'As a matter of fact,' he pursued, 'I never thought for a single moment that she meant a word of what she was saying. Of course I didn't. I imagined she was just talking for silly effect, as usual. Well, that seems to dispose of the good old cliche, doesn't it?'
'What good old cliche?'
'That people who talk about committing suicide never do it. And yet,' Roger ruminated, 'I could have sworn that it applied in her case more forcibly than it could in any other. The more I think of it, the more certain I'd have been that she was just talking poppycock. I suppose it couldn't possibly have been an accident?'
'Is this the celebrated detective's brain working for our benefit?' asked Mrs. Lefroy, with a laugh that sounded a little forced.
'Hardly,' Roger smiled. 'But if you'd like to hear the celebrated novelist's opinion, it is that such a situation simply couldn't be entrusted to fiction. One has to go to real life for such boldness.'
'What do you mean?'
'The coincidence of it all. Here is a woman whose existence is a source of annoyance, and perhaps a good deal more than annoyance, to several different people, and that for several different reasons. And just at the moment when those people are resenting it perhaps more intensely than ever before, she very obligingly, and most unexpectedly, kills herself. You must admit that the coincidence is far too violent to be stomached in fiction.'
'Is it?' Mrs. Lefroy asked reluctantly. 'I don't think really it's as strong as all that.'
'Don't you?'
'Well - it is just a coincidence, of course, and nothing else.'
'Oh, of course,' said Roger.
They looked into the fire for a few moments. Mrs. Lefroy leaned her bare arm on the beam that formed the rough mantelpiece and fidgeted with the toe of her white satin slipper among the dead ashes on the edge of the fire.
'I wish the police would hurry up and come,' she burst out suddenly.
'I thought you said just now you were dreading them?'
'Did I? How foolish of me. Of course I'm not,' said Mrs. Lefroy, with an unnatural little laugh.
Roger said nothing. Apparently Mrs. Lefroy read into his silence a mild expostulation, for she added: 'Yes, you're quite right. I am dreading them. It was ridiculous to pretend that I'm not.'
'Why are you dreading them?'
Mrs. Lefroy looked at him bravely. 'Because there isn't a single person connected with this family who won't be absolutely delighted to hear that Ena's dead. It's no good beating about the bush: there won't be. And I'm so afraid that the police may guess it.'
'Is there any particular reason why they shouldn't guess it? I mean, as you say, Mrs. Stratton wasn't a very pleasant person: and not to beat about the bush myself, I should say that she's a lot more use to the community dead than alive. But does it matter that the police should know that too?'
'Well, it's not very - nice, is it?' Mrs. Lefroy hedged.
'Sudden death never is very nice,' Roger said solemnly.
Mrs. Lefroy moved impatiently. 'Oh, don't talk platitudes.'
'Weren't you rather talking platitudes yourself, Mrs. Lefroy?'
'Well, you know perfectly well what's in my mind. It's in your own, too. If you want me to put it into plain words, I'm terribly afraid that if the police do guess that, they may suspect something absolutely preposterous.'
'Yes,' Roger agreed, with a little sigh, 'you're right; that was in my own mind, too.'
Dr. Chalmers arrived before the police. He came up the stairs alone. Roger looked round from where he was standing by the fireplace and saw him ascending the last short flight of the well staircase. 'Ah, Chalmers. You've been very quick.'
'I hadn't got to bed. This is a terrible business, Sheringham.'
'Yes. Have you seen Ronald?'
'No, I came straight in; the front door's still unlocked. Where is he?'
'In his bathroom, I think, changing.'
'And - Mrs. Stratton?'
'On Ronald's bed. Shall I tell him you've come?'
'Oh, it's all right, thanks. I'll find him myself.'
Dr. Chalmers turned and went down the stairs again.
'Did you notice?' Roger said conversationally to Mrs. Lefroy. 'Did you notice how his manner had changed? Meeting him before, one couldn't possibly have told that he was a doctor, except for the very faint smell of ether that always hangs about a doctor. But just then he couldn't have been anything else. Even his voice was a bedside voice.'
'Yes,' said Mrs. Lefroy.
Colin Nicolson appeared in the ballroom door. 'Was that the police?' he asked.
'No, Chalmers.'
'Lilian's decided to change at last. Cut along, Lilian. It wasn't the police. Agatha, you haven't forgotten who you are now, have you?'
Mrs. Lefroy looked at him vacantly for a moment before her face resumed its normal expression. 'Oh! Yes, of course, Henrietta of France, wasn't it? I don't think it matters much, in any case.'
Lilian Williamson hurried off to change, and her husband followed her out of the ballroom to join the group in the other room. Nicolson began to forecast the questions which the police would probably ask.
Roger stood for a moment uncertainly among them. Then he edged towards the stairs. A sudden wish had come to him to have another and closer look at the roof before the police arrived.
And yet there seemed very little to be seen on the roof. Literally very little. The heavy beams of the gallows, a chair or two here and there for those willing to brave the temperature of an April night, and a little arbour of trelliswork set in wooden troughs of earth, with the bare stems of Virginia creeper and polygonum baldschuanicum writhing in and out of it - there was nothing else at all.
Yet Roger felt that there ought to be something else. He did not know what, but he was not satisfied. It was too neat, too tidy altogether, too convenient that Ena Stratton should have committed suicide just at this juncture, when so many people desired it. Did Mrs. Lefroy suspect that perhaps her future sister - in - law had not committed suicide? Mrs. Lefroy was a shrewd woman as well as an intelligent one. She was worried about something. Was it only what she had voiced, or had she a deeper, untellable fear?
Yet of course Ena Stratton must have committed suicide. There was absolutely no evidence of anything else, not the smallest sign of it. And Roger very sincerely hoped that she had committed suicide. He would have been extremely sorry to see a decent person hang for such a worthless excrescence on humanity's surface.
And yet . . .
He stood in the middle of the gallows triangle, peering up at the crossbeams. They were high. There were three good feet of cord showing above the heads of the two life - size figures that remained, and the toes of their shoes were at least eighteen inches off the ground. Those crossbeams were ten feet high and more.
But that did not appear to have the least significance.
Roger fetched a chair which was standing somewhere between the gallows and the door into the house, set it beside one of the dangling figures, and mounted upon it. His body stood almost level with that of the figure, neck and neck practically on the same plane. Standing there, he could have unfastened the noose from the figure's neck and draped it around his own. It would have sagged a little on his shoulders, but not much when the noose was enlarged. Unquestionably Ena Stratton could have stood there and done the same.
He jumped down onto the roof again. The chair, spurned by his retreating foot, tumbled over with a crash, and Roger cursed. His nerves were upset, and that added to his sense of frustration.
Yet he did not know why he should be feeling frustrated at all. If there was nothing there to discover, he could discover nothing. And he wanted nothing there to be discovered. Why then feel frustrated if nothing presented itself for discovery?
He walked down into the sun parlour, switched on the light, and looked moodily round, found nothing, and walked back to the roof again. A thought pulled him up with a jerk. Where, after all, was the third straw dummy?
