Who Killed Charmian Karslake? Read online

  “No, thanks. I wonder if you formed any idea as to what nationality Miss Karslake belonged.”

  The manager stared at him. “Why, everybody knows she came from the States.”

  “Everybody appears to think she did,” the inspector corrected. “But in the course of my inquiries, limited though they have been as yet, I have still some reason to think she may be an Englishwoman.”

  “An Englishwoman,” repeated the manager, sitting down in his amazement. “I have never heard such a thing even hinted at. Her accent was distinctly American.”

  “An accent may be acquired purposely,” the inspector said. “Well, I will have a look at the dressingroom, Mr. Searle.”

  “Do!” said the manager, rising. “And, as I said, I will send her dresser to you. Should there be anything known here that is likely to help you, Mrs. Latimer would be the one to know it.”

  He gave them in charge of a boy, who took them by dark and devious ways to the dressing-rooms behind the stage. He stopped before one with Miss Karslake’s name on the card on the door, and handed a key to the inspector.

  “Please, sir, Mr. Searle said I was to give you this.”

  The inspector took it with a word of thanks and opened the door.

  The room looked small, but the inspector knew that it was large for the room of a theatrical star. It was dark, since the only window was high up, and apparently gave on to some inside passage. A large dressingtable occupied all one end of the room. There was a great mirror with side-wings that enabled the actress to view her face and head from all angles. Near at hand was a box of grease-paints, on the other side a case of brushes of all sizes, beside the proverbial hare’s-foot. Tubes, partly or wholly squeezed out, lay about in all directions with various little pots of colouring matter at whose uses the two detectives could only guess. Frocks shrouded in dust sheets hung on the wall, and a great dress-basket stood at the left-hand side of the toilet-table, but at first sight there was certainly no sign of anything that could help the detectives.

  Stoddart was smelling the great cut-glass scentbottle that stood on a shelf, with an assortment of lipsticks and different sizes of combs and pins, when there was a knock at the door and a little old woman appeared, looking something like the dame in a fairy story. Short and stout, she had bright, bead-like eyes that looked as if they would ordinarily sparkle with fun, but which today were filled with tears, while her pleasant, rosy face was drawn and lugubrious looking. She made a curious sideway inclination of her body, a sort of compromise between a bow and the old-fashioned curtsy.

  “Sarah Latimer, gentlemen, at your service,” she said, in a high-pitched, rather squeaky voice. “Mr. Searle told me to come to you. I was Miss Karslake’s dresser.”

  The inspector put his scent-bottle down and turned round.

  “I wanted to see you, Mrs. Latimer – to see whether you could help us. I feel sure that you, like us, must be anxious to clear up the mystery that surrounds Miss Karslake’s death.”

  “Me, sir,” Mrs. Latimer wiped away a tear. “I would like to hang the cruel brute that murdered her, if that is what you mean,” with a sudden accession of energy.

  “Quite! I understand. That is what we should all like to do,” the inspector said soothingly. “And, somehow, I think you can help us materially, Mrs. Latimer.”

  The old lady shook her head vigorously. “Folks that murder others don’t come my way, sir. Nor I don’t want them to, neither. If I knew who killed Miss Karslake he would be in prison now.”

  “That is what we all feel,” the inspector assented diplomatically. “But there is a lot of spade work to be done before we manage that, Mrs. Latimer. But now if you could just help me by answering a few questions – first, as to any visitors who came to the theatre for Miss Karslake.”

  “Which is soon answered,” Mrs. Latimer said hurriedly and ungrammatically. “She never had none at all. It has been a matter of talk with us at the wings that no one ever came to see Miss Karslake. At least, I tell an untruth. Odd times, folks have asked for her, but none of them ever saw her. The orders were that Miss Karslake saw no one, that she knew no one in England nor wanted to know anyone.”

  “H’m! Sounds pretty sweeping,” the inspector commented. “Queer thing too, such heaps of Americans in town. One would have thought she would have known some of them.”

  “If she did, she didn’t want to see them,” Mrs. Latimer said.

