The Mystery At Lover's Cave

“Well, I’d better begin at the beginning,” said Roger.

“Now, in the very first place I made up my mind, as you know, Inspector, that the person whom you seemed to be suspecting (whether you really did or not, I don’t know; but you certainly gave me that impression)—I made up my mind that that person was not responsible for Mrs. Vane’s death. The evidence was against her, of course, and badly, but there are some cases where circumstantial evidence, however apparently convincing, can lead one rather badly astray, and I was sure this was one of them. I admit that I had nothing definite to go on; my reasons were purely psychological. I felt, quite simply, that to suspect Margaret Cross of murder—and a seemingly cold-blooded, carefully-planned murder at that—was nothing short of ridiculous. The girl was transparently sincere and honest.”

“If it wasn’t she, then, who was it?”

“Well, both of you know that my suspicions finally centred upon this fellow Meadows, alias all the rest of it. I thought I had a pretty good case against him even before we knew anything about him at all; afterward it almost amounted to a foregone conclusion. And then Meadows apparently committed suicide. Well, that didn’t affect my case; if anything (and the circumstances being as they were) it was actually strengthened. But Meadows, it turned out, could hardly have committed suicide at all. He must have been murdered. How did that make things look?

“Now, this is where we jumped to the wrong conclusion, Inspector. At least I did, I can’t answer for you; I’ve never known what was really in your mind from the very beginning. Misled, intentionally or otherwise, by you, I practically assumed that the two murders had been committed by one and the same person—or if I didn’t actually assume that, I came so near it as automatically to wash out the idea that Meadows committed the first. We agreed that they must almost certainly be interdependent, and I accepted your very plausible theory that the strongest and most obvious motive for the second was that Meadows had been an actual eye-witness of the first. And that theory of course eliminated him from the list of suspects. At the same time you made out a very useful case against Vane for the double murder.

“And now I’m afraid we become a little personal.

“Thinking things over in bed last night, away from your magnetic influence, I was suddenly struck by this bright thought: why does Inspector Moresby go to such pains to plant in my mind the idea that both murders were committed by the same person, and to give me the impression that this is what he himself thinks? He’s a reticent sort of devil; he’s never volunteered any ideas of his own worth speaking of before; he knows that in a way we’re rivals here; the last person he’d want to help toward a solution is Roger Sheringham—why? And of course the answer to that came pat: because he wants to put me on the wrong track! He doesn’t think those murders were committed by the same person. On the contrary, he’s convinced they weren’t. How’s that, Inspector?”

The inspector laughed heartily. “No, no, Mr. Sheringham,” he said, shaking his head. “You do me an injustice, you do really. That was my honest opinion when I was talking to you last night. I had no doubt at all that Mrs. Vane and Meadows were murdered by the same person and I don’t mind admitting it.”

“Humph!” observed Roger, not altogether without scepticism. “And do you still think so?”

“I’m always open to conviction, I hope,” replied the inspector carefully. “Yes, go on, sir. This is very interesting.”

“Well, whether you really thought there were two murderers or whether you didn’t, my base suspicions of you did me one good turn: they biased me in favour of thinking so myself. So when I set out to pay a visit to Meadows’ lodgings this morning, I was already prepared to look for his murderer in somebody other than that of Mrs. Vane. Well, I made my investigations, I unearthed a few new facts which looked interesting but which I was blessed at the moment if I could make head or tail of, and I sat down after lunch to try to think the whole thing out.” Roger re-lit his pipe, which had gone out, and settled himself more comfortably in his chair.

“It wasn’t for some little time that a very simple question occurred to me, to which the answer began at last to put me on the right track. The question was this: what after all has happened to make it so impossible that Meadows should be the murderer of Mrs. Vane, as seemed so obvious before? And the answer, of course, was—nothing! Very well, then. Could I get any further with the second mystery by utilising my theory of the two agents to make Meadows the solution of the first?

