Dead Man's Bluff

by Roderic Jeffries

  He was a smooth bastard, thought Clayton disgustedly, no shadow of doubt about that.

  *

  Riger was a domineering cross-examiner, using a heavy broadsword rather than a rapier. As he stared at Mrs Knott in the witness-box, he rested his thumbs in the buttonholes of his tail coat and spread his hands out over his large stomach. ‘You say your marriage was happy?’ he asked in tones of incredulity.

  ‘It was always happy.’ It was obvious she was lying, but she gained sympathy from the manner in which she faced him, very afraid yet ready to fight.

  ‘Can you really claim it was happy when you knew your husband was going around with another woman?’

  ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘You’ve heard Miss Clews testify that you saw her and your husband dining in a restaurant.’

  ‘She’s lying.’

  Riger leaned forward until his stomach was pressed against the edge of the desk-flap. ‘Did your husband ever spend a night away from home?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered reluctantly. Her hair was in some disorder, her face was badly lined, and there was no colour in her cheeks. She looked well into middle age.

  ‘How often would he be away at night?’

  ‘I … I can’t remember.’

  ‘Did he often leave the farm during the day?’

  ‘Yes, but … He had to do business.’

  ‘What business?’

  'There was market day and … and people to see.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘I … Just people.’ She gestured vainly with her hands.

  ‘Is it not true to say that in the last few months of his life your husband spent more time away from the farm than on it?’

  ‘Yes, but … ’ Again the gesture with her hands: a gesture that suggested the vain struggling of a trapped bird.

  ‘Did you know your husband was spending a great deal of money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yet you’ve admitted that the amount he gave you for housekeeping was cut down in December of last year and again in February?’

  ‘I just thought … The farm was doing so badly … ’

  ‘Your husband was often away from the farm during the day, was sometimes away all night, and he was spending money. Surely, in the face of this evidence, you must have been suspicious he was going out with another woman?’

  ‘I knew he wasn’t,’ she said loudly.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘He was my husband. He was a Knott.’

  ‘He was a Knott,’ repeated Riger, with heavy sarcasm. ‘Is that supposed to make him incapable of committing adultery?’

  ‘Yes,’ she cried.

  Riger wearily shrugged his shoulders. ‘Where did you go on Monday, the twenty-first of August?’

  ‘My friend, Miss Corrins, picked me up and we went to her home.’

  ‘And your husband stayed at the farm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What time did you arrive at Miss Corrins’s house?’

  ‘It was about ten o’clock.’

  ‘At what time did you leave her house?’

  ‘We didn’t leave it until the evening,’ she said, more loudly than she had previously spoken.

  Riger looked at the jury with an expression of exasperation. ‘Mrs Knott, you do your case no good by so obviously lying.’

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘Mr Jarrold has testified that you drove away from Miss Corrins’s house at about one-thirty. Miss Clews has testified you were outside the shop where she works at a little after two.’

  ‘They’re lying.’

  ‘Mr Jarrold has further testified that he was bribed to say you did not leave the house in the afternoon.’

  ‘He’s lying.’

  ‘Why should he lie? What possible motive can he have?’

  Tears welled out of her eyes.

  ‘I put it to you that it is you who have been lying from the very beginning. You drove away from Miss Corrins’s house at about one-thirty and reached Trighton at two. You went to the shop where Miss Clews works and stared at her through the window and the sight of her increased your desperate jealousy of her and hatred for your husband who was deceiving you. You drove back to Knott Farm, where you knew your husband was planning an insurance swindle, and you found him in the act of setting that fraud in motion. You accused him of deceiving you. You grabbed the shotgun off the wall of the store-room … ’

  ‘No,’ she cried.

  ‘You loaded the gun with two cartridges from the box you’d bought with his murder in mind, you aimed the gun, fired, and he crumpled to the ground … ’

  ‘Oh, God, I swear it wasn’t like that.’

  ‘And as he lay there dead, shot by you, you calmly set about making the crime seem a self-contained murder.’

  ‘No,’ she screamed. ‘I didn’t shoot him. I couldn’t ever have done, even though I was so desperate. I begged him to give her up, I pleaded with him time after time, but I couldn’t ever have killed him.’

  ‘Then you did know your husband was having an affair with Miss Clews?’

  She sobbed heavily.

  ‘Did you drive to Trighton and stare at Miss Clews through the shop window?’

  ‘Yes,’ she mumbled.

  ‘And you then drove back to Knott Farm?’

  She struggled to regain some self-control. ‘I never went back to the farm. I just drove round and round … I couldn’t think what to do … I was so desperate … She broke down and wept.

  The judge spoke. ‘The court will adjourn for ten minutes to help the witness regain her composure.’

  ‘My Lord … ’ began Riger in protest, seemingly oblivious of the very deep distress of the accused.

  The judge stood up and left the dais by the right-hand door.

  *

  Mrs Knott had regained a measure of composure and her distress was now only immediately obvious from the fact that she could not keep her hands still. Her eyes were red and puffy, but she managed to contain further tears. ‘I … I tried to find out where Daniel was going and who he was seeing, but he wouldn’t tell me. Then one day I went with Pamela to a restaurant at Craxley Green and … and saw Daniel with her.’ She turned and looked quickly at Hazel Clews, who sat in the centre of a row of seats, and her mouth twisted in bitter hatred.

