8. The Episode of the Eccentric Millionairess

There was one interruption, however, before he was able to carry out this plan. The five of them squeezed into Lily Christine III with great difficulty. Sally sat on Cadogan’s knee, which Cadogan rather liked, and they set off, with Fen driving, on a hurried, nerve-tearing passage of the narrow road, bouncing over bridges like a scenic railway, and missing stray livestock and pedestrians by inches. How they failed to mutilate or kill the A.A. man at the junction with the Banbury road Cadogan was never able to imagine; they left him staring after them, too horrified even to call out. Cadogan, in telegrammatic, broken sentences, acquainted Sally and Mr. Hoskins with what they knew of the case so far.

“Golly,” said Sally when he had finished; and added a little shyly: “You do believe what I told you, don’t you? I know it sounds fantastic, but—”

“My dear Sally, this is such a wild business I’d believe you if you said you were the Lady of Shalott.”

“You do talk funnily, don’t you?” But the words were swept away in the rush of wind and the din of the engine.

“What?” said Cadogan.

Wilkes turned round in the front seat. He could hear better when there was a noise going on. “She says you talk funnily.”

“Do I?” It had not previously occurred to Cadogan that he talked funnily: the thought disturbed him.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” Sally said “What do you do? What’s your job, I mean?”

“I’m a poet.”

“Golly.” Sally was impressed. “I’ve never met a poet before. You don’t look like one.”

“I don’t feel like one.”

“I used to read poetry at school,” Sally continued reminiscently. “There was one bit I liked. It went:

‘Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.’

“I haven’t the foggiest what it means, but it sounds nice, anyway. It was in a book called Poetry For the Middle Forms… I’m not sitting too hard on you, am I?”

“No, I like it.”

“It must be jolly good fun being a poet,” Sally mused. “No one to boss you about, and no one to make you work when you don’t want to.”

“It’d be all right if one earned any money at it,” Cadogan replied.

“Go on. How much do you earn?”

“From being a poet? About two pounds a week.”

“Golly, that isn’t much. Perhaps you aren’t very important yet.”

“I think that’s probably it.”

This seemed to satisfy Sally, for she sang happily to herself until Fen’s mounting a pavement with two wheels while taking a particularly sharp corner diverted all their minds from the subject.

It was shortly after this that the interruption occurred. As they neared Oxford, shops began to appear, traffic increased, and the signs of undergraduate habitation became more numerous. Just before they arrived at the turning which leads off to Lady Margaret Hall, Cadogan, who had been staring vacantly at the landscape, suddenly shouted to Fen to stop, and Fen did this so suddenly that they were nearly overwhelmed by a following car, which fortunately circumvented them, though not without abuse. Fen twisted round in his seat and said:

“What in God’s name is the matter?”

Cadogan pointed, and their eyes followed the direction of his arm. A hundred yards or so behind where they had stopped was a toyshop.

“I think it’s the same one,” said Cadogan, clambering out of the car. “In fact, I’m almost sure…” The others followed him, and they clustered round the window.

“Yes,” said Cadogan. “Because I remember thinking how ugly that doll with the cracked face looked.”

“I remember it, too,” said Sally.

“And there’s that box of balloons I knocked over… Anyway, it looks like it.” Cadogan searched for the name above the shop. It was “Helston”, in faded white letters, elaborately scrolled.

He and Fen went inside. The shop was inhabited only by a dusty young man with a shock of red hair.

“Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “What can I do for you? A doll’s house for the little girl?” He had been reading a manual on salesmanship.

“What little girl?” said Fen blankly.

“Or a box of bricks or some toy soldiers?” Cadogan bought a balloon and went outside to present it to Sally.

“Is the owner of the shop in? It’s a Miss Alice Winkworth isn’t it?”Fen asked.

“Yes, sir, Miss Winkworth. No, sir, I’m afraid she’s not in. Anything I can do for you…”

“No, I wanted to see her personally. You haven’t her address, I suppose?”

“No, sir, I’m afraid I haven’t. You see, I’ve only been here a short while. She doesn’t live on the premises. I know that.”

