Murder in the Maze (A Clinton Driffield Mystery)

by J. J. Connington

  “This is Mr. Howard Torrance, Sir Clinton, a guest at the house. He was in the Maze at the moment when the murder was done. Torrance, this is the Chief Constable.”

  He turned to the gardener.

  “This is Skene, Sir Clinton, one of the gardeners on the estate. He came with me here as soon as we learned what had happened.”

  Sir Clinton nodded a brief appreciation of Stenness’ explanations. The secretary had wasted no words over the business, and yet had given all the information necessary at the moment.

  Howard Torrance, thus brought to the front, seized the opportunity offered to him.

  “Some darts here. Skene found them at the foot of the hedge. Lid of a tin box was lying beside them as well.”

  Sir Clinton picked up the lid and inspected the tiny missiles which had been collected.

  “Air-gun darts, evidently,” he commented.

  Characteristically enough, he did not call attention to the equally obvious fact that they were not ordinary air-gun darts. The woollen feathering instead of showing the usual gaudy colours, was stained brown; and a rusty powder seemed to cling to the fibre. A tiny patch of the same pigment showed on the metal jackets of the darts, near the points. Sir Clinton put the collection down again carefully.

  “Now, Skene,” he said, turning to the gardener, “that was a good piece of work of yours. Can you show me exactly where you found these things?”

  Obviously delighted with the Chief Constable’s compliment, Skene was only too ready to indicate the precise position where he had picked up the darts and the box-lid.

  “You got the lot, I suppose? At least all you could see from here?”

  Howard Torrance, watching the Chief Constable, was surprised to see that his eyes, instead of searching the ground, seemed to be ranging over the surface of the hedge; and when Skene answered the question, Sir Clinton’s thoughts appeared to be elsewhere. He turned to Stenness.

  “Can you take us to the other side of this hedge at that point?”

  Stenness led the way once more into the Maze; and Sir Clinton found that quite a considerable distance had to be traversed before they reached the required position.

  “This is the place?” he inquired, as Stenness came to a halt. “That’s clear enough,” he added, as he stooped to pick something from the side of the path. When he held it out, they recognised it as the bottom of the tin box of which the lid had already been found. Sir Clinton turned to the constables.

  “Hunt about and see if you can find any more of these darts. You mustn’t miss a single one, remember. And handle them carefully. They’re deadly things, evidently.”

  Then, as Stenness and Howard Torrance showed signs of joining in the search, the Chief Constable stopped them with a gesture.

  “I think we’ll leave the officials to do the work,” he said with a certain finality in his tone.

  Again he appeared to be more interested in the hedge itself than in the roots where more darts might be hidden; and after a moment or two he went forward and seemed to peer closely into the greenery at one particular point. When he stepped back again, Howard moved forward in curiosity; and Sir Clinton made way for him. As he brought his eye to the position in which he had seen the Chief Constable’s, he looked into a concealed loophole. The twigs had been trimmed away to form a tunnel, the ends of which had been left covered with a thin screen of leafage; and a glance through the aperture showed that it bore directly on the chair in which Roger Shandon had been killed.

  But already Sir Clinton seemed to have lost interest in the matter. He whistled; and the dog which had been left behind in Helen’s Bower came running to him.

  “Have a sniff,” he invited the animal, holding out to it the part of the tin box which he still held in his hand. “Now see what you can make of it.”

  He turned to his companions.

  “It’s a poor chance. Don’t blame the animal if it fails.”

  Part of Sir Clinton’s character was revealed in the whimsical apology. He was always noted for his loyalty to his subordinates and his readiness to recognise the impossibility of some tasks. It was the complement to his sternness when he had to deal with inefficiency.

  “That’s right! Good dog! He’s on to something!” Wendover announced unnecessarily.

  The beast had apparently picked up some scent or other, for it hurried off along the alleys, followed by Sir Clinton and the other three men. The constables were left to their search among the hedge roots.

