The Footsteps That Stopped (Musaicum Murder Mysteries). Dorothy Fielding

      CHAPTER 1

       Table of Contents

      "I THINK I'll go on up to Riverview." Chief Inspector Pointer, one of the Big Five of New Scotland Yard, laid down the report which he was reading. "Yes, I think I'd like to see the house where yesterday the mistress was found shot, the companion seems to've been endowed with second sight, and where a caller apparently dissolved into air."

      Superintendent Haviland stared at him blankly, and then around his own Twickenham police station.

      "The coroner's verdict was 'Death by misadventure," he said finally, glancing at the clock as though to assure himself that that was only half an hour ago. "Of course, as I was just saying to Mr. Wilmot here, the verdict's all wrong, but it was the only possible one according to the witnesses. Perhaps it's just as well. It sounds better than 'suicide,' for the relatives."

      They were talking of the death of Mrs. Tangye who had been found, yesterday afternoon, sitting dead beside her tea-table, with a service-revolver lying on the floor beside her, and a bullet from it through her heart. The Webley was a souvenir of her days as an officer in the Waacs during the last year of the war, and was kept on a bracket in the room. Her husband had explained to the Coroner that his wife had recently spoken of having her initials engraved on it. He suggested that she must have been looking it over with that in her mind when she had met with her fatal accident. The Coroner thought this sounded highly probable. There was no question at the inquest, or before it, of foul play. To say that there was no sign of a struggle, hardly did justice to the ordered neatness of the room and the dead woman. She wore at neck and wrist fine lace frills which would have torn at a touch. The very material of her new gray velvet frock was as spotless and smooth as when she had slipped into it after lunch. The bullet fitted the revolver. The only finger-prints on the butt were those of the dead woman. Apart from these facts, Mrs. Tangye was the last person to sit tamely in a chair and let any one press a weapon against her breast, as the blackened frock, as well as the autopsy, showed must have been done. She was a good shot. She had once in France put a bullet through a drunken Annamite's foot with most unrattled precision.

      The chair on which she was found was a fragile, gilt affair which she favoured for making tea. Any struggle, and over it would have gone. It was not so much as scratched. Behind her stood a none too firmly placed electric stand-lamp. It too would have crashed very easily. On the table beside her lay a china bell-push. The bell was in perfect order, and had not been rung.

      Nothing was reported missing. Her purse lay in her handbag with over five pounds in it on a chair in the room. The French windows were said to have been found locked from the inside. The servants were certain that no one could have entered the house unnoticed between four, the hour when Florence, the parlour-maid, had brought in the tea-things and seen her mistress alive, and six, when she had made the terrible discovery.

      No sound of a shot had been heard, and yet the revolver bore no marks of a silencer. It was thought that it must have gone off when some noisy vehicle was passing.

      All the friends of Mrs. Tangye with whom the police had been able to get into touch agreed that she had seemed in the best of spirits, and that the suicide was out of the question.

      She was thirty-five, and even the gossipy circle could not hint at any entanglement on her part.

      Yet Haviland, the Twickenham police Superintendent, did believe that it had been a case of suicide. For on the day before her death Mrs. Tangye had sent off a large trunk of clothes to the Salvation Army leaving out for herself only the garment she was wearing. And yesterday, the fatal day, she had spent some hours destroying all her private papers.

      "What on earth do you mean, Pointer?" Wilmot, the third man, asked curiously. "I've seldom listened to duller evidence. But I suppose I'm prejudiced. Naturally, as a newspaper man, I had hoped for something more worth while, more—"

      The door flew open. A young man dashed in. Nodded to Wilmot and Haviland. Shot a discreet glance at Pointer. Seated himself in front of a battered typewriter in one corner, and began a spirited imitation of a machine-gun in action.

      Pointer

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