Moonlight and imagination!
Then the front door did open quietly: but it was Inspector Hazlerigg who stepped out.
Chapter Sixteen —Later— The Bill of Costs Is Presented
“E. and O.E.”
I
The Crown, on the advice of its Law Officers, preferred only one charge against Miss Cornel; the murder of Marcus Smallbone. To this charge, despite the strongest persuasion of her advisers, Miss Cornel pleaded guilty. After a formal hearing, therefore, Mr. Justice Arbuthnot pronounced the sentence of death. It was then represented to the Home Secretary that although the available evidence as to the prisoner’s state of mind—her fanatical attachment to her late employer and the lack of any motive of personal gain in her crime—were not sufficient to support a plea of unbalance of mind, they might properly be considered in relation to the Crown’s prerogative of mercy. The Home Secretary, after due consideration, commuted the sentence to one of penal servitude for life.
On the day that he announced his decision, three conversations of interest took place.
II
“Did you ever think that Sergeant Cockerill might have done those murders?” asked Bohun.
“Originally, he was fairly high up on my list,” admitted Inspector Hazlerigg. “Why?”
“It’s academic now, of course. But he had a motive—much the same sort of motive as Miss Cornel had, actually. You knew he used to be Abel’s batman.”
“Yes. We’d dug down as far as that.”
“Did you know he was left-handed?”
“I most certainly did not,” said Hazlerigg, considerably startled. “Are you sure?”
“Perhaps left-handed is rather a strong way of putting it. I mean that he’s a man who does a two-handed job by holding the object in his right hand and making the movements with his left. A right-handed man usually does it the other way about.”
“When did you notice this?”
“I noticed it,” said Bohun, “when he came into my room on the Tuesday or the Wednesday—it was almost my first day in the office—and started mending a chair for me.”
“I see.”
“Then again, he had plenty of very good opportunities.”
“Quite so. Might I ask when you decided that he was not a murderer?”
“When I heard him sing,” said Bohun. “The fellow’s an artist. No one who sings Bach like that could kill a man with a piece of picture-wire. That’s a commercial, utilitarian way of killing. An artist would have too much respect for the beauty of the human neck. He might shoot a man in a fine frenzy, or stab him with a stiletto, or—you’re laughing at me.”
“Don’t stop,” said Hazlerigg. “It’s a pleasure to listen to you. You know, you’d get on famously with our modern school. Pickup is always lecturing me on their theories. They think that all detection should be a combination of analysis and hypnosis.”
“It’s all very well for you to laugh,” said Bohun crossly, “but if you think it’s nonsense, what were you doing at that concert? I saw you.”
“If you really want to know,” said Hazlerigg, “I was doing something which might have been done a good deal sooner. I was finding out how Sergeant Cockerill spent his Saturday mornings.”
“How he spent—”
“Yes. Did it never seem to you to be rather an odd arrangement that he should appear at the office for a few minutes at half-past nine or ten, then disappear for two or three hours, and turn up again at twelve-thirty. How did you suppose he spent the middle of the morning?”
“I don’t think I ever really gave it a thought,” said Bohun. “But I can see you’re longing to tell me. What did he do?”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” said Hazlerigg, “he used to rehearse. But I found there was a little more to it than that. One of his neighbours, who was also in the choir, used to give him a lift in his car, and wait for him afterwards and take him home. A Colonel Lincoln. A very respectable man and an unimpeachable witness. He used to park his car in New Square whilst Cockerill locked up. He says Cockerill never kept him waiting more than two minutes.”
“That sounds pretty conclusive,” agreed Bohun.
“I was fairly certain, even before that,” said Hazlerigg. “That was only corroboration. As I frequently said, the sheet anchor of my faith all along was the conviction that the same person must have done both killings. Now I agree that on the face of it Cockerill could quite easily have killed Smallbone. But he could never have killed Miss Chittering.”
“Well, do you know, it just occurred to me to wonder,” said Bohun. “It’s true that Mason, the porter, was with him when he was approaching the building—”
“I know what you’re going to say. It occurred to me, too. You thought that Cockerill might have gone inside and quietly noosed Miss Chittering during the time that Mason was fooling around with that pigeon. I timed it the next night. He would have had about four minutes. I suppose it was barely possible—feasible, I mean, in a detective story sense. But apart from the improbability of it, there was one factor which I think ruled it out of court. I went along with Mason the next night to check up and he was quite emphatic about it. All the office lights were out. There’s a fanlight over the secretaries’ room and you can see at once if that light’s on. According to Mason it wasn’t. The reason for that’s plain enough, of course. When Miss Cornel had finished with Miss Chittering she turned the lights out and pulled the door shut—she didn’t want the body to be discovered at once. It would have made everybody’s alibis far more confusing, in fact, if the discovery could have been delayed until the next morning.”
“Yes. By the way, how did she get back into the building without being seen by anybody?”
“I don’t suppose she ever left the building. She probably sat, in the dark, on the next flight of stairs and waited till the coast was clear.”
“What a ruthless woman,” said Bohun. “And, incidentally, what a nerve.”
“A strong left wrist isn’t the only thing you develop in a Women’s Golf Championship,” said Hazlerigg.
III
“Darling,” said Anne Mildmay. “You remember that awful night.”
“Which awful night?” said Bob, looking up from what he was doing. “Oh, at Sevenoaks—yes.”
“Do you think I was drugged?”
“I don’t know,” said Bob. “You had a very advanced hangover the next morning.”
“But what would have been the point of it?”
“If you ask me,” said Bob, “it wasn’t drugs at all. It was two glasses of neat whisky coupled with the excitement.”
“And what was I supposed to be excited about?” demanded Anne coldly.
“The prospect of marrying a farmer,” said Bob.
Silence fell again on the little room, with its French window which opened on to an uncut lawn running down to a quiet river under a silver September sky.
“The joke of it is,” said Bob, “that I took up farming to get away from office work.” He wiped the ink off his finger on to one of the tassels of the tablecloth.
“Never mind,” said Anne. “Get on and finish that ‘Milk Marketing—Cows in Calf—Feeding Stuffs—1950–51—Estimated quantities’, and I’ll take it down to the post after tea.”
IV
That same afternoon, Bohun, back in the office, was drinking his tea (as a partner he now had it brought to him in a cup with a saucer) and watching Mr. Craine. No one, he reflected, would have thought that the cheerful little man had just completed a very trying six months. His reserves of vitality were amazing. He had paid off the Husbandmen and dealt firmly with their scruples about suppressing the details of Abel’s most irregular mortgage. He had used the balance of Bohun’s money judiciously to strengthen the finances of the firm. He had taken on three new assistants, and had snapped up the services of John Cove, now inexplicably qualified. He had undertaken the whole cost and the endless work involved in Miss Cornel’s defence. He had smoothed down the susceptibilities of innumerable clients. He had engaged a new, even more ravishing and, at the moment, inexperienced secretary. She was learning quickly.