“The third one was queerer still,” said Tommy. “A French woman. A woman who’d suffered terribly from the loss of her husband and her child. She was brokenhearted and she was an angel of mercy.”
“That’s right,” said Tuppence, “I remember. They called her the angel of whatever the village was. Givon or something like that. She went to all the neighbours and nursed them when they were ill. Particularly she used to go to children when they were ill. She nursed them devotedly. But sooner or later, after apparently a slight recovery, they grew much worse and died. She spent hours crying and went to the funeral crying and everybody said they wouldn’t know what they’d have done without the angel who’d nursed their darlings and done everything she could.”
“Why do you want to go over all this again, Tuppence?”
“Because I wondered if Dr. Murray had a reason for mentioning them.”
“You mean he connected—”
“I think he connected up three classical cases that are well known, and tried them on, as it were, like a glove, to see if they fitted anyone at Sunny Ridge. I think in a way any of them might have fitted. Miss Packard would fit in with the first one. The efficient matron of a Home.”
“You really have got your knife into that woman. I always liked her.”
“I daresay people have liked murderers,” said Tuppence very reasonably. “It’s like swindlers and confidence tricksmen who always look so honest and seem so honest. I daresay murderers all seem very nice and particularly softhearted. That sort of thing. Anyway, Miss Packard is very efficient and she has all the means to hand whereby she could produce a nice natural death without suspicion. And only someone like Mrs. Cocoa would be likely to suspect her. Mrs. Cocoa might suspect her because she’s a bit batty herself and can understand batty people, or she might have come across her somewhere before.”
“I don’t think Miss Packard would profit financially by any of her elderly inmates’ deaths.”
“You don’t know,” said Tuppence. “It would be a cleverer way to do it, not to benefit from all of them. Just get one or two of them, perhaps, rich ones, to leave you a lot of money, but to always have some deaths that were quite natural as well, and where you didn’t get anything. So you see I think that Dr. Murray might, just might, have cast a glance at Miss Packard and said to himself, ‘Nonsense, I’m imagining things.’ But all the same the thought stuck in his mind. The second case he mentioned would fit with a domestic worker, or cook, or even some kind of hospital nurse. Somebody employed in the place, a middle-aged reliable woman, but who was batty in that particular way. Perhaps used to have little grudges, dislikes for some of the patients there. We can’t go guessing at that because I don’t think we know anyone well enough—”
“And the third one?”
“The third one’s more difficult,” Tuppence admitted. “Someone devoted. Dedicated.”
“Perhaps he just added that for good measure,” said Tommy. He added, “I wonder about that Irish nurse.”
“The nice one we gave the fur stole to?”
“Yes, the nice one Aunt Ada liked. The very sympathetic one. She seemed so fond of everyone, so sorry if they died. She was very worried when she spoke to us, wasn’t she? You said so—she was leaving, and she didn’t really tell us why.”
“I suppose she might have been a rather neurotic type. Nurses aren’t supposed to be too sympathetic. It’s bad for patients. They are told to be cool and efficient and inspire confidence.”
“Nurse Beresford speaking,” said Tommy, and grinned.
“But to come back to the picture,” said Tuppence. “If we just concentrate on the picture. Because I think it’s very interesting what you told me about Mrs. Boscowan, when you went to see her. She sounds—she sounds interesting.”
“She was interesting,” said Tommy. “Quite the most interesting person I think we’ve come across in this unusual business. The sort of person who seems to know things, but not by thinking about them. It was as though she knew something about this place that I didn’t, and that perhaps you don’t. But she knows something.”
“It was odd what she said about the boat,” said Tuppence. “That the picture hadn’t had a boat originally. Why do you think it’s got a boat now?”
“Oh,” said Tommy, “I don’t know.”
“Was there any name painted on the boat? I don’t remember seeing one—but then I never looked at it very closely.”
“It’s got Waterlily on it.”
