The Best Crime Stories Ever Told by Dorothy L. Sayers Read Free Book Online Page A

two, and so it turned out. It didn’t trouble me, however, and I slept very well.
    “It was a quarter to eight when Lord Aviemore woke me by coming into the cabin. He was pale and agitated. He told me that his sister-in-law could not be found, that the maid had gone to her cabin at half-past seven and found it empty!
    “I got up in a hurry and went to the cabin. The dressing-case Lady Aviemore had taken with her was there, and her small velvet bag lay on the bed, with her fur coat. Her purse, full of notes and silver, and her jewel-case were on the table, and by them lay a note, folded up, but without address, which you can see presently. To make a long story short, she had disappeared in the night, and there is not the slightest doubt that she found her grave in the Adriatic. The body was never recovered.”
    Selby paused, and unlocked a drawer in the table before him. He took out a lady’s black velvet bag and a folded sheet of thin ruled paper.
    “It was Lord Aviemore,” he said, “who found this note in the cabin, and was the first to read it. While I read it, he sat on the cabin-bed with his face in his hands. All through what followed—the official inquiries and so forth—he seemed scarcely awake to what was happening, and I had to do most of the talking. When I had brought him back to London, the firm wrote telling him about the will, which I had not mentioned to him for fear of upsetting him yet more during the journey. Later on, when I saw him about the disposal of Lady Aviemore’s personal effects and valuables, I mentioned that there was a handkerchief bag, with a few trifles in it. ‘Give it away,’ he said. ‘Do what you like with it.’ Well I kept it,” said Selby, with an air of slight embarrassment, “as a sort of memento. And I kept the note too. Here it is.”
    Selby ceased, and handed the note to Trent. He read these words, written in a large, firm, rounded hand:
    I have loved more, and been more happy, than is good for anyone. And it was through me that they died. Such an ending to such a marriage as ours has been is far worse than death to me. This is not sorrow that I feel; it is destruction, absolute ruin. My soul is quite empty. I have been kept up this month past only by the resolution I took on the day when I lost them, by the thought of what I am going to do now. I take my leave of a world I cannot bear any more.
    There followed the initials “L.A.” Trent read and re-read the pitiful message, so full of the awful egoism of grief. He asked at length, “Is this her usual handwriting?”
    “Except that it seems to have been written with a bad pen it is just like her usual writing. But now listen, Trent. I asked you here today because of your reputation for getting at the truth of things. Soon after the suicide I got an idea into my head, and I have puzzled over these relics of Lady Aviemore a good many times without much result. I did find out a fact or two, though; and it struck me that if I could discover something, you would probably do much better.”
    Trent, studying the paper, ignored this tribute. “Well,” he said, finally, “what is your idea?”
    “I’d rather not state it, Trent. But I can tell you a fact or two, as I said. That sheet, as you see, is a sheet torn from an ordinary ruled writing-pad. Now here is a point. I have taken that sheet to a friend of mine who is in the paper business. He has told me that it is a make of paper never sold in Europe at all, but sold a good deal in Canada. Next, Lady Aviemore never was in Canada. And the pad from which the sheet was torn was not in her dressing-case or anywhere in the cabin. Nor was there any pen and ink there, or any fountain-pen. The ink, you see, is a nasty-looking grey ink.”
    “Continental hotel ink, in fact. She wrote it in the hotel, then, with an hotel pen. But not on hotel paper. Yes, I see,” remarked Trent, gazing at the other thoughtfully. “And the other things?” he inquired,