Murder at the Manor

by Martin Edwards

  “Are you there, Wynn?” he demanded, in high-strung irritation. “What the devil’s happening? Aynosforde hasn’t left his room, we’ll swear, but hasn’t the iodide gone off?”

  “The iodide has gone off and Aynosforde has left his room, though not by the door. Possibly he is back in it by now.”

  “The deuce!” exclaimed Tulloch blankly. “What am I to do?”

  “Return—” began Carrados, but before he could say more there was a confused noise and a shout outside the window.

  “We are saved further uncertainty,” said the blind man. “He has thrown himself down into the moat.”

  “He will be drowned!”

  “Not if Swarbrick put the drag-rake where he was instructed, and if those keepers are even passably expert,” replied Carrados imperturbably. “After all, drowning…But perhaps you had better go and see, Jim.”

  In a few minutes men began to return to the dining hall as though where the blind man was constituted their headquarters. Colonel Aynosforde and Parkinson were the first, and immediately afterwards Swarbrick entered from the opposite side, bringing a light.

  “They’ve got him out,” exclaimed the Colonel. “Upon my word, I don’t know whether it’s for the best or the worst, Mr Carrados.” He turned to the butler, who was lighting one after another of the candles of the great hanging centre-pieces. “Did you know anything of a secret passage giving access to these stairs, Swarbrick?” he inquired.

  “Not personally, sir,” replied Swarbrick, “but we always understood that formerly there was a passage and hiding chamber somewhere, though the positions had been lost. We last had occasion to use it when we were defeated at Naseby, sir.”

  Carrados had walked to the stairs and was examining the wall.

  “This would be the principal stairway then?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, until we removed the Elizabethan gallery when we restored in 1712.”

  “It is on the same plan as the ‘Priest’s Chamber’ at Lapwood. If you investigate in the daylight, Colonel Aynosforde, you will find that you command a view of both bridges when the stone is open. Very convenient sometimes, I dare say.”

  “Very, very,” assented the Colonel absently. “Every moment,” he explained, “I am dreading that Aunt Eleanor will make her appearance. She must have been disturbed.”

  “Oh, I took that into account,” said Tulloch, catching the remark as he put his head in at the door and looked round. “I recommended a sleeping draught when I was here this—no, last evening. We have got our man in all right now,” he continued, “and if we can have a dry suit—”

  “I will accompany you, sir,” said Swarbrick.

  “Is he—violent?” asked the Colonel, dropping his voice.

  “Violent? Well,” admitted Tulloch, holding out two dripping objects that he had been carrying, “we thought it just as well to cut his boots off.” He threw them down in a corner and followed the butler out of the room.

  Carrados took two pieces of shaped white paper from his pocket and ran his fingers round the outlines. Then he picked up Dunstan Aynosforde’s boots and submitted them to a similar scrutiny.

  “Very exact, Parkinson,” he remarked approvingly.

  “Thank you, sir,” replied Parkinson with modest pride.

  The Manor House Mystery

  J. S. Fletcher

  Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863–1935) was born in Yorkshire, and worked there as a newspaperman before relocating to London, where he established himself as a hard-working novelist. His reputation received a powerful boost when President Woodrow Wilson expressed his enthusiasm for The Middle Temple Murder, and Fletcher continued to write crime novels until his death, although by then his fame had been superseded by that of younger authors, notably Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

  Fletcher never lost his love of north England; he set a good deal of his fiction there, and his recurrent characters included the Yorkshireman Archer Dawe (“the famous amateur detective, expert criminologist, a human ferret.”) Fletcher was as prolific a writer of short stories as he was of novels, and although sometimes quantity came at the expense of quality, at his best he was one of the most entertaining authors of popular fiction of his day.

  ***

  1

  Misadventure—Or Murder?

