Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery Read online

  “Right-ho, I won’t, if it’s a secret,” Anthony promised.

  Roger looked slightly disappointed.

  chapter two

  Girls and Murder

  Ludmouth village is nearly a mile away from its station. On arriving at the latter Roger and Anthony put their traps in the combined ticket office, porter’s room, luggage depot and cloakroom, and proceeded to make enquiries regarding hotels.

  ‘“Otel?” repeated the combined porter, stationmaster and ticket inspector, scratching the top of his head with an air of profound cogitation. “Why, there ain’t no ‘otel’ ereabouts. Leastaways, not what you might call an ‘otel, there ain’t.”

  “Well, a pub, then,” rejoined Roger a trifle irritably. The journey had been a long and tiresome one, and since changing at Bournemouth they had seemed to progress at the rate of ten miles an hour. For one who was as eager to get going as Roger had been all that day, few things could have been more maddening than the journey as habitually performed between Bournemouth and Ludmouth. It is not to say that the train does not go fast when it is going, but stations seem to demoralise it completely; it sits down and ruminates for a matter of twenty minutes in each one before it can bring itself to go on to the next. “What’s the name of the best pub in Ludmouth?”

  The combination chuckled hoarsely. “The best pub?” he echoed with considerable amusement. “The best pub, hey? Oho! Hoo!”

  “I’ve said something funny,” Roger pointed out to Anthony. “You see? The gentleman is amused. I asked the name of the best pub, so no wonder he’s convulsed with mirth.”

  Anthony inspected the combination with some attention. “I don’t think he’s laughing at you at all. I think he’s just seen a joke that Gladstone made in 1884.”

  “There ain’t nobbut one!” roared the combination. “So when you says the best pub I –”

  “Where is the one pub in Ludmouth?” asked Roger patiently.

  “Why, in the village, o’ course.”

  “Where is the village of Ludmouth and its one pub?”

  Roger pursued with almost superhuman self-restraint.

  This time a more lucid reply was forthcoming, and the two strode out into the hot sunshine and down the country road in the direction indicated, leaving behind them a combination of porter, stationmaster and ticket inspector guffawing at irregular intervals as some fresh aspect of this cream of jests appeared to occur to him.

  It was a warm walk into the village, and they were glad enough to plunge into the gloom of the little old-fashioned inn which stood in the middle of the small cluster of houses which constitutes the nucleus of the village. A smart rap or two on the counter brought the landlord, a large man of aspect not unlike a benevolent ox and perspiring almost audibly.

  “Can’t serve you, gents, I’m afraid,” he rumbled cheerfully. “Leastaways lemonade you can have, or ginger beer, for the matter of that; but nothing else.”

  “That so?” said Roger. “Then produce two large tankards of beer, the biggest tankards and the wettest beer you’ve got, for we came not as travellers but as residents.”

  “You don’t mean you want to stay ‘ere as well? You want rooms?”

  “Rooms we shall want, certainly; but what we want just at the moment is beer – and don’t forget what I told you about the size of those tankards.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a different matter, that is,” agreed the landlord. “I can let you have a couple of quart tankards, if they’re any use to you.”

  “Any use? You watch!”

  With much wheezing and creaking the landlord filled the two huge tankards, and the two fell upon them gratefully. Then Roger replaced his on the counter and wiped his mouth.

  “So this is the only inn hereabouts, is it?” he asked with a careless air.

  “Yes, sir; it is that. Ludmouth’s a small village, you see, as far as the village goes.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, there’s far more big ‘ouses round and gentry and suchlike than there is of us villagers, and naturally they don’t want public ‘ouses.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, quite so. By the way, I believe there’s a friend of mine somewhere about here called Moresby. You seen or heard of him by any chance?”

  “Mr Moresby?” beamed the landlord. “Why, he’s staying ‘ere, he is. Took ‘is room this very mornin’, he did. Well, fancy that!”

  “Fancy it indeed! You hear that, Anthony? Dear old Moresby staying under the very same roof-tree! What do you think of that, eh?”

