Was It Murder?

by James Hilton

  “By then, as you know, there were all sorts of rumours about the place, and it was pretty generally known that Scotland Yard was on the job. Two of my men, plain-clothes chaps, of course, found the bat during a casual stroll about the grounds. They weren’t looking for anything—they just tumbled across it. It struck me at the time that the thing must have been very badly hidden, and why, after all, should it have been hidden at all and not destroyed? Still, it was evidence, and it enabled us to get a Home Office order for the exhumation of the body, and that, of course, led to the discovery of something that was a complete surprise to us—the bullet in the boy’s brain.

  “All this must have startled Mrs. Ellington pretty considerably, for her detailed plans to have her husband suspected had been on rather different lines. You see now, perhaps, why I was so secretive about what it was that my men had discovered? Mrs. Ellington knew it couldn’t have been the revolver, for she had hidden that carefully. She didn’t know, of course, anything about Lambourne’s faked cricket-bat clue. All she did know was that SOMETHING had been discovered, SOMEWHERE, and SOMEHOW, and she must have spent awful moments wondering whether she had dropped a handkerchief or a spot of face-powder or some other incriminating trace in the swimming-bath. It’s not a bad plan to give people these awful moments, and it certainly worked with Mrs. Ellington. You said just now that she had nerve, and I agreed that she had, but only up to a point. That’s the whole truth of the matter, and I’m rather proud that, having noticed it, I made use of it all along.

  “Not, of course, that I suspected her at first. On the contrary, there was a fairly strong case against Ellington himself—the cricket-bat clue, the missing revolver clue, his obvious motive—oh yes, I daresay we might have got a conviction. Only, to me, at any rate, the case seemed too strong—as well as in some ways too weak. We had found the cricket-bat a little too easily. The missing revolver had been confessed to by Ellington himself. The motive—well, it was obvious enough, but wasn’t it, in a sort of way, TOO obvious? All this may sound rather vague, but then it WAS only a vague feeling, at the time. I’m quite certain that if Mrs. Ellington’s plans hadn’t gone astray we should have been provided with some much more convincing clues to implicate her husband—clues that were neither too far-fetched nor too obvious. She was clever enough to get inside the skin of a detective, as it were, and see things with just his critical mind. She was much cleverer than Lambourne—she would never have left such a schoolboyish signpost as a blood-stained cricket-bat lying under a bush. As for what she WOULD have left us, if she had had a chance, I can’t tell you. But I’ll wager it would have pointed to her husband in some subtle and rather indirect way.

  “For days, as a matter of fact, I felt like arresting Ellington—on suspicion, at any rate. And yet, in a way, I never felt any enthusiasm about it—subconsciously, even then, I must have known he wasn’t guilty.”

  Guthrie smiled. “We detectives deal in evidence, of course, not in subconscious intuitions. Anyhow, before long, the case against Ellington was decidedly weakened by Brownley’s statement that on the fatal night he had seen Lambourne walking towards the Ring with a cricket-bat. I had already, in a way, been rather favourably impressed by Ellington. I didn’t like him, and I don’t like him, but I didn’t think he was the ‘killer’ type, and I certainly doubted his ability to plan anything very astute. So, you see, my suspicions veered a little towards Lambourne. It wasn’t easy to think of a motive in his case, but then he was such a queer person that he might well have had a queer enough reason. I did, I admit, think for a time that he might have killed the boy to throw suspicion on Ellington. And it was then that Mrs. Ellington got into her second panic. (Her first, you remember, was when you first arrived at Roseveare’s summons.)

  “I had questioned Lambourne pretty stiffly, and had got out of him the story of what he really did on the night of the murder. I don’t know that I actually disbelieved him, but he evidently thought I did, and was sufficiently upset by it all. What happened after that was in a way superbly logical. He had one of his periodic nerve attacks, Mrs. Ellington ministered to him as on former occasions, and the next day he was found dead of an overdose of veronal. Whereupon Mrs. Ellington volunteered the information that on the previous evening he had made a full confession of murder to her, and had promised to make the same over again to me in the morning. All perfectly feasible and not really improbable, when you come to think about it. Her story and her way of telling it were both admirably convincing. It wasn’t legal evidence, of course, but it was moral evidence of a rather unshakable character. There was really nothing for me to do after listening to it but to shrug my shoulders and shake the dust of Oakington from my feet for ever. Which I did. Or rather, to be more accurate, appeared to do.”

