Jack on the Gallows Tree

by Bruce, Leo

  “Yes. Two women who will not be kept away when they hear of this, a Mrs Gosport and a Mrs Plummer.” Carolus gave the addresses. “Then you say Raydell is bringing in Dante Westmacott and his wife? I hope he includes Mrs Goggs in his party and that you send Priggley for Thickett and, of course, the Bickleys. I’ll phone John Moore.”

  He found Moore rather uncommunicative. Nothing was said about Gabriel Westmacott, but Moore agreed to come to the Royal Hydro at six.

  “There’s a small thing I want you to do for me, John. Arrange for a letter to be handed in to me a few minutes after I mention that it’s coming.”

  “What letter?”

  “Any letter. Addressed to me in typescript. Can it be done?”

  “I suppose so. How you love your amateur theatricals, don’t you?”

  At lunch time Rupert Priggley gave him astonishing news. Miss Shapely would attend. She had informed Priggley that Carolus had been guilty of deceiving her, but in the circumstances she had forgiven him and arranged to leave her bar to Fred for an hour or so.

  Carolus heard this without apparent interest.

  “You seem frightfully blah about all this,” said Rupert. “You’re usually straining at the leash when it comes to the final disposal of evidence.”

  “I know. But this case is rather different.”

  “Expecting more fireworks?”

  “I’ve told you there’s a lot to clear up. I don’t know quite how much.”

  “Well, don’t produce any bangs. You’ll upset Maurice Richardson. He calls you ‘soothing’.”

  Carolus looked anything but soothing when he faced his heterogeneous audience at six o’clock that evening. He showed none of his flippant and easy-going manner, but appeared to be suffering from a strain of some kind. His face was set and rather drawn. Even the beaming pride with which Mr Gorringer greeted him failed to draw from Carolus a responsive smile, and he spoke to Mr Gorringer briefly and formally. He glanced for a moment at the small assembly as though to make sure that certain faces were among those present, then looked at his notes.

  “To your text, Mr Deene,” said Mrs Gorringer misquoting Queen Elizabeth I by only two vowels.

  “One of the first things I realized about this case was that it was upside down. Usually the motive for a murder is clear enough and the investigator has the task of deciding who is to be considered a suspect. Here the suspects, several of them, were obvious enough, it was the motive which was baffling. What motive could there be for murdering both these women? If it had been possible to regard them as separate and unrelated crimes, it would have been easy enough. Several people had motives for murdering Miss Carew and several other people for murdering Mrs Westmacott. No one appeared to have a motive for murdering both.

  “That, I saw at once, was the key to the whole thing. Find someone who would benefit by both deaths and all that would be necessary would be to dig up those bits of evidence which all murderers leave behind them.

  “Detective Inspector John Moore, with far more experience and knowledge of criminals and their ways than I had, very wisely looked for a mercenary motive. For if there was a motive at all, if the murders were not the work of a homicidal maniac, it must be mercenary. Revenge, passion, jealousy, hatred, fear, all could be dismissed from any reasonable consideration. Yet here one was thwarted. Unless it was for a few hundred pounds believed to be missing from Mrs Westmacott’s room, there had been no robbery and no one beneficiary was common to the two wills.

  “So there we stuck and might remain stuck for ever if the murderer could not be induced by some means to reveal himself. It was most frustrating, because there was a singular lack of clues on which to attempt a more simple and practical solution. I saw no future in looking for fingerprints or footprints or those convenient little traces which are so often left. In any case I knew that if a conclusion was to be reached through these the police would reach it long before I should. They are experts in that field.

  “Nor did I believe in the maniac theory. We know that a maniac may be enormously clever and cunning. We know that a homicidal maniac or a schizophrenic may pass for years as a normal person. But in this case I had reason to believe that the murders had been planned at least six months before they took place. There was a kind of calculation about them which was not the calculation of a madman. The very things that suggested madness, the lilies on the corpses and so on, were too deliberately bizarre to be credible as the work of a lunatic.

  “Realizing that gave me my first illusory step forward. Whoever had murdered these women wanted his acts to appear those of a madman. He had gone to great lengths to achieve that. And great risks, too. Admittedly he had stolen the lilies before killing either of his victims so that if he were caught in the theft he would be guilty only of stealing flowers. Yet it was a risk and all for something which merely gave a macabre touch to the crimes. A madman might have thrown over a corpse any flowers found handy—only someone wanting to appear mad would prepare for the murder by stealing special flowers for it.

  “Yet that still didn’t show me his motive. I was still baffled by that and I had the feeling that I should never solve the case unless I could find it. I ask you, if you will, to consider that. You may have guessed long before yesterday who the murderer was, but it could be nothing more than a guess if you did not know his motive. Guessing is easy, particularly easy in this case, but it has got to be backed by something more cogent. So that although some of you may be congratulating yourselves on having guessed correctly, I say that you have no reason to do so unless you see why he did it. I believe there are only two people in the world who know that.

