The Terriford Mystery/Chapter 15

ISS PRINCE got up very early on the morning Harry Garlett was to appear before the magistrates, to be either committed for trial, or sent out into the world a free man.

Though glad, in a sense, that her friend Agatha Cheale had been saved by illness from the painful ordeal of appearing against her late employer, she, Miss Prince, felt, from a selfish point of view, sorry. For it had been arranged, at Agatha Cheale's own request, that the older woman should accompany her to the police court, and Miss Prince had a special reason for wishing to know what exact evidence as to the arsenic, the administration of which had undoubtedly killed Mrs. Garlett, would be tendered to-day.

As things had now fallen out, she would have to possess her soul in patience till the afternoon.

It may be asked why Miss Prince did not follow the example of innumerable women belonging to the neighbourhood, that is, go off to Grendon and, after a more or less long wait, fight her way into the police court? Had she been thirty years younger she might have done so, but being the manner of woman she was, the thought of doing so unladylike and bold a thing never even occurred to her. And yet, during the whole of the wakeful night which preceded her early rising, her mind was entirely occupied with the form the evidence against Harry Garlett was likely to assume.

As is the case with most clever, malicious gossips, no woman could on occasion keep her own counsel more rigidly than could Miss Prince. No doubt this was owing, in a measure, to the fact that for more than half her life she had been the trusted confidante of her father. In no profession is there so high a standard of loyalty to another's personal secrets as in the medical profession, and what is true of the doctor is generally true also of the doctor's wife and daughter.

So it was that Miss Prince had kept rigidly to herself a dreadful suspicion which since the arrest of Harry Garlett had hardened into certainty.

Lucy Warren, hearing her mistress stirring, had hurried down to cook the breakfast, and Miss Prince, leaving her cold bedroom, felt a certain warmth about the heart as there floated up her tiny staircase a pleasant aroma of frizzling bacon.

Worried and unhappy as she felt, uncertain, too, as to where her duty lay—a most unusual feeling with her—she yet told herself that she was indeed fortunate in her good, quiet, sensible young servant. Even as a child Lucy Warren had been a favourite of hers, and the girl seemed so superior to her class, so reserved, so proud, that for a moment Miss Prince asked herself whether she would not do well to confide in Lucy, for she longed to share her anxiety and uncertainty with some other human being. But the thought was no sooner there than she dismissed it, aware that if the moment came when she felt she must share her secret, it was to a lawyer that a certain fact, known to her alone, must be admitted.

But one thing she did this morning marked both to herself and to Lucy Warren the unusual nature of the day. She ordered her breakfast, for the first time in her life, to be brought to her upstairs sitting room. Perhaps because it was upstairs, she very seldom used this room, except when she asked a few friends in to supper and a game of cards. From her point of view, though she would not have admitted it, the upstairs sitting room of the Thatched Cottage was a cardroom and nothing else.

She sat down, feeling deadly cold, for though the fire was burning brightly the room was chilly, as a room in which no fire has been lit for some days is apt to be. But it was not the cold which made Miss Prince feel so shivery, and so miserably undecided in her mind. For the first time in her now long life she was confronted with a problem to which she could see no solution that would not bring disaster, even death, in its train.

Lucy Warren came up with her mistress's breakfast tray. She drew up a small table and set it before her in silence, making no remark, as almost any other young woman would have done, as to Miss Prince's surprising choice of a breakfast room, and she was just leaving the room when her mistress called out: “Lucy!”

Lucy turned round. “Yes, ma'am?” she said inquiringly.

Always Miss Prince insisted on being accorded brevet rank both by her own servants and the people of the village. She hated the term “Miss.”

“Come nearer, Lucy. I want to speak to you.”

And then, somewhat to Miss Prince's astonishment, she saw that her words startled the girl. Lucy became painfully red, as she stood before her mistress twisting and untwisting a bit of apron in her hand, and looking very unlike her usual composed self.

