The Silk Stocking Murders

In his morning paper (not The Daily Courier) which he had been saving up to read in the train, was a rather fuller account of the tragedy, though now relegated to an unimportant page. Roger was quite gratified to observe that such details as were given corresponded almost exactly with those of Janet’s case; its perpetrator evidently corresponded exactly to the type which he had described so meticulously last night. Whatever he might feel for Janet, Roger had no sympathy with this girl; she was of the kind which is far better out of this world than in it. And she had copied poor little Janet with a slavishness that was really rather nauseating: the silk stocking tied in a single loop and twisted over the door, the screwed hook on the further side, the bare leg, the unsigned note—they were all there.

Her name was Elsie Benham, ‘described as an actress’, as the paper cautiously put it. (‘And of course we know what that means,’ Roger commented caustically. ‘Why do they always “describe themselves as actresses?” It’s uncommonly tough on the real ones.’) She was known as a habituée of night-clubs (‘That’s more like it’) and had been seen at one on the night of the tragedy. She was alone, and a friend who spoke to her mentioned that she seemed depressed. She left alone, at two o’clock in the morning, and must have killed herself very soon after reaching the flat which she shared with another friend who is at the moment out of London (‘Euphemism for weekending in Paris,’ observed the sarcastic reader), for when she was discovered yesterday afternoon by a man who possessed a key to the flat (‘As I said’) the doctor who was hurriedly summoned gave it as his opinion that she had been dead for at least twelve hours. ‘Which is not a bad sentence, even for this rag,’ thought Roger.

He skimmed through the rest of the report, tossed the newspaper aside and opened a novel.

It was not till two hours later, as he was idly watching the fields fly past the window, that two things struck Roger. The evening paper had exaggerated when it spoke of the pathetic ‘letter’ left by the dead girl. It was not a letter; it was merely a quotation. ‘How wonderful is Death!’ she had written on a blank piece of paper. ‘Death and his brother Sleep.’

‘How wonderful is Death.

Death and his brother Sleep,’

murmured Roger. ‘It’s curious that a lady “described as an actress” and known as a habituée of night-clubs should choose to quote Queen Mab on such an occasion. It’s curious that she could quote Shelley at all. It’s very curious that she would quote him correctly; I’d have taken a small bet that any lady “described as an actress” who might improbably have a nodding acquaintance with Shelley, would quote: “How beautiful is Death.” Very curious; but not, apparently, impossible. Well, well, there must be more things in our night-clubs, Sheringham, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

He watched a few more fields slide past.

‘And here’s another funny thing,’ thought Roger. ‘All the papers this time feature the bare leg. But the bare leg wasn’t mentioned before, in any of the accounts I read. When Moira told me, it was complete news to me. I wonder how this woman got hold of that. I suppose it must have been alluded to in some paper I never saw; though I certainly thought I’d studied them all at one time or another. Curious.’

He went on watching the fields, and set to wondering what he was going to say to Mr Manners. The nearer he got to Dorsetshire, the more impertinent his mission began to appear.

In the end he decided not to try the village inn at Little Mitcham, as had been his first intention, but to put up in the neighbouring town of Monckton Regis. This would look less intrusive. He could then, finding himself so near to Mr Manners, go over to Little Mitcham to pay his respects with perfect propriety.

This course he duly followed. Mr Manners welcomed him eagerly, carried him off at once to his study, and plied him with questions which Roger found a good deal of difficulty in answering tactfully. The old man seemed very depressed, as was only to be expected, but his grief was dignified and unembarrassing. Pressed with warmth to stay to luncheon and meet the rest of the family, Roger acceded after protest, quietening his conscience with the reflection that at such a time as this the presence of a stranger might be a blessing in disguise to the stricken household; at the least it would take their minds for a few hours off their loss.

The other four daughters were aged respectively twenty-four, seventeen, fourteen and twelve, and with the eldest, Anne, Roger found himself almost immediately on terms of good friendship. She was one of those capable girls whom the emergency seems so often to produce; and unlike most capable girls, she was good to look upon as well. Not so pretty as Janet had been, perhaps, but in a way more beautiful, and built in miniature; and her air of reposeful efficiency (not the assertive efficiency which most capable women possess) Roger found extremely attractive. Making his mind up with his usual rapidity during lunch, he sought an opportunity after the meal was over to take her aside, and, under pretext of admiring the garden in its garment of budding spring, proceeded to tell her the whole story.

If Anne was shocked, she scarcely showed it; if she was much upset, she concealed her feelings. She merely replied, gravely: ‘I see. This is extraordinarily good of you, Mr Sheringham. And thank you for telling me; I much prefer to know. I quite agree with your conclusions, too, and I’ll do anything to help you confirm them.’

‘And you can?’ Roger asked eagerly.

