Sir Clinton picked out a cigar and cut it with some care.
“I hear we may congratulate you on your engagement, Stenness,” he said. “I suppose it’s rather early to ask when you’re going to be married?”
Stenness looked across the room, rather as though he were in doubt about the intention behind the question.
“I’ll have to make some money first,” he answered. “One can’t live on somebody else’s income.”
Sir Clinton laughed.
“Some people don’t seem to find it so hard as all that. But if that’s your difficulty, perhaps I could do something for you. I’ve some small influence in South Africa, and it so happens that a man out there asked me to look round for someone to fill a post. The pay’s good enough to marry on. I’ll come across to-morrow to Whistlefield in the morning and talk to you about it. My impression is that it would suit you. And it has one big advantage. It would take you both out of your old surroundings and make a clean break with all this affair, which would hang round your neck if you stayed in this country. People will talk, no matter what happens; and Miss Hawkhurst couldn’t help knowing they were talking, if she stayed on here.”
He paused to light his cigar before he continued.
“And that brings me to my reason for getting you people together to-night. None of you are likely to talk; but you’d be hardly human if you didn’t think about this Whistlefield affair. And it’s on the cards that you might fall into misapprehensions over it, which might lead to difficulties. I’ve come to the conclusion that it will be better if you know all that I know myself about it; and I think that will clear the whole thing up and let you get it out of your minds. Once a puzzle’s solved, no one troubles about it any more; but even a trace of mystery will keep one worrying spasmodically and so one can’t put the matter aside for good.”
He glanced round the group and he could see that his suggestion met with the approval of them all.
“Very well. You must bear in mind, first of all, that I’m going to give you a mixture of facts and theories. I can’t guarantee that every detail will be absolutely accurate, for some of it’s guess-work on my part.”
“Go ahead,” said Wendover. “We understand that well enough.”
“One thing that most people forget when they read about a police case in the papers,” continued Sir Clinton, “is the handicap of local knowledge. On the face of it, any one of you three had a better chance than I had of getting to the bottom of the Whistlefield affair. All of you had some knowledge of the characters of the people involved; each of you at any rate knew his own part in the business: but a detective coming in from the outside sees nothing before him but a group of strangers with totally unpredictable qualities. He has all that lee-way to make up before he even starts level with you—and he hasn’t much time to pick up his information.”
“That’s true,” said Stenness, thoughtfully. “I’d never looked at it in that light. The police have a harder job than I thought.”
“There’s a countervailing advantage of course,” Sir Clinton hastened to admit. “A detective comes to a case with no preconceived ideas about character. The actors are all strangers to him; and he has to depend on his wits and his judgment entirely. That was my position when I came into the Whistlefield case. I knew none of you personally, and I was quite free from prejudices about you.”
“Facts are more important than opinions in a case of this sort, so that really leaves a balance in your favour,” Ardsley suggested.
“Quite true—once you’ve got your facts,” Sir Clinton agreed. “Now let’s take the facts in the order that they presented themselves. The things I saw when I was called to the Maze were plain enough. An air-gun had been used to fire poisoned darts. Roger Shandon had been hit in the shoulders and the neck; Neville Shandon had been struck rather lower down in the body. There had been no attempt at robbery, except for the tearing away of the sheet of notes in Neville’s hand. Loopholes had been cut in the hedge, evidently beforehand—for no one would start cutting loopholes with his victim a few yards away. A box of darts had been spilt at the loophole from which Roger Shandon was shot. The murderer had managed to dodge either Miss Forrest or young Torrance, or both of them, as he made his way out of the Maze. Finally, my dog proved that the murderer had followed a very roundabout track in leaving the Maze. He got out near the river bank. He went across to a clump of trees, on one of which there was a mark about three feet off the ground. Then he had gone across the grass to the road. And when he reached the road, his trail stopped short.”
“Yes,” Wendover interjected, “you talked a lot of rot about the murderer getting into his private aeroplane and flying away, I remember.”
