The Footsteps That Stopped (Musaicum Murder Mysteries). Dorothy Fielding

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СКАЧАТЬ for any gnat in sight."

      "Doesn't Mrs. Tangye's partiality for having tea in an impossible room strike you as peculiar?" Pointer countered.

      Haviland stared. Wilmot permitted himself to look puzzled.

      "Senseless whim," he murmured, "but not necessarily criminal, I should have thought."

      "Not necessarily senseless," Pointer replied with a faint smile.

      "You think the smoky fire—but would that weigh much, in fact, with a desperate woman—sick of life—?" groped Haviland.

      "It would weigh heavily with a woman expecting a visitor," Pointer reminded him. Haviland stepped away to let a perambulator come up and pass them.

      "In the plan which the Superintendent drew of Riverview," Pointer went on in his absence, "Haviland's an excellent officer, very thorough along his own lines. He has a quick eye."

      "He has—for a fact," Wilmot laughed, and Haviland, catching the last word, grinned.

      "I'm an Essex man," he said in excuse, as he turned to Pointer when the bridge was empty again, "you were saying, sir?"

      "That in your plan the morning-room shows as the only one in the house which can be entered directly from the garden, without having to pass any other window. Now, adding this interesting detail to the unusual fondness of Mrs. Tangye for a smoky room yesterday, and you get quite an intriguing little sum."

      "You might, if they belonged together," Wilmot agreed cautiously, "but if you add the density of the atmosphere to the distance from the earth to the moon, your result's not likely to be of much practical use."

      "That's what I thought when I learnt from the evidence at the inquest that Mrs. Tangye had been expecting a visitor. An expected caller drew a straight line through my sum. This cable of Mrs. Cranbourn's, however, reverses that. Or rather, what seems like a stroke through the whole, becomes one of it's most important items."

      "Are we at last to be permitted to glimpse your meaning—to fathom the mysterious depths with which you credit that fact?" Wilmot screwed up his eyes. A sign of close attention.

      "Remember the situation of the morning-room. Mrs. Tangye's sticking to it in spite of discomfort, and add the new fact that very definite instructions were given by her that she was not at home yesterday, except to a certain, very carefully specified lady, who quite positively couldn't come. I maintain that my sum total's worth thinking over. Especially if you add a few other extras floating around."

      Wilmot pondered for some minutes.

      "You mean?" he repeated cautiously.

      "This: Mr. Tangye never gets back on Tuesdays from his office until half-past six at the earliest. Mrs. Tangye sends her companion off just before four to change a novel for her at the circulating library and tells her to have tea out. The library is about half an hour away. It doesn't close till seven. Tea at Riverview was ordered at four; one would have thought that Miss Saunders could have had it before going for the book. The maid, after bringing in the tea-things, always leaves her mistress undisturbed until she clears away at six. That is a rule of the house, we learnt. Now, if in addition, Mrs. Tangye tells her that on no account will she be at home to anybody except to some one who isn't—can't be—coming, then, in this way she both has an excuse for ordering, as she does, a very ample tea, and also insures in every possible way that she can count on being undisturbed for two hours. Four to six."

      "But the caller of later on? The woman who came and said she was frightfully overdue," Haviland protested, "aren't you forgetting her? Her name may have been Cranbourn too, as Tangye suggested."

      "Sort of gratuitous little muddle that's quite to be expected," Pointer agreed.

      "Yes," Wilmot said slowly, thinking over Pointer's words, "you can't get around the fact that some woman came. And on an appointment, you know."

      "I don't know," Pointer put up his pipe with a sigh, "I must leave her on one side for the moment. Her coming doesn't explain anything—nor hang together with anything."

      "She made a bee-line for the morning-room," Haviland pointed out.

      "True but I can't see why Mrs. Tangye should stick to that particular room in spite of smoke, and bitter cold, for the sake of some one who could come to the front door, and therefore could have been shown into any other room. At least as far as we yet know to the contrary."

      "Then for what reason did she stick to it?" Wilmot asked irritably. He never liked asking for solutions.

      "There's just a possibility that Mrs. Tangye gave some one an appointment in that room. Some one who was not to come to the front door. It was this bare possibility which brought me down to Twickenham in the first place. Only that expected visit—that bluff—about Mrs. Cranbourn—put my theory all out, for the moment."

      "Um-m. Seems to me a very heavy scaffolding to builds around one smoky chimney," Wilmot temporised. Had he been the one to originate it, he would have hailed it with joy.

      "Oh, there are other things. Why did Mrs. Tangye walk up and down outside that window, while the maid brought in tea? Unless it were to be on the lookout lest this 'some one' should blunder into the room while the girl was still there? It was hardly an afternoon to select for a turn in the garden. The open window would send its ray of light far out as a beacon, a guide, remember."

      "You think Mrs. Tangye had given some one a rendezvous, a secret appointment yesterday afternoon?" Wilmot cocked his head on one side. "Is that where that cousin of hers comes in? The one you questioned Tangye about? Your interest in any one is rarely to their credit. Who is he?"

      "He seems a bit of a dark horse. Distinguished himself at Oxford. So much so that the authorities thought one half term quite sufficient. I haven't got all the notes on him yet. Apparently, as Tangye said, he dropped out of sight some dozen years ago."

      "But Mrs. Tangye was Mrs. Grundy's twin sister. Nothing romantic. Nothing of the heart could make the lady we looked at just now step one inch off the beaten track. Take that from me."

      Pointer took it. Took it very seriously. Wilmot's judgments on men and events were not to be lightly passed over. He had a famous knack of winning by a head. His own head, as Fleet Street put it.

      "Nevertheless, the fact remains," Pointer continued, "that on the two days following last Sunday, Mrs. Tangye takes very similar measures to safeguard herself from interruption for at least a part of the afternoon."

      "There's that vanished cousin of hers," Haviland put in, "he might fit the idea you have about that morning-room. Supposing he's done something and couldn't show his face, in fact."

      "Just so. He might. Though I don't necessarily think that it was a man who came. As I said before, I only call the criminal 'him' for the sake of brevity. Also women don't commit murder as often as men do."

      "Not enough courage," Wilmot was no lover of the fair sex. "But even if you're right about Mrs. Tangye's reason for speaking as though she expected Mrs. Cranbourn, I hold that it would only be to gain time for the last, fatal step. That at least is how I read the story. Sorry. But it seems to me the only reading—so far. I see no possibility of that bullet having been fired by any other hand but Mrs. Tangye's.

      "I maintain," he said again, after turning Pointer's suggestion carefully over in his mind, "that Mrs. Tangye stuck to that room СКАЧАТЬ