“A very appropriate name for a boat—what does that remind me of?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“And she was quite positive that her husband didn’t paint that boat—He could have put it in afterwards.”
“She says not—she was very definite.”
“Of course,” said Tuppence, “there’s another possibility we haven’t gone into. About my coshing, I mean—the outsider—somebody perhaps who followed me here from Market Basing that day to see what I was up to. Because I’d been there asking all those questions. Going into all those house agents. Blodget & Burgess and all the rest of them. They put me off about the house. They were evasive. More evasive than would be natural. It was the same sort of evasion as we had when we were trying to find out where Mrs. Lancaster had gone. Lawyers and banks, an owner who can’t be communicated with because he’s abroad. The same sort of pattern. They send someone to follow my car, they want to see what I am doing, and in due course I am coshed. Which brings us,” said Tuppence, “to the gravestone in the churchyard. Why didn’t anyone want me to look at old gravestones? They were all pulled about anyway—a group of boys, I should say, who’d got bored with wrecking telephone boxes, and went into the churchyard to have some fun and sacrilege behind the church.”
“You say there were painted words—or roughly carved words?”
“Yes—done with a chisel, I should think. Someone who gave it up as a bad job.
“The name—Lily Waters—and the age—seven years old. That was done properly—and then the other bits of words—It looked like ‘Whosoever . . .’ and then ‘offend least of these’—and—‘Millstone’—”
“Sounds familiar.”
“It should do. It’s definitely biblical—but done by someone who wasn’t quite sure what the words he wanted to remember were—”
“Very odd—the whole thing.”
“And why anyone should object—I was only trying to help the vicar—and the poor man who was trying to find his lost child—There we are—back to the lost child motif again—Mrs. Lancaster talked about a poor child walled up behind a fireplace, and Mrs. Copleigh chattered about walled-up nuns and murdered children, and a mother who killed a baby, and a lover, and an illegitimate baby, and a suicide—It’s all old tales and gossip and hearsay and legends, mixed up in the most glorious kind of hasty pudding! All the same, Tommy, there was one actual fact—not just hearsay or legend—”
“You mean?”
“I mean that in the chimney of this Canal House, this old rag doll fell out—A child’s doll. It had been there a very, very long time, all covered with soot and rubble—”
“Pity we haven’t got it,” said Tommy.
“I have,” said Tuppence. She spoke triumphantly.
“You brought it away with you?”
“Yes. It startled me, you know. I thought I’d like to take it and examine it. Nobody wanted it or anything. I should imagine the Perrys would just have thrown it into the ashcan straight away. I’ve got it here.”
She rose from her sofa, went to her suitcase, rummaged a little and then brought out something wrapped in newspaper.
“Here you are, Tommy, have a look.”
With some curiosity Tommy unwrapped the newspaper. He took out carefully the wreck of a child’s doll. Its limp arms and legs hung down, faint festoons of clothing dropped off as he touched them. The body seemed made of a very thin suede leather sewn up over a body that had once been plump with sawdust and now was sagging because here and there t
he sawdust had escaped. As Tommy handled it, and he was quite gentle in his touch, the body suddenly disintegrated, flapping over in a great wound from which there poured out a cupful of sawdust and with it small pebbles that ran to and fro about the floor. Tommy went round picking them up carefully.
“Good Lord,” he said to himself, “Good Lord!”
“How odd,” Tuppence said, “it’s full of pebbles. Is that a bit of the chimney disintegrating, do you think? The plaster or something crumbling away?”
“No,” said Tommy. “These pebbles were inside the body.”
He had gathered them up now carefully, he poked his finger into the carcase of the doll and a few more pebbles fell out. He took them over to the window and turned them over in his hand. Tuppence watched him with uncomprehending eyes.
“It’s a funny idea, stuffing a doll with pebbles,” she said.
“Well, they’re not exactly the usual kind of pebbles,” said Tommy. “There was a very good reason for it, I should imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have a look at them. Handle a few.”
