Free The Scandal at 23 Mount Street (An Angela Marchmont Mystery Book 9) by Clara Benson

outside the flat and conversed in low voices. Mrs. Marchmont was inside, under the watchful eye of a police constable, although she seemed to have no intention of trying to make a run for it.
    ‘So, then,’ said Scott. ‘It’s all looking clear enough. Mrs. Marchmont comes home from this ball—incidentally, we’ll have to talk to the people she was with to confirm she was there at all. Still, let’s assume she was. She’s just got home when her husband turns up for a late-night visit, having already dunned her for money and made a nuisance of himself earlier in the week. They have a row—she says herself that she’d had a bit to drink—and she gets the gun out of the drawer and shoots him. Then she panics, disposes of the gun and calls us.’
    ‘After presumably going to bed and getting a good night’s sleep first,’ Willis could not help pointing out. ‘She didn’t call us until this morning, and her bed looked as though it had been slept in.’
    ‘It’s easy enough to rumple up a bed,’ said Scott dismissively.
    ‘But why did she wait so long before she called us?’
    ‘Who knows?’ said Scott. ‘Perhaps she spent the whole night looking for somewhere to dispose of the gun.’
    ‘Easy enough to get rid of a heavy object in London,’ said Willis. ‘You just drop it in the Thames.’
    ‘I expect that’s what she did in the end,’ said Scott. ‘But who’s to say how long it took her to come up with that idea? I don’t suppose she was thinking straight. Or perhaps I’m wrong—perhaps she’s just cold-hearted and callous enough to have got rid of the gun immediately and come home again. Perhaps she slept the sleep of the just all night while her husband lay in a pool of blood on the parquet in the next room.’
    Willis opened his mouth to argue but closed it again. He was a good policeman and knew that he must not let his liking for Mrs. Marchmont obscure the facts, which, he had to admit, all pointed to her guilt.
    ‘I wonder what the money was for,’ went on Scott thoughtfully. ‘It was a tidy sum. I wonder whether he mightn’t have been blackmailing her. We’ll have to look into that. Something like that would be a big enough motive for murder.’
    ‘But she’d already paid him,’ said Willis.
    ‘Yes, but we don’t know whether he’d already cashed the cheque,’ said Scott. ‘Perhaps she decided to put him out of the way before he could do it. Or perhaps he’d come to ask her for more money. That’s the trouble with blackmailers: they never know when to stop. It might be that he pushed her a little too far, and she decided to put an end to it once and for all. I dare say it will all come out when we look more deeply into the thing. So, then,’ he went on, with a cheerfulness that was entirely misplaced, in Willis’s view, ‘I suppose we’d better take the lady in. I only wish all cases were as easy as this one. If we hurry, we can get back to the Yard and finish those reports by the end of the day.’
    Willis thought of Inspector Jameson, away in Scotland with his new wife, and wished he had been the one to take the call. But no, he corrected himself; the Jamesons were friends of the chief suspect, and the inspector would never be allowed to investigate this case. Willis wondered what he would say when he found out what had happened. It was likely to be a shock to everyone, he thought.
    The two men entered the flat and found Angela Marchmont and the police constable both sitting in silence. The other men had packed up and left, and but for the bloodstains behind the sofa and the hole in the wall one would never have known that a violent death had occurred here. Mrs. Marchmont looked up expectantly and showed no surprise as Scott announced that he was arresting her on suspicion of the murder of her husband and gave her the usual warnings.
    ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I didn’t do it, but I quite understand why you have to arrest me.’
    She stood up and accepted the coat