The Mystery At Lover's Cave

Roger did not see the inspector again that day till supper, when he was obviously tired out and disinclined to talk. He referred in terms of gentle sarcasm to Roger’s breach of trust, though quite without heat, his attitude being one rather of disillusionment than anger; one gathered that the person he really blamed for the business was himself, for being such a consummate idiot as to trust a journalist. He listened to Roger’s explanation and apologies and accepted the latter, but retaliated, as the culprit had foreseen, by refusing to utter a single word about the case.

The inquest was duly opened the following morning, but though Roger attended in a spirit of pious hope nothing of the least importance transpired. Twelve solemn rustics viewed the body and then sat perspiring in the village schoolroom, and that was practically all that happened. Almost the only witness was the stout landlady, who was able to give evidence of identity and who also had been the last person to see the deceased alive. She agreed, in the time-hallowed formula, that he had then seemed in his usual health and spirits, and added, with more originality, that had he been there when she heard of his death the Coroner could have knocked her down with a feather. She was going on to add a good deal more, but was held with a testy hand.

Inspector Moresby deposed to finding the body, and Roger, somewhat to his surprise, was called to give corroborative evidence. As to who the dead man really was, the inspector preserved a strict silence; and whether the Coroner had been taken into the secret or not, the court was apparently content to accept the Rev. Meadows as a chance visitor to Ludmouth on a prolonged stay and made no inquiry into his antecedents. The whole proceedings had not lasted more than a quarter-of-an-hour when, Dr. Young being called and stating his inability to give the cause of death, the enquiry was adjourned for this to be ascertained and the Coroner formally ordered a post-mortem to be made.

Naturally the news of this second death increased the public interest in the Ludmouth Mystery, as it was now generally called, and in spite of Inspector Moresby’s careful reticence popular imagination was not slow to link the two tragedies together. Newspapers which had hitherto paid little attention to the affair made haste to send down their own representatives, and Roger had cause half-a-dozen times a day to congratulate himself on his foresight in preventing all other intruders from finding foothold in the Crown. To all enquirers the landlord, that mountainous man, presented an ox-like front of stolid imperturbability: they couldn’t have a room, for why? there wasn’t one, that was why. Even offers of double or treble the market-price failed to move him. He seemed to have conceived a bovine affection for Roger (opposites, it has already been said, do sometimes make for a male friendship), and followed out his guest’s wishes to the letter, bewildered but faithful. By way of some return Roger felt compelled to drink as much beer as he could possibly contain.

Thereafter matters progressed for the next ten days or so, inasmuch as the actual case was concerned, not at all. Indeed so far as Roger could see the whole thing was over, bar the shouting. The finding of poison of some description in the body and the subsequent verdict (after Inspector Moresby had unfolded the real story) of suicide during temporary insanity, was practically a foregone conclusion. Roger’s articles in the Courier grew shorter and shorter as he found it increasingly difficult to find anything new to say, and he would have given them up altogether had the editor not made it a personal favour that he should carry them up to the adjourned inquest in order to help the paper as much as possible over the slack season. And all the time Inspector Moresby gave a really first-class imitation of a sphinx, so far as any unusual happenings in Ludmouth were concerned.

During these days Roger converted for the most part what had been chiefly a duet during the proceeding week, into a trio. The original members made no audible protest, but whatever their real feelings on the point Roger saw no reason why, having brought Anthony for the express purpose of keeping him company, he should be callously abandoned to loneliness just because his susceptible cousin’s fancy in companionship happened to have strayed temporarily elsewhere—or so at any rate he phrased it to himself; for after all, one could hardly expect Roger to admit, even privately, to jealousy of a young man nearly a dozen years his junior. At other times he told himself seriously that it was no less than his duty to break up his cousin’s tête-à-têtes with a young woman of (when all was said and done) distinctly doubtful origin and antecedents; it might be an awkward thing, Roger pointed out earnestly to himself, were Anthony to become in any way involved; his mother would have a good deal to say about it, and she would certainly say it, and forcibly, to him. Roger continued to martyr himself to duty.