  “It was a real puzzler and I almost gave it up. Mrs Westmacott and Miss Carew did not know one another, indeed had never met to our knowledge. There were certain tenuous links between them, but only such as must always exist between two residents in a small town like this. Both Mrs Westmacott’s sons had met Miss Carew; both women had sold old gold to the same bullion dealer on the same day. But what significance could there be in that? It brought me no nearer to finding a common motive.

  “I did not take seriously the possibility of the murders having been done by two different people working independently. It would mean the fantastic improbability that one of them stole a lily, murdered Miss Carew and disappeared for the rest of the evening while the other chanced to pass the stone quarry, chanced to enter it, chanced to find the corpse, and thereupon went off, stole another lily from the same garden and murdered Mrs Westmacott in the belief that whoever murdered Miss Carew would be blamed for it. That of course makes nonsense.

  “Nor for a number of reasons which will emerge later, did I like the notion of two murderers working in co-operation. This is an old gambit and stories and films have been made from it. In this case it would mean that someone who might be suspected of wanting to kill Miss Carew but not Mrs Westmacott had made an agreement with someone who might arouse the opposite suspicions, and each had killed the other’s victim, so that neither could be suspected of the murder he had committed. It sounds ingenious but it simply does not work out. In this case each would have made quite sure of an alibi for the murder of which he could be suspected and there was a notable absence of alibis among the suspects.

  “I did find the motive eventually, otherwise we should not be here. But I am not sure that I can explain how I came to perceive it.”

  Carolus stopped and re-examined his notes. For the first time, when he looked up his face was less clouded.

  “Let’s have a drink,” he said and called Napper, who had been put on duty for the occasion.

  Conversation in the room was not animated at this point. As Mr Gorringer pointed out to Carolus, he had told them nothing yet.

  “I have disposed of a few false trails, surely,” said Carolus between sips of his customary whisky and soda.

  “I told you my lilies would come into it,” said Mrs Gosport loudly. “He’s already been on about those and I haven’t heard anything of any
one in a cloak calling at the house.”

  Mrs Plummer, sitting not far away, smiled, seeming to say that her time would come.

  “Better bring another pair of those,” Charlie Carew told the waiter. “While we’ve got the chance. Don’t you think so, Ben?”

  Ben Johnson, beside him, nodded.

  “Speed it up a bit,” whispered Rupert Priggley to Carolus. “You’re spinning it out like one of your history lessons. And what about the questions you were going to ask?”

  Carolus ignored this. He had arranged that those present should be his guests this evening and was looking round to see that all who wanted a drink were supplied.

  “Go and ask Thickett what he’ll have,” he said to Rupert, “and anyone else who hasn’t got one.”

  “I trust this solicitude does not mean that we have some new shock to bear?” suggested Mr Gorringer jovially. “Ah, but I must ask no questions. Your health, Deene. We eagerly await some more substantive information.”

  But when Carolus resumed he seemed even less substantive.

  “I am trying to explain,” he said, “how I came to realize the murderer’s motive. It did not come to me in the way fashionable among modern detectives, in a blinding flash of insight. But it did not come through reasoning, either. I think it was when I had reached the brick wall I have described. All possible theories seemed out. And suddenly, yes quite suddenly, I realized that I was thinking exactly as the murderer wanted me to.

  “Now that was the point. The murderer had prepared for every eventuality, including investigation, both the expert investigation of the police and the more imaginative but probably less reliable kind of investigation of someone like myself. I was doing just what he wanted me to do—looking for someone with a motive for both murders and finding no one at all.

  “Then I saw it. Whoever had murdered these two women had a motive for one murder and not for the other and by murdering both he had cleared himself of suspicion. You see the point? If he had only murdered the woman he wanted dead he would have been discovered at once. At least he would have been identified at once and the evidence to incriminate him would almost surely have been found. But by gratuitously murdering the other he had covered himself. He had made the police and me and everyone else believe that either the murders were the work of a maniac or that someone must be found who had a motive for both. Ingenious? It was the most devilishly ingenious idea and it nearly came off.”

  John Moore sat staring fixedly at Carolus and unconsciously he slightly nodded his head.

  18

  “THIS discovery of mine, or if you like this notion, this probability, this theory, narrowed the field of suspects down to three. There were three people who had most evidently the traditional and sure essentials, Motive, Opportunity and Capacity, to do these two murders. I was irreverently reminded of the lines which I quoted to Mr Gorringer:

  … Three wild lads were we;

  Thou on the land, and I on the sand,

  And Jack on the gallows-tree!

  “Now, since two of these who qualified as suspects are in this room I feel I must ask permission from you, Mr Carew, and you, Mr Westmacott, to talk as if you were not here. An explanation like this can be of no interest if it has to respect people’s susceptibilities. I am sure you see the logic of that.”

  Charlie Carew, who had finished his pair of drinks, grinned beerily.

  “I don’t mind what you say,” he agreed.

  “Go on,” said Dan Westmacott.

  “Considering people we know as suspects must always seem somewhat fantastic, and murders like this in a small town in which people are known to one another, at least by repute, make it tough for the investigator. I do not mean that those three were the only possibilities, for Colonel Baxeter and Bickley could be said to have motives of a sort and their only alibis depended on the testimony of their wives, while even Wright had some kind of motive and nothing but the word of his fiancee to show that he could not have been at the two places at the relevant times. I also had to bear in mind the possibility that I was wrong in my analysis of motive, in which case others entered the field. But I decided to follow the theory I had formed and study the procedure of the murderer.

