Three-Act Tragedy Read online

  ‘Look at it this way: Babbington’s murdered—yes, murdered—I’m not going to hedge, or mince terms—murdered one evening in my house. Tollie ridicules me gently for my suspicions in the matter, but all the time he’s got suspicions of his own. He doesn’t talk about them—that’s not his way. But quietly, in his own mind, he’s building up a case. I don’t know what he had to build upon. It can’t, I think, be a case against any one particular person. He believed that one of those people was responsible for the crime, and he made a plan, a test of some kind to find out which person it was.’

  ‘What about the other guests, the Edens and the Campbells?’

  ‘Camouflage. It made the whole thing less obvious.’

  ‘What do you think the plan was?’

  ‘Sir Charles shrugged his shoulders—an exaggerated foreign gesture. He was Aristide Duval, that master mind of the Secret Service. His left foot limped as he walked.

  ‘How can we know? I am not a magician. I cannot guess. But there was a plan…It went wrong, because the murderer was just one degree cleverer than Tollie thought…He struck first…’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Or she. Poison is as much a woman’s weapon as a man’s—more so.’

  Mr Satterthwaite was silent. Sir Charles said:

  ‘Come now, don’t you agree? Or are you on the side of public opinion? “The butler’s the man. He done it.”’

  ‘What’s your explanation of the butler?’

  ‘I haven’t thought about him. In my view he doesn’t matter…I could suggest an explanation.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, say that the police are right so far—Ellis is a professional criminal, working in, shall we say, with a gang of burglars. Ellis obtains this post with false credentials. Then Tollie is murdered. What is Ellis’s position? A man is killed, and in the house is a man whose fingerprints are at Scotland Yard, and who is known to the police. Naturally he gets the wind up and bolts.’

  ‘By the secret passage?’

  ‘Secret passage be damned. He dodged out of the house while one of the fat-headed constables who were watching the house was taking forty winks.’

  ‘It certainly seems more probable.’

  ‘Well, Satterthwaite, what’s your view?’

  ‘Mine?’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘Oh, it’s the same as yours. It has been all along. The butler seems to me a very clumsy red herring. I believe that Sir Bartholomew and poor old Babbington were killed by the same person.’

  ‘One of the house-party?’

  ‘One of the house-party.’

  There was silence for a minute or two, and then Mr Satterthwaite asked casually:

  ‘Which of them do you think it was?’

  ‘My God, Satterthwaite, how can I tell?’

  ‘You can’t tell, of course,’ said Mr Satterthwaite mildly. ‘I just thought you might have some idea—you know, nothing scientific or reasoned. Just an ordinary guess.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t…’ He thought for a minute and then burst out: ‘You know, Satterthwaite, the moment you begin to think it seems impossible that any of them did it.’

  ‘I suppose your theory is right,’ mused Mr Satterthwaite. ‘As to the assembling of the suspects, I mean. We’ve got to take it into account that there were certain definite exclusions. Yourself and myself and Mrs Babbington, for instance. Young Manders, too, he was out of it.’

  ‘Manders?’

  ‘Yes, his arrival on the scene was an accident. He wasn’t asked or expected. That lets him out of the circle of suspects.’

  ‘The dramatist woman, too—Anthony Astor.’

  ‘No, no, she was there. Miss Muriel Wills of Tooting.’

  ‘So she was—I’d forgotten the woman’s name was Wills.’

  He frowned. Mr Satterthwaite was fairly good at reading people’s thoughts. He estimated with fair accuracy what was passing through the actor’s mind. When the other spoke, Mr Satterthwaite mentally patted himself on the back.

  ‘You know, Satterthwaite, you’re right. I don’t think it was definitely suspected people that he asked—because, after all, Lady Mary and Egg were there…No, he wanted to stage some reproduction of the first business, perhaps…He suspected someone, but he wanted other eye-witnesses there to confirm matters. Something of that kind…’

  ‘Something of the kind,’ agreed Mr Satterthwaite. ‘One can only generalize at this stage. Very well, the Lytton Gores are out of it, you and I and Mrs Babbington and Oliver Manders are out of it. Who is left? Angela Sutcliffe?’

  ‘Angie? My dear fellow. She’s been a friend of Tollie’s for years.’

  ‘Then it boils down to the Dacres…In fact, Cartwright, you suspect the Dacres. You might just as well have said so when I asked you.’

  Sir Charles looked at him. Mr Satterthwaite had a mildly triumphant air.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Cartwright slowly, ‘that I do. At least, I don’t suspect them…They just seem rather more possible than anyone else. I don’t know them very well, for one thing. But for the life of me, I can’t see why Freddie Dacres, who spends his life on the racecourse, or Cynthia, who spends her time designing fabulously expensive clothes for women, should have any desire to remove a dear, insignificant old clergyman…’

  He shook his head, then his face brightened.

  ‘There’s the Wills woman. I forgot her again. What is there about her that continually makes you forget her? She’s the most damnably nondescript creature I’ve ever seen.’