  In a private sitting-room of an old-fashioned country town hotel, a man sat at a writing-desk absent-mindedly drawing unmeaning scrawls on a blotting-pad. On the table in the centre of the room lay the remains of the last course of a simple dinner; he himself had almost forgotten that he had eaten any dinner. In fact, he had left untouched most of what he had last taken on his plate—in the middle of a spoonful of apple-tart he had got up from his chair to walk up and down the room, thinking, speculating, racking his brain; just as abstractedly he had sat down at the desk, to lay hand on a pen, and begin to scribble lines and curves. He went on scribbling lines and curves and circles and various hieroglyphics, until an old waiter came in and laid the evening newspaper at his side. He started then and looked up, and the waiter glanced at the table.

  “You can clear away,” said the absent-minded man. “I’ve finished.”

  He remained where he was until the table had been cleared and he was once more alone; then he turned his chair to the fire, put his slippered feet on the fender, and picked up the paper. It was a small, four-page sheet, printed at the county town twenty miles away, and it contained little news which had not already appeared in the morning journals. The man turned it over with listless indifference, until his eye lighted on a paragraph, headed “The Flamstock Mystery.” The indifference went out of his face then; he lifted the folded sheet nearer and read with eagerness.

  “The mystery attending the death of Mr. Septimus Walshawe, J.P., of Flamstock, remains still unsolved. That this much-respected townsman and magistrate died of poisoning there is no doubt. It is inconceivable that Mr. Walshawe took his own life; no one who was familiar with him could believe for a moment that a man of his cheery temperament, his optimistic character, and his interest in life could ever terminate a useful and fully occupied existence by suicide. Nor is there any evidence that Mr. Walshawe took poison by misadventure. There is a growing feeling in Flamstock that the deceased gentleman was—to put it in plain language—murdered, but, although the services of a noted expert in criminal detection have been employed in this case, nothing, we understand, has so far transpired which is likely to lead to the detection of the cowardly—and clever—murderer.”

  The reader threw the newspaper aside with a smile. He was the noted expert in criminal detection to whom the paragraph referred, and, after several days’ investigation of the Walshawe case, he was not quite so certain about the facts which appertained to it as the writer of the paragraph appeared to be. All that he was actually certain about was that he was very much puzzled. He had done a good deal of thinking during the last few days; he knew that a lot of thinking was still to be done. And, realising that there was no likelihood of his thinking of anything else that evening, he lighted a cigar, and settling himself comfortably before the dancing flames, fell to representing the case to his own judgment for perhaps the hundredth time.

  This was how the case stood. Mr. Septimus Walshawe, a gentleman of about sixty years of age at the time of his sudden death, had lived in Flamstock, a small country town, for twenty-five years. He rented the Manor House, a quaint old mansion at the top of the High Street. He was a man of considerable means, and a bachelor. His tastes were literary and antiquarian. He was the possessor of a notable library; he collected old china, old silver; he had a small but valuable museum of antiquities. He was never so happy as when he was busied about his books and his curiosities, but he was by no means a recluse. From the time of his coming to Flamstock he took a good deal of interest in the life of the town.

  He had served on its town council; he had been mayor; he had f
ounded a literary and philosophical institute, and once a year he lectured to its members on some subject of importance. Also, he was a magistrate, and he never failed in his attendance at petty sessions or quarter sessions. In short, he was a feature of the town; everybody knew him; his face and figure was as familiar in High Street as the tower of the old church, or the queer figures which ornamented the town-hall clock.

  So much for Mr. Walshawe’s public life. His private life appeared to have been a very quiet one. His household consisted of a housekeeper, a cook, three female servants, and a boy in buttons; he also employed two gardeners and a groom-coachman, who drove his one equipage, an old-fashioned landau.