Sir Clinton smiled slightly.
“I was near enough for all practical purposes, as you’ll see, Squire. Now we come to what I thought it reasonable to infer from the facts. First of all, an air-gun can be fired by either a man or a woman, so the weapon didn’t even suggest the sex of the criminal. The poison was obviously going to be a good clue; for it made the crime abnormal, so to speak; and the more uncommon the method is in a murder, the more you limit the possibilities in the identity of the murderer. Next, it was clear enough that Roger had been shot while he was sitting in his chair with his back to the murderer. In that position, only his shoulders and neck would be exposed as targets and it was there that he was hit. Neville, on the other hand, had been shot from the front or slightly to the side. That suggested the possibility that Roger might have been killed in mistake for Neville, whereas Neville could not have been mistaken for Roger, since the murderer, shooting from the front or side, could see his face as he fired.”
“Did you lay much stress on that in your mind?” Stenness asked.
“Not much at the time. It suggested that Roger might have been killed first of all, by mistake, and that Neville was the man the murderer was really after. But alone, it amounted to very little. Then comes the fact that nothing seemed to have been removed from either body, except the notes torn out of Neville’s hand. Of course, I’d been following the Hackleton case; and it was clear enough that Neville Shandon might have been put out of the way to keep him from examining Hackleton. That’s been done before—remember how Maitre Labori was shot in the back as he was going into Court to examine General Mercier during the Dreyfus case. I merely docketed that in my memory and kept an open mind on the point. I hadn’t enough data to make it worth while doing more.
“The next point was the discovery of the loopholes. That established premeditation—the crime had been thought out and prepared for beforehand. And that meant, further, that the murderer was someone who knew that one or other of the Shandons was likely to be in the Maze that afternoon or at least at some time thereabouts. That looked like a local criminal at first sight. But one has to be judicial; and it was clear enough that a premeditated crime might have been preceded by a good deal of quiet spying; and thus an outsider might have got to know the Shandons’ habits. One couldn’t lay much stress on that.”
“So at that point you didn’t know whether the Hackleton case came in or not?” Stenness asked.
“No. I simply kept an open mind on the point. Now the next thing was the box of darts which Skene found scattered about. That was easy enough to read. The murderer must have fumbled while he was shooting Roger—because the box was at Roger’s loophole. He was in a deadly hurry, or he’d have picked them up then. Evidently he’d something else to do in a hurry and he meant to come back for the darts. Isn’t it clear enough that when he’d shot Roger, he saw the face after he’d fired; and he realised he’d hit the wrong man. Neville had still to be reckoned with—and it looks to me as if the murderer had counted on Neville being in the Maze just then. I expect he had private information. So he grabbed three darts from the ground and rushed off to finish Neville, which he did. Neville may have been alarmed by something, which would account for his standing up when he was shot at. Then the murderer proposes to go back for his lost dar
ts. But now he finds someone else in the Maze. He hears voices. Probably he finds his road back to Helen’s Bower blocked by these strangers. So he runs as hard as he can to get rid of his air-gun, which is the deadly evidence against him. But he gets into difficulties in avoiding these unknown people in the Maze and it takes him some time to get out.”
“Did you suspect anyone in particular at that point?” Wendover interrupted.
“It might have been young Torrance, of course,” Sir Clinton admitted. “He might have doubled his own part with that of the murderer. I kept an open mind.”
“I suppose it might have been Miss Forrest, if you take every one into account,” Ardsley commented.
“I didn’t speculate much at the time,” Sir Clinton answered. “What really started me thinking definitely was the clue that my dog gave us. He led us, you remember, by a very winding track through the Maze—evidently the turnings and windings were due to the murderer dodging someone in the alleys. Then we came near the river—that suggested that he flung away his air-gun into the water as he passed. Then the dog led us to a tree in a small clump near by. Wendover noticed a mark on the trunk of the tree, about three feet off the ground and he suggested that it had been made by the boot of the murderer while he was trying to climb the tree. But after that the trail went on and reached the road—and there it stopped dead. The dog simply baulked there; it found nothing further.”