  Mr Satterthwaite smiled.

  ‘I rather fancy she might embody Burns’s famous line—“A chiel’s amang ye takin’ notes.” I rather fancy that Miss Wills spends her time taking notes. There are sharp eyes behind that pair of glasses. I think you’ll find that anything worth noticing in this affair has been noticed by Miss Wills.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Sir Charles doubtfully.

  ‘The next thing to do,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, ‘is to have some lunch. After that, we’ll go out to the Abbey and see what we can discover on the spot.’

  ‘You seem to be taking very kindly to this, Satterthwaite,’ said Sir Charles, with a twinkle of amusement.

  ‘The investigation of crime is not new to me,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘Once when my car broke down and I was staying at a lonely inn—’

  He got no further.

  ‘I remember,’ said Sir Charles, in his high, clear carrying actor’s voice, ‘when I was touring in 1921…’

  Sir Charles won.

  Chapter 4

  The Evidence Of The Servants

  Nothing could have been more peaceful than the grounds and building of Melfort Abbey as the two men saw it that afternoon in the September sunshine. Portions of the Abbey were fifteenth century. It had been restored and a new wing added on to it. The new Sanatorium was out of sight of the house, with grounds of its own.

  Sir Charles and Mr Satterthwaite were received by Mrs Leckie, the cook, a portly lady, decorously gowned in black, who was tearful and voluble. Sir Charles she already knew, and it was to him she addressed most of her conversation.

  ‘You’ll understand, I’m sure, sir, what it’s meant to me. The master’s death and all. Policemen all over the place, poking their noses here and there—would you believe it, even the dusbins they had to have their noses in, and questions!—they wouldn’t have done with asking questions. Oh, that I should have lived to see such a thing—the doctor, such a quiet gentleman as he always was, and made Sir Bartholomew, too, which a proud day it was to all of us, as Beatrice and I well remember, though she’s been here two years less than I have. And such questions as that police fellow (for gentleman I will not call him, having been accustomed to gentlemen and their ways and knowing what’s what), fellow, I say, whether or not he is a superintendent—’ Mrs Leckie paused, took breath and extricated herself from the somewhat complicated conversational morass into which she had fallen. ‘Questions, that’s what I say, about all the maids in the house, and good girls they are, every one
of them—not that I’d say that Doris gets up when she should do in the morning. I have to speak about it at least once a week, and Vickie, she’s inclined to be impertinent, but, there, with the young ones you can’t expect the training—their mothers don’t give it to them nowadays—but good girls they are, and no police superintendent shall make me say otherwise. “Yes,” I said to him, “you needn’t think I’m going to say anything against my girls. They’re good girls, they are, and as to having anything to do with murder, why it’s right-down wicked to suggest such a thing.”’

  Mrs Leckie paused.

  ‘Mr Ellis, now—that’s different. I don’t know anything about Mr Ellis, and couldn’t answer for him in any way, he having been brought from London, and strange to the place, while Mr Baker was on holiday.’

  ‘Baker?’ asked Mr Satterthwaite.

  ‘Mr Baker had been Sir Bartholomew’s butler for the last seven years, sir. He was in London most of the time, in Harley Street. You’ll remember him, sir?’ She appealed to Sir Charles, who nodded. ‘Sir Bartholomew used to bring him up here when he had a party. But he hadn’t been so well in his health, so Sir Bartholomew said, and he gave him a couple of months’ holiday, paid for him, too, in a place near the sea down near Brighton—a real kind gentleman the doctor was—and he took Mr Ellis on temporary for the time being, and so, as I said to that superintendent, I can’t say anything about Mr Ellis, though, from all he said himself, he seems to have been with the best families, and he certainly had a gentlemanly way with him.’

  ‘You didn’t find anything—unusual about him?’ asked Sir Charles hopefully.

  ‘Well, it’s odd your saying that, sir, because, if you know what I mean, I did and I didn’t.’

  ‘Sir Charles looked encouraging, and Mrs Leckie went on:

  ‘I couldn’t exactly say what it was, sir, but there was some thing—’

  There always is—after the event—thought Mr Satterthwaite to himself grimly. However much Mrs Leckie had despised the police, she was not proof against suggestion. If Ellis turned out to be the criminal, well, Mrs Leckie would have noticed something.

  ‘For one thing, he was standoffish. Oh, quite polite, quite the gentleman—as I said, he’d been used to good houses. But he kept himself to himself, spent a lot of time in his own room; and he was—well, I don’t know how to describe it, I’m sure—he was, well, there was something—’

  ‘You didn’t suspect he wasn’t—not really a butler?’ suggested Mr Satterthwaite.

  ‘Oh, he’d been in service, right enough, sir. The things he knew—and about well-known people in society, too.’

  ‘Such as?’ suggested Sir Charles gently.

  But Mrs Leckie became vague, and non-committal. She was not going to retail servants’ hall gossip. Such a thing would have offended her sense of fitness.

  To put her at her ease, Mr Satterthwaite said:

  ‘Perhaps you can describe his appearance.’

