patient elimination. There aren't so very many people it could be now."
"You mean -?"
"It knocks out any women clerks who were at their work all the afternoon. It knocks out the schoolmistress. She was teaching. And the district nurse. I know where she was yesterday. Not that I ever thought it was any of them, but now we're sure. You see, Mr. Burton, we've got two definite times now on which to concentrate - yesterday afternoon, and the week before. On the day of Mrs. Symmington's death from, say, a quarter past three (the earliest possible time at which Agnes could have been back in the house after her quarrel) and four o'clock when the post must have come (but I can get that fixed more accurately with the postman). And yesterday from ten minutes to three (when Miss Megan Hunter left the house) until half past three or more probably a quarter past three as Agnes hadn't begun to change."
"What do you think happened yesterday?"
Nash made a grimace.
"What do I think? I think a certain lady walked up to the front door and rang the bell, quite calm and smiling, the afternoon caller... Maybe she asked for Miss Holland, or for Miss Megan, or perhaps she had brought a parcel. Anyway Agnes turns around to get a salver for cards, or to take the parcel in, and our ladylike caller bats her on the back of her unsuspecting head."
"What with?"
Nash said, "The ladies around 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 her out of the way? 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 was suspicious of this person -"
Nash interrupted me: "She wasn't. Not to this pitch. She just thought it 'queer' shall we say? 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!"
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 co-operation, 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 maid-servants 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 rattle-snake 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 that 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 hurried 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?"
"Toward Combe Acre, 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."
