Miss Silver laid her knitting down in her lap and coughed again.
“That would be one explanation, Inspector, but it is not the only one.”
Crisp looked hard at her.
“Look here, Miss Silver, you were the last person to see Florence Duke or to have any conversation with her. Was she, or was she not, in a state of nervous depression?”
“I have already told you that she was.”
“She was nervous and depressed because she knew she had got to see her husband’s body and give evidence at the inquest?”
“She was frightened and nervous about the identification. I would remind you, Inspector, that I had particularly desired she should not be told until this morning that she would have to identify the body.”
Crisp frowned.
“I thought it best to let her know. Now, Miss Silver-are you prepared to state that there was nothing in Mrs. Duke’s conversation or behaviour to support the idea of suicide?”
Miss Silver looked at him in a candid manner and said,
“No.”
“Then I think I have a right to ask you what she did say.”
Miss Silver said gravely,
“She spoke of her married life. It was obviously very much on her mind. She spoke of there being things which she could not forget. When I warned her that she might be in danger and begged her to let Captain Taverner take her to a place of safety for the night-”
He interrupted forcibly.
“You did that?”
She inclined her head.
“I am thankful to be able to recall that I did. She would not listen to me. She said she did not care. She went so far as to say, ‘If someone was to bring me a good glass of poison this minute, I’d drink it.’ ”
Crisp brought his fist down with a bang on the table.
“That’s all I want, thank you, and that’s all the jury will want! Short of someone seeing her go over the cliff it’s all anyone could want!”
Miss Silver coughed.
“I wish to be perfectly fair, and I have told you what the poor woman said. But I did not believe at the time, nor do I believe now, that she had any serious intention of taking her own life. She was in the mood to wish herself dead as an alternative to the painful position in which she found herself, but I have to state that I do not believe she committed suicide. I believe that she was murdered.”
Crisp threw himself back in his chair.
“Come, come, Miss Silver, you can’t expect us to swallow that! On your own showing Mrs. Duke locked herself into her room last night. You left your own door open, and you say that you are a very light sleeper and that the slightest noise in the passage would have waked you, yet you heard nothing. Are you going to ask us to believe that someone got into Mrs. Duke’s room, overpowered her, got her downstairs, and threw her over the cliff, all without making any sound at all?”
“No, Inspector.”
He went on in a tone flavored with contempt.
“To start with, according to you she had her key in the door, so no other key could have been used from the outside. To go on with, she walked down that passage on her own feet. There was powder spilt there, and she had walked through it-her stockings were full of the stuff. Look here, it’s simple enough what she did. She knew you were watching her, and she meant to give you the slip. You say you went over to the bathroom to wash. Well, as soon as you’d gone she unlocked her door, locked it again on the outside in case you tried the handle, took her shoes in her hand, and went off along the passage and down the stairs in her stocking feet. That’s how she picked up the powder. Castell found the back door unlocked this morning, so that’s how she got out of the house. Then all she’d got to do was walk up the hill to the top of the cliff and throw herself over. And to cap it all, there’s the missing key in her pocket. It’s as plain as a pikestaff.”
Miss Silver coughed, but she had no time to do more, for at that moment the door opened and the Chief Constable came into the room.
CHAPTER 36
Half an hour later Randal March sat looking across the table with something very like exasperation dominating his thought. He now possessed all the information with which a zealous and efficient subordinate could supply him. The medical evidence was not to hand, but as Crisp had put it, “When a woman has broken her neck you can’t get from it. And if she hadn’t done it herself, it looks as if the law would have had to do it for her. A clear case of murder and suicide-and how anyone can make out anything else, well, it passes me.”
March was inclined to agree with him. But there sat Miss Maud Silver with that mild air of deferring to authority which, as he very well knew, could mask a quite incalculable degree of obstinacy. He had sent the estimable Crisp to take statements from other members of the party, and was now alone in the office with Frank Abbott propping the mantelshelf and Miss Silver who sat with her hands folded in her lap upon little Josephine’s completed dress. On his first entrance she had risen to go, but he had detained her. Crisp, undeterred by her presence, had expressed himself quite vigorously on the subject of amateur detectives and their theories, to all of which Miss Silver had listened with unruffled calm. She had not, as a matter of fact, advanced any theories of her own. She had actually hardly opened her lips, but she undoubtedly conveyed an impression of uncompromising disbelief in the theory advanced by Inspector Crisp. She sat there with folded hands and waited in very much the same way in which she had been used to wait when she was governess to the March family and Randal did not know his lesson. He was Chief Constable of the county now, and she was a little elderly person with no status at all, but the atmosphere of that schoolroom and its moral values persisted.
Randal March’s exasperation proceeded from the fact that he found himself influenced by them. Whatever his reason said, he could never quite rid himself of the old feeling of respect with which Miss Silver had managed to imbue a singularly disrespectful little boy of eight. There were reinforcements in the shape of all those subsequent times when Miss Silver had taken her own line in the face of other people’s theories and earned a good deal of credit, not for herself but for the police.
Frank Abbott, watching the two of them, was being a good deal diverted. His affection and admiration for his Miss Silver did not at all stand in the way of his considering her entertainment value to be high. He was perfectly well aware of what she was waiting for, and could spare a rather sardonic sympathy for Randal March. With all the evidence on one side and Maudie on the other, he was certainly in for a bad time.
It was really only a minute or two before March said,
“You know, Miss Silver, Crisp is perfectly right-no jury in the world is going to hesitate about its verdict.”
Miss Silver looked at him mildly.
“I have not said anything, Randal.”
He gave a half-angry laugh.
“Not in words perhaps, but the amount of solid disapproval with which you have been filling the room-”
“My dear Randal!”
He laughed again.