Sir Clinton paused for a moment to let this point sink in.
“A trail can only stop dead in that way for either of two reasons. First, a man may stand still and wait. But since the man wasn’t there he obviously hadn’t waited. The only other way in which a thing like that could happen is by the man getting into the air off the road at that point.”
“Ha! The private aeroplane, I suppose,” said Wendover sarcastically.
Sir Clinton’s retort crushed the Squire slightly. “Or the private motor—or even the humble push-bike. If you step into a car or get on to a bicycle your trail will stop so far as footsteps are concerned.”
Wendover admitted the hit.
“What an ass I was not to see that at once. And of course the road was bone-hard and had no dust on it, so he left no track of his tyres?”
“None that I could swear to. Now that bicycle settled a good deal. It cleared at once Torrance, Miss Forrest, and most probably Costock as well. I may say at once that I never took Costock seriously. He’s a miserable creature who couldn’t screw himself up to murder if he tried. I had him watched; but I never really suspected him of anything beyond a futile attempt at blackmailing Roger Shandon. He hadn’t even the nerve for that. His pistol was really for self-defence against Shandon, I’m sure, just as he said it was.”
Wendover harked back to the problem of the track.
“You seem very sure it was a bicycle and not a motor car.”
“Isn’t it fairly certain?” Sir Clinton asked. “If the murderer had used a car, he’d have been seen by the lodge-keepers if he left the grounds—at least he’d have run that risk. But a bicycle can be carried off the road by hand and taken through a gap in a hedge quite easily. Since the murderer evidently would not want to be seen, the bicycle is the obvious thing. Call it a bicycle, anyway, for convenience just now. My trouble was that I couldn’t prove which way the bicycle went; whether it went towards the house or towards the East Gate. I left the matter alone for the time, hoping for something else to turn up. Of course, I set my men at work to hunt for any bicycle that had been concealed in the grounds; but they failed to find it.”
“Why didn’t you make inquiries about bicycles at Whistlefield?” Wendover demanded.
“Because I wanted to keep my thumb on the bicycle question. I didn’t want to get the name of being too clever—so far as the murderer was concerned. It was far better to let him think his method was undetected.”
“So at that point,” Stenness put in, “you didn’t know whether the murderer had gone back to the house or had gone outside the grounds?”
“No,” Sir Clinton admitted. “I didn’t. The next thing, if you remember, was my visit to the house and my interviews with various people, yourself included. Bear in mind that at that time, I didn’t know whether the murderer was one of the house group or had come in like a bolt from the blue from outside. I had to get that point cleared up as soon as possible; and it offered a good deal of difficulty.
“When I came to interview the various people at the house, it was simply a case of meeting a number of strangers for the first time. I had to pick up what I could, and at the same time take care not to be prejudiced by initial impressions. That’s more difficult than you’d think. Torrance and Miss Forrest were cleared already, so I did not need to pay much attention to them, apart from their evidence. You, Stenness, gave me a bit of trouble, I admit. I couldn’t quite make you out at that time.”
Stenness acknowledged this with a faint smile. Sir Clinton hastened on with his narrative without giving either of the others a chance of interrupting.
“Arthur Hawkhurst caused me some thought, though. Stenness gave me a hint about his attack of sleepy sickness. He came in with an air-gun in his hand. He seemed an irresponsible sort of boy. But that was all. There’s a big chasm between that and homicidal mania. I simply docketed him in my memory and left the matter there.”
At this point Sir Clinton seemed to find his narrative growing more interesting to himself. He pulled himself up in his chair and glanced round his audience before taking up the next part of his subject.
