‘What line are the police taking?’
‘We’ve worked out what the movements of this Italian maid must have been, so now they are sorting out all the mental hospitals and any private nursing homes who may have batsy patients, to see whether anyone is missing. We’ve put out radio and television broadcasts on all networks, and we’ve got every squad in the country sorting out their own local loony-bins.’
‘You’re pretty sure the criminal is mentally disturbed, then?’
‘Must be. The absence of motive shows that. This last murder makes even less sense than the first two.’
‘You know, all the murders have taken place in this part of the country, haven’t they? And in each case there has been a connecting link, in a way.’
‘You mean the fact that none of the victims was English, and that there were those notices on the bodies?’
‘Not only that. Haven’t you noticed that, in every case, there has been a sort of tie-up with Mrs Schumann and with James?’ said Laura.
‘Don’t say any more over the phone. I’ll come along. Expect me for tea.’
‘A tie-up with Mrs Schumann as well as with James?’ said Dame Beatrice, when Laura had replaced the receiver.
‘As I see it. Mrs Schumann’s daughter was engaged to James and is killed. Mrs Schumann’s lodger is killed. James is a teacher at the school where this Mrs Clancy was the secretary, and this third dead woman was Mrs Clancy’s servant. Don’t you think there’s a tie-up?’
She put this theory to her husband that same evening.
‘Yours is a long shot and, in my view, an unfair one,’ said Gavin, when he had listened to her argument. ‘There’s nothing to connect either Mrs Schumann or James definitely with any of these crimes. I admit we looked at him pretty hard over the first one, simply because he was engaged to the girl and there didn’t seem to be anybody else in the picture, but, apart from that—’
‘They’d had rows, he and Miss Schumann.’
‘Oh, but, look here, Laura! Suppose you’d wanted to give me some gosh-awful tie, or a billy-goat or an overcoat trimmed with astrakhan, and we’d had a toss-up because I refused to wear it or accept it, would that mean I’d murder you? And suppose, on another and, actually, a former occasion, I’d called you a misguided little – what shall I say?’
‘That I would consider insulting?’
‘Yes. Well, never mind what it might be, but, if you took umbrage, you might (just conceivably) murder me, but it wouldn’t make sense if I murdered you, would it?’
‘You did say, though, that, in cases of murder, you always looked hardest at their nearest and dearest, and, in Karen Schumann’s case, her nearest and dearest were her mother and James.’
‘My dear girl, in the case of Karen Schumann, Phillips looked at the unfortunate Edward James until his eyes nearly fell out of his head. He got nowhere. In the case of Maria Machrado we have no reason to suspect that James so much as knew her. He only seems to have met her twice, at most.’
‘He knew that Machrado went there for week-ends and the Christmas vacation.’
‘But what could he possibly have against her? My chaps have never even looked at James twice, once we’d got on to this fellow Otto Schumann.’
‘Who couldn’t have committed this third murder, because he was on remand, awaiting trial, when it happened.’
‘I grant you that. I’ll go further and tell you a state secret. We’re going to let him go. He won’t come up for trial.’
‘I’m glad you’ve got that much sense.’
‘But, of course, he’ll be tailed. No jury will convict him now that it’s known he can’t have murdered this Italian woman …’
‘And is hardly likely to have killed his twin sister …’
‘And we don’t want to bring him to a trial where it’s a moral certainty he would be acquitted.’
‘So you’re going to wait for the murderer – and you still really think it’s Otto Schumann – to have another go?’
‘Well, be reasonable, my love. If he’s innocent it’s right we should let him go, and if he’s guilty we must get him some way or another. He won’t be able to get away with a fourth attempt. We shall see to that all right.’
‘By the way, you were going to tell me something about Otto Schumann being on his ship at the time of his sister’s death.’
‘Oh, yes. His guardian angel was working overtime that week, because, if it could be shown that he had had the opportunity to kill his sister, we’d be bound to get him for the murder of Machrado.’
‘Yes, I see that, but what did his guardian angel have to do with it?’
‘Plenty, according to information received. After we knew about the fuss over that Lascar seaman, my chaps naturally wanted to find out as much about Otto as they could, so as to strengthen their case, so we rounded up the shipping magnates who control that particular line and asked them for a detailed account of the ship’s – Schumann’s ship’s – movements as from the beginning of last November.
‘Well, they let us have a copy of her itinerary or schedule, and we thought we were on to something pretty warm, because on November fifteenth she was due in at Poole and was supposed to stay there a week, unloading and loading up again and having something done to the refrigerating plant in one of the holds.’
‘A week beginning on the fifteenth, and Karen Schumann was killed on the nineteenth,’ said Laura. ‘So what happened?’
‘Two days out from Las Palmas they got an S.O.S. from a Dutch ship which had started a pretty bad fire, so they were delayed while they helped fight the blaze, then they (and another couple of ships