  “Good enough,” Anthony agreed.

  “I should say so.” He took another pull at his tankard. “Been having some excitement down here, landlord, haven’t you? Lady fell over a cliff, or something?”

  “Mrs Vane, sir? Yes. Very sad business, very sad indeed. A wonderful nice lady she was too, they say, though I can’t say as how I knew ‘er meself. A bit of a stranger in these parts, she was, you see. ‘Adn’t been married to the doctor more nor five years.”

  “The doctor? Her husband is a doctor, is he?”

  “Well, in a manner o’ speaking he is. He’s always called Dr Vane, though he don’t do no doctoring. Plenty o’ money he’s got now and always ‘as’ ad since he settled ‘ere twenty or more years ago, but a doctor he was once, they do say, an’ Dr Vane he’s always called.”

  “I see. And where does he live? Near here?”

  “A matter of a mile or so out Sandsea way; big ‘ouse standin’ in its own grounds back from the cliffs. You couldn’t miss it. Very lonely, like. You might take a stroll out there and see it if you’ve got nothing to do.”

  “By Jove, yes, we might, mightn’t we, Anthony?”

  “I should think so,” said Anthony cautiously.

  “But first of all about these rooms. How many have you got vacant, landlord?”

  “Well, besides Mr Moresby’s, there’s four others altogether. If you’d like to step up in a minute or two and see ‘em, you could choose which ones you’d like.”

  “We won’t bother. We’ll take them all.”

  “What, all four of ‘em?”

  “Yes; then we can have bedroom and a sitting-room apiece, you see.”

  “But there’s a sitting-room downstairs I could let you‘ave. A proper sitting-room.”

  “Is there? Good! Then we’ll take that too. I love proper sitting-rooms. That’ll be five rooms altogether, won’t it? I should think that ought to be enough for us. What would you say, Anthony?”

  “I think that might be enough,” Anthony assented.

  “You see, landlord? My friend agrees with me. Then that’s settled.”

  “It’ll cost you more sir,” the landlord demurred in some bewilderment.

  “Of course it will!” Roger agreed heartily. “Ever so much more. But that can’t be helped. My friend is a very faddy man – a very faddy man indeed; and if he thinks we ought to have five rooms, then five rooms we shall have to have. I’m very sorry, landlord, but you see how it is. And now I expect you’d like us to pay you a deposit, wouldn’t you? Of course. And after that, there are our bags and things to be got from the station, if you’ve got a spare man about the place; and you might tell him from me that if the red-faced man who hands them over begins to make curious noises all of a sudden, he needn’t take offence; it only means that he’s just seen a joke that someone told him the year Queen Victoria was born. Let’s see now; a deposit, you said, didn’t you? Here’s ten pounds. You might make me out a receipt for it, and be careful to mention all five rooms on the receipt or I shall be getting into trouble with my friend. Thanks very much.”

  The landlord’s expression, which had been growing blanker and blanker as this harangue proceeded, brightened at the sight of the two five-pound notes which Roger laid on the counter; words may be words, but money is always money. He had not the faintest idea what it was all about and it was his private opinion that Roger was suffering from rather more than a touch of the sun, but he proceeded quite readily to
make out the required receipt.

  Roger tucked it away in his pocketbook and, professing a morbid interest in the late Mrs Vane, began to ask a number of questions regarding the exact spot where she had fallen over the cliff and how best to get there. This information having been obtained and the conveyance of the bags arranged for, he shook the puzzled landlord heartily by the hand and drew Anthony out into the road.

  “Well, I suppose you know what you’re doing,” remarked that young man, as they set off briskly in accordance with the landlord’s instructions, “but I’m blessed if I do. Why on earth did you book four bedrooms?”

  Roger smiled gently. “To prevent all the other little journalists from sharing our advantage in staying under the same roof as Inspector Moresby of Scotland Yard, Cousin Anthony. A dirty trick, no doubt; but nevertheless a neat one.”

