Murder in the Mill-Race

had noticed that the letter box at Gramarye was a very solid and businesslike affair, a stout box firmly screwed to the back of the front door, its lid secured by a padlock, the key of which had been on the key ring found on Sister Monica’s body. Peel, on the principle “you never know your luck,” had gone to Gramarye on the morning of the twenty-fifth to see if any letters had arrived. His luck was in. He found a typewritten envelope addressed to “Miss Torrington.” Inside it was a half-yearly dividend warrant for £12-10-0 from the South West Building Society, and Peel promptly sat down to think and to do a little arithmetic, to the tune of “this is a very different cup of tea.” The sergeant had been puzzled by the absence of any personal accounts. Despite Lady Ridding’s firm statement of the cash basis of all Sister Monica’s monetary transactions, Peel felt that there must be some records of her personal expenditure. He could not believe that a person who had kept such detailed and elaborate accounts of the institution she ran could have refrained from keeping accounts of the spending of her own income. Peel sat and pondered. He had some money invested in a building society himself and he knew the current rates of interest. £12-10-0 for the half year—that meant interest on a capital sum of one thousand pounds, a sum which took a bit of saving, thought Peel to himself. Could she have saved it? Pencil in hand, he worked out sums on the basis of Sister Monica’s salary over a period of thirty years. It was obvious at a glance that it meant saving an average of thirty-three pounds a year over all that period. “I suppose it’s possible if she was one of the careful kind,” thought Peel, “and she hadn’t many expenses. But we shall have to find out how she paid it in, whether it was by little instalments at first and then bigger ones year by year, or whether it was in several hundreds at a time. Of course, there was the sister who died . . . She may have left her the money. That’ll mean searching at Somerset House.”

Peel sat and thought for some time, and by the time he met his superior officers, who had come to make arrangements for the inquest, Peel had a number of ideas to put forward, including the suggestion that deceased might have had “other irons in the fire”—further capital in addition to that in the Building Society.

The Divisional Inspector looked at the sergeant with a thoughtful eye. “What’s in your mind, Peel?”

“Two things, sir. First, I’m pretty certain something’s been stolen: an attache case or cash box, maybe. That dame—meaning deceased—must have kept personal records of some kind. Where’s her Building Society book, for one thing, and her chequebook or savings bank book? Second, when a woman’s told everybody she despises money and then turns out to have a nice little sum invested, I want to know where she got it from. Maybe I’m doing a bit of fancy thinking, but deceased was a very queer party indeed, to my way of thinking.”

2

The Deputy Chief Constable, the Divisional Detective Inspector, and the Milham Prior police met for consultation that evening. Major Rootham, who was acting as Chief Constable during the illness of the permanent C.C., gave it as his opinion that the whole case indicated dirty work, and not in one direction alone.

“Deceased has been paying ten pounds a month into the Building Society over a period of eight years,” he said. “The money was paid in pound notes, posted in registered envelopes. That is to say, she paid her entire salary in since 1943. Yet she must have paid out money for clothes and other personal expenses. This indicates that she had other means, of which at present we know nothing unless we assume she spent nothing but the interest on the capital sum.”

“I think Sergeant Peel’s got a suggestion to make there,” said the Milham Prior Inspector. “He’s only got rumour to go on, but it’s a very suggestive rumour.”

“Well, sir,” said the sergeant, “ever since the outbreak of war, when collections for various funds were run in most localities, deceased organised all the collections, apart from National Savings, of course. There were any number of good causes during the war—Red Cross, prisoners’ comforts, help for bombed areas, refugees and evacuees, to say nothing of the funds of the village institute and various collections in connection with the church. I’m told that none of these accounts was audited or examined by anybody in authority. Sister Monica was trusted to run the whole thing: she was so good at collecting money, and it saved everybody else trouble. Its worth noting that in the last year or so she has been relieved of all these extra duties. They’ve got a new treasurer for the institute, and the churchwardens have taken over all the collecting for the church. Now I’m ready to admit that I’ve got these stories from sources which couldn’t be used as evidence—but I reckon it’s worth looking into.”

“What you really mean is that deceased helped herself from the collections:1” asked Major Rootham.

“Well, sir, I believe that other people think she did,” said Peel, “but I’m wondering if she did a spot of blackmail as a side line. We don’t know yet what other investments she’s got. But one thing I’m certain of: she must have had some private papers in that house, and probably some cash as well, and we can’t find a trace of anything of the kind.”

“You think somebody in the house robbed her?” asked Rootham.

“I think somebody robbed her,” said Peel, “but it’s not easy to see how they disposed of the proceeds if it was anybody in the house who did it. There’s the three young servant maids. I wouldn’t put it beyond any of them to steal, but