The Case of the Two Pearl Necklaces by A. E. Fielding

Author:A. E. Fielding
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839740626
Publisher: Red Kestrel Books
Published: 2019-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

XI. A MOTHER’S GRIEF DOES NOT APPEAR TO BE OVERWHELMING

Mrs. Finch showed few outward marks of grief, to the chief inspector’s apparently casual glance, when he followed Arthur Walsh and Sewell into the drawing-room at Ennismore Gardens. She looked surprised to see Pointer with them, but without expressing it otherwise.

She turned to Arthur with both hands outstretched. “I don’t know how to say what I feel! Grief for poor Violet, and horror at the way of her death!”

He held her hands for a moment before gently seating her again, as he said brokenly, “I don’t think any of us can express what we feel about it, except by doing all we can to help Scotland Yard to see to it that her murderer doesn’t escape justice. Sewell, here, is helping, too—in his own expert way.”

Mrs. Finch seemed puzzled at this, but she asked no question; and Sewell had been told by Arthur, on their way to Ennismore Gardens, that she presumably knew nothing about the loss of any pearls, which had made Sewell give him a somewhat astonished glance but, like Mrs. Finch now, he had asked no questions.

“The first of the lot that’s a complete enigma to us,” Arthur continued, “is, what could have taken Vi to Mills’s flat?”

Mrs. Finch seemed to pause a moment before replying that, with Mills and herself away at Maidenhead, Violet might have made an appointment with some one there, thinking she would be sure to have the place to herself. Or, rather, knowing she would have—Mrs. Finch corrected herself. “For Mills and I were detained in Maidenhead all day until half-past four, when he agreed to buzz up to town for me, to ask Violet for some papers which I thought we ought to have. I know the exact time, because we compared our watches as to whether he could get them back to me within an hour and a quarter. It was just possible, if the road was clear both ways, and if Violet was quick about handing them to him.”

If Mills had left Maidenhead at half-past four, he would only have just been able to reach Ennismore Gardens at a quarter past five. It was a complete alibi, if it could be depended on. One does not as a rule suspect a mother of giving a false alibi to anyone who might have killed her daughter, but, apart from the fact that Mrs. Finch did not strike Pointer as being an ordinary mother, the man in question was her business partner, and he thought that, to this woman, the latter fact might outweigh everything else.

“And was your husband, Mr. Gray, with you?” Pointer asked now.

He was told that Mr. Gray was in Birmingham at a motor show there. He had been away some three days, and, except for this tragedy which would bring him home at once, would have been away for another three.

Pointer did not ask her as to what the relations had been between the stepfather and the dead woman.

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