The Silk Stocking Murders Read Free Page A

excellent people in private life and devoted to their wives, are conscienceless, unfeeling bandits when it comes to news. Roger’s reticence was instinctive, but had he troubled to search for its cause he would certainly have found it in the fact that the Dorsetshire Vicarage would have enough to bear during the next few days without a pitiless and lurid publicity being added to the sum of their troubles. That, at any rate, he could spare them.
    It was still with the secret of Unity Ransome’s identity undisclosed, then, that he returned later to
The Courier’s
offices and, having obtained from the bespectacled one a copy of the photograph which had appeared in
The Daily Picture,
prepared to write to Mr. Manners and ask him, as gently as possible, whether he recognised his daughter in the portrait of the girl who had committed suicide in the Sutherland Avenue flat.
    Yet, seated definitely at the task, his pen in his hands, the paper spread out in front of him, Roger found himself quite unable to make a beginning. The paper remained blank, the pen executed a series of neat but meaningless squiggles round the edges of the blotting-pad, and Roger’s brain buzzed busily. It was not the difficulty of the job which prevented him from forming even the initial “Dear Sir” of the letter; it was something quite different.
    “Hang it!” burst out Roger suddenly aloud, hitting the desk in front of him a blow with his fist. “Hang it, it isn’t
natural!”
    It was an old cry of his, and in the past it had led to important things. His own spoken words made Roger prick up his own ears. He threw the pen absently from him, drew out his pipe and settled down in his chair.
    Then minutes later he struck the match he had been holding during that period in his hand. Five minutes later he struck another. Three minutes after that he applied the third match to his pipe.
    “Now am I,” communed Roger with himself, crossing his legs afresh and drawing deeply at his now lighted pipe, “am I getting a bee in my bonnet—am I getting hag-ridden by an idea—am I all that, or
is
there something funny in this business? I’m inclined (yes, most decidedly I’m inclined) to think there is. Let us, therefore, tabulate our results in the approved manner and see where they lead us.”
    Picking up the pen again, he began to cover the blank sheet at last.
    “Assuming that Janet Manners=Unity Ransome:
    “(1) Janet was not only a dutiful but an affectionate daughter. She was at pains to write cheerful letters home every week. She went out of her way not to distress her father in any manner, even concealing from him the fact that she had found work on the stage, because he probably would not like it. Is it not, then, almost inconceivable that she should have deliberately taken her own life without at least preparing him towards not hearing from her for a considerable time? The only explanation is that she acted on a sudden, panic-stricken impulse.
    “(2) So far as one can see, Janet had no possible reason for suicide. She had been unusually lucky in getting good work. Her object was firstly to keep herself and so save expense at home, and secondly to contribute to the Vicarage household upkeep. She had achieved the first, and she was on her way to achieving the second. Not only had she no reason for killing herself, but she had every reason not to do so. In short, on the facts as known, the only explanation for Janet’s suicide is that she suddenly went raving mad. This is in accord with the panic-stricken impulse, and both show that all the facts are not known.
    “(3) We know that Janet did commit suicide, because she tells us so herself. But in what a very stereotyped formula! Would a girl who had the initiative to leave a country parsonage and go on the stage express herself, in a note of such importance, in such a very hackneyed way? And what was she ‘sick and tired’ of? Again, this can only mean that we do not know all the facts.
    “(4)