“I want you to cast your mind back to last April and May—I mean, of course, when your friend Agnes Dean was my servant. You used to be in and out of my kitchen a good deal, I think.”

Lucy answered freely, eagerly: “Yes, ma'am, I used to come along most days.”

“Now I want to ask you a very serious question, Lucy, and I rely on you to keep the fact that I have asked it of you to yourself. Did she tell you, or were you aware of your own knowledge, that Mr. Garlett was ever in this house at a time when I was out of it?”

“Not that I know of, ma'am. The only person who used sometimes to come and wait for you while you was out was Miss Cheale.”

“Of course, I know that,” Miss Prince spoke with a touch of impatience. “What I want you to try to remember is whether Mr. Garlett was ever in this house alone for, say, a quarter of an hour? Especially, Lucy,” she hesitated, then asked the question firmly, “whether he was ever in this upper part of the house by himself? As you know, he is my landlord. On him depend all the outside repairs. It is possible, nay, even probable, he may have come upstairs once or twice on such business as that.”

“Mr. Garlett never bothered about that sort of thing himself, ma'am. He always sent the builder along. A nice fat lot of money Blackman has made out of that poor gentleman in the last ten years! Mr. Garlett never bothered, and Mrs. Garlett was too ill to bother.”

Miss Prince looked fixedly at the girl.

“Then you are not one of those,” she observed in a rather cold tone, “who believe that Mr. Garlett poisoned Mrs. Garlett?”

Lucy hesitated, and then she made a reply that surprised Miss Prince.

“I don't care one way or the other,” she said sullenly. “Though it doesn't seem to me that Mr. Garlett had any reason to do such a wicked thing. It wasn't as if he'd known Miss Bower then—leastways he did know her, but he didn't like her. I know that!”

“You know that, Lucy?”

“I do, ma'am. I heard Mr. Garlett say one day, when I was waiting at table, that he wished Mrs. Maclean hadn't gone and asked him to take her niece on at the factory. He said it would be difficult to reprimand her—that was the word he used—if she did anything that he or old Mr. Dodson didn't like. He said it was a mistake to mix up friendship and business.”

“Whom did he say that to?” asked Miss Prince eagerly. Here she was on her old familiar ground of gossip.

“He said it to the lawyer, Mr. Toogood,” answered Lucy.

“Was that just before his wife's death?”

“Well, 'twas perhaps a fortnight before she died. I can't say exactly. Miss Cheale had already gone upstairs, and Mr. Garlett had rung for more port wine, and it was as I came into the dining room that I heard him say that.”

“Dear me, that's very interesting.”

“You won't let on I've told you that, ma'am?” asked Lucy earnestly. “Mother's fearful lest I be mixed up in it all. She was once called to an inquest and never forgot it. It made her ill for months afterward, that it did—she was so terrified. Those lawyers 'ud get anything out of you. They make you say black's white—and white's black.”

“I don't think there's the slightest reason to fear that you will be called as a witness,” said Miss Prince coldly, “and in any case, if you were called, it would be your duty to attend, Lucy. Surely you would think it a duty to speak up and tell the truth?”

And then Lucy, emboldened by Miss Prince's benignant mood, ventured a question.

“Will you be a witness, ma'am?”

“I? Certainly not! Why should I be?” Miss Prince looked disturbed—she even flushed a little. “Miss Cheale will be a witness for the Prosecution, for she was with poor Mrs. Garlett when she died.”

And then Lucy said in a singular tone:

“Miss Cheal will be sorry if Mr. Garlett is hanged. She was such a friend of his.”

“Not only a friend,” said Miss Prince quickly, “but a relation, too. Miss Cheale is a distant cousin of Mr. Garlett's. I've always supposed that that was why Mrs. Garlett left her that legacy.”

Lucy turned away, and perhaps it was as well that Miss Prince did not see the look that came over her face.

“Lucy? One word more. Has your mother heard from Mr. Guy Cheale lately? Does she know where he is, and what he's doing?”

