Mystery at Lynden Sands (A Clinton Driffield Mystery)

by J. J. Connington

  “You’ve missed the crucial bit of evidence, inspector. Mme Laurent-Desrousseaux could have given it to you if you’d asked her; but you didn’t think of it. I did.”

  “And might I ask what this valuable bit of evidence is?” the inspector inquired, with heavy politeness.

  Wendover had no objection now.

  “It’s the time that the rain began to fall on Friday night,” he explained, with the air of setting a dull schoolboy right. “Mme Laurent-Desrousseaux told me that the rain started all of a sudden, after the Fleetwoods’ motor had gone away from the shore.”

  The inspector thought he saw what Wendover was driving at.

  “You mean that Staveley put on his coat when the rain came down, and you’re relying on his not having had it on beforehand when Mrs. Fleetwood met him? But you’ve only her story to go on.”

  “No, inspector. I’ve got an independent witness to the fact that he was carrying his coat over his arm at first. Mme Laurent-Desrousseaux told me he was carrying it that way when she met him before eleven o’clock.”

  “He might have put it on as soon as she left him,” objected the inspector, fighting hard for his case.

  Wendover shook his head.

  “It’s no good, inspector. There’s more evidence still. If you remember, Staveley’s jacket was wet through by the rain, although he was wearing his rainproof coat over it. He was shot through the coat. He put the coat on after the rain started. But by the time the rain had started the Fleetwoods were away up the road to the hotel in their car. Further, if he put it on after the rain started, then the shot that Mme Laurent-Desrousseaux heard was obviously not the shot that killed Staveley. See it now, inspector?”

  Armadale was plainly disconcerted by this last touch.

  “It’s ingenious,” he conceded gruffly, without admitting that he was convinced. “What you mean is that Staveley was carrying his coat while he talked to Mrs. Fleetwood. She fired her pistol and her shot missed him. She ran off to the car. Then, after the car had gone, the rain came down and soaked Staveley to the skin. After being nicely wet, he took the trouble to put on his coat, which had slipped his mind during the downpour. And then someone else came along and shot him for keeps. That’s how you look at it?”

  “More or less.”

  “H’m!” said Armadale, pouncing on what he thought was a weak spot. “I generally manage to struggle into a coat, if I have one, when a thunderstorm comes down. This Staveley man must have been a curious bird, by your way of it.”

  Wendover shook his head. In view of past snubbings, he was unable to banish all traces of superiority from his tone as he replied:

  “It’s all easily explicable, inspector, if you take the trouble to reason it out logically. Here’s what really did happen. Mrs. Fleetwood’s story is accurate up to the point when the pistol went off. It so happened that, as she fired, Staveley slipped or tripped on the rock, and came down on the back of his head. You remember the contused wound there? That happened in this first fall of his.”

  The inspector paid Wendover the compliment of listening intently to his theory. The old air of faint contempt was gone; and it was clear that Armadale was now seriously perturbed about the solidity of his case.

  “Go on, sir,” he requested.

  “Staveley came down hard on the rock with his head and was stunned,” Wendover explained. “He lay like a log where he had fallen. It wasn’t a good light, remember. Now, just think what Mrs. Fleetwood could make of it. Her pistol went bang; Staveley dropped at that very instant; and there he was, to all appearance, dead at her feet. Naturally she jumped to the conclusion that she’d shot him, and probably killed him. She went off instantly to consult her husband, whom she’d left in the car. Not at all unnatural in the circumstances, I think.”

  The inspector’s face showed that he was beginning to feel his case cracking; but he said nothing.

  “Meanwhile,” Wendover continued, “all her husband had seen was some sort of scuffle on the rock—in a dim light, remember—and he’d heard her pistol explode. Perhaps he’d seen Staveley fall. Then his wife cut back towards the car, and he ran up along the groyne to rejoin her. What could he think, except that his wife had shot Staveley? And she thought so herself; you’ve got Mme Laurent-Desrousseaux’s evidence for that, in the report she gave you of the Fleetwoods’ conversation before they started the car.”

  “There might be something in it,” Armadale conceded, in a tone which showed that he was becoming convinced against his will. “And what happened after that? Who really committed the murder?”