So there was really nothing more to be said. But as he was leaving, Fen asked:

“Did you notice anything unusual about the shop when you opened this morning?”

“Well, sir, it’s funny you should say that, because several things seemed out of place, like. I was afraid there’d been a burglary, but then there was no sign of breaking in, and nothing that I could see was missing…”

When they were in the car again, and heading for St. Christopher’s: “Obviously that’s the normal habitat of the toyshop,” Fen said. “It’s interesting, though not unexpected, to find that this Winkworth woman owns it. She seems to have provided the scenery for the whole affair. I suppose she’s Leeds.”

“We ought to have buried Danny,” said Sally suddenly. ‘We oughtn’t to have left him like that.” They drove in silence to the front gate of St. Christopher’s.

Parsons, the porter, hailed them as they passed through the lodge. “The police have been a third time for Mr. Cadogan,” he said sombrely. “They’re getting rather angry. They went and had a look in your room, Professor Fen. I saw to it they didn’t disturb anything.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Said I didn’t know anything about it. Perjury.” Parsons retired, grumbling, to study the Daily Mirror.

They all crossed the two quadrangles to Fen’s room. “What do the police want him for?” Sally whispered to Fen.

“Pornographic books,” said Fen impressively.

“No, seriously.”

“He stole some food from the grocer’s—when we were looking round this morning.”

“Golly, what a stupid thing to do.”

Fen’s room proved to contain an occupant. Mr. Erwin Spode, of Spode, Nutling, and Orlick, publishers of high-class literature, rose to his feet in a twitter of nervousness as they came in.

“Hello, Erwin,” said Cadogan in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

Mr. Spode coughed nervously. “In point of fact, I was looking for you. I was in Oxford, so I thought I’d look you up. About that American lecture tour.”

Cadogan groaned. “Let me introduce you,” he said. “Mr. Spode, my publisher: Professor Fen, Miss Carstairs, Mr. Hoskins, Dr. Wilkes.”

“I thought that as this was your college I should perhaps find you here.” Mr. Spode addressed himself to Fen. “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion.” His semicircular profile bore marks of anxiety, and his thin hair was ruffled. He rubbed his face with a handkerchief. “It’s hot,” he complained.

It certainly was hot. The sun was falling lower in the heavens, but it still blazed with unabated strength. The green and cream of the room were cooling, and all the windows were flung wide, but it was still hot. Cadogan felt he could do with a bathe.

“When did you arrive?” he asked Mr. Spode, less because he wanted to know than because he could think of nothing else to say.

“Last night,” said Mr. Spode with something very like frank dismay.

“Oh?” Cadogan’s interest was abruptly aroused. “But you said when you left me you were going back to Caxton’s Folly.”

Mr. Spode became more unhappy than ever; he coughed repeatedly. “I called in at my office on the way back, and found a message asking me to come up here at once. I drove. I would have given you a lift, but when I rang up you’d already left. I’m staying at the ‘Mace and Sceptre’,” he concluded defensively, as if this both explained and excused everything.

Fen, who had been arranging about tea for them all with an elderly, mirthless individual who proved to be his scout, returned to the room, unlocked a drawer in his untidy desk, and took out a small automatic pistol. For a moment conversation was still: something of the implication of that act was borne in on everyone present.

“I’m sorry I shall have to desert you,” he said. “But this interview really won’t wait. Make yourselves at home. Sally, don’t budge from here until I get back—remember you’re still very dangerous to these people. Mr. Hoskins, don’t take your eyes off Sally for a moment.”

“I find it practically impossible to do so already, sir,” said Mr. Hoskins gallantly. Sally favoured him with an impish grin.

Curiosity, and the desire for tea, were conducting a mimic battle in Cadogan’s brain; curiosity emerged triumphant. “I’m coming too,” he announced.

“I don’t want you,” said Fen. “Remember what happened last time.”

“But if I stay here,” Cadogan argued, “the police will find me.” (“And about time too,” Fen muttered.) “Besides that, I’m curious.”

