The Silk Stocking Murders Read Online Free

disappointment.
    “I’m making a few enquiries, on behalf of
The Courier,”
Roger went on, toying delicately with the truth. “We’re not altogether satisfied, you know.” He looked extremely portentous.
    Miss Carruthers’ large eyes became larger still. “What not with?” she asked, her recent disappointment going the same way as her grammar.
    “Everything,” returned Roger largely. He crossed his legs and thought what be should be dissatisfied with first of all. “What was her reason for committing suicide at all?” he demanded; after all, he was more dissatisfied with that than anything else.
    “Well, reely!” said Miss Carruthers. And then she began to talk.
    Roger, listening intently, was conscious that he was hearing an often-told tale, but it lost none of its interest on that account. He let her tell it in her own way.
    Uny, said Miss Carruthers (“Uny!” mentally ejaculated Roger, and shuddered), had absolutely no reason in the world for going and doing a thing like that. None whatsoever! She’d had a slice of real luck in stepping into a London show straight away; she was always bright and cheerful (“well, as happy as the day is long, you might say,” affirmed Miss Carruthers); everybody liked her at the theatre; and what is more, she was marked out by common consent as one who would go far; it was generally admitted that the next small speaking part that was going, Uny would click for. And why she should want to go and do a thing like that——!
    In fact, Miss Carruthers could hardly believe it when she came in that afternoon and saw her. Hanging on the hook on the bedroom door, she was, with her stocking round her neck, and looking—well, it very nearly turned Miss Carruthers up just to see her.
Horrible!
She wouldn’t describe it, not for worlds; it made her feel really ill just to think of it. —And here Miss Carruthers embarked on a minute description of her unhappy friend’s appearance, in which protruding eyeballs, blue lips and bitten tongue figured with highly unpleasant prominence.
    Still, Miss Carruthers was by no means such a little fool as it apparently pleased her to suggest. Instead of screaming and running uselessly out into the street as, Roger reflected, three-quarters of the women he knew would have done, she had the sense to hoist Janet somehow up on to her shoulders and unhook the stocking. But by that time it was too late; she was dead. “Only just, though,” wailed Miss Carruthers, with real tears in her eyes. “The doctor said if I’d come back a quarter of an hour earlier I could have saved her. Wasn’t that just hell?”
    Wholeheartedly Roger agreed that it was. “But how very curious that she should have done it just when you might have been expected back at any minute,” he remarked. “It couldn’t be,” he added, stroking his chin thoughtfully, “that she
expected
to be saved, could it?”
    Miss Carruthers shook her golden head. “Oh, no. I’d told her I wasn’t coming back here, you see. I was going to tea with a boy, and I said to Uny not to expect me; I’d go straight on to the theatre. Well, now you know as much about it as I do, Mr.——Mr.——”
    “Sheringham.”
    “Mr. Sheringham. And what do you imagine she wanted to go and do it for? Oh,
poor
old Uny! I tell you, Mr. Sheringham, I can hardly bear to stay in the place now. I wouldn’t, if I could only get decent digs somewhere else, which I can’t.”
    Roger looked at the little person sympathetically. The tears were streaming unashamedly down her cheeks, and it was quite plain that, however artificial she might be in other respects, her feeling for her dead friend was genuine enough. He spoke on impulse.
    “What do I imagine she did it for? I don’t! But I tell you what I do imagine, Miss Carruthers, and that is that there’s a good deal more at the back of this than either you or I suspect.”
    “What—what do you mean?”
    Roger pulled his pipe out of his pocket. “Do you