Anne shook her small head. She was small all over, delicately boned, with small, rather serious features set in a small, oval face. ‘At the moment,’ she confessed, ‘I don’t see that I can. Janet knew plenty of men round here, of course, and I can give you a list of the ones she knew best, but I’m quite sure that none of them could be at the bottom of it.’

‘We could at any rate find out which of them had been in London since she went up there,’ Roger said, loath to abandon the line on which all his hopes were now pinned.

‘We could, of course,’ Anne agreed. ‘And we will, if you think we should. But I’m convinced, Mr Sheringham, that it isn’t here that we must look for the cause of my sister’s death. When she left here she hadn’t a care in the world, I know. Janet and I—’ Her voice faltered for a moment, but recovered immediately—‘Janet and I were a good deal more than sisters; we were the most intimate of friends. If she’d been worried before she left here, I’m certain she would have told me.’

‘Well,’ said Roger, with more cheerfulness than he felt, ‘we’ll simply have to see what we can do; that’s all.’

The upshot was that Roger spent a very pleasant weekend in Dorsetshire, saw a great deal of Anne, who, to his great delight, did not seem to have the faintest wish to discuss his books with him, and returned to London on the Monday apparently not an inch nearer his objective. ‘Though a weekend in Dorsetshire in early April,’ he told the lady in the office as he paid his hotel-bill, ‘is a thing no man should be without.’

‘Quate,’ agreed the young lady.

Roger strolled down to the station. He had made a point of mentioning to Anne the time of his train, in case anything cropped up that she might want to communicate to him at the last moment. As he walked on to the platform, he looked up and down to see if she were there. She was not.

With a sense of disappointment which he could not remember having experienced for at least ten years, and of which he became instantly as near to being ashamed as Roger could concerning anything connected with himself, he made his way to the bookstall and bought a paper. Opening it a few minutes later, his eye at once caught certain headlines on the centre page. The headlines ran as follows:

ANOTHER SILK STOCKING TRAGEDY

SOCIETY BEAUTY HANGS HERSELF

LADY URSULA GRAEME’S SHOCKING FATE

‘This,’ said Roger, ‘is becoming too much of a good thing.’

CHAPTER V (#ulink_7df3c2f5-1ec9-5ef7-98d6-abe37f0a5d53)

ENTER CHIEF-INSPECTOR MORESBY (#ulink_7df3c2f5-1ec9-5ef7-98d6-abe37f0a5d53)

SEATED in the train, Roger began to peruse the account of Lady Ursula’s death. Now that it had to deal with the daughter of an earl instead of an obscure habituée of night-clubs, the story had been allotted two full columns on the centre page, and every detail, relative or not, that could be hastily scraped together had been inserted. Briefly, the facts were as follows.

Lady Ursula had left her home in Eaton Square, where she lived with her widowed mother (the present Earl, her eldest brother, was in the Diplomatic Service abroad), shortly before eight. She dined with a party of friends at a dance-club in the West End, where she stayed, dancing and talking, till about eleven. She then began to complain of a headache and tried to induce one of the others to accompany her for a little run in her car; the rest of the party refused, however, as it was raining and the car was an open two-seater. Lady Ursula then left the club, saying that she would go for a run alone to blow her headache away, if no one would accompany her.

At half-past two in the morning a girl called Irene Macklane, an artist and a friend of Lady Ursula’s, returned to her studio in Kensington from a party in a neighbouring studio and found Lady Ursula’s car outside. She was not surprised at this, as Lady Ursula was in the habit of calling on her friends at the most unusual of times of the day and night. On going inside and calling, however, she could at first see no sign of her.

The studio had been made out of the remains of some old stables, and spanning its width in the centre was a large oak beam, some eight feet above the ground, in the middle of which, on the underside, was a large hook, from which Miss Macklane had hung an old-fashioned lantern. This lantern contained an electric light bulb which was connected by a flex to a light-point farther down the room. On turning the switch at the door, Miss Macklane was surprised to see the lantern light upon the floor some distance away from the beam instead of in its normal position. She lifted it up and was then horrified to see Lady Ursula hanging in its place from the hook in the beam.

The details of her death corresponded almost exactly with those of Janet’s and the other woman’s. An overturned table lay on the floor a few feet away, and Lady Ursula had made use of one of the stockings which she was wearing at the time; the leg from which she had taken it was bare, though the foot still wore its brocade slipper. A loop had been formed by tying the extreme ends of the stocking together, this had been passed over Lady Ursula’s head, the slack twisted round three or four times, and a tiny loop at the end slipped over the hook. She had then apparently kicked the table away and met her death, like the other two, from slow asphyxiation.