“Oh, my dear paws,” was Fen’s comment. “I suppose it’s useless to try and stop you.”

“I think I might go to the station first, though, and collect my bag: there’s a gun in it.”

“No,” said Fen rudely. “We don’t want you blazing away like a cowboy all over the streets of Oxford. Besides, think what would happen if you were arrested with it on you… Stop arguing and come along.” Such was the force of Fen’s personality that Cadogan stopped arguing and went along.

“I’m not sorry to have escaped Spode,” he told Fen as they walked towards Mr. Rosseter’s office.

“Why?”

“He wants me to lecture in America on modern English poetry.”

“No one ever asks me to lecture in America on anything,” said Fen gloomily. “You ought to be glad. I should be.” His temperament was inclined to be mercurial. “What do you think of the girl, Sally?”

“Beautiful.”

“No, you old lecher,” said Fen affectionately. “I mean, is she telling the truth?”

“I’m pretty sure of it. aren’t you?”

“I should think so, but I have a distrustful nature just the same. After all, it’s a somewhat unusual business, isn’t it?”

“So unusual that no one in his senses would invent it.”

“Yes, you may be right there. You know it occurs to me—somewhat belatedly—that the time-limit hasn”t much significance after all. Miss Tardy had to be got rid of before she could start kicking up a fuss about her claim, that’s all. And, of course, it was preferable that she should disappear before anyone knew she was in England. I wonder when exactly she arrived, and if she stayed the night anywhere, or visited anyone before she came to Oxford. I should rather guess not—that would leave too many obvious traces; in those circumstances getting rid of her would be a risk.”

“What do you think’s happened to the body?”

Fen shrugged. “A furnace, perhaps—or someone’s back garden. It”ll probably be impossible to trace at this stage.”

They passed the Church of St. Michael, standing almost opposite the shop where Sally worked, crossed the Cornmarket, and made their way past the Clarendon Hotel towards Mr. Rosseter’s office. The rush of traffic was abating. Cadogan felt extremely hungry, and his head was beginning to ache again; he was also conscious that he had had too much beer at the ‘Mace and Sceptre’.

“I feel like Gerontius,” he said gloomily, breaking a long silence.

“Gerontius?”

“‘This emptying out of each constituent…’ Sick, I mean.”

“Never mind. We’ll have some tea at Fuller’s when we’ve seen Rosseter… Here we are.”

They clattered up the dusty wooden staircase, lined with indifferent sporting prints and with caricatures by du Maurier of forensic luminaries long since extinguished. The outer office, where the Dickensian clerk should have been, was empty, and they went on to the frosted-glass door which led into Mr. Rosseter’s own room. Cadogan noticed that Fen’s hand was in the pocket which contained the pistol, and that he pushed open the door without immediately stepping inside. The long room with its low ceiling was also untenanted, and the big desk which stood in front of the windows looking out over the Cornmarket was bare. Some of the heavy volumes of law reports had been dragged out of their shelves to reveal a small wall safe, with the door standing open. The sunlight which slanted transversely through the windows lit up a room denuded and abandoned.

“He must have done a bunk,” said Cadogan without surprise.

“I wonder,” said Fen. He went on into the room.

“Both of you put up your hands,” said a voice behind them. “Immediately, please, or I shall shoot.”

Cadogan wheeled round, and in that split second he saw the hammer of a revolver jerk back as the trigger tightened, and resigned himself—without much enthusiasm—to eternity. But no shot followed.

“That was a very stupid thing to do, Mr. Cadogan,” said Mr. Rosseter, his voice shaking a little. “You should remember that I cannot afford to take the slightest risk.”

The gun he held had something strange about the barrel—a sort of tube pierced with holes like a sieve. Hie hand which held it glistened with sweat, but was perfectly steady. Mr. Rosseter no longer wore the sombre clothes which are the livery of his profession; instead, he was dressed in a light grey pin-stripe suit. The green eyes behind his glasses were narrowed almost to slits in the intent focus of a careful marksman. His bald crown, slightly pointed at the top, shone with the refraction of the light, and Cadogan noticed for the first time that his fat, carefully manicured hands were covered with a reddish down.