“Now there were two pointers toward the murderer of Meadows, both somewhat vague—motive and aconitine. Assuming, as I think one had every right to do, that Meadows would not have shrinked from blackmail, the first of these was so wide that I shelved it for a time and concentrated on the second. This was wide too, but it could be narrowed down. If one took the working assumption that the aconitine had come from Dr. Vane’s laboratory, there were, excluding servants and so on, three people who could have got hold of it: Dr. Vane himself, Miss Williamson and Miss Cross. Well, for some reason or other (psychological again) I wasn’t drawn toward Dr. Vane as the murderer although, as you showed, Inspector, it was possible to make out a pretty convincing case against him—probably because you had gone out of your way to make a pretty convincing case against him, perhaps. In the same way, of course, I had already discarded Miss Cross. There remained Miss Williamson.

“Well, Miss Williamson was a difficulty. Why in the name of goodness should she want to kill Meadows? I could see no possible reason. There would have been a reason, of course, if she had already murdered Mrs. Vane—an idea that had already occurred to me by the way, Inspector, and for the same motive, before you put it forward once as a joke, if you remember. There would have been a motive in that case, if Meadows had seen her do it; but I was working on the theory that he had murdered Mrs. Vane himself. For the life of me I couldn’t see, if that were the case, how she could possibly be his murderess.”

“Out of the question, I should have said,” interjected the inspector.

“Yes, that’s what I decided. Well, there were all my three suspects discharged without a stain on their characters; so I was driven to the conclusion that either the aconitine had not come from Dr. Vane’s laboratory at all, or else Meadows had not killed Mrs. Vane. In either case I was in an impasse and had to go back a little way. I went back to motive.

“Now this is where we really do begin to warm up. Do you remember last night, Inspector, you asked me who had the biggest motive for wanting Meadows out of the way, and I replied, somewhat facetiously, that Mrs. Vane had? I began to play with that idea.”

“Mrs. Vane?” repeated Anthony incredulously. “But she was dead already.”

“When Meadows died, yes; but she had plenty of motive, I imagine, for wanting him out of the way before she died herself. Anyhow you see the idea. I was asking myself, with growing excitement: was there any way in which Mrs. Vane could have brought about Meadows’ death, although she herself was already dead? And the answer, of course, was obvious. Yes, there was!” Roger leaned back in his chair and beamed triumphantly at his audience.

“This is very clever, Mr. Sheringham,” said the inspector ungrudgingly. “Very clever indeed. Yes, I see now what you’re driving at, but let’s have it in your own words.”

“Well, as you probably discovered yourself, Meadows had had no visitors during the last few weeks, so far as the landlady knew. Any theory, then, which was to cover the insertion of poison in his tobacco must presuppose the murderer’s visit late at night and, probably, through the sitting-room window, with or without Meadows’ own knowledge. But on the night before the murder the landlady, although awake, heard no sounds at all, whereas she had heard a visitor’s voice, quite distinctly, some three weeks beforehand, that visitor being proved to be Mrs. Vane.”

“Wait a minute, sir,” said the inspector. “What’s all this about? I don’t know anything of a visit of Mrs. Vane’s.”

“Ah!” Roger grinned. “Well, I’m one up on you there at any rate. Look at this!” He drew the little handkerchief out of his pocket-book, tossed it over to the other and explained how it had come into his possession.

“Yes,” agreed the inspector with a rueful air. “Yes, you’re certainly one up on me there, Mr. Sheringham.”

“That’s good,” said Roger with undisguised satisfaction. “Well, to continue. Apart from the information about Mrs. Vane’s visit, two other facts emerged: one, that Meadows changed his pipes once a week, to which no significance appears to attach, the other, that he was a very small smoker—and that’s very important indeed. I found out from the village shop, you see, that he bought a quarter-of-a-pound at a time, but only smoked it at the rate of an ounce a week. As he evidently emptied the whole lot into that tobacco-jar in his room which you sent away to be analysed, that would mean that the bottom contents of the jar would remain in place for between three and four weeks. For anybody conversant with his habits, this knowledge might be very useful indeed.”

The inspector nodded slowly. “Very ingenious, sir; very ingenious.”