  He seemed to have no near relations—in fact, the only relation who ever came to see him was a niece, married far away in the North of England, who visited Flamstock for a week or two every year, and for the last few years had brought her two small children with her. It was understood by those Flamstockians who were admitted to Mr. Walshawe’s confidence that this lady would inherit all he had. And she had inherited it now that he was dead, and it was by her express desire and on her instructions that the New Scotland Yard man who toasted his feet at the fire of his private parlour in the Bull and Bucket had come down to Flamstock to find out the truth about the mystery which surrounded her uncle’s death.

  That Mr. Walshawe’s death had taken place under mysterious circumstances there was no doubt. He was found dead in bed at noon on the tenth day of November on a Thursday. The detective had no need to refer to his memoranda for these precise facts as regards Mr. Walshawe’s doings for some days previous to the day of his death.

  Nothing had occurred which could be taken as presaging his decease; he had shown no sign of illness, had made no complaint of any feeling of illness. In fact, he had been rather more than usually active that week.

  On the Monday evening he had delivered his annual lecture at the institute; on the Tuesday he had sat on the bench at the town hall from eleven in the morning till five in the afternoon; on the Wednesday he had lunched at Sir Anthony Cleeke’s house, just outside the town; that evening he had entertained a few friends to dinner; one or two of whom had stayed rather late.

  The fact that they had stayed rather late had relieved Mrs. Whiteside, the housekeeper, of any fear when Mr. Walshawe did not come down to breakfast at his usual hour next morning. She knew that he had not gone to bed until quite two o’clock.

  When breakfast-time had been passed by two hours, however, she went to call him, and, getting no answer, walked into his room to find him asleep, but looking so strange and breathing so uneasily that she had become alarmed and sent at once for medical help.

  There was delay in getting that. Dr. Thorney, Mr. Walshawe’s medical attendant, was away from home, and his assistant had gone into the country on a round of visits. Consequently an hour elapsed before medical help was brought to his bedside. And when it arrived Mr. Walshawe was dead.

  In the opinion of the coroner this was decidedly a case for a post-mortem examination, and it was immediately carried out. Its results went to prove that Mr. Walshawe had died from veronal poisoning. Thereupon the mystery began.

  It was not known to any member of his household that he ever took such things. There was no trace of such things in the house. His private apartments were searched from top to bottom; his desks, his drawers, every receptacle, every nook and cranny where drugs could have been concealed, were scrupulously examined. Nothing was found.

  Nor could anybody be found who had ever sold veronal or any similar drug to Mr. Walshawe. There were three chemists in Flamstock; none of them had ever known him as a customer for any drug of that sort. Advertisements asking for information on this point were inserted first in the local papers of the neighbouring towns, then in the London newspapers. Had any chemist ever sent veronal to Mr. Walshawe by post?

  There was no reply to these advertisements. Of course, as plenty of people were quick to point out, Mr. Walshawe could have purchased veronal when he was away from the town.

  But, as a matter of fact, he had not been away from Flamstock for well over a year. And, in addition to that, those who knew him best and most intimately agreed that he was given to boasting of his general robust health, his good appetite, and, above everything, his power of sleeping. He was the last man in the world, said they, to have need of sleeping draughts; he had been heard to say, a thousand times, that he slept like a top from eleven o’clock until seven. He had said so, Sir Anthony Cleeke remembered, only the day before he was found dead.

  It was inconceivable that he should have taken veronal in a sufficient quantity to kill him. Yet the fact remained that he had died from veronal poisoning, and must have taken a considerable dose.

  When the man from New Scotland Yard came on the scene, brought there by Mr. Walshawe’s niece, he had at first come to an immediate conclusion that the dead man had taken the veronal himself. He had had his own reasons, he said, for taking the drug, and being—possibly or probably—unaccustomed to it, he had taken too much.

  But he was faced with the fact that no trace of Mr. Walshawe ever having bought or possessed such a drug could be found. He was also faced with the general habits and tone of the dead man. He was further having it impressed upon him, day by day, that Mr. Walshawe’s niece was sure, certain, convinced that somebody had administered the veronal to her uncle in order to do him to death.

