Anthony Berkeley – The Silk Stocking Murders (страница 5)

Chorus-girls (or chorus ladies, as they call themselves nowadays) are divided into three types, the pert, the pretty and the proud, and of these the last are quite the most fell of all created beings. Roger was relieved to see that Miss Carruthers, with her very golden hair and her round, babyish face, was quite definitely of the pretty type, and therefore not to be feared.

‘Oh!’ said Miss Carruthers prettily, and looked at him in dainty alarm. Strange men on her stairs were, it was to be gathered, one of the most terrifying phenomena in Miss Carruthers’ helpless young life.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Roger, suiting his smile to his company. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but could you spare me a few minutes, Miss Carruthers?’

‘Oh!’ fluttered Miss Carruthers again. ‘Was it—was it very important?’

‘I am connected with The Daily Courier,’ said Roger.

‘Come inside,’ said Miss Carruthers.

They passed into a sitting-room, the furniture of which was only too evidently supplied with the room. Roger was ensconced in a worn armchair, Miss Carruthers perched charmingly on the arm of an ancient couch. ‘Yes?’ sighed Miss Carruthers.

Roger came to the point at once. ‘It’s about Miss Ransome,’ he said bluntly.

‘Oh!’ said Miss Carruthers, valiantly concealing her disappointment.

‘I’m making a few enquiries, on behalf of The Courier,’ Roger went on, toying delicately with the truth. ‘We’re not altogether satisfied, you know.’ He looked extremely portentous.

Miss Carruthers’ large eyes became larger still. ‘What not with?’ she asked, her recent disappointment going the same way as her grammar.

‘Everything,’ returned Roger largely. He crossed his legs and thought what he should be dissatisfied with first of all. ‘What was her reason for committing suicide at all?’ he demanded; after all, he was more dissatisfied with that than anything else.

‘Well, reely!’ said Miss Carruthers. And then she began to talk.

Roger, listening intently, was conscious that he was hearing an often-told tale, but it lost none of its interest on that account. He let her tell it in her own way.

Uny, said Miss Carruthers (‘Uny’! mentally ejaculated Roger, and shuddered), had absolutely no reason in the world for going and doing a thing like that. None whatsoever! She’d had a slice of real luck in stepping into a London show straight away; she was always bright and cheerful (‘well, as happy as the day is long, you might say,’ affirmed Miss Carruthers); everybody liked her at the theatre; and what is more, she was marked out by common consent as one who would go far; it was generally admitted that the next small speaking part that was going, Uny would click for. And why she should want to go and do a thing like that—!

In fact, Miss Carruthers could hardly believe it when she came in that afternoon and saw her. Hanging on the hook on the bedroom door, she was, with her stocking round her neck, and looking—well, it very nearly turned Miss Carruthers up just to see her. Horrible! She wouldn’t describe it, not for worlds; it made her feel really ill just to think of it.—And here Miss Carruthers embarked on a minute description of her unhappy friend’s appearance, in which protruding eyeballs, blue lips and bitten tongue figured with highly unpleasant prominence.

Still, Miss Carruthers was by no means such a little fool as it apparently pleased her to suggest. Instead of screaming and running uselessly out into the street as, Roger reflected, three-quarters of the women he knew would have done, she had the sense to hoist Janet somehow up on to her shoulders and unhook the stocking. But by that time it was too late; she was dead. ‘Only just, though,’ wailed Miss Carruthers, with real tears in her eyes. ‘The doctor said if I’d come back a quarter of an hour earlier I could have saved her. Wasn’t that just hell?’

Wholeheartedly Roger agreed that it was. ‘But how very curious that she should have done it just when you might have been expected back at any minute,’ he remarked. ‘It couldn’t be,’ he added, stroking his chin thoughtfully, ‘that she expected to be saved, could it?’

Miss Carruthers shook her golden head. ‘Oh, no I’d told her I wasn’t coming back here, you see. I was going to tea with a boy, and I said to Uny not to expect me; I’d go straight on to the theatre. Well, now you know as much about it as I do, Mr—Mr—’

‘Sheringham.’

