“But Miss Wingford had a maid who had been with her for thirty years and had always understood that she would be remembered in the will; she claimed that Miss Wingford had promised to leave her well provided for, and when she found that she wasn’t even mentioned, she flew into a passion. She told the nephew and the two nieces who had come down for the funeral that she was sure Miss Wingford had been poisoned, and she said that if they didn’t go to the police, she’d go herself. Well, they didn’t do that, but they went to see Dr. Brandon. He laughed. He said that Miss Wingford had had a weak heart and he’d been treating her for years. She died just as he had always expected her to die, peacefully in her sleep; and he advised them not to pay any attention to what the maid said. She had always hated the companion, a Miss Starling, and been jealous of her. Dr. Brandon was highly respected; he had been Miss Wingford’s doctor for a long time, and the two nieces, who’d stayed with her often, knew him well. He was not profiting by the will, and there seemed no reason to doubt his word, so the family thought there was nothing to do but go back to London.
“But the maid went on talking; she talked so much that at last the police, much against their will, I must admit, were obliged to take notice, and an order to exhume the body was made. There was an inquest, and it was found that Miss Wingford had died from an overdose of veronal. The coroner’s jury found that it had been administered by Miss Starling, and she was arrested. A detective was sent down from Scotland Yard, and he got together some unexpected evidence. It appeared that there’d been a good deal of gossip about Miss Starling and Dr. Brandon. They’d been seen a lot together in places in which there was no reason for them to be except that they wanted to be together, and the general impression in the village was that they were only waiting for Miss Wingford to die to get married. That put a very different complexion on the case. To make a long story short, the police got enough evidence in their opinion to justify them in arresting the doctor and charging him and Miss Starling with murder.”
The Judge took another sip.
“The case came up for trial before me. The case for the prosecution was that the accused were madly in love with one another and had done the poor old lady to death so that they could marry on the fortune Miss Starling had wheedled her employer into leaving her. Miss Wingford always had a cup of cocoa when she went to bed, which Miss Starling prepared for her; and the counsel for the prosecution claimed that it was in this that Miss Starling had dissolved the tablets that caused Miss Wingford’s death. The accused elected to give evidence on their own behalf, and they made a miserable showing in the witness box. They lied their heads off. Though witnesses testified they had seen them walking together at night with their arms round one another’s waists, though Brandon’s maid testified she had seen them kissing one another in the doctor’s house, they swore they were no more than friends. And oddly enough, medical evidence proved that Miss Starling was virgo intacta.
“Brandon admitted that he had given Miss Wingford a bottle of veronal tablets because she complained of sleeplessness, but declared he had warned her never to take more than one, and then only when absolutely necessary. The defense sought to prove that she had taken the tablets either by accident or because she wanted to commit suicide. That didn’t hold water for a moment. Miss Wingford was a jolly, normal old lady who thoroughly enjoyed life; and her death occurred two days before the expected arrival of an old friend for a week’s visit. She hadn’t complained to the maid of sleeping badly — in fact, her maid had always thought her a very good sleeper. It was impossible to believe that she had accidentally taken a sufficient number of tablets to kill herself. Personally, I had no doubt that it was a put-up job between the doctor and the companion. The motive was obvious and sufficient. I summed up and I hope summed up fairly; but it was my duty to put the facts before the jury, and to my mind the facts were damning. The jury filed out. I don’t suppose you know that when you are sitting on the bench, you somehow get the feeling of the court. You have to be on your guard against it, to be sure it doesn’t influence you. I never had it more strongly than on that day that there wasn’t a soul in court who wasn’t convinced that those two people had committed the crime with which they were charged. I hadn’t the shadow of a doubt that the jury would bring in a verdict of guilty. Juries are incalculable. They were out for three hours, and when they came back I knew at once that I was mistaken. In a murder case when a jury is going to bring in a verdict of guilty they won’t look at the prisoner; they look away. I noticed that three or four of the jurymen glanced at the two prisoners in the dock. They brought in a verdict of not guilty. The real names of Mr. and Mrs. Craig are Dr. and Mrs. Brandon.
“I’m just as certain as I am that I’m sitting here that they committed between them a cruel and heartless murder and richly deserved to be hanged.”
“What do you think made the jury find them not guilty?”
“I’ve asked myself that; and do you know the only explanation I can give? The fact that it was conclusively proved that they had never been lovers. And if you come to think of it, that’s one of the most curious features of the whole case. That woman was prepared to commit murder to get the man she loved, but she wasn’t prepared to have an illicit love affair with him.”
“Human nature is very odd, isn’t it?”
“Very,” said Landon, helping himself to another glass of brandy.
Rex Stout
The Cop Killer
The third of our unusually fine short detective novels... In this form the creator of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin has few peers among contemporary crime writers...
There were several reasons why I had no complaints as I walked along West Thirty-fifth Street that morning, approaching the stoop of Nero Wolfe’s old brownstone house. The day was sunny and sparkling, my new shoes felt fine after the two-mile walk, a complicated infringement case had been polished off for a big client, and I had just deposited a check in five figures to Wolfe’s account in the bank.
Five paces short of the stoop I became aware that two people, a man and a woman, were standing on the sidewalk across the street, staring either at the stoop or at me, or maybe both. That lifted me a notch higher, with the thought that while two rubbernecks might not put us in a class with the White House still it was nothing to sneeze at, until a second glance made me realize that I had seen them before. But where? Instead of turning up the steps I faced them, just as they stepped off the curb and started to me.
“Mr. Goodwin,” the woman said in a sort of gasping whisper that barely reached me.
She was fair-skinned and blue-eyed, young enough, kind of nice-looking and neat in a dark blue assembly-line coat. He was as dark as she was fair, not much bigger than her, with his nose slanting slightly to the left and a full wide mouth. My delay in recognizing him was because I had never seen him with a hat on before. He was the hat-and-coat-and-tie custodian at the barber shop I went to.
“Oh, it’s you, Carl—”
“Can we go in with you?” the woman asked in the same gasping whisper, and then I knew her too. She was also from the barber shop, a manicure. I had never hired her, since I do my own nails, but had seen her around and had heard her called Tina.