  She pointed out that there was nothing to show that he was likely to take a sleeping draught; certainly nothing to indicate that he was tired of life. Tired of life, indeed! Why, he was just then full of spirits, full of interests. He was looking forward to attending, on the very day on which he died, a sale by auction at a neighbouring country house, where there were certain antiquities and objects of art which he ardently desired to possess.

  He had been talking of them when he lunched at Sir Anthony Cleeke’s; he talked of them at his own dinner-party in the evening. No—no; nothing would persuade her that her uncle had done anything to bring about his own death. Nothing!

  “Misadventure?” suggested the detective.

  “No misadventure!” retorted Mr. Walshawe’s niece. “My uncle was murdered. It is your place to find out who murdered him.”

  This was the problem which vexed the mind of the detective as he sat musing and reflecting in his quiet room at the Bull and Bucket. It seemed to him that he was doing little good. He had been in Flamstock nearly a fortnight, pursuing all sorts of inquiries, following up all manner of suggestions, and he was no nearer any solution of the mystery. Nevertheless, he knew what he wanted. And he muttered a word unconsciously.

  “Motive!” he said. “Motive! Motive!”

  A tap came at the door, and the old waiter put his head into the room.

  “Mr. Peasegood to see you, sir,” he said.

  The detective, with the alacrity of a man who is relieved at the prospect of exchanging ideas with a fellow-creature, rose.

  “Show Mr. Peasegood in, William,” he answered.

  2

  The Legal Visitor

  The man who came into the room, contenting himself with a nod of greeting until the waiter had gone away, was known to the detective as Mr. Septimus Walshawe’s solicitor. He had already had several interviews with him, and they had discussed the details of the case until it seemed as if they had covered every inch of the debatable ground. Yet it now appeared to him that Mr. Peasegood had something new to communicate; there was the suggestion of news in his face, and the detective wheeled an easy-chair to the hearth with an eagerness which really meant that he was anxious to know what his visitor had to say.

  “Good evening, Mr. Peasegood,” he said. “Glad to see you. Can I offer you anything now—a drink, a cigar?”

  Mr. Peasegood was slowly drawing off his gloves, which he deposited carefully within his hat. He also divested himself of his overcoat, and, having run his fingers over
his smooth hair, he dropped into the seat and smiled.

  “Not just now, Mr. Marshford,” he answered. “Perhaps a little later. Business first—eh?”

  “There is business, then!” exclaimed the detective. “Ah! Something to do with the case, of course?”

  “Something to do with the case, of course,” repeated Mr. Peasegood, blandly. “Very much to do with the case.”

  Marshford threw his cigar into the fire and, leaning forward in his chair, looked fixedly at his visitor.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “You are aware,” continued Peasegood, “of the tenor of Mr. Walshawe’s will, which was executed by myself some years ago?”

  “Yes—yes,” replied Marshford; “of course. That is, I know what you told me—that, with the exception of a few trifling legacies, everything was left to the niece, Mrs. Carstone?”

  “Just so,” assented Peasegood. “It is ten years since I drew up that will. I have been under the impression that it was Walshawe’s last word as to the disposition of his property.”

  The detective started.

  “And—wasn’t it?” he asked eagerly.

  Peasegood smiled in an odd fashion.

  “Another will—a later will—has come to light,” he replied. He looked narrowly at the detective, and he smiled again. “It is a perfectly good will,” he added; “and, of course, it upsets the other.”

  “Bless me!” said Marshford. “I’m sorry to hear it—for Mrs. Carstone’s sake.”

  Peasegood laughed.

  “Oh, it doesn’t make any great amount of difference to Mrs. Carstone!” he remarked. “Oh, no! But it may make a considerable difference to somebody else in a way which that somebody else won’t quite appreciate; a very considerable difference.”

  Marshford looked an inquiry. He was eager with inquisitiveness, but he recognised that Peasegood was one of those men who will tell a story in their own way, and he waited.