She took some wonderingly from his hand.
“They’re nothing but pebbles,” she said. “Some are rather large and some small. Why are you so excited?”
“Because, Tuppence, I’m beginning to understand things. Those aren’t pebbles, my dear girl, they’re diamonds.”
Fifteen
EVENING AT THE VICARAGE
“Diamonds!” Tuppence gasped.
Looking from him to the pebbles she still held in her hand, she said:
“These dusty-looking things, diamonds?”
Tommy nodded.
“It’s beginning to make sense now, you see, Tuppence. It ties up. The Canal House. The picture. You wait until Ivor Smith hears about that doll. He’s got a bouquet waiting for you already, Tuppence—”
“What for?”
“For helping to round up a big criminal gang!”
“You and your Ivor Smith! I suppose that’s where you’ve been all this last week, abandoning me in my last days of convalescence in that dreary hospital—just when I wanted brilliant conversation and a lot of cheering up.”
“I came in visiting hours practically every evening.”
“You didn’t tell me much.”
“I was warned by that dragon of a sister not to excite you. But Ivor himself is coming here the day after tomorrow, and we’ve got a little social evening laid on at the vicarage.”
“Who’s coming?”
“Mrs. Boscowan, one of the big local landowners, your friend Miss Nellie Bligh, the vicar, of course, you and I—”
“And Mr. Ivor Smith—what’s his real name?”
“As far as I know, it’s Ivor Smith.”
“You are always so cautious—” Tuppence laughed suddenly.
“What’s amusing you?”
“I was just thinking that I’d like to have seen you and Albert discovering secret drawers in Aunt Ada’s desk.”
“All the credit goes to Albert. He positively delivered a lecture on the subject. He learnt all about it in his youth from an antique dealer.”
“Fancy your Aunt Ada really leaving a secret document like that, all done up with seals all over. She didn’t actually know anything, but she was ready to believe there was somebody in Sunny Ridge who was dangerous. I wonder if she knew it was Miss Packard.”
“That’s only your idea.”
“It’s a very good idea if its a criminal gang we’re looking for. They’d need a place like Sunny Ridge, respectable and well run, with a competent criminal to run it. Someone properly qualified to have access to drugs whenever she needed them. And by accepting any deaths that occurred as quite natural, it would influence a doctor to think they were quite all right.”
“You’ve got it all taped out, but actually the real reason you started to suspect Miss Packard was because you didn’t like her teeth—”
“The better to eat you with,” said Tuppence meditatively. “I’ll tell you something else, Tommy—Supposing this picture—the picture of the Canal House—never belonged to Mrs. Lancaster at all—”
“But we know it did.” Tommy stared at her.
“No, we don’t. We only know that Miss Packard said so—It was Miss Packard who said that Mrs. Lancaster gave it to Aunt Ada.”
“But why should—” Tommy stopped—
“Perhaps that’s why Mrs. Lancaster was taken away—so that she shouldn’t tell us that the picture didn’t belong to her, and that she didn’t give it to Aunt Ada.”
“I think that’s a very far-fetched idea.”
“Perhaps—But the picture was painted in Sutton Chancellor—The house in the picture is a house in Sutton Chancellor—We’ve reason to believe that that house is—or was—used as one of their hidey-holes by a criminal association—Mr. Eccles is believed to be the man behind this gang. Mr. Eccles was the man responsible for sending Mrs. Johnson to remove Mrs. Lancaster. I don’t believe Mrs. Lancaster was ever in Sutton Chancellor, or was ever in the Canal House, or had a picture of it—though I think she heard someone at Sunny Ridge talk about it—Mrs. Cocoa perhaps? So she started chattering, and that was dangerous, so she had to be removed. And one day I shall find her! Mark my words, Tommy.”
“The Quest of Mrs. Thomas Beresford.”
II
“You look remarkably well, if I may say so, Mrs. Tommy,” said Mr. Ivor Smith.