  Wendover had thought out his line of argument very carefully. He meant to convince the inspector once for all, and prevent him giving Cressida any further annoyance.

  “Don’t let’s hurry,” he suggested. “Just let’s look around at the circumstances at that moment. You’ve got Staveley lying on the rock, stunned by his fall—or at any rate sufficiently knocked out to prevent his getting up at once. In the crash, his wrist-watch has stopped at 11.19; but the glass of it hasn’t been broken. You know how easily some wrist-watches stop with a shock; even if you play a shot on the links with a watch on your wrist the swing of the club’s apt to stop the machinery.

  “Then comes the rain. It soaks Staveley; but he’s too muzzy to get up. The crack on the head keeps him quiet—or he may have been unconscious for a while. By and by he wakes up and scrambles to his feet; finds the rain pouring down; and mechanically he picks up his rainproof and puts it on. By that time the Fleetwood car is well on its way to the hotel. There was only one person near at hand.”

  “Mme Laurent-Desrousseaux, you mean?” demanded the inspector. “You’re trying to fix the murder on her, sir? She had a grudge against Staveley; and there he was, delivered into her hands if she wanted him. Is that it?”

  Wendover could not resist a final dig at Armadale.

  “I shouldn’t care to commit myself too hastily to an accusation against anyone,” he said, smiling pleasantly at the crestfallen inspector. “Certainly not until I was sure of my ground, you understand?”

  Armadale was so engrossed in a reconsideration of the evidence that apparently Wendover’s mockery escaped his attention.

  “Then your case is that the wrist-watch stopped at 11.19, when he fell the first time, but that the glass wasn’t broken until he was shot down, later on?”

  “That’s what seems to fit the facts,” Wendover averred, though without letting himself be pinned down definitely.

  “It’s one way of looking at the business, certainly,” the inspector was forced to admit, though only grudgingly. “I can’t just see a way of upsetting your notions right away. I’ll think it over.”

  Sir Clinton had been listening with a detached air to the whole exposition. Now he turned to Wendover.

  “That was very neatly put together, squire, I must admit. The handling of the watch-stopping portion of the theme showed how well you’ve profited by your study of the classics. I wish I had time to read detective stories. Evidently they brighten the intellect.”

  Wendover was not deceived by this tribute to his powers.

  “Oh, of course I know well enough that you spotted the flaw long before I did. You told us, days ago, that there was one. It was when the inspector produced the pistol from Mrs. Fleetwood’s blazer, I remember.”

  “There’s a flaw in almost every case that depends purely on circumstantial evidence, squire; and one can never guess how big that flaw is till one has the whole of the evidence together. It’s safest to wait for all the evidence before publishing any conclusions; that’s what I always bear in mind. Mistakes don’t matter much, so long as you keep them to yourself and don’t mislead other people with them.”

  He turned to Armadale, who was still in deep cogitation.

  “I’m going up to town this afternoon, inspector, to look into that end of the Fordingbridge business. In the meantime, I want you to do two things for me.”

  “Very good, sir,” said the inspe
ctor, waking up.

  “First of all, put all that sand-heap we’ve collected through fairly fine sieves, and see that you don’t miss a .38 cartridge-case if it happens to be there. Quite likely it may not be; but I want it, if it should chance to turn up.”

  “So that’s what you were looking for all the time?” Wendover demanded. “I must say, Clinton, you came as near lying over that as I’ve known. You said you were looking for shells, or the brass bottle with the jinnee in it; and you insisted you were telling the truth, too; and that makes it more misleading still.”

  “Not a bit of it, squire. I told you the plain truth; and if you take the wrong meaning out of my words, whose blame is it? Did you never hear an American use the word ‘shell’ for an empty cartridge-case? And the jinnee’s brass bottle, too. Gould you find a neater description of a cartridge-case than that? Didn’t the jinnee come out in vapour, and expand till no one would have supposed he could ever have been in the brass bottle? And when you fire a cartridge, doesn’t the gas come out—far more of it than you’d ever suppose could be compressed into the size of the cartridge? And wasn’t the jinnee going to kill a man—same as a pistol cartridge might do? I really believed that I’d produced a poetical description of a cartridge-case which would be fit to stand alongside some of Shakespeare’s best efforts; and all you can say about it was that it misled you! Well, well! It’s sad.”

