‘I don’t like exhumations,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘but if you and Dame Beatrice are sure of your facts, we certainly can’t allow this maniac to go on indiscriminately murdering innocent girls and women.’
‘Indiscriminately is not quite the right word,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘She does discriminate. Her victims have to become part of a pattern. As to her being a maniac, that will have to be decided later.’
‘Well, you can’t say that her behaviour is normal, my dear Beatrice.’
‘Neither was that of Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry and Joan of Arc – not that I am making any real comparisons, of course.’
‘I should hope not, indeed!’
‘My point is that abnormal behaviour, which, I take it, means beyond that which would generally be expected, seemingly beyond the scope of the general run of women – is not necessarily an indication of insanity. In any case, I doubt very much whether Mrs Schumann is insane in the legal sense. I am perfectly certain that she knew what she was doing when she did it, and that she knew that it was wrong.’
‘If she murdered her husband, though, that would not conform to the pattern to which you referred. Whatever happened to him, he certainly was not garrotted and then strangled. The doctor would have noticed it’ – he smiled ironically – ‘if that had been the case. Besides, all the other victims have been women. It doesn’t add up.’
‘Oh, I think it might. Herr Schumann was killed to leave the way for her to marry James.’
‘But James preferred the daughter,’ said the Chief Constable.
‘Yes, but he only became engaged to her in order to choke the mother off, it seems,’ said Maisry. ‘Putting two and two together, as Dame Beatrice and I have done, there could have been no commitment to the daughter until James realised that, in spite of his expressed distaste for her advances, Mrs Schumann was still determined to pursue him. We believe that she continued with this campaign, even after he had announced his engagement to the daughter, and I personally think – and Dame Beatrice upholds my opinion – that on the day of Karen Schumann’s death there was a show-down between her and her mother, and Mrs Schumann, long the toad under the harrow in what, to her, must have been a depressing household, went berserk and murdered her daughter. She half-strangled her in the cord of the dog-whistle and then (in a panic, most likely) finished the job off.’
‘Then, you mean, she set about diverting suspicion from herself by moving the body and leaving the message which was found on it? I see.’
‘There was no fake about the message,’ said Maisry. ‘She’d been told by her daughter that James had once called her a misguided little Arian. She told Dame Beatrice so, in order to direct suspicion towards James for daring to prefer her daughter to herself. At least, that’s the way it looks.’
‘It sounds quite feasible, I suppose.’
‘Everything else follows from it. Machrado seems to have been, well, a trifle kittenish with James in Mrs Schumann’s presence, and that led directly to her death. Again, the note left on the body was intended to incriminate James. “Hell hath no fury”, you know, sir.’
‘Quite. But, of course, Phillips strongly suspected James at first, you know. You are certain, I suppose, that he is cleared? You see, even if we get permission to exhume Herr Schumann’s body – and that may not be easy – it seems to me there is nothing to prove that, if Schumann was murdered, and ten to one you’ll find no indication of that, you know, James isn’t just as likely to have done it as the widow. You seem, if I may say so, to have swallowed his story hook, line and sinker, but there’s no more proof that he didn’t commit all these murders as that Mrs Schumann did. What do you say to that?’ He looked at Dame Beatrice. She replied:
‘There is one point – I will not call it proof – which indicates that James was not responsible. Once we had traced the source of the messages – that is to say, once we had worked on the connection between the nationalities of the victims and the heresies implicit in the numerals which formed part of the messages – it became so unlikely that James would have given such a pointer to himself that my own always very slight suspicions of him vanished.’
‘The murderer, whether it was Mrs Schumann or not, could hardly have thought it likely that you would trace any connection between the dates on the messages and the heresies with which they were connected.’
‘It took us some time to trace the connection, of course, but time was on the murderer’s side in the sense that, the greater the number of deaths she could bring about, the greater the chances became that we should come to the conclusions which, in the end, we did come to, and that those conclusions would automatically implicate James because of his studies in theology.’
‘I still can’t see why they don’t,’ said the Chief Constable discontentedly. ‘Well, if you’re both set on having Schumann’s body disinterred, we’d better get on with it. You’ll have to back me up, Beatrice, you know, if the powers that be are going to allow us to do it.’
‘As to why they do not implicate Edward James,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘there is the almost unassailable evidence of the dog-whistle which lured away Laura’s wolf-hound and led him to find the body of Karen Schumann.’
‘Be that as it may,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘I propose to leave no stone unturned before we actually get to the stage of approaching the Home Secretary for an exhumation order. As I see it, we ought to get in touch with the doctor who issued
