Then, my shocked mind beginning to work overtime, I returned to wondering whether Evans was the murderer and, if so, whether perhaps he was deliberately re-imposing his fingerprints on the poker, holding me as witness that his prints were innocent ones.
‘Two can play at that game,’ I thought confusedly. You will understand, Dame Beatrice, that I was not myself at the time, or I would never have given way to such morbid imaginings. I spoke to him. ‘Damn cold in here,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we have the fire on?’ I stooped and pressed the switch. ‘Now I have some explicable fingerprints,’ I thought.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Ought to have thought of it for myself.’
‘And so have put your seemingly innocent dabs on to something else you may have touched when you were here before,’ I thought; and such was my disordered state that I only just stopped myself saying it aloud.
I suppose we must have sat there for the best part of an hour before anybody turned up. I don’t know what Evans’s thoughts were, but I know now that we were both adding two and two together and totalling them into a conclusion that the other fellow was a murderer. Looking back, I can see that if my mind had not been temporarily disturbed I would never have dreamed of suspecting Evans, but under the influence of shock one seldom thinks clearly.
The first person to turn up was the local doctor. He was accompanied by Targe. Evans and I went together to the front door – Evans first putting down the poker – to let them in, but Targe did not cross the threshold.
‘So where is the body?’ asked the doctor, coming in in a business-like way. ‘Are you sure it is defunct?’
‘Yes, nobody, not even you, can do her any good,’ replied Evans in a phrase I suppose he had used to dramatic effect in one of his books. We took the doctor into the bedroom. He looked at the body on the bed.
‘Well, well! What’s all this?’ he said. ‘All right, you two need not stay. I can manage.’
‘We are witnesses,’ said Evans, ‘to a very nasty business. We leave nobody alone here until the police arrive.’
The doctor shrugged his shoulders, took off his overcoat, turned up his cuffs and began, I suppose, a preliminary examination of the body. He had finished and was washing his hands in the bathroom (to which Evans and I had followed him, although I saw no point whatever in doing so, but Evans had caught my sleeve and steered me along) when the police turned up.
They sent us over to the house and then I suppose they went through the usual routine of photographs, fingerprints, agreement or otherwise between the doctor Targe had summoned and the police surgeon, and then, of course, they came over to the house and began the inevitable questioning of myself and the others. As Miss Minnie’s landlord and one of the three who had found the body, I was interrogated first.
How long had I owned Weston Pipers?
For about two years and a half.
How long had the deceased been a tenant?
Ever since the alterations to the mansion had been completed.
How long ago was that?
Last May twelvemonth.
Why had the deceased rented the bungalow instead of taking an apartment in the house?
She was a recluse.
Could she have had an apartment instead of the bungalow if she had asked for one?
Yes, she could have had the choice of two, but she opted for the bungalow and would not consider anything else. My – I boggled a bit here, not knowing quite how to describe Niobe’s position in my scheme of things – my housekeeper, who had been responsible for all the lettings while I was in Paris, would confirm.
Had I any previous acquaintance with the deceased before she rented the bungalow?
I certainly had not.
How did the deceased get on with the other tenants?
So far as I knew, she had had nothing to do with them at all.
Thank you, sir, that would be all for the moment. Would I ask my housekeeper to spare them a few minutes? Oh, by the way, sir, they noticed that I had fitted anti-burglar devices to my downstair windows. Had I had any particular reason for doing that?
No, it had been a precautionary measure, that was all.
Yet the same precautions, they had noticed, had not been extended to the bungalow.
No, they had not.
Why not, sir? Surely it was more necessary for the bungalow of an old lady living alone to be so protected, rather than a house which (they consulted a list) contained five able-bodied men?
Well, we – that is, my housekeeper – suspected that Miss Minnie herself broke into the house at night, so there was no point in fortifying the bungalow.
Why would Miss Minnie break in?
She seemed to have some idea that there was a will somewhere in the house which made her Mrs Dupont-Jacobson’s heir and not myself.
Would I explain that, please.
So, of course, Dame Beatrice, I gave them the low-down on the whole business of how I had come by my inheritance and they made plenty out of it. It turned out that they had made enquiries and that the lawyers knew of no other will except the one which named me as the heir, but there was no doubt that Miss Minnie had been distantly related to my benefactress and the police did their best to make me admit that I had known this. I side-stepped them – quite truthfully – so then they began asking about the discovery of the body.
Why had I thought it necessary to have two witnesses with me when I broke into the bungalow?
Because I did not know whether Miss Minnie was ill or whether she was dead.
Why should I suppose she might be dead?
I didn’t really suppose it.
So if I thought she might have been taken ill, wouldn’t it have been more natural to have taken a woman – my housekeeper, for example – with me, rather than two men?
I discovered that we should have to break a window and climb in and men are better at that sort of thing than women.
Was there no spare key to the bungalow?
I had no idea. The tenants were supplied with keys to their rooms, although no longer to the front door to the house. We assumed there was always somebody about to let people in and my housekeeper was nervous about front door keys which might get lost, so we had collected them and locked them away. At this they returned to my breaking the window.
Had I no key to the bungalow?
Not that I knew of.
Miss Nutley was almost sure she had given me a spare key.
Well, of course, Dame Beatrice, all that was only the beginning of it. All the others were interrogated, but, according to the accounts they gave me of the interviews (at a mass meeting which Targe, who ghoulishly appeared to be in his element at the prospect of being mixed up in one of the real-life crimes which furnished him with the material for his books, insisted upon calling and which took place in my sitting-room), nobody could tell the police anything of importance.
We were all on tenterhooks for the next few days. An inquest was held and a verdict brought in of murder by person or persons unknown. Miss Minnie (identified by a smooth-faced, soft-voiced gentleman who announced himself as the proprietor of the quasi-religious journal of which Miss Minnie was editor) was buried at the journal’s expense against the ultimate winding-up of her estate, floral tributes were sent by everybody in the house and, as the police made no reappearance at Weston Pipers for just over a fortnight, the reporters gave up pestering us and we went on much as usual.
If this seems a heartless and ill-conceived proceeding under the circumstances, it must be remembered that none of us had ever really known Miss Minnie and that, in any case, she had dissociated herself entirely from any of our activities. Soon, however, we were in the thick of the police enquiry once more.
It came as a surprise to all of us, I think. It certainly came as a shock to me. I suppose when all one asks for is a quiet life with no major upheavals, one is easily lured (as they say) into a false sense of security, so when Mrs Smith, who had been ‘doing the hall’ when they knocked, came to my sitting-room to tell me of their arrival, I felt the sense of panic I used to experience at school when an interview with the headmaster was pending.