Twenty-Three: A DEMON AT BAY
All secrecy was now abandoned and I followed Pons’ racing torch across the frozen ground. He was keeping up a tremendous pace despite the difficult terrain and I temporarily lost him through the encroaching mist until we were skirting the ancient graveyard where such terrible events had begun. By the time I had caught up with him, he was ringing the bell at the front door of Yeoman’s. The flustered housekeeper, in night clothes, eventually opened the door.
“Quickly, woman!” Pons said grimly. “I must see your mistress at once!”
“But she is in bed, sir.”
“I think not,” said Pons, brushing peremptorily past her. “Tell her to come down here or we will have to go up.”
“There is really no need, gentlemen,” said the calm voice of Sarita Peters.
She had opened the drawing room door to let a crack of light across the shadowy hall. She wore a dark dress and her face was white and strained, but she was in complete control of herself.
“Do come in, though I have no idea why you should make this brutal intrusion into a widow’s grief.”
Pons smiled sardonically as we followed her into the big room I recalled from our previous visit. I just had time to see that the lady’s damp overcoat and a dark scarf of the same material were lying across the arm of a chair and that the polished leather boots she wore bore traces of damp.
“You have been out, I see,” said Pons, sitting down at her abrupt gesture which included both of us.
She bit her lip.
“I went for a short walk. I could not sleep under these terrible circumstances.”
“I think not,” Pons continued.
He had noticed a metal instrument shaped like a trowel which was protruding from one of Mrs Peters’ overcoat pockets.
“A little night gardening, perhaps? Or were you intending to continue the masquerade of The Devils’ Claw?”
Sarita Peters whirled like a tigress and went to stand by the fireplace with quick, jerky movements. She looked like a cornered beast as she glared back at my companion. The elaborate combs of her high-piled coiffure glinted in the light of the lamps, echoing the fiery glitter of her eyes. I have seldom seen such a magnificent or menacing sight as this superb woman brought to bay but fighting back with all her strength, I had little inkling of Pons’ allegations and suspicions or how he had arrived at them, but I gazed open-mouthed at the titanic battle that was commencing to rage between these two well-matched opponents.
“I do not know what you mean, Mr Pons. And I must ask you and Dr Parker to leave my house.”
“It is not your house, Mrs Peters,” said Pons calmly, lighting his pipe and puffing contentedly as he surveyed his opponent over the glowing bowl.
“Smoke by all means,” Sarita Peters said sarcastically. “You have my permission.”
Pons inclined his head ironically.
“I repeat that this is not your house, Mrs Peters. And it never will be now that Mr Mulvane has Simon Hardcastle’s original will.”
I knew this to be incorrect but was staggered to see the effect it had on this cornered woman. Her eyes narrowed to pinpoints and she clawed at the air with her disengaged hand while she used the other to grip the mantelpiece until her knuckles showed white.
“I presume you have the document you induced the wretched Hardcastle to sign, turning over all his estate and possessions to you and your late husband. But it will be of no use to you with at least one murder to your credit and being an accessory to another. It is a great pity that your lover, Vincent Tidmarsh, is dead, or he would have been able to corroborate most of my suppositions.”
“So!”
She drew in her breath with a venomous hiss and looked at me with madness in her eyes.
“So you shot him, Dr Parker?”
I shook my head.
“No, Mrs Peters. I fired in the air to frighten. He fell to his death over the low battlements.”
Her figure seemed to crumple and I thought she was going to fall into the red embers of the fire and Pons went forward to her assistance but she threw him off roughly and sat down on the arm of an easy chair. Pons walked back toward me and surveyed her impassively, puffing blue streams of smoke from his pipe toward the ceiling.
“You are within a hair’s-breadth of a hempen rope, Mrs Peters, so I advise you to be more co-operative. Things will go better for you if you do so.”
She shot him another look of hatred.
“Never! I will deny everything. You have no proof…”
“But the circumstances are overwhelming. Let me just put some of the facts to you. Suppose, for a moment, that a fiery and beautiful woman was tired of her husband and of living on another man’s estate. Her husband, Andrew Peters, though outwardly a fine organiser and efficient manager of old Simon Hardcastle’s affairs, was deeply in debt to bookmakers, owing to his addiction to gambling on the turf.
“His wife was the prime mover in hatching a scheme to get the old man in her clutches. With her husband’s collusion she convinced Simon Hardcastle that she was in love with him. But to avoid scandal they used the old family vault for their assignations, a place where nobody had been for years. She and her husband revived an ancient local legend of The Devil’s Claw. A tramp died in the woods of natural causes and Peters used an obsolete nineteenth-century gardening tool to make strange indentations in the ground round the body. I know this is so because I purchased an identical tool at an ironmonger’s in Chalcroft, from their old stock in the cellar, and I have no doubt that Peters found it entirely suitable for your purpose.”
The woman sat dumbly, looking at Pons with smouldering eyes.
“He used an old folk tune which was whistled when the wife had assignations in the graveyard. If there was danger the gate was opened, making a screaming noise. After the murder the husband smashed the padlock to make it look as though it were the work of strangers. The wife used the term Angel, when writing letters regarding their assignations, unsigned we must assume. This was in order to keep up the pretence that the husband knew nothing of the liaison.
“Now we come to the night of the murder. They had an oil stove for warmth, as the vault was perfectly dry, and I caught the particular odour of paraffin and hot metal when I inspected the scene. It was overlaid by the faint traces of a woman’s perfume. The one you are wearing now, Mrs Peters. In addition Mr Mulvane had seen both stove and camp bed before he was struck down. You used the camp bed for your lovemaking, and I saw the four sets of scratches the metal legs had made — many of them — through repeated use. Then you both undressed and made love by the light of an oil lantern.”
“Good heavens, Pons!” I could not help exclaiming. “How disgraceful!”
Pons held up a finger, an ironic smile on his lips. He turned back to the crushed figure of Sarita Peters, and continued his discourse in the same calm, even tones.
“That night you had finally got him to sign the estate over to you. This is pure surmise, I agree, but it fits all the indications and will no doubt be confirmed when you come to trial. Old Hardcastle had outlived his usefulness. As you were preparing to dress, you killed him, Mrs Peters, in a most cold-blooded and diabolical manner!”
“It is a lie!”
“I think not,” Pons said.
He was at her side in an instant and to my astonishment plucked at the luxuriant mass of her hair. Something glinted in the lamplight as she tried to claw him away. Pons had a smile of triumph on his face as he turned back to me, so that I could see the long, thin steel blade, which had something like a brightly coloured bead at the end.
“A hatpin, Pons!”
“Hardly, Parker. But something of the sort. A very special one, no longer found in Europe. Six inches long, as you can see, once common in South America, I believe, to hold the thick coils of Latin ladies’ hair or to keep a mantilla in place. The hair was pulled back into a bun and the pin used to secure it, as in the case of Mrs Peters.”