“Thank you,” Lady Sara said. “That is important evidence, but it would clinch the matter if someone saw him there. Would it be possible to find out whether anyone did?”
“It would be possible to try,” Fallowby said. “But unless he went to the theatre with another member, it’s chancy.”
Rick and I sat up late with Lady Sara discussing other approaches to the case that looked promising to us, but Lady Sara was like a horse player who continues to back a favourite even when it is dead last at the final turn. She held to her deduction that the murderer had to be a former tenant.
The next morning she invited Chief Inspector Mewer to see her, along with an official of the post office, and they had a long discussion about telegrams. As a result, the offices near Halstead’s home and office were to search their files — a tremendous task — for telegrams to or from Halstead.
The Chief Inspector was in a testy mood — he still hadn’t identified the murdered man. “Are you trying to pull another needle out of the haystack?” he demanded. “How many times do you expect that to succeed?”
Lady Sara ignored him. “One more thing,” she told the postal official. “Please arrange a search of records of Lake District offices for telegrams addressed to Halstead — probably at his office.”
Chief Inspector Mewer winced. However, a search of postal records was no problem of his, since his men wouldn’t be involved, so he said nothing. Lady Sara got her way as she usually did.
Edward Fallowby telegraphed about noon. He had been in touch with eight other members of the Two Hundred, and all were agreed that Halstead talked like a man who had just seen the play and had been genuinely disappointed by it. But no one had seen him at the theatre. Fallowby promised to continue his enquiries.
Stephen Lynes was a promising young artist and protégé of Lady Sara’s. He was the proprietor of a highly successful waxworks on Tottenham Court Road, which she had financed for him. When she needed an artist, he was always available.
She collected him immediately after lunch and took him and me off to the morgue. We were met there by Sir Thomas Tallmage, a distinguished London physician who had been Lady Sara’s suitor for more than twenty years.
“What is it you want?” Sir Thomas asked.
“Can you form any notion of what a dead man’s voice sounded like from examining his throat?” Lady Sara wanted to know.
Sir Thomas sat down in the nearest chair and stared at her. Then he laughed. “If anyone else had asked me that, I would have thought the question too silly to even consider. Since you are asking me, I suppose I’ll have to go through the motions and make some kind of guess.”
He did examine the murdered man and found nothing abnormal about his voice box. “He was neither soprano nor bass,” he opined. “Since he has a well-developed chest, I would call him a baritone. More than that I can’t say — except that if it’s a singing role you want him for, he is no longer available for auditions.”
Lady Sara thanked him and turned the corpse over to Stephen Lynes. His task was to make a careful drawing of the murdered man. “A lifelike drawing,” she said. “Too often photographs of a corpse show a person who is unmistakably dead. I want something that shows what the man looked like when he was alive.”
Lynes produced a remarkably lifelike drawing, and Lady Sara immediately asked for several copies. The first two she handed to me. I left at once. My assignment was to get to the Lake District as quickly as possible and assist Charles Tupper, who was already there. At Euston Station I caught a train to Birmingham, where an intersecting line ran directly north to Kendal and the Lake District.
The Lake District centres in the Cumbrian Mountains, and railways shun a mountainous region. In the vicinity of the Lake District, they follow the coast or turn inland to form a complete circle around it. A few branch lines point towards the interior but only for short distances. One of these terminates at Windermere, where Charles Tupper had set up his headquarters.
Charles was waiting for me with a hired trap when I arrived there early next morning, and the first thing I did was hand him Lynes’s drawing of the dead man.
“Oh good,” he said. “The telegrams are a washout. I think the dead man and Halstead communicated by mail — if they communicated at all and if the dead man did come from here. The written description of him fits a lot of people, so I was reduced to looking for someone from here, and that fits almost anyone.”
“The man we want will also be missing,” I pointed out.
“True, but he hasn’t been missing long enough to be missed. Also, we’re getting into fall, and many Lake District residents head for milder climates during the winter. ‘Lake District’ covers a lot of territory, as you may have noticed, and I’ve sampled only one small corner of it. What if he comes from the Keswick area on the other side of the mountains?”
“We have to start somewhere,” I said, “and, as you said, the drawing should help.”
“The drawing should be an immense help.”
Charles had a stocky build something like that of a bulldog, which he resembled in his tenacity. With the drawing we retraced the ground he had already covered. In Bowness he had found three promising leads, or at least three leads. The drawing eliminated all of them. In Windermere it was a similar story. We headed north, pursuing a thin scattering of leads through tiny communities.
At Ambleside, we called on the postmistress, a plump, cheerful, businesslike woman who made her cramped post office radiate hospitality. Charles presented Lynes’s drawing to her, and she exclaimed at once, “Why, that’s Sherwin Danson!”
It didn’t take her long to tell us everything she knew about him. He owned a cottage that he occupied from May through October. When cold weather came, he and his housekeeper usually left for Falmouth, but as far as she knew, they were still at the cottage. Danson rarely received any mail. Letters from London? Perhaps one or two in the course of a summer. She gave us careful instructions to finding his cottage.
After an exhausting climb back into the hills, we came upon a pretty cottage with a striking view of the long, gleaming Lake Windermere curving away to the south far below us.
The housekeeper, one Gwenda Owen, a tiny, middle-aged Welsh woman whose English was unexpectedly fluent, received us with puzzlement that changed to confusion when Charles handed her Lynes’s drawing of the dead man.
“Yes, yes, that’s Mr. Danson. Where did you get it?”
As gently as I could, I explained that the drawing was of a man who’d suffered a serious accident. She was needed in London at once to identify him. She had difficulty understanding why she was needed. “But surely he knows who he is,” she kept protesting. When finally she understood, she collapsed completely. That evening, we formed an oddly contrasted group in the Windermere Railway Station. Charles and I were feeling inappropriately exultant for having resolved an impossible problem, but Mrs. Owen was displaying enough grief for the three of us.
Early the next morning, Lady Sara met us at Euston with her carriage, and we were driven directly to the morgue, where Mrs. Owen had no difficulty making a tearful identification of the dead man as Sherwin Danson. Lady Sara sent a note to Chief Inspector Mewer, who was certain to be both pleased and irritated — pleased to have his work done for him and irritated to find that Lady Sara had stolen another march on him.
We took Mrs. Owen to a small, homey boarding house where Lady Sara thought she would be more comfortable than in a hotel. By the time we got her settled there, she had given us our whole case.