The Craig Poisoning Mystery (Musaicum Murder Mysteries). Dorothy Fielding
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Название: The Craig Poisoning Mystery (Musaicum Murder Mysteries)
Автор: Dorothy Fielding
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066381479
isbn:
"Lucky you're the head of the family," Godolphin murmured a trifle grimly, as he thought of Lady Craig, whose gushing welcome had by no means hoodwinked him.
"The house is hers," Houghton went on, "but she won't want to antagonize me just now. Supposing I'm right in thinking I'm Ronnie's executor. So ring bells; order the servants about as though they were your own; take anything away, for the time being, that you want to; open everything you see. In short, search the house from top to bottom, only find that part of a letter that Ronnie wrote of."
"Have you looked in the bedroom for it?" Godolphin asked.
Houghton explained that Lindrum had come in just as he was starting the search, and that, naturally, the two medicos had wanted the room to themselves.
"You disarranged nothing?" Pointer asked. "It may be most important to know if you altered the position of anything."
"I think I can say with certainty that I didn't lay so much as a finger on anything but a writing-cabinet which stood, locked, on a table close to the bed. I looked around the room, saw that there was no pillow under which the paper might have been tucked, thought of feeling under the sheet at the head of the bed but couldn't bring myself to do that—and decided to first look in the writing-case. I had just relocked it—my cousin's keys were on the mantel, and I put them back there- when—."
"So you did touch the keys, Houghton, as well as the cabinet?" Godolphin said with a dry chuckle.
Houghton gave a half-smile in reply. "Well—true. In the same way that I suppose I touched the door handle, the key which Match gave me—by the way, here it is; Lindrum handed it to me when they had finished—even the carpet. I trod on that too. Sorry. But now, look here, I quite understand that no one can be allowed to go into that room alone, or I shouldn't have stayed down here for a second, but will you both come up with me now, at once, and let us see if we can't find that precious paper my cousin referred to?"
Godolphin and Pointer both rose by way of assent.
"Supposing it to be still in existence I shouldn't locate it, off-hand, in the room where Mr. Craig died," Pointer said in a low tone to the chief constable, who gave him an emphatically assenting look.
Houghton led the way upstairs. Godolphin followed and waved to Pointer to come along. Strictly speaking, as yet the Scotland Yard man was only an onlooker, Indeed, still more strictly speaking, if the affair were placed in his hands, he would still be supposed to act only as an adviser to the chief constable. But even that standing was not his yet. For the moment, there were only the words of the dying man, written and spoken, and the belief of the two doctors, to show that a crime had been committed. Such, at least, was the theory. In point of fact, none of the three men had the least doubt on the matter, and the chief inspector carried with him up to the bedroom a camera which he had borrowed from his host of last night, the local superintendent.
CHAPTER IV
AT a word from Godolphin, Houghton remained with the former in the doorway while Pointer took several photographs of the room and then quickly measured the distances between the various most important pieces of furniture and marked them on a plan.
That done, the room was free to move about in, though Godolphin asked Houghton not to touch anything. He himself stepped first of all to the bed and looked long at the face which had been hidden by the sheet. "He's altered," Godolphin said pityingly; "must have suffered agonies, by the change in him."
"He relied on me—and I wasn't there!" came in a choked whisper from Houghton, who strode to the window a Moment and stood there, back to the room, biting his lips.
Pointer eyed the dead man closely. He saw a good-looking man with sharply cut features—features that suggested considerable driving power. He looked a very unyielding man, the detective thought, a man whom he would expect to insist on his own way even in trifles. He looked, to Pointer, like one who would live to schedule, and insist on others living to it too. There was nothing easy-going about the face. But it was emphatically the face of a law-abiding man.
"I'll see to it that whoever did it pays for it!" Houghton now said tensely, moving away from the window and stepping to the writing-cabinet. He picked up the keys, which lay where he had left them, unlocked the case and flung back the top.
"You see, the paper's not in here!" He fluttered through the contents a second time, more carefully.
Godolphin good-naturedly forbore to remind him about not touching things, and went through the little cabinet too.
"There's no gum here," he remarked as he did so, "otherwise it seems to be stocked with everything that the mind of a stationer could think of. What's the word the house-agents always use? 'Replete.' That's it."
"Yes, a sort of portable office. But as you say, there's no gum, though there's a pot of Stickwell. And what's much worse, there's no 'part of a letter.'" Houghton shook his head.
Pointer, after looking the case over very carefully too, took out the letter sent Houghton by the dead man.
"It evidently came from that block there. Want to make sure?" asked Godolphin, without much interest.
"I think we'll find it's an inch shorter than the rest of the sheets on this pad." The man from the Yard was measuring the two with his long but very strong-looking fingers, the fingers of an engineer.
4.
Godolphin, who was turning away, turned back keenly interested. As he had thought, the letter sent Houghton was identical in make of paper and color, but, as Pointer thought, it was an inch shorter. The envelope, on the other hand, tallied absolutely with the others in the same division, envelopes made to go with that particular block.
Pointer eyed the lower edge closely.
"I rather thought that something had been torn off here and that the edge had then been roughened to look like the other edges," he murmured half to himself.
"That would explain why the envelope was opened!" came in great excitement from Houghton.
"Y-yes, only I don't think it was Mr. Craig who went to the trouble of trying to hide the fact that the paper had been shortened," Pointer said, deep in thought.
"Someone with plenty of time did that. Neatly done."
"It looks as if a postscript had been added and cut off by someone," Godolphin thought. "I can't imagine Craig working to make the sheet look as if it hadn't been touched, can you, Houghton?"
Houghton ridiculed the idea. "The last man in the world to've cared how the paper looked," he added.
"No," his voice was husky, "what was taken away was the name! I feel sure Ronnie opened it to scrawl with his weary fingers the poisoner's name. Perhaps a sort of feeling that he had better tell me...Well, this, at any rate, proves that the letter is no forgery, had proof been needed."
"Whoever tore it off must have known—positively—that you and the writer were not going to meet. At least, that's how it looks to me—so far," Pointer said slowly.
"By Jove!" came from Houghton, "what СКАЧАТЬ