“Ernest Shandon was the final figure—for, of course, I dismissed Miss Hawkhurst at once. Now at first sight, Friend Ernest was an unattractive fellow. First, he was obviously callous in the extreme. He didn’t seem sorry about his brothers’ deaths; his sore toe bulked far more prominently in his conversation. That seemed a bit grotesque to me at the time. It stuck in my memory on that account alone. Then, second, he seemed absolutely selfish. His ego seemed to be the only thing that really interested him. He wanted his tea; and he meant to have it, too. That seemed a bit abnormal, though one can’t hang a man for wanting his tea, of course. Third, he gave me the impression of being one of the dullest and stupidest men that one could wish to meet. Altogether, one would say, there wasn’t much to be got out of a person of that type; dull, selfish, callous, and stupid. And yet, if you look back now, you’ll see that the whole basis of the Shandon tragedies lies in just those qualities. It’ll be quite clear when we come to it.
“I’ve pointed out that my difficulty was to fix as soon as possible whether this was ‘an inside job’ or one carried through by an outsider. Also, quite possibly there might be more trouble at Whistlefield. Now I’d taken particular care to note that the murderer knew the Maze thoroughly. So as a wild shot I dropped the hint about Ariadne’s clue—the thread which would guide a man through the Maze if he didn’t know it very well. I flung that down casually. I hadn’t really much hope of doing much with it; for I hardly believed in further trouble then. But it would do no harm, so I dropped the suggestion in presence of some of the possible criminals.”
“H’m! Now I begin to see some light,” Wendover commented.
“The next point was the nature of the poison,” Sir Clinton went on. “The local doctor suggested you, Ardsley, as an expert; so I went over at once to get your views. Once I knew it was curare, I felt I’d got something definite enough to go on. That isn’t a common stuff. Of course you probably had a stock yourself; and I didn’t feel inclined to interfere with you. I thought it fairly clear that if you had gone on the murder tack you’d have avoided a stuff which could be traced to you directly. So I asked about any other local source, and you put me on to the pot in the Whistlefield museum.
“That put a different complexion on the whole case. It was evidently essential to get hold of that supply immediately. If the murderer had drawn a private stock from the pot, we couldn’t help that. If he had just used enough to poison his darts, then we could stop further supplies by confisca
ting the pot. So I packed you and Wendover off to secure it.”
“Wendover being to watch me, I suppose?” Ardsley put in with a grim smile.
“I won’t deny it. You’d have done the same in my place,” Sir Clinton pointed out.
“Why didn’t you come yourself?” Wendover inquired.
“Because I’d something else on hand that had to be done in a hurry. I must confess frankly that I’d nothing definite to go on. It was mere intuition, if you like; or you can call it a case of taking precautions against eventualities which one doesn’t expect to occur. It was rather like the business of Ariadne’s clue—a long shot which might come off. And I thought it had more chance of bearing fruit. These poisoned darts were clues of a sort. They were also weapons. So if the murderer got a chance of grabbing them, I thought he might be tempted. But I wasn’t going to let him have the real things, not likely. I gave him a substitute, quite similar in appearance, but really quite harmless. Then if he tried any more of his games, the chances were that he’d use the darts I gave him; and do no great harm with them. Even if he had one or two deadly darts left, he’d be sure to mix the lot together, and that reduced the risk of poison in a dart chosen at random from the mixture of deadly and harmless ones.
“So, when we were passing through the village, I got you to drop me, Wendover; and I bought some darts, drilled them like the deadly ones, faked them to match with Condy’s fluid, put some litmus in so as to make my lot easily recognisable by a simple test, and then I was ready. Incidentally, I think I got the reputation of being quite mad. I needed a tin to keep the deadly darts in—I wasn’t going to have them loose in my pocket—and I had to leave the real tin for the murderer to pick up if he wanted. So I sent out for some Navy Cut, used the tins for the lethal darts, and staggered the sergeant down there by presenting him with the tobacco. He’s still puzzling over it, I guess.
Murder in the Maze (A Clinton Driffield Mystery) Page 24