In the course of his devotion to this stern mistress, he observed Margaret closely. Now that she had been definitely cleared of the horrible suspicion of causing her cousin’s death, her demeanour had altered perceptibly. The iron self-control which she must have been exerting during that week was relaxed, and signs of a corresponding reaction were not infrequent. At one moment she would be more self-reliant than she had appeared before, and less dependent upon their strength; at another she would laugh almost hysterically and propose the maddest escapades on the spur of the moment. Anthony she kept continually upon tenterhooks of bewilderment, treating him one day as if she were seriously in love with him and the next as if he bored her beyond words.

Roger was convinced that there was really nothing of the coquette in her, that she was as straightforward and unguileful as he could wish a girl to be, so that he found himself at times seriously perturbed about her. The place, he felt sure, exercised a distressing effect upon her, and he continued to urge her to leave it, if only for a temporary holiday. Her manner of receiving these suggestions was on a par with the rest of her behaviour: one day she would say shortly that it was quite impossible for the moment, that she must stay and look after George till everything had quite blown over; on another she would jump eagerly at the idea and begin to discuss, quite seriously, the feasibility of flying over to Paris and embarking on a hectic European tour the very next day—yet when it came to the point of a final decision it was always the first mood which prevailed with her. In some vague way Roger felt a certain responsibility for her, and it worried him more than he would have cared to admit.

Inspector Moresby evidently also felt that the case was only marking time during these days, pending definite confirmation of the existence of poison in the body from Sir Henry Griffen, the Home Office analyst, for he took the opportunity of going over to Sandsea for a couple of days to resume his interrupted holiday with his wife and family. It seemed as if he was anxious not to lose touch with Ludmouth, however, for he only took two days when he might have taken five, and was back again at the inn considerably before Roger expected him.

As for Anthony, that young business man began to feel seriously alarmed as the days went by that he would have to return to London before the adjourned inquest brought the case definitely to an end. He had only got three weeks’ holiday, and already two of them were gone. Careful though he had been to conceal any exuberant display of admiration, Anthony really had found himself profoundly impressed by Roger’s handling of the case and his laying bare of its hidden core which even such a tough bird as Inspector Moresby had failed to uncover, and it would have broken his heart to be compelled to leave before all the threads were finally unravelled and the last knots smoothed out.

Fortunately he was not called upon to do so. The Rev. Samuel had died on a Tuesday; on the following Friday the inspector had gone over to Sandsea, returning on Sunday evening; on the next Thursday, exactly a fortnight after his arrival in Ludmouth, Roger was sitting alone with the inspector after supper—and for once Inspector Moresby was not feeling quite so official as usual.

It happened like this:

“I wonder,” Roger had said, “when you’ll hear from Sir Henry about the cause of death.”

And the inspector replied, surprisingly: “Oh, I heard yesterday morning!” He may have felt tempted to bite his tongue out immediately afterward, but indubitably that is what Inspector Moresby replied.

“You did?” squeaked Roger. “Inspector, you—you taciturn devil!”

The inspector applied himself to such small remnants of beer as were still to be found at the bottom of his tankard. “Perhaps it was about time for me to be a little more taciturn than I have been sometimes,” he remarked with ominous application from its depths.

“But I’ve grovelled about that,” Roger said eagerly. “Simply grovelled. Also I’ve explained it all away. Nothing like that will ever occur again.—Inspector, you—you are going to tell me what Sir Henry said, aren’t you?”

The inspector, having arrived at the regretful conclusion that his tankard really was empty this time, replaced it on the table. “No, Mr. Sheringham, sir,” he said with a good deal of firmness. “I’m not.”

“Oh, you are!” Roger wailed. “Don’t you remember? Think again. You—you are, really.”

“I’m really not,” retorted the inspector still more firmly.