  Wendover, now that he saw the true interpretation, could hardly protest further. He had to admit the ingenuity which had served to mislead him.

  “Then there’s another thing, inspector, which is much more important. You’ll go at once to a magistrate and swear information against Mrs. Fleetwood on a charge of murder, and you’ll get a warrant for her arrest. That’s to be done immediately, you understand. You’ll hold that warrant ready for execution; but you won’t actually arrest her until I wire to you: ‘Take Fleetwood boat on Thursday.’ As soon as you get that message, you’ll execute the warrant without any delay whatsoever. That’s vital, you understand? And, of course, there mustn’t be a whisper about this until the moment of the arrest.”

  As he heard these instructions, the inspector glanced at Wendover with the air of one who has pulled a rubber out of the fire at the last moment. Wendover, thunderstruck, stared at Sir Clinton as though he could hardly believe his ears.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Telegram

  On the departure of Sir Clinton, Wendover found himself in a position of isolation. The Fleetwoods and Miss Fordingbridge kept to their own suite, and did not show themselves in the public rooms; but the whole hotel was astir with rumours and discussions among the guests on the subject of the recent tragedies; and Wendover shrank from associating too closely with anyone. He felt that he was in a position of trust, and he feared lest, under the strain of questioning, he might be betrayed into divulging, unconsciously, something or other which was best kept from the public. A reporter from a newspaper in the nearest town demanded an interview, in the hope of eliciting something; but Wendover had the knack of posing as a dull fellow, and the reporter retired baffled and uncertain as to whether his victim had any exclusive information or not. Armadale was the only person with whom Wendover might have talked freely; and Armadale was entirely antipathetic.

  Wendover filled in his time as best he could by taking long walks, which kept him out of reach of the more inquisitive guests as much as possible. He reviewed the whole range of affairs from the beginning, in the hope of seeing his way through the tangle; but there seemed to be so many possible cross-trails that he had to admit to himself that even an approximate solution of the problem was beyond him, and that he could produce nothing better than the merest guesswork.

  In the first place, there was the Peter Hay case. There, at least, the motive was plain enough. Someone had good reason to silence Peter Hay and suppress any evidence which he might give with regard to the Derek Fordingbridge claim. But, unfortunately, at least two people might be supposed to have good grounds for wishing to burke Peter Hay’s evidence: the claimant and Paul Fordingbridge. Either of them would fit the facts neatly enough.

  Then there was the Foxhills’ housebreaking, and the theft of various articles. Obviously the silver was not the important part of the loot, since it was worth next to nothing; and the few odds and ends found in Peter Hay’s cottage must have been planted there merely to confuse the trail. The real thing the thief had wanted was Derek Fordingbridge’s diary. But here again the two possibilities were open. To a false claimant, the diary would be an invaluable mine of information; and, if the man at Flatt’s cottage were an impostor, it was obvious that he would do his best to lay hands on such a treasure. On the other hand, if he were the real Derek, then Paul Fordingbridge would have every interest in suppressing a document which could be utilised to confirm his nephew’s recollections at every point.

  The problem of Staveley’s death was a piece of the puzzle which defeated all Wendover’s attempts to fit it into place. Who had an interest in removing Staveley? The Fleetwoods, according to the inspector’s ideas; and Wendover could not help admitting that a jury might look at things from the inspector’s point of view. Undoubtedly he himself had produced enough circumstantial evidence to clear Cressida of even a manslaughter charge, provided that one pinned the prosecution down to the period when she met Staveley on the rock; but Wendover had been thoroughly alarmed by Sir Clinton’s instructions to Armadale; and he feared that he had missed some vital link in the chain of evidence which might overturn his whole case for the defence.