  It was anything but a simple route along which the dog led them; for it seemed to wind backwards and forwards almost at haphazard.

  “Nobody who knew the Maze would have tried to get out this way,” Stenness commented at last.

  His remark was hardly needed; for already the dog had more than once halted in the middle of an open alley and then retraced its course for no obvious reason. It was Howard Torrance who saw the meaning of these intricate tracings before the remainder of the party.

  “Of course!” he explained. “The murderer didn’t go straight out of the Maze immediately. Probably he found Miss Forrest and myself blocking the road again and again as we wandered about. And he’d got to avoid being seen by us. That’s why he had to turn and wind about like this.”

  At last the dog led them to the edge of the Maze, passed out through the iron gate, and went on eagerly across the grass. The track had brought them to the river side of the labyrinth, where a tiny clump of trees had been planted; and into this the dog plunged. A few paces further on it halted for a moment at the foot of a tree.

  “Perhaps he climbed that,” Wendover suggested, going up and examining the trunk. “Look! There’s a faint mark here on the trunk, “just about the height that a man could reach with his foot.”

  Sir Clinton examined the mark, which was very slight indeed. Then he looked at the dog, which had set off in a fresh direction.

  “I suppose he must have got tired of the view and come down again, in that case. One usually does come down. One rarely climbs higher than the top.”

  He set off after the dog, which was now making for the road running past the Maze. But here it seemed to go astray. It snuffed about with the utmost eagerness, casting wider and wider in its attempt to recapture the scent; but soon it was clear that it had lost the track. Sir Clinton took it back to the tree once more and allowed it to start afresh. This time he followed closely on its track; and his companions noticed that he had pulled some paper from his pocket and was scattering tiny fragments on the grass to mark the animal’s route. But this attempt also ended in failure. Beyond the road, the trail seemed to be lost.

  “We may as well give it up,” Sir Clinton admitted. “One can’t expect infallibility from a dumb animal.”

  As he called the beast off, a motor-horn sounded, and they saw a car coming from the direction of the house.

  “That’s our doctor, I expect,” Sir Clinton surmised; and Stenness confirmed the guess.

  In a few minutes they had all made their way to Helen’s Bower, under Stenness’ guidance. Once there, the doctor proposed to begin his examination of the bodies; but the Chief Constable intervened.

  “Just a moment, Doctor. Before you shift anything, I want to take one or two photographs. Nothing like a permanent record for future reference.”

  He took a case which one of the constables had carried and produced from it one of the largest-sized Kodaks. Then, by the marks of the feet in the grass, he replaced the overturned chair in its proper position; and finally he marked the position of the loophole in the hedge by means of a scrap of paper.

  “I want something to give the scale,” he explained, at the last moment. “Would you mind sitting in the chair, Mr. Stenness? And perhaps you’d stand by the loophole, Mr. Torrance.”

  He looked round the enclosure for an instant. “And here, Costock, you get over into that corner. It’ll give some notion of the distance.”

  When they had placed themselves, he took several photographs from various positi
ons.

  “Now, Doctor, you can get to work if you like.”

  The doctor made only a cursory examination.

  “I think it would be best to shift the body up to the house. The light’s not very good here, now the sun’s going down. Besides, I’ll need to do more than I can do in this place.”

  “There’s a second body waiting for you,” Sir Clinton explained. “We’ve the whole thing to do over again.”

  The doctor, a taciturn man, shrugged his shoulders without making any audible comment; and they made their way, guided by Stenness, to the Pool of Narcissus. Sir Clinton gave some directions to his constables and despatched the gardener to the house to bring down something on which the bodies could be carried. Then the photographic procedure was repeated; and the doctor made his examination of Neville Shandon’s corpse.

  “There must be a loophole in this hedge as well,” the Chief Constable mused aloud, “but it’s not worth while hunting for it at present. It won’t run away.”

  The constables reported the discovery of several fresh darts which had fallen either into the hedge itself or among the roots on the outer side. Skene, it appeared, had secured all those on the inner border. Sir Clinton counted the tiny projectiles carefully, dropped them into the tin box, and put the box in his pocket.