  “Well, anyhow,” Inspector Stoddart went on, “I want you to give me your attention altogether for one minute, Mrs. Latimer. Have you ever seen anything, do you remember having seen anything, any trifle however small, that might have indicated to you that Miss Karslake was not an American but an Englishwoman?”

  Mrs. Latimer did not answer for a minute. Her black beads of eyes glanced here, there and everywhere.

  “Ah, now you are talking,” she said at last. “Many’s the time I have asked myself that same question. For, though she wasn’t much of a talker, there have been things she has had to say to me, and there have been bits of speech she has let drop that I could swear had come from the Midlands. I am a Meadshire woman myself, you know, sir.”

  “Meadshire!” echoed the inspector, cocking his ears. “Anywhere near Hepton was it you came from, Mrs. Latimer?”

  “Well, no, it wasn’t. As a matter of fact, it is a matter of thirty miles away, I should say, right the other side of the county. But I thought it seemed strange like, her going down to Meadshire. The thought came to me that maybe her home had been at Hepton.”

  “Did you say anything to her about it?”

  Mrs. Latimer shook her head. “Miss Karslake wasn’t one to encourage questions. Ten to one she would only have looked at me haughty-like and said nothing if I had mentioned Hepton.”

  The inspector glanced at his notes.

  “There are two more questions I should like to put to you, Mrs. Latimer. Did Miss Karslake ever give you any reason to think that she had been married?”

  Mrs. Latimer’s tears were forgotten now, her smile became expansive.

  “It would be difficult to tell that, sir, with a theatrical lady. Most of ’em have tried it on four times, and there’s not many hasn’t had a shot at it at all. But as for Miss Karslake I don’t know. She never said anything to give herself away.”

  “Well, well! Some folks, even women, can keep their own counsel,” the inspector said with a grin. “Now, just one thing more, Mrs. Latimer. I have reason to think that Karslake was not the lady’s real name. Can you help us there?”

  “I don’t think so –” Mrs. Latimer began. Then she paused and hesitated. “Well, only this, sir, and I don’t know as it means anything. Miss Karslake wasn’t much of a smoker, not like some ladies I have known, but she had a cigarette sometimes, just to soothe her nerves, and one day I picked up her cigarette-case, after rehearsal. Real silver it was, and a monogram on the back. S.G. or G.S. the letters were, not C.K. anyway. I gave it to her that evening and she said, ‘Oh, thank you, Mrs. Latimer, I wouldn’t have lost it for anything. It was given to me on my eighteenth birthday.’ Then she looked at it again and turned rather red as she put it in her handbag. I think she had remembered.”

  While Stoddart was talking to the dresser, Harbord had been going over the toilet-table and its accessories, the frocks and the contents of the dress-basket. He stopped now.

  “There appears to be nothing here, no letters or papers of any kind.”

  “Which there isn’t, sir,” the dresser said at once.

  “Miss Karslake never had any letters here. At the stage door they were instructed not to take them in if any were brought there for Miss Karslake, nor flowers, or such-like. And I never saw her write a line from the time she came until the last night before she went down to Hepton.”

  “Well, it seems to me there is nothing more to be said. I am much obliged to you, Mrs. Latimer. If you should think of anything that might help us later on, you will let us know.”

  “That I will, s
ir, and glad to. Anything I could do to punish the poor thing’s murderer would be done, you may be sure.”

  The two detectives did not speak until they were outside the theatre, then Harbord drew a deep breath.

  “Drawn blank!”

  “Practically,” the inspector assented. “Just one trifle may be useful.”

  “Yes,” Harbord looked at him. “And –”

  “The initials on the cigarette-case. Once we find out her real name and can trace her life from the beginning I feel sure we shall discover the clue to the mystery of her death. I had this, this morning.”

  He took out his pocket-book and unfolded a sheet of paper.

  “If Inspector Stoddart wishes to know Miss Karslake’s address, he will hear something of her at Mrs. William Walker’s, 10 Moira Road, Victoria,” he read aloud, and then passed the paper to Harbord.