“I thought you would be coming here sooner or later, gentlemen,” he continued. “So I waited for you on the floor above. you’ll be glad to hear that I’ve given my clerk a holiday: we can talk undisturbed. Go into my office, please, and don’t attempt to lower your hands; I shall be too far behind you for it to be worth while.” He followed them in, and Cadogan heard him turn the key in the lock.

“You must let me relieve you of that pistol, Professor. Throw it on the floor, please… Thank you. Mr. Cadogan, I shall be compelled to see if you…” He ran his hands over Cadogan’s clothes.

“You’re tickling,” said Cadogan.

“My apologies,” said Mr. Rosseter sarcastically. “You may lower your hands now, but don’t make any sudden movements, please. As you’ll appreciate, I’m really in a very nervous condition. Keep at the end of the room, by the door.” Kicking Fen’s gun over by the desk, he backed after it, and lowered himself cautiously into the swivel chair. Then he rested the barrel of the gun on the edge of the desk, but without relaxing; they were two to one, and he was not inclined to rely on Providence. “As an inveterate cinema-goer,” he went on, “I am aware of the danger of having you too close at hand. From where you are I can shoot one of you without the other having time to rush me before I can move the gun. And I really am quite a sound shot—last year, for example, I won the Swedish International Championship at Stockholm.”

“While these biographical details are unusually interesting,” said Fen mildly, “that isn’t what we came here for.”

“Of course not,” Mr. Rosseter purred. “Most inconsiderate of me. The fact is, gentlemen, that ever since I had reported to me the stupid failure”—his voice rose—“the stupid failure of those two men, I haven’t been at all my normal self. I haven’t been well, gentlemen.”

“Very regrettable,” said Fen.

“But I knew you would be coming to see me, so, of course, I had to wait. You have really been a great nuisance indeed. I had to settle with you—that is, I should have wanted to kill you even if it had not been essential to my own safety.”

“I don’t really see how you expect to get away with it.”

“Well, now. In the first place, this revolver, as you see, is silenced; in the second, I have facilities for concealing your bodies until such time as I am out of reach of the law—”

“We have friends, you realize, who know where we are. They”ll be very curious if we don’t return.”

“Of course you have friends,” said Mr. Rosseter benignly. He seemed virtually to be complimenting them on the fact. “I hadn’t quite overlooked that. They will receive a message to say you have chased me up to—Edinburgh, shall we say? Anywhere that’s suitably remote.”

“And yourself?”

“I shall just have time to catch the evening plane from Croydon. In Paris I shall lose my identity, and midday tomorrow I shall be on a boat belonging to a country with which Britain has no extradition treaty… You see, it’s all very tiresome, and not at all what I originally intended. Now I shall have no time at all to wind up Miss Snaith’s estate.”

Cadogan asked: “Did you kill Miss Tardy?”

“There is the injustice of it all.” With his left hand, Mr. Rosseter gestured broadly, evoking the phantoms of an intolerable persecution. “I did not. I had fully intended to, but someone was before me.”

Fen looked up sharply. “You know who?”

Mr. Rosseter chuckled suddenly—a homely cachinnation of genuine pleasure, without a trace of sinister overtones. “As it happens, I do—and how surprised you’ll be when I tell you! It all looked so difficult—so implausible. Almost a locked-room mystery; certainly an ‘impossible murder’. But I solved it. I solved it.” He chuckled again. “And the murderer—who, of course, is one of the residuary legatees—is going to pay me for that knowledge. Blackmail—an amiable art. My flight, you see, will make no effectual difference to the disposal of Miss Snaith’s money; the executorship will be vested elsewhere, and in due time the residuary legatees will receive their inheritance. One of them, however, will not enjoy very much of it because it will mostly be conveyed to me in another country. If it is not, a disinterested friend of mine will hand over a lot of very interesting information to the police.” He nodded towards a brief-case which was leaning against the side of the desk. “I shall post that information to him as soon as I am clear of Oxford.”