Lucy did not turn round, as a properly trained servant ought to have done.

“Mother heard from Mr. Cheale? Not that I know of. Why should she?”

Then she slipped out of the room and went down the stairs at such a pace that her mistress concluded she must have heard some one knocking at the back door.

Miss Prince began eating her now cold egg and bacon. She felt sick and shivery, yet she forced herself to eat, and after a while the food and her good China tea made her feel a little better. But even so she was in a miserable state of uncertainty.

With all her odious peculiarities she had a strict, if a narrow, sense of duty, and she could not make up her mind as to what she ought to do with regard to a sinister fact known to herself alone.

Miss Prince, for her misfortune, knew of a place in Terriford where arsenic could be found. And deep in her heart she was quite certain it was from that store or cache of arsenic that had been stolen the dose of poison which had killed Emily Garlett.

That store or cache of arsenic was here, in her own house, close by where she was now considering the difficult problem of what it was her duty to do.

Sitting there, in front of the now bright fire, she could visualize with horrid clearness the fat glass-stoppered bottle with the red label on which was printed in black letters the word “Arsenic.”

The bottle—which contained a sufficient quantity of the deadly poison to have killed every one in the village—stood on the top shelf of her drug cupboard, in a tiny room next door, known all over the village as “Miss Prince's medicine room.”

As residuary legatee to her father, everything that had belonged to him at his death had passed into her possession, and she had chosen to take with her to her new home the drugs that had been in his dispensary.

In a country medical practice every little counts. Thanks to Miss Prince, the poorer folk in Terriford had hardly ever had occasion to consult Dr. Maclean. He had spoken to her of the matter only once—years ago—soon after his arrival. She had said what had been far more true then than it was to-day—that the working folk were so miserably poor that it would be sheer cruelty to ask them to send for the doctor for every trifling ailment. Further, she had asserted that often she relieved him of work for which he could never expect any payment, and Dr. Maclean had admitted, somewhat reluctantly, the force of the argument.

But while the knowledge of that stoppered bottle on the top shelf of the drug cupboard which she generally, but not invariably, kept locked, made her feel acutely anxious, she tried to persuade herself that it could not be her duty to force herself into this, to her, horrible affair. Not only was the thought of appearing in the witness-box at a great trial terrible to one with Miss Prince's old-fashioned feminine outlook on life, but she was well aware that she would certainly be severely censured, by both counsel and judge in the case, for keeping such poisons as arsenic and strychnine in her house.

She faced the grim certainty that she, and she alone, could supply the missing link in the chain of circumstantial evidence now tightening around Harry Garlett. But would that link be missed? Never having liked him, and having now no doubt as to his guilt, she equally had no doubt as to his fate. Was it essential that she, his wife's oldest friend, should hound him to his death?

She asked herself with a sharp feeling of self-rebuke why she had been such a fool as to keep a poison which she never had any reason to use? But there it was, she had kept it.

Getting up at last, she took off a small bookshelf “The Student's Handbook of Forensic Medicine and Public Health,” and turning to the entry “Metallic Irritants,” she quickly made herself mistress of what information was there.

She learned that white arsenic—that is the type of arsenic in her possession—was not only colourless and odourless, but almost devoid of taste, thus very easily administered in powdered sugar, and even she, with her wide knowledge of drugs, received a certain shock when she discovered that a pinch of arsenic holds no less than seventeen grains, two grains being a fatal dose.

Now Miss Prince, in common with almost every one in the neighbourhood, had severely blamed Dr. Maclean for his lack of suspicion, but, as she read the little black volume by which her father had set such store, she realized that the old doctor had not been so much to blame after all. For, whereas in many cases the symptoms of arsenical poisoning point to an irritant administered, all sorts of anomalies may and do occur. In fact the symptoms are frequently so misleading that death due to the action of arsenic has even been described as spontaneous internal inflammation!