‘Mr Sheringham. And what do you imagine she wanted to go and do it for? Oh, poor old Uny! I tell you, Mr Sheringham, I can hardly bear to stay in the place now. I wouldn’t, if I could only get decent digs somewhere else, which I can’t.’

Roger looked at the little person sympathetically. The tears were streaming unashamedly down her cheeks, and it was quite plain that, however artificial she might be in other respects, her feeling for her dead friend was genuine enough. He spoke on impulse.

‘What do I imagine she did it for? I don’t! But I tell you what I do imagine, Miss Carruthers, and that is that there’s a good deal more at the back of this than either you or I suspect.’

‘What—what do you mean?’

Roger pulled his pipe out of his pocket. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked, gaining a few seconds. He had to take a swift decision. Should he or should he not take this fluffy little creature into his confidence? Would she be a help or a hindrance? Was she a complete little fool who had had a single sensible moment, or was her apparent empty-headedness a pose adopted for the benefit of the other sex? Most of the men with whom she would come in contact, Roger was painfully aware, do prefer their women to be empty-headed. He compromised: he would take her just so far as he could into his own confidence without betraying that of others.

‘I mean,’ he said carefully, as he filled his pipe, ‘that so far as I’ve been able to gather, Miss Ransome was not the sort of girl to commit suicide—’

‘That she wasn’t!’ interjected Miss Carruthers, almost violently.

‘—and that as she did so, she was driven into it by forces which, to say the least, must have been overwhelming. And I mean to make it my business to find out what those forces were.’

‘Oh! Oh, yes. You mean—?’

‘For the moment,’ said Roger firmly, ‘nothing more than that.’

They looked at each other for a moment in silence. Then Miss Carruthers said an unexpected thing.

‘You belong to The Courier?’ she asked, in a hesitating voice. ‘You’re doing this for them? You’re going to publish everything you find out, whether—whether Uny would have liked it or not?’

Roger found himself liking her more and more. ‘No!’ he said frankly. ‘I am connected with The Courier, but I’m not on it. I’m going to do this off my own bat, and I give you my word that nothing shall be published at all that doesn’t reflect to the credit of Miss Ransome—and perhaps not even then. You mean, of course, that you wouldn’t help me, except on those terms?’

Miss Carruthers nodded. ‘I’ve got a duty to Uny, and I’m not going to have any mud slung at her, whether she deserves it or not. But if you’ll promise that, I’ll help you all I can. Because believe me, Mr Sheringham,’ added Miss Carruthers passionately, ‘if there’s some damned skunk of a man at the bottom of this (as I’ve thought more than once there might be), I’d give everything I’ve got in the world to see him served as he served poor old Uny.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ Roger said easily. The worst of the theatre, he reflected, is that it does make its participants so dramatic; and drama in private life is worse than immorality. ‘We’ll shake hands on that bargain.’

‘Look here,’ said Miss Carruthers, doffing her emotional robe as swiftly as she had donned it, ‘look here, I tell you what. You wait here and smoke while I make us a cup of tea, and then we’ll talk as much as you like. And I have got one or two things to tell you,’ she added darkly, ‘that you might like to hear.’

Roger agreed with alacrity. He had often noticed that there is nothing like tea to loosen a woman’s tongue; not even alcohol.

In a surprisingly short time for so helpless-looking a person, Miss Carruthers returned with the tea-tray, which Roger took from her at the door. They settled down, Miss Carruthers poured out, and Roger at last felt that the time was ripe to embark on the series of questions which he had really come to ask.

Miss Carruthers answered readily enough, leaning back in her chair with a cigarette between lips which even now must occasionally pout. Indeed, she answered too readily. Nevertheless, from the mass of her verbiage Roger was able to pick a few new facts.

In the main her replies bore out the brief account of her evidence at the inquest, though at very much greater length, and Miss Carruthers dwelt upon her theory that her friend was ‘a cut above the rest of us, as you might say. A real lady, instead of only a perfect one.’ To Roger’s carefully worded queries as to any indication of Unity Ransome’s real identity, Miss Carruthers was at first vague. Then she produced, in a haphazard way, the most important point she had yet contributed.

‘All I can say,’ said Miss Carruthers, ‘is that her name may have been Janet, or she might have had a friend called Janet, or something like that.’