“I’m feeling perfectly well again,” said Tuppence. “Silly of me to let myself get knocked out, I suppose.”
“You deserve a medal—Especially for this doll business. How you get on to these things, I don’t know!”
“She’s the perfect terrier,” said Tommy. “Puts her nose down on the trail and off she goes.”
“You’re not keeping me out of this party tonight,” said Tuppence suspiciously.
“Certainly not. A certain amount of things, you know, have been cleared up. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you two. We were getting somewhere, mind you, with this remarkably clever association of criminals who have been responsible for a stupendous amount of robberies over the last five or six years. As I told Tommy when he came to ask me if I knew anything about our clever legal gentleman, Mr. Eccles, we’ve had our suspicions of him for a long time but he’s not the man you’ll easily get evidence against. Too careful by far. He practises as a solicitor—an ordinary genuine business with perfectly genuine clients.
“As I told Tommy, one of the important points has been this chain of houses. Genuine respectable houses with quite genuine respectable people living in them, living there for a short time—then leaving.
“Now, thanks to you, Mrs. Tommy, and your investigation of chimneys and dead birds, we’ve found quite certainly one of those houses. The house where a particular amount of the spoil was concealed. It’s been quite a clever system, you know, getting jewels or various things of that kind changed into packets of rough diamonds, hiding them, and then when the time comes they are flown abroad, or taken abroad in fishing boats, when all the hue and cry about one particular robbery has died down.”
“What about the Perrys? Are they—I hope they’re not—mixed up in it?”
“One can’t be sure,” said Mr. Smith. “No, one can’t be sure. It seems likely to me that Mrs. Perry, at least, knows something, or certainly knew something once.”
“Do you mean she really is one of the criminals?”
“It mightn’t be that. It might be, you know, that they had a hold on her.”
“What sort of hold?”
“Well, you’ll keep this confidential, I know you can hold your tongue in these things, but the local police have always had the idea that the husband, Amos Perry, might just possibly have been the man who was responsible for a wave of child murders a good many years ago. He is not fully competent mentally. The medical opinion was that he might quite easily have had a compulsion to do away with children. There was never any direct evidence, but his w
ife was perhaps overanxious to provide him always with adequate alibis. If so, you see, that might give a gang of unscrupulous people a hold on her and they may have put her in as tenant of part of a house where they knew she’d keep her mouth shut. They may really have had some form of damaging evidence against her husband. You met them—what do you feel about them both, Mrs. Tommy?”
“I liked her,” said Tuppence. “I think she was—well, as I say I summed her up as a friendly witch, given to white magic but not black.”
“What about him?”
“I was frightened of him,” said Tuppence. “Not all the time. Just once or twice. He seemed suddenly to go big and terrifying. Just for a minute or two. I couldn’t think what I was frightened of, but I was frightened. I suppose, as you say, I felt that he wasn’t quite right in his head.”
“A lot of people are like that,” said Mr. Smith. “And very often they’re not dangerous at all. But you can’t tell, and you can’t be sure.”
“What are we going to do at the vicarage tonight?”
“Ask some questions. See a few people. Find out things that may give us a little more of the information we need.”
“Will Major Waters be there? The man who wrote to the vicar about his child?”
“There doesn’t seem to be any such person! There was a coffin buried where the old gravestone had been removed—a child’s coffin, lead lined—And it was full of loot. Jewels and gold objects from a burglary near St. Albans. The letter to the vicar was with the object of finding out what had happened to the grave. The local lads’ sabotage had messed things up.”
III
“I am so deeply sorry, my dear,” said the vicar, coming to meet Tuppence with both hands outstretched. “Yes, indeed, my dear, I have been so terribly upset that this should happen to you when you have been so kind. When you were doing this to help me. I really felt—yes, indeed I have, that it was all my fault. I shouldn’t have let you go poking among gravestones, though really we had no reason to believe—no reason at all—that some band of young hooligans—”