I found myself stepping nearer, as though drawn by a magnet. There is something hypnotic in such horrible scenes! And then I barely checked a cry.
Wendell Marsh’s dead fingers held a pipe – a strangely carved, red sandstone bowl, and a long, glistening stem.
Sheriff Peddicord noted the direction of my glance.
‘Mr Marsh got that there pipe in London, along with those other relics he brought home. They do say as how it was the first pipe ever smoked by a white man. The Indians of Virginia gave it to a chap named Sir Walter Raleigh. Mr Marsh had a new stem put to it, and his butler says he smoked it every day. Queer, ain’t it, how some folks’ tastes do run?’
The sheriff moistened his lips under his scraggly yellow moustache.
‘Must have been some fight what done this!’ His head included the wrecked room in a vague sweep.
Madelyn strolled over to a pair of the ribboned curtains, and fingered them musingly.
‘But that isn’t the queerest part.’ The chief glanced at Madelyn expectantly. ‘There was no way for anyone else to get out – or in!’
Madelyn stooped lower over the curtains. They seemed to fascinate her. ‘The door?’ she hazarded absently. ‘It was locked?’
‘From the inside. Peters and the footman saw the key when they broke in this morning… Peters swears he heard Mr Marsh turn it when he left him writing at ten o’clock last night.’
‘The windows?’
‘Fastened as tight as a drum – and, if they wasn’t, it’s a matter of a good thirty foot to the ground.’
‘The roof, perhaps?’
‘A cat might get through it – if every part wasn’t clamped as tight as the windows.’
Mr Peddicord spoke with a distinct inflection of triumph. Madelyn was still staring at the curtains.
‘Isn’t it rather odd,’ I ventured, ‘that the sounds of the struggle, or whatever it was, didn’t alarm the house?’
Sheriff Peddicord plainly regarded me as an outsider. He answered my question with obvious shortness.
‘You could fire a blunderbuss up here and no one would be the wiser. They say as how Mr Marsh had the room made sound-proof. And, besides, the servants have a building to themselves, all except Miss Jansen’s maid, who sleeps in a room next to her at the other end of the house.’
My eyes circled back to Wendell Marsh’s knotted figure – his shrivelled face – horror-frozen eyes – the hand gripped about the fantastic pipe. I think it was the pipe that held my glance. Of all incongruities, a pipe in the hand of a dead man!
Maybe it was something of the same thought that brought Madelyn of a sudden across the room. She stooped, straightened the cold fingers, and rose with the pipe in her hand.
A new stem had obviously been added to it, of a substance which I judged to be jessamine. At its end, teethmarks had bitten nearly through. The stone bowl was filled with the cold ashes of half-consumed tobacco. Madelyn balanced it musingly.
‘Curious, isn’t it, Sheriff, that a man engaged in a life-or-death struggle should cling to a heavy pipe?’
‘Why – I suppose so. But the question, Miss Mack, is what became of that there other man? It isn’t natural as how Mr Marsh could have fought with himself.’
‘The other man?’ Madelyn repeated mechanically. She was stirring the rim of the dead ashes.
‘And how in tarnation was Mr Marsh killed?’
Madelyn contemplated a dust-covered finger.
‘Will you do me a favour, Sheriff?’
‘Why, er – of course.’
‘Kindly find out from the butler if Mr Marsh had cherry pie for dinner last night!’
The sheriff gulped.
‘Che-cherry pie? ‘
Madelyn glanced up impatiently.
‘I believe he was very fond of it.’
The sheriff shuffled across to the door uncertainly. Madelyn’s eyes flashed to me.
‘You might go, too, Nora.’
For a moment I was tempted to flat rebellion. But Madelyn affected not to notice the fact. She is always so aggravatingly sure of her own way! With what I tried to make a mood of aggrieved silence, I followed the sheriff’s blue-coated figure. As the door closed, I saw that Madelyn was still balancing Raleigh’s pipe.
From the top of the stairs Sheriff Peddicord glanced across at me suspiciously.
‘I say, what I would like to know is what became of that there other man!’
4
A wisp of a black-gowned figure, peering through a dormer window at the end of the second-floor hall, turned suddenly as we reached the landing. A white, drawn face, suggesting a tired child, stared at us from under a frame of dull-gold hair, drawn low from a careless part. I knew at once it was Muriel Jansen, for the time, at least, mistress of the house of death.
‘Has the coroner come yet, Sheriff?’
She spoke with one of the most liquid voices I have ever heard. Had it not been for her bronze hair, I would have fancied her at once of Latin descent. The fact of my presence she seemed scarcely to notice, not with any suggestion of aloofness, but rather as though she had been drained even of the emotion of curiosity.
‘Not yet, Miss Jansen. He should be here now.’
She stepped closer to the window, and then turned slightly.
‘I told Peters to telegraph to New York for Dr Dench when he summoned you. He was one of Uncle’s oldest friends. I – I would like him to be here when – when the coroner makes his examination.’
The sheriff bowed awkwardly.
‘Miss Mack is upstairs now.’
The pale face was staring at us again with raised eyebrows.
‘Miss Mack? I don’t understand.’ Her eyes shifted to me.
‘She had a letter from Mr Marsh by this morning’s early post,’ I explained. ‘I am Miss Noraker. Mr Marsh wanted her to come down at once. She didn’t know, of course – couldn’t know – that – that he was – dead!’
‘A letter from – Uncle?’ A puzzled line gathered in her face.
I nodded.
‘A distinctly curious letter. But – Miss Mack would perhaps prefer to give you the details.’
The puzzled