  “That’s eleven altogether. Go back and hunt for anything more. I must have every one of these darts if you have to finish the search by lamplight. Make absolutely certain that you miss nothing.”

  Skene arrived shortly afterwards with two other gardeners carrying hurdles; and the two bodies were transported to the cars and so conveyed to the house. Two more constables had arrived, and these were put under the guidance of Skene and given instructions to search the whole of the Maze for anything suspicious.

  When the bodies had been taken up to a bedroom, Sir Clinton and the doctor carried out a minute examination. Each victim had been struck by three darts. In the case of Neville Shandon, the wounds suggested that the shots had been fired from the front and rather to one side. Roger’s body, on the other hand, contained one dart imbedded in the back of the neck, and two in the upper part of the rear surface between the spine and the shoulder on the left side. Beyond the punctures made by the darts, neither victim showed a trace of either wound or struggle.

  “Poison, obviously,” Sir Clinton concluded. The doctor agreed, adding in confirmation:

  “None of these darts came near a vital spot. Alone, they’d never have killed a man.”

  “Can you guess what poison was used?”

  The doctor shook his head.

  “Not my line. Some of these Indian arrow poisons, perhaps. Ardsley could tell you something about them, most likely.”

  “Who’s Ardsley? Could one get hold of him quickly?”

  “He lives less than a mile from here. He’s a medical; but he doesn’t practice. Curiously enough, toxicology is his line, more or less. He’s a bit of a physiologist, too. I know he has a vivisection license. You might do worse than look him up. He might be able to give you a hint.”

  Sir Clinton looked thoughtful for a moment.

  “What worries me is that a man can’t be in two places at once. I’m going to take over this case myself, and there’s enough work on hand in the next hour to keep two men busy. It’s time I’m up against at present.”

  The doctor, reflecting on the conflicting calls of a country practice, was inclined to think that Sir Clinton seemed to make a fuss about very little.

  Chapter Five

  The Evidence in the Case

  When the doctor had completed his work and left the room, Sir Clinton pulled the tin box of darts from his pocket and went over to the window to examine it. The box itself suggested nothing in the way of a clue; it was of a common pattern. He turned from it to the darts themselves.

  “That brown stuff on the feathering is evidently the poison, whatever it may be,” he reflected. “It doesn’t seem much of a dose to kill a man, especially if one assumes that it was a quick death. Even ordinary snake poison would hardly do the trick quick enough. And yet these fellows didn’t seem to have moved much after they were hit, to judge by the look of the ground.”

  He took a Coddington lens from his pocket and scanned one of the darts carefully; then with a pin he probed a dark spot near the point of the projectile.

  “So that’s it? He’s drilled a hole clean through the metal and filled up the hollow with poison. That would mean a fair quantity driven well home under the skin; and the blood would soon wash the stuff out of the cavity, since both ends are open. An ingenious devil, evidently.”

  He thoughtfully replaced the dart in the box; but before putting the tin back into his pocket he counted the missiles carefully.

  “Eleven of them here; and six more in the two bodies.”

  He glanced at the open box again, trying to estimate its probable capacity.

  “That must have been the lot.”

  The doctor had extracted the six fatal darts from the bodies and left them lying on a piece of lint on the dressing-table. Sir Clinton rolled them up cautiously; took his cigarette-case from his pocket; emptied out the contents; and inserted the packet of darts instead.

  “I’m not likely to get pricked now, short of a big smash.”

  After putting both the cigarette-case and the tin box containing the darts into his pockets, he left the room and went downstairs. The windows throughout the house had been darkened; but Sir Clinton found his way in the semi-obscurity to Roger Shandon’s study; and here he came upon Wendover, the two guests, and the secretary. Costock had been left in the hall in charge of a constable.

