“No. I’d heard tell her wandered…” Mrs. Venner broke off. She was quite unused to protracted arguments, and her distress showed in her face. Sergeant Peel had asked questions, but he hadn’t picked her answers to pieces as this London detective was doing.
“Do you know where she went?” persisted Macdonald. “Did she cross the footbridge or go into the village street?”
“I don’t know.”
“You sound very sure about that,” replied Macdonald, “but you haven’t answered my question. Why was it you didn’t speak to her?”
“Well, if you must know, her had gone queer. She’d changed like. Doctor said she found work too much for her and her wasn’t well. When a woman of Sister’s age gets overdone and won’t give up, her do get snappy and tiresome like. I knew her was queer.”
She broke off as she heard a footstep in the passage outside, and she said quickly: “That’ll be Venner, wanting his tea.” The door opened and a big grizzle-haired man stood in the doorway, looking at Macdonald as Mrs. Venner said hastily, “’Tis a detective from London, that C.I.D. they’re always telling of, and I’m fair moithered with all the questions he do keep asking.”
Macdonald stood up. “My name’s Macdonald, Mr. Venner. Chief Inspector C.I.D. There’s no need for me to tell you why I’m here.”
“That there isn’t,” said Venner, “but we’ve told all we do know to sergeant, and a-worrying of us isn’t going to make us tell no more.”
“Well, I’m going to tell you just what I’ve learnt since I’ve been here,” said Macdonald, speaking easily and deliberately. “The first thing is that though you knew more than a year ago that Miss Torrington walked about in the park after midnight, that fact wasn’t mentioned at the inquest on Nancy Bilton, though it certainly ought to have been. Second, when Mrs. Venner saw Miss Torrington out in the park late one night, Mrs. Venner did not speak to her, as you’d have expected a good neighbour to have done. Finally, Mrs. Venner says that Miss Torrington had changed: she had become queer.”
“Well, so she was,” agreed Venner. “Her’d got awkward like.”
“Very well,” said Macdonald. “She was queer. And part of her queerness was wandering late at night. You knew she was in charge of small children. Did either of you report to the committee of the children’s home or to the doctor, that the Warden had ‘gone queer’—was behaving in an abnormal manner?”
Venner answered that one. “Folks in village don’t go reporting things,” he said. “We live and let live. Life wouldn’t be worth living if us got telling on one another.”
“Live and let live. In this case it’s been die and let die, hasn’t it?” said Macdonald.
4
It was some time later that Macdonald came out of the Venners’ house, and turned down the path that led to the footbridge over the mill stream, less than fifty yards away from the Venners’ windows. Reeves was standing on the bridge, looking down into the swirling water. Macdonald went and joined him there and Reeves said promptly:
“I’ve no use for this idea that deceased hit the back of her head on that hand rail. She was too tall and the hand rail’s too low.” Macdonald nodded and Reeves went on:
“When a person falls in a faint, in my experience they more often fall forward than backwards, but if they fall backwards their head goes back first, of its own weight. If she fell backwards, the rail would have caught her somewhere in the small of her back. She might have toppled backwards into the water, but she wouldn’t have hit her head.”
“But she might have slumped down like a sack, weak at the knees,” said Macdonald.
“All right: that means she slipped into a kneeling position—you’ve got to fold up somewhere. The knees go forward, the feet back. In order for her to have hit her head on the hand rail she must have been facing the water, either up or down stream. If she’d gone at the knees, wouldn’t she have grabbed at the hand rail?—it’d have been almost a reflex—you grab at anything when you’re dizzy. In which case her weight would have gone forward, not back. Finally, assuming she slumped down on her knees and toppled backwards, her head still wouldn’t have hit the hand rail because she was too long in the back. You try it. She was only a couple of inches shorter than you.”
“I’m not sure that’s a valid argument, because a body slumps at the waist as well as at the knees,” said Macdonald, “but I think you’ve got one point. If she went on her knees first, even though she did hit her head somehow on the hand rail she wouldn’t have hit it hard enough to make the bruise described. There wouldn’t have been enough velocity. It’d have been a flop, not a crash.”
“The only other way she could have bruised the back of her head was if she fell flat on her back while walking over the bridge,” added Reeves. “In which case I don’t see how she rolled into the river without assistance. The bridge isn’t that narrow, and it’s perfectly steady.”
“Yes. I agree with you there.”
“We might offer a prize to any near-six-footer who succeeds in banging his-her head on the hand rail when they go at the knees on this bridge,” said Reeves. “Seeing’s believing. How much could the folks in the Mill House hear of what goes on out here, Chief?”
“They couldn’t hear any ordinary