“It doesn’t occur to you,” Fen suggested, “that your residuary legatees will come in for a good deal of attention from the police after you’ve left?”

“Of course they will,” Mr. Rosseter’s manner was bland. “But what are they to be charged with? Your murder? But I shall be the obvious culprit The murder of Miss Tardy? But how is it to be established? Solely on the evidence of the Carstairs child? My dear sir, the police would not be so idiotic as even to issue a warrant. I should say that I was careful to ascertain from Miss Tardy that there is absolutely no evidence that she came into this country at all. She caught the Dieppe boat which arrived at midday yesterday, and came straight to Oxford without stopping anywhere or seeing anyone. As to the evidence of ticket-collectors and such people, even if they remembered her (which is exceedingly unlikely), a clever counsel could tie them in knots with the greatest of ease. Finally, the body has now been disposed of beyond all hope of recovery. No, no: the residuary legatees may undergo some unpleasantness, but they have absolutely nothing to fear.”

For the first time, Cadogan properly realized that Mr. Rosseter genuinely did mean to kill them: now he had told them all this there was nothing else he could do. Cadogan felt a sudden sickening in his belly; every word Mr. Rosseter said, every new fact he gave them, hammered down their coffins with one more nail. Yet he looked out of the window at the street he knew so well, and found he was hardly able to believe his own imminent destruction. Two logics struggled inside him: the logic of “I am certainly awake, and, that being so, the thing is bound to happen”; and the logic of “These things simply do not happen.” He glanced at Fen. There was no longer any trace of the habitual fantastic naivety in those hard blue eyes; but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

“And now,” Mr. Rosseter was saying, “you will want to know all about it—from the beginning. I have half an hour to spare before I need go, and you deserve to hear the details. The earliest stages I need not go over again. You know of Miss Snaith’s feelings about her niece, Miss Tardy, you know of her eccentricities; and you have discovered, no doubt, that I am named in the will as the residuary legatee. You must be aware by now, however, that in this respect I am merely the instrument of a secret trust. The reason for this arrangement you shall hear: it is simply the prosaic fact that Miss Snaith altered the residuary legatees in her will so frequently that the making of new wills became a nuisance to everybody. Under a secret trust she could make these changes with much greater convenience. Naturally, as her legal adviser I deplored so unconventional a scheme, but there was nothing I could do about it. And the final arrangement was that I made out for her certain sureties which could be donated to anyone whom she chose to select as her heir. Their names she declined to give me, since, as you know, she went in exaggerated fear of violent death; and so imagined, no doubt, that I should seek out the objects of her beneficent intentions and incite them to murder her. Such childishness seems scarcely conceivable, but there, in any event, is the fact. On her death I was to receive a paper containing the names of these legatees, and when the six months which were allowed to Miss Tardy were out, I was to advertise for them in the Oxford Mail. They would then take their sureties to the bank, and there obtain the papers which both proved their claim and insured the inheritance against possible depredations by myself. I should add that Miss Snaith, who was devoted to the works of Edward Lear, chose to identify the residuary legatees by names taken from his limericks. They appeared in the advertisement which you saw—Ryde, Leeds, West, Mold, and Berlin.”

(The Premature Burial, Cadogan thought: didn’t the hero of that story listen to his own coffin being hammered down?)

“I advertised for Miss Tardy in the way the will required,” Mr. Rosseter went on. The gun was still held steady on the edge of the desk. “You understand that at the time I had no criminal intentions; I merely thought it a pity that so much money should be wasted on nonentities to whom Miss Snaith imagined she was indebted for some trivial kindness. And I confess I was annoyed that she had seen fit to leave nothing to me. I am afraid that some of my past career, gentlemen, would perhaps not bear a very close investigation; I would not mention this were it not that the fact has an important bearing on what follows.”

Another nail.

“Three days before the six months was up, I received a letter from Miss Tardy formally claiming her inheritance, and announcing that she was on her way to England. She wrote from Dinkelsbühl, in Germany. And about an hour afterwards the event occurred which initiated this entire business.

