“But you said just now,” Parmiter put in, “that it was Sydney’s—Captain Dresser’s death that started everything.”
“Oh, I don’t think Mrs. Shearsby’s general principles envisaged murder at this time. But women inspired by jealousy and hatred will do things quite as extraordinary. Her idea was to enter Miss Ardmore’s mews flat and go through the letters and so on there, hoping to discover some weapon that would humiliate and hurt. Few of us have not a secret or two which we would prefer to keep concealed from our enemies. At any rate, that she had a key is certain.” Parmiter pulled at his moustache, looked at his empty pipe, and felt in an abstracted way in his pocket for tobacco. “This is absorbingly interesting to me,” he said.
Mr. Tuke smiled politely. “I am glad you find it so. We now carry my story forward to the events of the last few weeks. I will take the death of Mrs. Porteous first, out of order, because though it is fairly clear how it was brought about, there is a sad lack of evidence, and Lilian Shearsby is not being charged on this count. The modus operandi will be obvious to you by now.”
“I suppose,” Parmiter said, stuffing tobacco into his pipe, “this wretched woman got the notion from the Bedford poisonings—which I now recall, by the way. Did she take an impression of another key?”
“That was not necessary. All she had to do was to get her victim out of the way. This she accomplished on the Bank Holiday Sunday, when her husband was also out of her way. The earlier case shows that sodium nitrite is easily obtainable at the Sansil laboratories, where she was doing part-time work. If necessary, she could pretend she wanted some as a fertiliser. Where she displayed her native ingenuity was in leaving in the bungalow, among the chemicals of the late Cyril Porteous, an unlabelled bottle of the stuff. Its presence at once suggested to a coroner predisposed to the theory of misadventure, that a misadventure had occurred. The round trip would only take her a few hours, and when her husband returned after his day’s outing she was at home again. About this time her sister-in-law, also just home again from a journey to London in response to a bogus telephone call, was preparing a meal including potatoes, which require cooking in salt, and late rhubarb from her garden. The acid in rhubarb seems to be just what is wanted to bring out the latent devilishness in NaNO2. An uncovenanted bit of luck for Lilian.”
Par-miter had filled his pipe. His fingers fumbled with the match, and the first one he struck broke in half. Suddenly he clenched a fist and brought it down on his chair.
“Horrible, horrible!” he muttered. “That poor creature! And do you mean to say, Tuke, that this fiend of a woman will get away with it?”
“For getting her hanged,” said Mr. Tuke, “one homicide is as good as another. The police evidently think they have enough evidence on the first count in point of time—the murder of Raymond Shearsby. And arising out of that, I fancy she will also be charged with the murder of Joseph Eady.”
“Ah, this man Eady. Where does he come in?”
“I will tell you. But before we leave Mrs. Porteous, you will note the advantage of using sodium nitrite in such an atmosphere of chemistry. There was also the point that Miss Ardmore, at the Ministry of Supply, might be supposed to have means of obtaining it. She too might simulate an interest in gardening. If suspicion should be aroused, it could be diverted in her direction. As it was. In fact, Mrs. Shearsby rather overdid it. It was a tactical error.”
As Parmiter at last got his pipe alight, he lay back with a little sigh. He seemed to have tired, to have become older and more lined and melancholy in the last half hour. Harvey, who had glanced at his watch, gave him a quizzical look.
“I must hurry,” he said. “I have a dinner engagement. To go back now to the 28th of July, we can follow in my story every step of the murder of Raymond Shearsby. As it also had to look like an accident, the procedure had to be different from that employed at Guildford, no doubt already planned.” Mr. Tuke shook the ash from his cigar and put his fingertips together. “To take events in order,” he went on, “Lilian Shearsby, as a member of the W.V.S., sometimes went to meetings of this admirable body at Cambridge. At one of these she met a Mrs. Darby. Mrs. Darby’s husband, a writer on economics, was one of Raymond Shearsby’s few friends in this country, a fact which came out in conversation, and proved very helpful to Mrs. Shearsby later on.”
“Ralph Darby,” said Parmiter. “He’s in my files.”
Mr. Tuke made a little grimace. “This Recording Angel touch of yours is slightly macabre. This W.V.S. connection,” he continued, “had other uses. There was a big regional conference at Cambridge on the 28th of July, and Mrs. Shearsby decided to carry out her plan under cover of this respectable gathering. Her first step was to pilfer a suit of youth’s clothing from a consignment to her own branch at Bedford. She is a tall woman, and looks well got up as a man. She then sent her W.V.S. uniform to the cleaners, so that she could go to Cambridge in a less