  “There is no signature. Nothing more to be made of it except that the postmark is Hepton,” the inspector remarked. “But I think we will pay a visit to 10 Moira Road and find out what we can learn from Mrs. William Walker.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “H’m, I can’t say Moira Road appears to be an exhilarating locality,” the inspector said, as he and Harbord stepped out of their taxi and he glanced round.

  Moira Road was just a short little street at the back of Victoria. Without exception the houses seemed to belong to the lodging-house type. Number 10 differed in no appreciable respect from its neighbours.

  The inspector knocked and rang, and presently the door was opened by a maidservant, who looked at them inquiringly.

  “Mrs. William Walker,” the inspector said authoritatively.

  Obviously the girl was much impressed. Silently she opened the door and flattened herself against the wall. The inspector walked in.

  “Let Mrs. Walker know that we are here at once, please. Show her this card.”

  The maid took it and then, with another glance at the inspector, she hurried off to the back regions.

  They heard the sound of talking and soon a tall, untidy-looking woman appeared. One look showed the inspector that the roughly shingled hair was fair, that the big, prominent eyes were blue; and a suspicion he had entertained since he had received the anonymous letter became a certainty.

  “You wanted to see me?” she said, glancing from the inspector to Harbord.

  “If you can spare us a minute or two,” the inspector said politely.

  “Come in.” She opened the door of a little sittingroom and motioned to them to precede her. “I have nothing much to do just now. And if I had, well – I should make time for you, Inspector Stoddart. I was going to write to you. I hear that you have been making inquiries about me in Hepton.”

  The inspector raised his eyebrows in well simulated surprise.

  “You mean?”

  “I am – or I was before my marriage – Charlotte Carslake,” Mrs. Walker said quietly. “An old nurse of ours, Ruth Heddle, is living in Hepton. I have always kept up with her. Dr. Brett spoke to her, and she let me know.”

  “And wrote an anonymous letter to me!” the inspector finished.

  “An anonymous letter!” Mrs. Walker stared and laughed. “I am sure she did not. She hates putting pen to paper. It is all I can do to get her to write to me occasionally and give me a bit of news about the old place. But an anonymous letter about me! Who could have written it? And what did it say?”

  “Only that if we wanted to find Miss Lotty Carslake we should do well to come to 10 Moira Road.”

  “Somebody Ruth had been talking to, I suppose.” Mrs. Walker dismissed the subject with a shrug of her shoulders. “It was about Charmian Karslake I wanted to see you. I knew her years ago.”

  The inspector’s eyes became suddenly keen.

  “At Hepton?” he questioned.

  “No.” Mrs. Walker laughed. “And don’t run away with the idea that she was one of our Carslakes because she wasn’t. No, I first met Charmian Karslake in New York six years ago.”

  “Before she made her name.”

  “Decidedly before she made her name. But do sit down.” As she spoke, Mrs Walker took the chair nearest her and pulled another forward. “I am sure you would hear in Hepton that I made one of those wretched war marriages,” she proceeded. “Like most of them ours was dissolved in a year or two. I tried all sorts of ways to get my living, for by the time I had got rid of the beauty I had married I hadn’t much left. Then I met Bill Walker, an American actor, and we got married almost as quickly as we managed it in the first case, and I went back with him to the States. Of course they made the usual silly row about letting me in – threatened me with Ellis Island and all sorts of things. But in the end we won. It was while we were at the Grand Follies that I first saw Charmian Karslake. She was just understudying small parts, and living at a cheap boarding-house, half starving herself and saving every penny to send away somewhere. No, I haven’t an idea where it went or who it was to. But she had somebody to keep, that is certain,” Mrs. Walker anticipated the inspector’s question. “Though she was so thin that her eyes seemed ever so much too big for her face, she was beautiful, a lovely, vivid thing, with hair that looked as if every strand was alive and flaming. And she could act too. I knew her chance must come and I told her so. But it did not come while I was there. My husband fell ill and I brought him home, thinking the voyage might cure him. It was too late, though, poor chap. He died before we had been at home a month; and I have been on the loose ever since, scratching for my living on the stage and off the stage, for we had got rid of most of our money before the end came for Bill. My brother, Walter, out in South Africa sends me a cheque sometimes and I manage somehow for the rest. I often think longingly of the happy and sheltered life at Hepton when I was a kid.”