  “Oh, I see. Very cunning. And where are we off to now? The cliffs?”

  “Yes. You see, I want to get hold of Moresby as soon as I possibly can, and it seems to me that if he only arrived here this morning he’ll still be hanging round those cliffs; so the best thing I can do is to make for them too.”

  “Seems a sound scheme. And after that?”

  “Well, I ought to try to get an interview with one of the people at the house, I suppose, though I don’t much fancy the idea of tackling the doctor himself.”

  “Dr Vane? No, dash it, you can hardly butt in on him.”

  “That’s what I feel. He has a secretary, I believe, though I don’t know what her name is, and of course there’s the girl cousin, Miss Cross. She’s the person one ought to make for, I think.”

  Anthony frowned. “Seems rather rotten to me.”

  “To interview her? Not necessarily, at all. She might have something to say that she’d very much like published. She knows that the uncompromising fact about that ten thousand pounds is going to be talked about pretty hard if there’s any question of Mrs Vane’s death not being an accident; naturally she’d like an opportunity of putting an indirect answer of her own forward.”

  “I never thought of that,” Anthony confessed, his frown disappearing.

  “Nor did I, till this minute,” Roger said candidly. “Still, it’s true enough. And there’s a little job for you, Anthony. I shan’t want you with me while I’m talking to Moresby; it’s going to be difficult enough to get anything out of him in any case, but your presence would probably dry him up altogether. So you might stroll along the cliffs, locate the Vane’s house, and see if you can discover unobtrusively any information as to the girl’s movements or where I might be likely to catch her – outside the house, of course, if possible. What about that?”

  “Yes, I could do that for you. And meet you later on?”

  “Yes, just stroll back along the top of the cliffs again and I shall be sure to run into you. Well, there’s the sea not three hundred yards ahead, and nothing but nice, open downs along the top of the cliffs up there. We turn off to the right, I suppose, and you go straight along while I make for the edge just over there. I expect I shall be through in something under an hour. So long!”

  As Anthony made his way leisurely over the springy turf in the direction in which he judged his objective to lie, he pondered with no little interest over the object of their journey down to this charming part of the world and its possible outcome. There was in his make-up none of that eager curiosity regarding his fellow-creatures, their minds and the passions which sway them that had led Roger, after the way had once been opened to him, to explore the vast field of criminology with all its intense and absorbing interest for the student of the human animal. Indeed the notion of nosing out hidden facts and secret horrors (“like a bally policeman”, as he had contemptuously phrased it to Roger over their lunch on the train) had at first actually repelled him; it was not until Roger had been at considerable pains to point out the moral duty which every living person owes to the dead that his eyes were opened to any wider conception of the idea. And even then, though admitting that there must be detectives just as much as there must be hangmen, he was quite firm in his gratitude to Providence that he at any rate was not one of them; nor could Roger, expatiating on the glories of a clever piece of deductive reasoning, the exquisite satisfaction of logical proof, the ardour of the chase with a human quarry (but none the less a quarry that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred deserved not a jot of mercy) at the end of it, move him an inch from this position.

  It was this state of mind which had caused him to receive with ominous disapproval Roger’s pointed information about the girl cousin and her ten thousand pounds. A girl, to Anthony’s mind, should not be mentioned in the same breath as the word murder. Girls were things apart. Murder concerned men; not girls. Girls might be and very often were murdered, but not by other girls. If it were distasteful to hunt down a man suspected of murder, how impossible would it not be to harry a wretched girl in the same circumstances?

  As his thoughts progressed with his steps, an idea began to form in Anthony’s mind. He would not only seek out the whereabouts of Miss Cross, as Roger had asked him; he would contrive to speak to her for a minute or two and, if possible, drop a veiled warning as to the things that might be expected to happen – that were, in fact, even now happening – together with an equally veiled hint that at any rate he, Anthony Walton, was prepared to extend to her any help within his power, should she wish to accept it. After all, that was the least a chap could do. It was the only decent thing. Ten to one she wouldn’t need anything of the sort, but the offer – yes, of course it was the only decent thing to do. Girls were weak, helpless things. Let them know they’ve got a man behind them (even a perfect stranger if the case is serious enough to warrant it) and it makes all the difference in the world to ‘em. Naturally!