  “I examined this in some detail.

  “It was plain that he decided on his plan a considerable time ago, but like most clever murderers he avoided that greatest of all give-aways, hurry. A plan like this, though it might entail speedy action in its final execution, needed time to mature.

  “He decided, I think early, that one of his two murders would be an outside affair, the other would be done indoors. How quickly he chose his victim for what I think we may call the false murder I do not know, but again I think some considerable time ago. He fixed the date only approximately, meaning to leave the choice of occasion to circumstances. The two deaths had to occur in a single night and be linked by similar methods and appearances if his plan was to succeed, for they must be seen to be the work of a single agency. It did not matter which he planned to make first, the true or the false, and he decided to kill Miss Carew before Mrs Westmacott.

  “He had to find a place where the corpse would be discovered soon, but not too soon. It would never do for the corpse to be found before he had committed the second murder; on the other hand it must be discovered soon afterwards, or his plan would misfire badly and dangerously. So he hit on the quarry.

  “But how was he to get Miss Carew out there? He was fortunate in that about this time an unlikely event took place—Mr Raydell acquired an ocelot and was indiscreet enough to take it into the bar of the Dragon.”

  “Indiscreet!” Miss Shapely could not help interrupting indignantly. “It was simply scandalous. Poor Mr Sawyer is upset every time he thinks of it. If ever such a thing should happen again …”

  “Scarcely likely is it?” suggested Rupert Priggley. “There can’t be a lot of ocelots.”

  “Priggley!” warned Mr Gorringer, and Carolus continued:

  “Miss Carew was a lover of animals and as I heard from Colonel Baxeter frequently visited the Zoo. So when the evening came he could phone her (since he was acquainted with her) and suggest that they should run out to Lilbourne in her car and see the creature. He phoned from a call-box, as Colonel Baxeter observed, and while speaking to the Colonel disguised his voice. He made the arrangement, probably suggesting that Miss Carew should not tell her hosts at Dehra Dun lest they should wish to accompany her.”

  “A thing I should never have done,” put in the Colonel. “My wife and I disapprove of keeping wild animals in captivity.”

  “Miss Carew was amused and pleased with the idea, but decided to phone Mr Raydell to confirm that he had no objection. We know of both ends of that conversation, for the Colonel remembered her shouting as if to someone deaf and Mr Raydell told me of Miss Lightfoot’s reception of it.

  “Our friend was picked up by Miss Carew at some appointed place where he would not be seen getting into the car on that dark night, and since she had as usual brought her Kerry Blue terrier Skylark and this dog, as Colonel Baxeter said, invariably sat in the front seat of the car, he was able to climb in behind without seeming to do anything unusual.

  “On the way he asked her to stop for some reason, probably so that he could answer a call of nature, and when the car came to a halt he swiftly strangled her from behind, probably with her own scarf, perhaps with his. The dog did not realize what was happening and before he did anything else he chained the dog in the car. I imagine, since Miss Carew was going out to a farm, her dog would have a lead on him. Did you happen to notice that, Colonel Baxeter, when Miss Carew went out?”

  “I did not, but it was invariable. Skylark was unaccustomed to traffic and never left the house, even for the car, unless on a lead—a thin chain it was.”

  “Thank you. So the dog was chained in the car and the body could be dragged across without interference. In the course of that Miss Carew’s hat fell off and was found by Thickett next morning. What was more
significant, perhaps, was that Mrs Goggs heard the dog barking furiously. It is a pity that she had not a clock, as then we should have known the time of the murder.”

  “You can’t have everything,” said Mrs Goggs sulkily, and no one ventured to dispute this profound truth.

  “To return to our friend,” said Carolus. “He had made two important pieces of preparation. He was possessed of a black cape and wide black hat, and wearing these and dark glasses, he had taken a pair of shoes to be repaired by a shoemaker called Humpling. While in his shop he had stolen a pair of shoes, but he was intelligent enough to choose shoes of his own size. Nothing could divert suspicion from him better than this, for he meant them to be found near the body. It would naturally be thought that the murderer was a man with much larger or much smaller feet, for who would trouble to steal shoes to leave footprints which might have been his own? This bothered me for a time, but I was beginning to get his measure and see the sort of bluff and double bluff he practised.

  “The other thing he had done was, on the previous night, to steal from Mrs Gosport’s garden two stems of Madonna lilies, one for each corpse. They were to indicate that one man was responsible for both and with any luck to suggest a homicidal maniac. There is something very odd about leaving those funereal flowers on a woman you have murdered. They achieved this very effectively. As they were found they were, we heard, somewhat crushed. That was to be expected, since he carried them in each case concealed under his coat. He left one on the corpse of Miss Carew and drove back to Buddington. His first murder was comfortably achieved and he had only to carry out the second, a far easier matter. He left the car in the car-park of the Granodeon Cinema with the dog still in it, and either during the night or while near the quarry the poor beast badly scratched at the upholstery in its efforts to get out.