  ‘What did you do when you saw your husband at this restaurant?’ asked Riger.

  ‘I … I left immediately.’

  ‘You didn’t speak to him?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to make a scene.’

  ‘But no doubt there was a scene later that night when your husband returned home?’

  She made no answer.

  ‘Did you at that time know who the woman was whom you’d seen with your husband?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you do about this situation?’

  ‘I … I tried to find out who she was.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted to beg her to leave my husband alone.’

  ‘Did you imagine such an appeal would meet with any success?’

  ‘Can’t you understand? I had to try.’

  ‘How did you set about looking for her?’

  ‘Daniel had told me she lived in Trighton when he tried to make me believe she was just the daughter of an old friend. I wandered round the town, looking for her.’

  ‘You wandered round the town in the hopes you’d just bump into her?’ said Riger, in tones of disbelief.

  ‘Can’t you see,’ she said pathetically, ‘that I had to try to speak to her?’

  ‘Did you ever catch sight of her?’

  ‘Only once.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘I saw her going into Central Station with a man.’

  ‘Not your husband?’

  ‘I don’t know who he was.’

  ‘Did you speak to her?’

  ‘I bought a platform ticket and went in, but I chose the wrong platform. She was on the other side for the Parqueton tra
in and by the time I got over there, the train had gone out.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A few days before … ’ She gripped the edge of the witness-box with both hands.

  ‘Before you killed him,’ said Riger harshly.

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ she shouted.

  Riger turned over a page of his notebook. ‘What happened on the twenty-first of August to send you suddenly to Trighton?’

  ‘I was at Elizabeth’s. There was a telephone call when we were eating and someone told me I’d find Daniel’s girlfriend working in a flower-shop called Carol, in Trighton. I drove straight to Trighton and went to the shop. I … I saw her inside.’

  ‘Did it upset you to see her?’

  ‘Of course it did.’

  ‘Did you go inside and speak to her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I … I wasn’t going to make a scene.’

  ‘But you’ve just told us that you wanted to know who she was to ask her to leave your husband alone.’

  ‘But I couldn’t do that in the shop … I didn’t know what to do. I went back to the car and drove into the hills and tried to work out how to speak to her without making a scene.’

  ‘I put it to you that you did nothing of the sort. Frantic with jealousy, you drove to the farm and shot your husband dead.’

  ‘I couldn’t have shot him,’ she said desperately. ‘Why can’t you understand? We were the Knotts.’

  Riger was not the man to forgo the obvious retort: ‘Your husband was a Knott, yet he had committed murder in order to carry out an insurance fraud.’

  She was silent.

  Riger thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘If you did not murder your husband, why did you bother to try to bribe Mr Jarrold to say you’d never left the house?’

  ‘I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been in Trighton searching for the woman. I tried to hide what Daniel had been up to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve told you. We were the Knotts.’

  ‘You were the Knotts!’ he repeated sarcastically. ‘Mrs Knott, if you did not shoot your husband, how do you explain the fact that your finger-prints were on the box of Super County cartridges and on some of the cartridges in that box?’

  She spoke in so low a voice that many people in the court failed to hear what she said. ‘When I got home on Monday, I found a box of cartridges and some loose ones on the small table by the telephone. I just put the loose cartridges in the box and the box in the case in the gun-room.’

  ‘Was this after you’d been told by the police that two men had been found dead in the store-room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you saying that you’d received the most terrible news any married woman could receive and all you could do was tidy up the house?’

  ‘I … I didn’t know what I was doing … I always kept the house tidy and so I tidied these up … ’

  ‘Incredible behaviour — for an innocent person.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ she cried.

  Chapter 19

  Clayton sat at his desk and stared out of the window. It was one of those October mornings when the sky was cloudless, there was little wind, and the air had a champagne sparkle to it almost as if summer lay ahead and not behind.

  The trial had been adjourned the previous night and would not now resume until Monday morning. Hapwood would re-examine Mrs Knott, closing speeches would be made, the judge would sum up, and the jury would retire to consider their verdict. There was little doubt what that verdict would be.

  He stared at the paper-work which had accumulated since the beginning of the trial, despite all his efforts to clear it. He ought to be dealing with some of it now, but he kept wondering about certain odd facts which had bothered him from the time each came to light. Assume both barrels of the gun had been fired in the store-room at Knott Farm, as the test had suggested, why were three cartridges missing from the box of twenty-five found in Knott’s house? ‘Alexander’ had not been wearing gloves when he left Mrs Wade’s, yet the van had not had a fingerprint inside or outside. ‘Alexander’s’ journey need only have taken thirty minutes, yet the van had not driven up to the farm until forty-five minutes after leaving the house …

  Could you believe Mrs Knott? Could you believe that any woman in the present world would ever set such store by a name? Could you believe that all her thoughts and actions would be controlled by the one overriding desire to conceal anything that might tarnish the name of Knott? He could. That was why it had always seemed to him that her guilt was odd, the first of several breaks in the rhythm of the crime …

  She had come from humdrum surroundings and had married a man from an ancient family whom she believed to be wealthy: perhaps in her imagination married life was going to consist of luxury hotels, private yachts, gay parties, Monte Carlo, royalty … When the years had taught her the bitter truth, she had been left with nothing but the name. She clung frantically to that, finding in it something which to anyone else had long since been lost. She was a woman who had lived for and by an illusion, even at a time when that illusion had been shattered. She had known her husband was utterly careless of his name and was having an affair, yet she had done everything possible to prevent that affair becoming common knowledge for fear the name of Knott would become tarnished. In her world, a Knott could not murder, even though a Knott had murdered.