“A man came to see me here—let us for the moment call him Berlin. He had discovered that I was Miss Snaith’s lawyer, and had received from her one of the sureties which I mentioned; and, putting two and two together, had come to ask me if he were a beneficiary under the will. I said, of course, that I could tell him nothing. And it was then that my past career rose up to confront me.

“He had been in America at the time when I was there, and was acquainted with certain facts about me—enough, at all events, to make my career extremely difficult if they were ever revealed. I was compelled, gentlemen, to tell him about the will and about Miss Tardy, and the idea that so much money was slipping from his grasp was evidently intolerable to him. At first he demanded that I should suppress Miss Tardy’s claim, but I told him, of course, that such a scheme was ludicrous and impossible. Then he suggested that Miss Tatdy should be intimidated into signing the money away. Now, the likelihood of such a course having any ultimate effect was exceedingly small; any such document which Miss Tardy might sign would have to be produced in court by the residuary legatees, and the circumstances of its signing would be thoroughly investigated. But while he talked I had been considering a plan of my own, so I did not choose to acquaint him with these difficulties. In fact, I pretended to agree.

“We made arrangements for a further discussion of the matter later on, and he left. I then went ahead with my own idea. I wired Miss Tardy, inventing some specious legal technicality to induce her to come straight to me when she arrived in England; and I advertised, two days prematurely, for the other legatees. In due course, all of them but one visited me here. I need not go into more detail than to say that two of them were people of uncertain reputation, and that greed induced them to become accomplices in this absurd intimidation plot, and offered me a part of their inheritance as payment for my own services. One of them offered to provide the scene of action, a shop in the Iffley Road which was to be temporarily ‘disguised’ as a toyshop so that Miss Tardy should never be able to locate it again after she left. All this business was merely a comedy as far as I was concerned. The conspirators were to be masked, too, to prevent their recognizing one another subsequently. I deferred to this nonsense, inwardly wondering at the idiocy which provoked it; because all the time I knew that the only effective thing to do with Miss Tardy was to kill her.”

There was a moment’s silence. Outside, Cadogan could hear the hum of traffic, and see the sunlight winking on the windows of a deserted flat opposite. A sparrow settled on the sill, ruffled its feathers, and flew off again.

“It was a pity everything went so badly,” Mr. Rosseter continued reflectively. He had not at any time taken his finger from the trigger. “A great pity, in the first place, someone killed the woman before I was able to proceed with my own scheme; in the second, the Carstairs girl returned to the shop and saw us; and in the third, you, Mr. Cadogan, blundered in and saw the body. Those were all quite unforeseeable accidents. The plan itself was, I think, nicely contrived. Miss Tardy had telegraphed the time she would arrive, and the Carstairs girl was to act, unsuspecting, as a decoy. She would not see me when she arrived at the toyshop, but only our friend Berlin, who would give a false name; so she could not connect me with the affair, if anything went wrong, except by the letter, which I should swear I had not written. I need not trouble you with the whole business, except to say that if anything went wrong and Miss Tardy’s disappearance were noticed, then the maximum suspicion would fall on the residuary legatees and little or none on myself. Of course, I hoped that all would go smoothly and that Miss Tardy would simply disappear. I should kill her—naturally without letting it appear that I had done so—and remind them of the unpleasantness of their position. I am not unexperienced in violent death, or in what the Americans call a frame-up. They would be only too grateful (in the financial way) for having things hushed up, and all thereafter would be well.

“As you know, the plan miscarried.” Mr. Rosseter rose and strolled to the side of the desk. “But let me tell you what actually happened. And let me give you the names of the people concerned—it is ridiculous to continue with these childish pseudonyms.” He stood silhouetted blackly against the window. “In the first place there was—”

Something like a backfire sounded in the street outside. Mr. Rosseter stopped in the middle of the sentence. His eyes blurred, like lamps swept suddenly with a gust of rain, and his mouth dropped open, showing a trickle of blood in one corner. He fell forward on to his desk, and from there slipped down to the floor. Cadogan found himself staring dazedly at a neat round hole in the window-pane.