“I thought that you looked one of the happiest people I’d ever seen, Mrs. Ferens,” replied Macdonald, “and you reminded me of a Gauguin colour scheme. I argued that since you looked so happy, the probability was that your husband was a very contented—and fortunate—man.”
Raymond gave a shout of laughter. “Good for you. I am—and likewise, I am.”
Reeves sat up again. “Climate,” he observed. “It’s all the thing these days—climate. Your climate seems based on a permanent anticyclone. Nothing in it for C.I.D. chaps. What the G.P.s call an uninteresting case.”
4
“Let’s try again,” said Macdonald. “Facts and the elucidation thereof. It was a fact, bitterly resented by Sergeant Peel, that the village folk were quite unhelpful, and they stuck to it that Sister was wonderful. I managed to get that one unstuck a bit, and they admitted ‘Sister had changed,’ but they still stuck to the explanation of accidental death. Not one of them was willing to divulge a single fact which could assist the investigation. In short, they didn’t want the investigation to succeed. When Ferens and Sanderson exploded the theory that deceased collapsed on the bridge, Venner was furious with them. I argued that the village had a pretty good idea, as villages generally have, as to what had happened, and the village was doing its best to protect somebody whom they held in high regard. And when somebody planted a very nice little piece of evidence in Greave’s shack, I realised that the feeling of the village was very deeply moved.”
“Tramps,” put in Reeves disgustedly. “Never try that one on. Silly jugginses, they don’t give the County police any credit for earning their wages. Tramps aren’t invisible. One of the routine jobs the County men are good at is locating tramps. They can pull the whole lot in any day if they want to, and check up on their itineraries, real or imagined. I don’t mind the village thinking the C.I.D. are mutts. After all, we’re strangers, foreigners. But they might give their own chaps credit for a little gumption.”
“All quite true,” agreed Macdonald, “and Venner landed himself within distance of a capital charge by playing fool tricks with that bag which he’d found empty in the river.”
“Nothing like feelings for making sensible chaps go haywire,” said Reeves.
5
“Let’s get on to Hannah. Hannah’s a wonderful character,” said Macdonald. “They found her uneducable at school, probably owing to the shock she’d suffered in childhood, but she’s capable of arguing things out for herself which most educated people would miss. She noticed the smell of spirits in Sister’s breath. After Peel had been to Gramarye, ‘poking around in what didn’t belong to him,’ Hannah had a look round on her own. She found two bottles of medicine tucked away on a shelf she herself never used because it was right high up out of her reach, and the shelf was in her own housemaid’s cupboard. Hannah did not know what the medicine was or why it was there, and she couldn’t read the labels, but she sensed there was something odd about it. Unfortunately Peel had spoken sharply to her and frightened her, and in her half-childish, half-shrewd mind she decided that it would be better to throw the bottles away. Maybe they were poison, and if anyone had poisoned Sister, Hannah didn’t want any bottles found in her housemaid’s cupboard. So she buried them in the garden at the first opportunity, thereby throwing a spanner in the works without knowing it.”
“The medicine being laced with absolute alcohol?” queried Raymond.
“Nothing of the kind,” said Macdonald. “The medicine was exactly what it ought to have been. And to avoid confusing you further, I’m going to start in on a straight narrative. Some of it you know already, some of it you may have surmised, as I did, and some of it was told me by Dr. Brown before he died. Here is the story. Brown’s wife went out of her mind, years ago. In the distress induced by this tragedy, he turned to Miss Torrington for sympathy and eventually she became his mistress. That is a not uncommon occurrence when a middle-aged man becomes very unhappy, and if the woman in the case had been an ordinary woman, the affair might have gone its course and been forgotten, as many such affairs doubtless are. But Miss Torrington wasn’t an ordinary woman. She was avaricious and dominating beneath her habit of meekness. She eventually demanded money, and got it. Having got it, she hoarded it senselessly, as a miser does hoard. In short, Sister Monica became a miser. This went on for years, and the climax was reached when Brown, having retired from his general practice here, determined to leave Milham on the Moor and go to live in Wiltshire. It was then that Miss Torrington overreached herself. She demanded that Brown marry her. Brown refused. Miss Torrington then told him, in the authentic accent of Victorian melodrama, that she would follow him wherever he went and denounce him for what he was. Now Brown was old and tired. He wanted to get away from Milham in the Moor and the domination of Miss Torrington, and the thought of her pursuing him was a nightmare to him. He had realised what she was really like, and also what she was capable of.”
“Is this where the ghost of Nancy Bilton comes in?” asked Ferens.
“Yes—as a ghost to haunt Dr. Brown. He had known all the time that Miss Torrington had come down to the river to meet him the night that Nancy Bilton was drowned. He used to meet the Warden behind the saw mill, because he would not have her come to his house to collect the money he gave her, and his heart was so feeble that he could no longer walk up the hill without exhausting himself. The longer he thought about it, the more
