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.’
‘Ah!’ said Roger, keeping his composure. ‘And how do you know that?’
‘It’s in a prayer-book of hers. I only came across it the other day. Would you like to see it?’
‘I would,’ said Roger.
Obligingly Miss Carruthers ran off to fetch it. Returning, she opened the book at the fly-leaf and handed it to Roger. He read: ‘To my dear Janet, on her Confirmation, 14th March 1920. “Blessed are the pure in heart.”’ The writing was small and crabbed.
‘I see,’ Roger said, and took a later opportunity of slipping the book into his pocket. Miss Carruthers had definitely established the main point, at any rate.
He directed his questions elsewhere. Like Miss Carruthers, Roger had been struck with the idea that there might be a man behind things. He dredged assiduously in his informant’s mind for any clue as to his possible identity. But here Miss Carruthers was unable to help. Uny, it appeared, hadn’t cared for boys. She never went out with one alone, and would seldom consent to make up a foursome. She said frankly that boys bored her stiff. So far as Miss Carruthers knew, not only had she no particular boy, but not even any gentlemen-friends.
‘Humph!’ said Roger, abandoning that line of enquiry.
They sat and smoked in silence for a moment.
‘If you wanted to commit suicide, Miss Carruthers,’ Roger remarked abruptly, ‘would you hang yourself?’
Miss Carruthers shuddered delicately. ‘I would not. It’s the very last way I’d do it.’
‘Then why did Miss Ransome?’
‘Perhaps she didn’t realise what she’d look like,’ suggested Miss Carruthers, quite seriously.
‘Humph!’ said Roger, and they smoked again.
‘And with one of the stockings she was wearing,’ mused Miss Carruthers. ‘Funny, wasn’t it?’
Roger sat up. ‘What’s that? One of the stockings she was actually wearing?’
‘Yes. Didn’t you know?’
‘No, I didn’t see that mentioned. Do you mean,’ asked Roger incredulously, ‘that she actually took off one of the stockings she was wearing at the time, and hanged herself with it?’
Miss Carruthers nodded. ‘That’s right. A stocking on one leg, she had, and the other bare. I thought it was funny at the time. On that very door, it was; and you can still see the screw-mark the other side. The screw I took out, of course. I couldn’t have borne to look at it every time I came into the room.’
‘What screw?’ asked Roger, at sea.
‘Why, the screw on the other side of the door, that she fastened the loop to.’
‘I don’t know anything about this. I took it for granted that she’d done it on a clothes’-hook, or something like that.’
‘Well, I wondered about that,’ said Miss Carruthers, ‘but I expect it was because the hook in the bedroom was too low. And a stocking’d give a good bit, wouldn’t it?’
Roger was already out of his chair and examining the door. ‘Tell me exactly how you found her, will you?’ he said.
With many shudders, some of which may have been quite real, Miss Carruthers did so. Janet, it appeared, had been hanging on the inside of the sitting-room door, from a small hook on the other side, which had been screwed in at the right angle to withstand the strain. The stocking round her neck had been knotted together tightly at the extreme ends. As far as one could gather, she must have placed it like that loosely round her neck, then twisted the slack two or three times, and slipped a tiny loop on to the hook on the further side of the door, over the top. She had been standing on a chair to do this, and she must have kicked the chair violently away when her preparations were complete, with such force as to slam the door to, leaving herself suspended by the little hook that was now completely out of her reach, so that she could not rescue herself even had she wished. This was an obvious reconstruction on the two facts that Miss Carruthers had found the door shut when she arrived, and an overturned chair on the floor at least six feet away.
‘Good God!’ said Roger, shocked at this evidence of such cold-blooded determination on the part of the unfortunate girl to deprive herself of life. But he realised at once that this version did not square with his theory of panic-stricken impulse. Panic-stricken people do not waste time adjusting things to such a nicety, screwing in hooks at just the right height and leaving every trace of thoughtful deliberation; they simply throw themselves, as hurriedly as possible, out of the nearest window.
‘Didn’t the police think all this very odd?’ he queried thoughtfully.
‘No-o, I don’t think they did. They seemed to take it all for granted. And after all, as Uny did kill herself, it doesn’t matter much how, does it?’
Roger was forced to agree that it didn’t. But when he took his leave a few minutes later, to write that letter to Dorsetshire which must now put things beyond all hope, he was more than ever convinced that there was very, very much more in all this than had so far met the eye. And he was more than ever determined to find out just exactly what it might be.
The thought of that happy, laughing kid of the snapshot being driven into panic-stricken suicide had inexpressibly shocked him before. The thought of her now, driven into a deadly slow suicide, prepared with such tragic method and care, was infinitely more horrible. Somebody, Roger was sure, had driven that poor child into killing herself; and that somebody, he was equally sure, was going to be made to pay for it.
NEVERTHELESS, during the next few days the case against the unknown made little progress. Roger received a reply to his letter from Dorsetshire which served to inflame his anxiety to get to the bottom of the affair, but his efforts in that direction seemed to be beating upon an impassable barrier. Try as he might, he could not connect Unity Ransome with any man.
He tried the theatre. Of any girl who had been at all friendly with her he asked long strings of questions, the eager Miss Carruthers constantly at his elbow. Under her protecting wing he interviewed stage-doorkeepers, stage-managers, managers, producers, stars, their male equivalents, and everybody else he could think of, till he had acquired enough theatrical copy to last him the rest of his life. But all to no purpose. Nobody could remember having seen Unity Ransome with the same man more than once or twice; to