The bungalow on the Leatherhead road had been left untouched since its mistress’s death, her brother having as yet had no time to dispose of her effects. Inspector Vance’s visit there, however, had negative results. Leaving an officer of the Surrey Constabulary to continue researches on the spot, Mr. Vance and his colleague again returned to London. Here, the next morning, that of the 23rd, they began work at the other end, on the movements on or about the essential dates of the interested persons so far known to them. Mile Boulanger and Miss Ardmore were interviewed. Information received, both from these ladies and from Mr. Tuke, having dragged Messrs. Gartside and Mainward into the orbit of the case, the inspector continued to move in official circles, for while Charles Gartside was at the Ministry of Information, Mr. Mainward was in the Foreign Office. And the afternoon found Mr. Vance at Bedford, calling on Mortimer Shearsby at the laboratories of Imperial Sansil (almost another government department), and on Mrs. Shearsby at ‘Aylwynstowe’.
All three cousins had shown signs of strain at these interviews, but this was to be expected, for police inquiries into deaths by which other persons benefit do not inspire the latter, howsoever innocent, with ease and gaiety. Mile Boulanger was defensive and aggrieved, Miss Ardmore on her dignity and rather snappy, and Mortimer Shearsby alternately twittery and bellicose. Asked why, at the inquest on his sister, he had remained silent about the previous case of sodium nitrite poisoning, the chemist got on his high horse and lectured Inspector Vance about moral sabotage, on the lines of his apologia to Mr. Tuke. If the inspector said, ‘Poppycock’ to himself, for the time being he left it at that.
As for Lilian Shearsby and the two young men, the lady had been a little hoity-toity, and revealed plainly her animus against Miss Ardmore, though having perhaps taken her husband’s warnings to heart, she also left it at that. Mr. Gartside had looked at the inspector as though he were some noxious species of insect, and Guy Mainward appeared to be doing his best to be helpful.
The outcome of routine questions about dates and times and movements was as inconclusive as such preliminary probings commonly are. These questions were put to all six concerned; for while the two civil servants supplied certain alibis for Miss Ardmore and Mile Boulanger, Charles Gartside had also an established interest in Vivien’s finances, and Guy Mainward, to all appearance, as good as one in Gecile’s. And Lilian Shearsby was even more directly a beneficiary by the deaths of her cousins by marriage.
Going back to April the 10th, though Gecile might have cause to remember that she was all but run over by a lorry at approximately 9.10 p.m., the inspector hardly hoped that any of the other five would pretend to remember their movements on a particular evening four months ago. And so it proved. Miss Ardmore and the civil servants were admittedly in London, and the Mortimer Shearsbys could easily have got there. The last train back to Bedford did not leave St. Pancras till 9.50. In the interim report on all these proceedings which Mr. Vance drew up, he noted that Mile Boulanger’s own story required confirmation.
Coming to the 28th of July, when Raymond Shearsby met his death, memories began to improve. The chemist said he was no doubt in his garden—during the summer months he was seldom out of it in his spare time—from 6.15 until his wife returned late from a day in Cambridge. Miss Ardmore spent the whole evening with her fiance, while Cecile went to a lecture at the Institut Frangais and then returned to her lodgings in Pimlico. Lilian Shearsby attended a W.V.S. conference at Cambridge, where she also shopped and dined, leaving at 9 o’clock by bus for Hitchen, where she changed buses, arriving home at 10.45. Charles Gartside was with his Vivien from 6 o’clock onwards, and Mr. Mainward passed the evening in his flat, communing^ as he put it, with his Muse. It appeared that he was something of a poet.
Inspector Vance now came to the Bank Holiday weekend, which provided chunks of evidence of a peculiarly baffling sort. He provisionally accepted Mrs. Steptoe’s story that the caster in the kitchen of the bungalow contained ordinary cooking salt as late as the evening of Friday, the 4th of August, when she prepared a meal there. On the medical evidence this gave two whole days, the Saturday and Sunday, during which the substitution of sodium nitrite for the salt must have been effected. It was not known whether Mrs. Porteous had used the caster on the Saturday, and she was believed to have spent most of the Sunday in London, though where or with whom remained to be discovered. The movements of the six persons involved required accordingly to be traced throughout both those days. All six partook at least in part of the general holiday. Even if the schoolteacher was at home on the Saturday afternoon (which was in doubt) any one of them might have called on her; and as for the Bank Holiday Sunday the whole world could have walked in. When Blanche Porteous was out she left her clumsy front door key, after the casual fashion of the country, on a ledge above the door. To make things a little more difficult, the bungalow was two hundred yards from the nearest house, and screened by trees and a bend of the road.
Mortimer Shearsby’s weekend, by his own account, was spent as to the Saturday alone in his garden, while on Sunday he took his bicycle and some food and rode to Lilly Hoo, above Hitchen. Leaving the