The note she had left for Miss Macklane, however, was a little more explicit than those of the others, though its wording gave scope for conjecture. It ran:

I’m so sorry to have to do this here, my dear, but there’s simply nowhere else, and mother would have a fit if I did it at home. Don’t be too terribly furious with me!

U.

There followed a eulogistic account of Lady Ursula, ‘by a friend,’ expatiating on her originality, her lack of convention and her recent engagement to the wealthy son of a wealthy financier. Whether it was the engagement, or her determination at all costs to be original, that had led Lady Ursula to dispense with a life with which, as she was in the habit of informing her friends, she had for many years been bored stiff, the writer obviously found some difficulty in avoiding.

Roger put the paper across his knees and began absently to fill his pipe. This was, as he had commented, too much of a good thing. It was becoming a regular epidemic. Fantastic pictures floated across his mental vision of the thing becoming a society craze, and all the debutantes suspending themselves in rows by their own stockings. He pulled himself together.

The real trouble, of course, was that this did not square with the article he had written before leaving London. It upset things badly. For though the unknown habituée of night-clubs might have possessed the predisposition to suicide about which he had expatiated so glibly, he was quite sure that Lady Ursula Graeme did not. And from what he knew about the lady, even apart from the friend’s article upon her, he was still more sure that, if by any strange chance she had decided to do away with herself, she would most certainly not imitate the method of an insignificant chorus-girl and a wretched little prostitute. If she were to imitate anybody it would be in the grand manner. She might cut an artery in a hot bath, for instance. But far more probably she would evolve some daringly unconventional method of suicide which should ensure her in death an even greater publicity than she had been able to attain in life. Lady Ursula, in short, would set the fashion in suicide, not follow it.

And that letter, too. It might be more explicit in its terms than the other two, but it was even more puzzling. Whatever one might think about them in other ways, one does give our aristocracy credit for good manners; and by no stretch of etiquette can it be considered good manners to suspend oneself by one’s stocking in somebody else’s studio. Indeed, it would be far more in keeping with the lady’s character that she should have chosen a lamp-post. And would the dowager have no fit so long as her daughter did not suspend herself actually in Eaton Square?

It was all very curious. But it wasn’t the least good arguing about it, Roger decided, turning to another page of the paper, for there was no getting away from the fact that Lady Ursula had done all these things which she couldn’t possibly have done.

He proceeded to wade through the leading articles with some determination.

Lady Ursula’s death provided, of course, a three-days’ wonder. The inquest was fixed for Wednesday morning, and Roger made up his mind to attend it. He was anxious to see whether any of these little points which had struck his own attention, so small in themselves but so interesting in the aggregate, would strike that of anyone else.

Unfortunately Roger was not the only person who had conceived the idea of attending the inquest. On a conservative calculation, three thousand other people had done so as well. The other three thousand, however, had not also conceived the idea of obtaining a press-pass beforehand; so that in the end Roger, battered but more or less intact, was able to edge his way inside by the time the proceedings were not much more than half over. The first eye he caught was that of Chief Detective Inspector Moresby.

The Chief Inspector was wedged unobtrusively at the back of the court like any member of the public, and it was plain that he was not here in any official capacity. ‘Then why in Hades,’ thought Roger very tensely, as he wriggled gently towards him, ‘is he here at all?’ Chief Detective Inspectors do not attend inquests on fashionable suicides by way of killing time.

He grinned in friendly fashion as he saw Roger approaching (so friendly, indeed, that Roger winced slightly, remembering what must be inspiring most of the grin), but shook his head in reply to Roger’s raised eyebrows of inquiry. Brought to a halt a few paces away, Roger had no option but to give up the idea of further progress for the moment. He devoted his attention to the proceedings.

A man was on the witness-stand, a tall, dark, good-looking man of a slightly Jewish cast of countenance, somewhere in the early thirties; and it did not need more than two or three questions and replies to show Roger that this was the fiancé to whom allusion had been made. Roger watched him with interest. If anybody ought to have known Lady Ursula, it should be this man. Would he give any indication that he considered anything curious in the case?

Regarding him closely, Roger found it difficult to say. He was evidently suffering deeply (‘Poor devil!’ thought Roger. ‘And being made to stand up and show himself off before all of us like this, too!’), and yet there was a subtle suggestion of guardedness in his replies. Once or twice he seemed on the verge of making a comment which might be enlightening, but always he pulled himself up in time. He carried his loss with a dignity of sorrow which reminded Roger of Anne’s bearing in the garden when he had first told her of his suspicions; but it was clear that there were points upon which he was completely puzzled, the main one being why his fiancée should have committed suicide at all.

‘She never gave me the faintest indication,’ he said in a low voice, in answer to some question of the Coroner’s. ‘She seemed perfectly happy, always.’ He spoke rather like a small boy who has been whipped and sent to bed for something which for the life of him he can’t understand to be a crime at all.