  “Now,” Sir Clinton said, as he sat down, “I’m afraid I shall have to trouble you for information. What I want first of all are the plain facts—nothing else. We’ll come to suspicions afterwards. Which of you saw the Shandons alive last?”

  “I believe I did,” the secretary volunteered. “At about ten minutes past three this afternoon, Roger Shandon sent one of the maids for me, and I came straight to this room. He gave me some directions about letters. While he was doing this, Neville Shandon looked into the room. He had some papers in his hand. Seeing us engaged, he went away again. That would be about twenty-five past three, approximately. Almost immediately after that, Roger Shandon dismissed me; and I noticed him from the window, going towards the Maze. That was the last I saw of either of them, till I found their bodies in the Maze.”

  Sir Clinton went to the writing-table and made a note.

  “You saw Neville Shandon last at about 3.25 P.M., and Roger at, say, 3.30 P.M.?”

  “As near as I can gauge the times,” Stenness confirmed.

  Sir Clinton considered for a moment.

  “I judge that it would take a man walking at an ordinary pace at least ten minutes—say eleven or twelve—to reach the Maze from the house. That means that Neville Shandon could have reached the Maze at 3.37; and Roger might have got there at 3.42. But possibly they were some minutes later than that; and quite possibly, also, they may have arrived in a different order, since no one seems to have seen them actually enter the Maze, so far as we have gone with the story.”

  The secretary indicated assent to this with a nod. Sir Clinton turned next to Torrance.

  “I take it that you can carry our information further?”

  Howard Torrance gave his version of the events up to the moment when he discovered the body of Neville Shandon in the enclosure by the Pool of Narcissus.

  “Exact times are what we want,” Sir Clinton reminded him when he had completed his narrative.

  “Can’t give you anything except two. I happened to look at my watch while Miss Forrest and I were sitting under the trees. It was sometime after three, then. I think it was twenty past three, but I couldn’t swear to it. I took the time when I found Neville Shandon’s body. It was 3.52. I could swear to that, for I particularly noted it, knowing it might be wanted.”

  Sir Clinton jotted down these figures also.
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  “Now, Miss Forrest, I know you’ve had a very trying time. I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily, but it’s essential to get your evidence as to what happened in the Maze. Take your time, and don’t let yourself get excited. It’s all over now.”

  Vera gave him her account, to which he listened without putting any questions until she had finished.

  “Thanks very much, Miss Forrest. There’s just one point. You heard steps in the Maze several times: a man running at one period and going on tiptoe at other times. You’re sure of that?”

  “Quite sure. I’m not likely to forget it soon.”

  “I can quite understand that,” said Sir Clinton, soothingly, for the girl was evidently affected by the mere remembrance of what she had gone through. “I’m merely asking these questions to make sure of my ground, you know. You couldn’t have mistaken Mr. Torrance’s footsteps for those of the murderer by any chance?”

  At this question, the secretary’s face showed a gleam of enlightenment, as though he had detected a point which he had previously missed. He glanced at Howard Torrance for an instant as though trying to read his face; then he looked again at the girl.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Vera admitted frankly. “But I don’t think I did.”

  “You heard Mr. Torrance’s voice from time to time,” Sir Clinton continued. “I’m trying to suggest that he may have called from a distance at the same time as you heard the steps near at hand. You see, it’s essential to find out exactly when the murderer left the Maze if possible; and we can only do that by checking his movements in the Maze.”

  Vera thought for a moment or two before she replied.

  “I can’t recall it. You know, Sir Clinton, I was nearly out of my mind with panic. I didn’t take note of things. I couldn’t. And there’s another thing—I did notice that I couldn’t make out the directions from which sounds came. The Maze seemed to shift them about anyhow. I really couldn’t tell where Mr. Torrance was at any time when he shouted to me.”

  Sir Clinton nodded.

  “I’d rather have you say that than try to strain your memory to make things fit. Now, just to make sure: You really did hear the murderer’s steps—or at any rate some steps—quite close to you—on the other side of the hedge, once? And that was before you found Roger Shandon’s body?”