  Then there was the alternative hypothesis: that Mme Laurent-Desrousseaux had been the one to shoot Staveley. Again there seemed to be the double solution open, with no way of deciding which answer to choose. And, to make the matter still more complex, there was the second cartridge-case found at the groyne, which Stanley Fleetwood denied having used. Finally, Sir Clinton most obviously expected to find yet another empty cartridge-case somewhere on the sands. Wendover gave it up. Then a fresh thought struck him. Staveley, as the inspector had hinted, would be a good witness for the claimant; and therefore,’ making the same assumptions as before, Paul Fordingbridge had an interest in silencing him. But there was no evidence connecting Paul Fordingbridge with the matter at all. That seemed to be a blank end, like all the others.

  The next link in the chain of events was the attack on Cargill. The more Wendover considered the matter, the clearer it seemed to him that Cargill had been shot in mistake for the claimant. The two men were very much alike, except for the awful mutilation of the claimant’s face; and, of course, that would not show in the dark. Once the claimant was out of the way, then Paul Fordingbridge would be free from the impending disclosure of his malversations, if these had really occurred.

  And, suddenly, a light flashed on Wendover’s mind from a fresh angle. The claimant, Cressida, Paul Fordingbridge—that was the order of inheritance. If by some manoeuvre Paul Fordingbridge could clear out of his way, not the claimant only, but his niece as well, then he himself would come into the estate, and no one could ask any questions whatever. Cressida had been twice involved—once in the affair of Staveley; again when her car came up just after Cargill had been shot. Was it possible that Paul Fordingbridge had tried to kill two birds with one stone in the last crime? The inspector would have been a willing tool in his hands, since he believed Cressida quite capable of murder.

  Then there was the disappearance of Paul Fordingbridge himself, with all the puzzle of the footprints. A man didn’t fly; nor did he hand himself over to enemies without some sort of struggle. Had he a couple of confederates who had helped him to stage the whole wilfully mysterious affair on the sands? And what did Sir Clinton mean by his hints about Pere Francois and Sam Lloyd’s “Get off the Earth” puzzle? Wendover recalled that puzzle: two concentric discs with figures on them, and when one disc was revolved on the central pivot, you could count one Chinaman more or less according to where you stopped the disc. Three men when the discs were
in one position; two men when you gave a twist to one of the bits of cardboard. Had Sir Clinton some hanky-panky of that sort in his mind, so that the third man on the sands had no real existence? Wendover gave it up.

  He returned to the hotel for dinner, and spent as much time as possible in his own room rather than run the gauntlet of inquisitive guests. It was not until after dinner on Wednesday that he was again drawn directly into the game. He was just putting on his coat to go out, in order to escape his inquisitors, when the inspector appeared, evidently in a state of perturbation.

  “I’ve just had a wire from Sir Clinton, sir. My old landlady’s let me down badly. I’d warned the post office people to send me any message immediately, but I was out when it came, and the old fool put it behind her kitchen clock and forgot all about it. It wasn’t till I asked her that she remembered about it and gave it to me. Net result: hours wasted.”

  He handed a telegram form to Wendover, who read:

  “Heavy defalcations take Fleetwood boat on Thursday meet last train with car.”

  “Well, have you carried out your instructions?” he demanded.

  “No, worse luck!” Armadale confessed. “Owing to that old fool’s bungling, she’s slipped through my fingers.”

  Wendover’s whole ideas of the case were overturned by the inspector’s admission. He had refused to allow, even in his own mind, that Cressida could be guilty; but this sudden flight could hardly be squared with innocence by any stretch of probability.

  “Tell me what happened, inspector.”

  Armadale was obviously very sore. It was clear enough from his face that he felt he had muddled things just at the point when his own original theory was going to be vindicated.

  “I’d put a man on to watch her here. He couldn’t do much except hang about in plain clothes and attract as little attention as possible; so he chose the entrance-hall as his look-out post, where he could keep an eye on the lifts and the stairs together. To-night, after dinner, he saw her come down in the lift. She’d evening dress on, and nothing to protect her head; so of course he thought she was just moving about in the hotel. However, he followed her along a passage; and at the end of it she opened a door marked: ‘Ladies’ Dressing-Room.’ Well, of course, he could hardly shove in there; so he hung about waiting for her to come out again.”