  In the glow of this resolution Anthony had unconsciously directed his steps toward the sea, so that he was now striding along the very edge of the cliffs. Coming to his senses with a jerk, he pulled up short and looked inland. Not five hundred yards to his right there stood, in a large fenced area which evidently stretched to the road half a mile away, a big red house. As the landlord of the inn had said, there was no mistaking it. Anthony gazed at it for a few moments without moving; now that he was face to face with it, the task of penetrating its purlieus and demanding speech with an unknown lady in order to warn her against dangers which quite probably did not exist at all, suddenly took on a somewhat formidable aspect.

  His eyes left its red roof and began, probably with an instinctive idea of looking for help, to sweep the remainder of the view, arriving in due course at the edge of the cliff just in front of him. At this point Anthony started violently, for seated on a small grassy ledge not a dozen feet below the clifftop, which was crumbled away at the point to form a steep but not impossible slope down, was a girl who was occupied in gazing as hard at Anthony as he had been gazing at the house. As his glance at last fell upon her she also started, coloured faintly, and hurriedly transferred her eyes to the horizon in front of her.

  On an impulse Anthony stepped forward and raised his hat.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I am looking for Dr Vane’s house. Could you tell me if that is it?”

  The girl twisted half round to face him. She wore no hat, and the sun glinted on her dark hair, unshingled and twisted in two coils on either side of her head; the eyes with which she looked at Anthony were large and brown, and the simple little black frock she was wearing suited her lithe, graceful body so well that one would have said she should never wear anything else.

  “I thought you must be,” she said calmly. “Yes, it is. Did you want to see anyone in particular?”

  “Well, yes; I – that is, I rather wanted to see Miss Cross.”

  The girl suddenly stiffened. “I am Miss Cross,” she said coldly.

  chapter three

  Inspector Moresby Is Reluctant

  The village of Ludmouth lies about half a mile back from the sea. At the nearest point to the vill
age, where Roger and Anthony had left the road to strike across open country, the water had broken in upon the stern lines of the high cliffs which form the coastline for several miles in either direction. The result is a tiny little inlet, almost completely circular in shape, which has been dignified by the name of Ludmouth Bay.

  At either horn of this minute bay, which could hardly have been more than a couple of hundred yards wide, the cliffs rise almost sheer to a height of at least a hundred feet, to sink gradually down as they follow the bay’s curve into a strip of sandy beach at the innermost edge, whence a steep track leads up to the village on the high ground behind. It is a charmingly picturesque spot and, lying as it does a little way off the beaten track, has not yet been spoiled (except for occasional excursion parties on bicycles from the neighbouring town of Sandsea, half a dozen miles away to the West) by the ubiquitous tripper; for the roads on all sides are too steep and too dangerous for charabancs – a matter of much comfort to those of the inhabitants who keep neither public houses nor banana shops.

  The cliffs which stretch towards Sandsea face the open sea with considerably less frowning austerity than those to the East; they slope slightly backward instead of dropping sheer, and are so irregular and split up into huge boulders, clefts and rocky knobs, as to be by no means impossible for a determined man to climb. About a third of the way down their face they bear a narrow ledge, which proceeds more or less level for a considerable distance and has been turned, by means of a flight of steps cut in the rock at either end, into a pathway. At one time this pathway had been in some favour among the lads of the village as a place from which to fish when the tide was high; but customs change even in Ludmouth, and nowadays anyone in search of solitude could usually be sure of finding it here. To add to its advantages in this respect, a bulge in the rock just above served to hide it completely for nearly its whole length from the eyes of anybody standing on the top of the cliff overhead. Inspector Moresby, sitting on a low boulder at a spot where the ledge widened out to a depth of nearly a dozen feet, could be observed from nowhere except the open sea.