  Suppose she had told all the truth and nothing but the truth? She had arrived home that Monday to discover her husband was almost certainly dead. In her shock — and perhaps some grief, because her husband would still be the romantic aristocrat she had married as well as the man who had betrayed her — she had acted automatically and had tidied up the house, her bitter frustration having resulted in her developing a mania for tidiness. She had seen the cartridges and the box by the telephone, had put the cartridges into the box and the box into the case in the gun-room.

  The murderer had shot Daniel Knott with a size 3 shot, a box of which cartridges had been brought to the farm. But anyone who’d visited the farm and been in the store-room would have known that in there was a gun, old but still in working order, and cartridges. Therefore, the murderer had never been in the store-room. Only Hazel Clews and Alf Shear would never have been in there.

  Hazel Clews would have known all the details of the proposed insurance swindle — those she wasn’t willingly told by Knott, she’d have wheedled out of him. She’d passed the news on to Shear, who’d found the forty thousand pounds irresistible. She wasn’t stupid, but Shear was far smarter than she. He’d realized there was a chance to kill Knott and make his death appear the result of a fight with Alexander, the non-existent commercial traveller. Shear had even been able to visualize the possibility that the police might discover these two deaths were not an ‘enclosed’ murder and so had gone on to plan that in such eventuality suspicion must fall on Mrs Knott.

  Four people had been suspects, three had had good alibis for the time of death: logically, this made the fourth person the murderer. But if one tackled the problem the other way round and said Mrs Knott was not the murderer, but had been drawn to Trighton in order to make certain she did not have an alibi, what then? Obviously, the time of death had to be wrong.

  Browland had been quite sure there had been no shot between ten past two, when he left his house, and five past three. The van had driven up to the farm at a quarter past two. But weren’t there three cartridges missing from the box, and hadn’t the van taken forty-five minutes to do a thirty-minute journey, and hadn’t the van been wiped clear of prints … ? Knott had had to make his departure from Mrs Wade seem a perfectly normal one, so he’d not cleaned the van down before he drove off, nor had he worn gloves. But because the van had to be free of his prints, he’d stopped somewhere reasonably near to the farm where he could park the van out of sight and wipe it clear. He’d been doing this when he’d been shot — with the third cartridge. The time? About five past two �
� which gave Shear plenty of time to drive over from the pub in Trighton, which he and Hazel Clews had left at about ten past one. The sound of the shot? Browland hadn’t left his house until ten past two and in any case, if the van had been a mile or so away from the farm and to the north of it, he’d not have heard the sound even if he’d been outside. As for anyone else’s noticing the shot, guns were fired so frequently in the countryside, and so many explosive bird scarers were in use, that this one would not have aroused any comment in the mind of anyone — except a poacher! — who did hear it, even in retrospect, since it was well away from the murder farm and had been fired an hour before the murder was believed to have been committed. Shear had put the body in the van and had driven to the farm. At the beginning, it had been assumed that Alexander had been at the wheel of the van as it went up the farm drive, then, when it was discovered there was no such person as Alexander, it had automatically been accepted the driver was Knott. But there’d never been any proof of this. The landlord of the local pub had been quite unable to identify him.

  Shear had been back in Trighton at twenty past three, which meant he’d left the farm buildings at about two thirty-five, had had ten minutes to walk to wherever he’d left his own vehicle, thirty minutes to drive to Trighton, and five minutes to park and get to the flower-shop.

  When the shot in the store-room had been fired and the fire had started, Shear had been half-way back to Trighton, so there must have been some sort of timing mechanism. Clayton remembered the two small fused lumps of brass that had been sifted from the ashes — brass eye-screws or cup hooks through which string had been threaded?

  He stood up, turned, and went over to the bookcase and brought out of it a forensic text-book. In the chapter on arson, there were descriptions of the more common types of mechanical and chemical time-fuses. Mechanical fuses were subject to the evil of all mechanical things — they could break down: chemical fuses were far more reliable. The list of popular chemical compounds was short — phosphorus dissolved in disulphide of carbon, sulphuric acid, potassium chlorate, and powdered sugar, phosphide of calcium, metallic sodium, and metallic potassium. The text described the use of these chemicals and stated that the simplest time-fuse was made by suspending a bottle of sulphuric acid over the potassium chlorate mixture. The bottle was sealed with a thin cork or thick paper, the acid ate through the sealer, dripped down on to the mixture, and then started a violent fire.