The Silk Stocking Murders by Anthony Berkeley Read Free Book Online

Jewish cast of countenance, somewhere in the early thirties; and it did not need more than two or three questions and replies to show Roger that this was the fiancé to whom allusion had been made. Roger watched him with interest. If anybody ought to have known Lady Ursula, it should be this man. Would he give any indication that he considered anything curious in the case?
    Regarding him closely, Roger found it difficult to say. He was evidently suffering deeply (“Poor devil!” thought Roger. “And being made to stand up and show himself off before all of us like this, too!”), and yet there was a subtle suggestion of guardedness in his replies. Once or twice he seemed on the verge of making a comment which might be enlightening, but always he pulled himself up in time. He carried his loss with a dignity of sorrow which reminded Roger of Anne’s bearing in the garden when he had first told her of his suspicions; but it was clear that there were points upon which he was completely puzzled, the main one being why his fiancée should have committed suicide at all.
    “She never, gave me the faintest indication,” he said in a low voice, in answer to some question of the Coroner’s. “She seemed perfectly happy, always.” He spoke rather like a small boy who had been whipped and sent to bed for something which for the life of him he can’t understand to be a crime at all.
    The Coroner was dealing with him as sympathetically as possible, but there were some questions that had to be asked. “You have heard that she was in the habit of saying that she was bored stiff with life. Did she say that to you?”
    “Often,” replied the other, with a wan imitation of a smile. “She frequently said things like that. It was her pose. At least,” he added, so low that Roger could hardly hear, “we thought it was her pose.”
    “You were to have been married the month after next in June?”
    “Yes.”
    The Coroner consulted a paper in his hand. “Now, on the night in question you went to a theatre, I understand, and afterwards to your club?”
    “That is so.”
    “You therefore did not see Lady Ursula at all that evening?”
    “No.”
    “So you cannot speak as to her state of mind after five o’clock, when you left her after tea?”
    “No. But it was nearer half-past five when I left her.”
    “Quite so. Now you have heard the other witnesses who spent the evening with her. Do you agree that she was in her usual health and spirits when you saw her at tea-time?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “She gave you no indication that anything might be on her mind?”
    “None whatever.”
    “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mr. Pleydell. I know how distressing this must be for you. I’ll just ask you finally: can you tell us anything which might shed light on the reason why Lady Ursula should have taken her own life?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t,” said the other, in the same low, composed voice as that in which he had given all the rest of his evidence; and he added, with unexpected emotion: “I wish to God I could!”
    “He
does
think there’s something funny about it,” was Roger’s comment to himself, as Pleydell stepped down. “Not merely why she should have done such a thing at all, but some of those other little points as well. I wonder—I
wonder
what Moresby’s here for!”
    During the next twenty minutes nothing of importance emerged. The Coroner was evidently trying to make the case as little painful for the Dowager Countess and Pleydell as possible, and since it was apparently so straightforward there was no point in spinning out the proceedings. The jury must have thought the same, for their verdict came pat: “Suicide during temporary insanity caused by the unnatural conditions of modern life.” Which was a kind way of putting “Lady Ursula’s life.”
    There was first the hush and then the little stir which always succeeds the delivery of a verdict, and the densely packed court began slowly to