Miss Prince put her book back on its shelf and went out on the landing. She listened intently for a few moments, and then, turning the handle of the door giving into her medicine room, she went through into the tiny bare chamber.

After having shut the door softly, she gazed at the substantial wooden cupboard in which she kept the drugs which were a survival of the days when she had been her father's faithful assistant and dispenser.

The cupboard was locked now. But it had been often left open till a few days ago—owing to the trifling fact that something had gone wrong with the lock, and that it had become just a little tiresome to turn the key.

If only walls could speak! Miss Prince, gazing up at the grained wood, would have given years of her life to know if Harry Garlett had ever stood where she was standing now—but with the cupboard doors wide open before him.

At last, with an impatient movement, she took a step forward, and stood by the narrow window of her medicine room, and then, suddenly, she shrank back, and a deep frown gathered on her face.

Trudging quickly along in the wintry sunshine was James Kentworthy, the man who had, to use her own expression, bamboozled her. It was easy now to marvel at her stupidity in supposing for a moment that such an individual could have been connected, even very distantly, with her poor friend, Emily Garlett. But she had believed him, absolutely, and on the strength of it had asked him in to tea. Well she remembered the quiet, skilful way in which he had examined and cross-examined her concerning the inmates of the Thatched House.

James Kentworthy was on his way to Bonnie Doon, for it had been arranged that he and the doctor should drive together to Grendon in order to be present at the final inquiry before the magistrates.

The private inquiry agent felt, if possible, even more baffled than he had been at the end of his conversation with Jean Bower. He had learned everything there was to learn, or so he felt convinced, concerning the only people who had had access to Mrs. Garlett, and more and more it had become clear to him that the only human being with a paramount interest in her death was her husband, Harry Garlett. Twenty years of hard work in the Criminal Investigation Department had proved to him that where there is no motive there is no murder, and if this be true of an ordinary, sordid crime, how much more true when a secret poisoner is in question!

But Kentworthy was also aware of a fact which is often forgotten by those interested in murder mysteries—namely, that a motive which may seem utterly inadequate to one type of mind, to another may be overwhelmingly sufficient for almost any crime.

Again and again he had asked himself, in the last few days, what manner of woman was Agatha Cheale? Next to Harry Garlett she was the only human being who had benefited by Mrs. Garlett's death. On the other hand, the young lady had been in the enjoyment of a very exceptional salary. For her apparently simple and easy services she had been paid at the rate of three hundred pounds a year. Further, Mr. Toogood had assured him that Mrs. Garlett, secretive as are so many people concerning their money affairs, had not even made the husband whom she dearly loved acquainted with the terms of her will.

All those men whose professions, be they lawyers, doctors, ministers of the gospel, whose way of life brings them closely in touch with human nature, soon become aware of how difficult it is to form any accurate view concerning the secret relations of a man and a woman. Mr. Kentworthy had come to the reluctant conclusion that long before his wife's death Garlett had lived a double life. He was convinced of the truth of Lucy Warren's statement as to the meetings in the wood, and the more convinced because the girl had made it unwillingly, indeed had been frightened into making it. Twice he had tried in the last three days to get in touch with her again, each time choosing a moment when Miss Prince was out. But Lucy Warren had defied him, and the second time he had seen her she had said with a shrewdness that surprised him:

“I am not bound to tell you anything now. It was different when you came from the police.”

Kentworthy was convinced that she had told the truth, and so he accepted it as a fact that Garlett had been in the habit of meeting a woman secretly at night. Further, he believed that the anonymous letters had been written by that unknown woman, and he hoped that her association with Garlett—of whatever nature it might prove to be—would provide a sufficiently strong motive for her to have committed secret murder.

With his mind full of these vague and uncertain half-suspicions, the detective came within sight of Bonnie Doon, and then he hastened his steps, for the doctor's motor was already before the door waiting to start for the police court in Grendon where Harry Garlett's fate was to be decided to-day so far as it was within the power of the local magistrates to decide it.