  Mrs Leckie brightened.

  ‘Yes, indeed, sir. He was a very respectable-looking man—side-whiskers and grey hair, stooped a little, and he was growing stout—it worried him, that did. He had a rather shaky hand, too, but not from the cause you might imagine. He was a most abstemious man—not like many I’ve known. His eyes were a bit weak, I think, sir, the light hurt them—especially a bright light, used to make them water something cruel. Out with us he wore glasses, but not when he was on duty.’

  ‘No special distinguishing marks?’ asked Sir Charles. ‘No scars? Or broken fingers? Or birth marks?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir, nothing of that kind.’

  ‘How superior detective stories are to life,’ sighed Sir Charles. ‘In fiction there is always some distinguishing characteristic.’

  ‘He had a tooth missing,’ said Mr Satterthwaite.

  ‘I believe so, sir; I never noticed it myself.’

  ‘What was his manner on the night of the tragedy?’ asked Mr Satterthwaite in a slightly bookish manner.

  ‘Well, really, sir, I couldn’t say. I was busy, you see, in my kitchen. I hadn’t time for noticing things.’

  ‘No, no, quite so.’

  ‘When the news came out that the master was dead we were struck all of a heap. I cried and couldn’t stop, and so did Beatrice. The young ones, of course, were excited like, though very upset. Mr Ellis naturally wasn’t so upset as we were, he being new, but he behaved very considerate, and insisted on Beatrice and me taking a little glass of port to counteract the shock. And to think that all the time it was he—the villain—’

  Words failed Mrs Leckie, her eyes shone with indignation.

  ‘He disappeared that night, I understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir, went to his room like the rest of us, and in the morning he wasn’t there. That’s what set the police on him, of course.’

  ‘Yes, yes, very foolish of him. Have you any idea how he left the house?’

  ‘Not the slightest. It seems the police were watching the house all night, and they never saw him go—but, there, that’s what the police are, human like anyone else, in spite of the airs they give themselves, coming into a gentleman’s house and nosing round.’

  ‘I hear there’s some question of a secret passage,’ Sir Charles said.

  Mrs Leckie sniffed.

  ‘That’s what the police say.’

  ‘Is there such a thing?’

  ‘I’ve heard mention of it,’ Mrs Leckie agreed cautiously.

  ‘Do you know where it starts from?’

  ‘No, I don’t, sir. Secret passages are all very well, but they’re not things to be encouraged in the servants’ hall. It gives the girls ideas. They might think of slipping out that way. My girls go out by the back door and in by the back door, and then we know where we are.’

  ‘Splendid, Mrs Leckie. I think you’re very wise.’

  Mrs Leckie bridled in the sun of Sir Charles’s approval.

  ‘I wonder,’ he went on, ‘if we might just ask a few questions of the other servants?’

  ‘Of course, sir; but they can’t tell you anything more than I can.’

  ‘Oh, I know. I didn’t mean so much about Ellis as about Sir Bartholomew himself—his manner that night, and so on. You see, he was a friend of mine.’

  ‘I know, sir. I quite understand. There’s Beatrice, and there’s Alice. She waited at table, of course.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to see Alice.’

  Mrs Leckie, however, had a belief in seniority. Beatrice Church, the upper-housemaid, was the first to appear.

  She was a tall thin woman, with a pinched mouth, who looked aggressively respectable.

  After a few unimportant questions, Sir Charles led the talk to the behaviour of the house-party on the fatal evening. Had they all been terribly upset? What had they said or done?

  A little animation entered into Beatrice’s manner. She had the usual ghoulish relish for tragedy.

  ‘Miss Sutcliffe, she quite broke down. A very warm-hearted lady, she’s stayed here before. I suggested bringing her a little drop of brandy, or a nice cup of tea, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She took some aspirin, though. Said she was sure she couldn’t sleep. But she was sleeping like a little child the next morning when I brought her her early tea.’

  ‘And Mrs Dacres?’

  ‘I don’t think anything would upset that lady much.’

  From Beatrice’s tone, she had not liked Cynthia Dacres.

  ‘Just anxious to get away, she was. Said her business would suffer. She’s a big dressmaker in London, so Mr Ellis told us.’

  A big dressmaker, to Beatrice, meant ‘trade’, and trade she looked down upon.

  ‘And her husband?’

  Beatrice sniffed.

  ‘Steadied his nerves with brandy, he did. Or unsteadied them, some would say.’

  ‘What about Lady Mary Lytton Gore?’

  ‘A very nice lady,’ said Beatrice, her tone softening. ‘My great aunt was in service with her father at the Castle. A pretty young girl she wa
s, so I’ve always heard. Poor she may be, but you can see she’s someone—and so considerate, never giving trouble and always speaking so pleasant. Her daughter’s a nice young lady, too. They didn’t know Sir Bartholomew well, of course, but they were very distressed.’

  ‘Miss Wills?’

  Some of Beatrice’s rigidity returned.