  “I am sure you must do,” the inspector said sympathetically. “Tell me, did you never get any idea that Charmian Karslake came from Hepton as well as yourself?”

  Mrs. Walker shook her head.

  “Can’t say I did. We didn’t have much time for jawing, you know, inspector. Theatrical folks don’t. I just wish some of these novelists who write about the stage could try it for a week or two. They wouldn’t find it was quite all their fancy painted it. As for Charmian Karslake, I never heard her talk of her early days. If she did come from Hepton she took jolly good care to keep it quiet. But I tell you what I do think. I think she was a Britisher, as they say over the water. I am pretty sure from little things she let drop. No, there was nothing I can repeat or remember for that matter. There were just little things she would mention – flowers in the hedgerows – well, once she mentioned the Cotswolds, I know, but when I asked her about it she drew back and said it wasn’t the Cotswolds she had been talking of, it was somewhere in America and I had made a mistake, but I knew I hadn’t.”

  “Had she many friends when you knew her?” the inspector asked. “You will understand, Mrs. Walker, that we are out to solve the mystery of Charmian Karslake’s death and personally I feel convinced that the key to the whole matter will be found in her early life and in that part of it before she became famous. And we need your help.”

  “I don’t believe I can help you.” Mrs. Walker drew a long breath. “Charmian was not communicative. She was ambitious and she made up her mind to get on. She worked tremendously hard, and the only extravagance she was guilty of that I know of was that she had expensive dancing lessons from one of the best teachers of stage dancing in New York. As for friends, I don’t know that she had any. Nobody came to see her and she never spoke of any. No, you will have to go further back than that time in New York to find your clue, inspector.”

  “You have no knowledge of anyone having a feeling of enmity towards Miss Karslake?”

  “No. And I shouldn’t have thought anybody could have had,” Mrs. Walker said frankly. “She was just an honest, hard-working, little actress who kept herself to herself, which is more than most of them do.”

  The inspector took out his note-book. He wa
s not getting much assistance from Mrs. Walker.

  “What have you seen of Miss Karslake lately?” he asked.

  “Nothing at all,” Mrs Walker replied. “I said good-bye to her in New York when we came home, and that is the last I have seen of her. I wrote to her for a bit, but it was soon after that that Louisa Marillier was taken ill, and Charmian Karslake being her understudy went on in her place and made such a hit I didn’t like to press myself on her after that. And I had all the trouble over my husband’s death, so we drifted right apart. When she came to London I went to see her act and stood in a queue nearly all day just to get into the pit. I dare say she would have given me tickets if I had asked her for them, but I couldn’t bring myself to it.”

  “Did you find her much altered?”

  Mrs. Walker clasped her hands. “Oh, she was wonderful, glorious!” she breathed. “I never saw anyone so marvellously vital. You saw nobody else on the stage when she was there. She just dwarfed everybody. She would have been the best actress in the world if – if that vile man, whoever he was, had not killed her.”

  “Ah! I wish you could help us to find him,” the inspector said, looking at her closely. “Somebody went down to the Abbey, perhaps, who had reason to fear her.”

  “Well, I don’t know who it could have been,” Mrs. Walker said, moving impatiently under the inspector’s eye. “I should not think anybody had any reason to fear Charmian. If they had I know nothing about it.”

  “No.” The inspector did not speak again for a minute. He glanced at his notes, and made a few apparently aimless marks with his pencil. At last he looked up. “You know Hepton very well, I take it, Mrs. Walker.”

  “Oh, well, I certainly could not say that,” she re-turned. “I was only fifteen when my dear mother died and my brother and I left Hepton. I have never been back since and there’s a good lot happened to make me forget, though I will say I have a good memory.”

  “You remember the Penn-Moretons, of course?”

  “Oh, well,” Mrs Walker laughed, not altogether agreeably, “it would be impossible for anyone who had been at Hepton for even a day to forget the Penn-Moretons, I should say. They are the only people of importance in the place and they and their doings and their sayings are canvassed in every house you go into.”