  Revell leaned forward excitedly. “You mean that you didn’t believe her?” he exclaimed.

  “Believe her? Not only did I not believe her, but by the time she had got to the end of her yarn I knew for certain that she had murdered the boy herself.”

  “Good God!”

  “Yes, I was certain of it. And it was a single word that told me—a single word of two letters and one syllable—a word that we all use perhaps a hundred times a day. I don’t suppose you’ll remember it—the really significant things in life are often the least memorable. It was when she was describing how Lambourne had confessed. She did it all so perfectly —except for just that one word. She told how Lambourne and the boy had walked along by the side of the bath as far as the diving-platform, how Lambourne had waited till the boy was standing on the edge facing the empty bath with the platform just above him, and how Lambourne then had sprung back and shot up at the boy from behind. Revell, when I heard her say that, I had to use all the self-control I possess—for it told me, as clearly as a vision from Heaven, that the woman had done it!”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow the argument.”

  “No? I’m not surprised—it was a thing I might easily have missed myself if I hadn’t been lucky. Repeated at second-hand, as I did it just now, I don’t suppose it did exactly leap out at you. But I assure you, Revell, it was convincing enough to me. The little word ‘up’ was the one morsel of truth that the woman couldn’t help letting escape.”

  “The word ‘up’? How? I don’t remember—”

  “Not even now? I’ll say it again then. In recounting Lambourne’s confession, she told us that he had ‘shot up at the boy from behind’. Now d’you get it? Why on earth should she have used that word ‘up’? Lambourne’s rather a tall fellow—he wouldn’t have needed to shoot up at all, for the boy was only of medium height. But Mrs. Ellington herself was exceptionally little—hardly five feet, I should say—and for her it would have had to be a distinctly upward shot. Unconsciously, while describing Lambourne’s supposed movements, she had had her own in mind, and that one little word, to anyone who noticed it, was as eloquent as a signed confession.”

  He paused and then went on: “Of course you can laugh if you like and say that it was a preposterously vast conclusion to draw from a preposterously minute premise. I quite agree, and I was fully aware of it at the time. No one knew better than I did that it wouldn’t stand for a minute before a judge and jury. To begin with, there was no one to swear that she had said it —and there were a hundred other ways in which a clever counsel could have ridiculed it to pieces. I simply had to pack up and go, although I was perfectly sure that she had committed murder and had managed to palm it off on a poor devil of a suicide.

  “And even that wasn’t quite so hellish as the real truth, as it happened. Here, again, I depend on nothing but her own statement, but she told this part of it so proudly that it may well be true. It’s frightful enough, in all conscience, for, according to her, Lambourne’s death was neither suicide nor accident, but murder. And it was she who murdered him!”

  Revell stared speechlessly.

  “Yes. And the way she managed it was perhaps the most astonishing part of the whole business.
She’d got into a panic, you see, with all the inquiries being made, and she had the idea that if someone only confessed everything would be all over. So, knowing that Lambourne was hopelessly in love with her, she went to him and told him nothing less than the whole truth. Yes, it wasn’t HE who confessed to HER, but SHE who confessed to HIM. And at the end of it all, working upon his hysteria, she suggested a suicide-pact between them—that they should both make their exit together from a horrible world. She played on Lambourne’s shattered nerves like a virtuoso, and in the end, no doubt by making love to him pretty daringly, she had her way. Roseveare, as it happened, came along just then—just a sudden idea to see if Lambourne was asleep, that was all—he listened a few minutes outside the door, heard a bit of the love-making, and walked away in disgust. I gather he had suspected Mrs. Ellington of that sort of thing before.”

  “Did he tell you all this?”

  “Yes—explained it fully after the inquest on Lambourne. His one idea, of course, was and had been all along to avoid any more scandal to the School.”

  “Yet he lied to you about that second visit of his to Lambourne’s room.”

  “No, he didn’t. It was the fault of my too-precise question. I asked him when he last saw Lambourne, and he answered—quite truthfully— nine o’clock. He didn’t see him after that, though he heard him talking.”

  “It was pretty cool of him, though, to say nothing about it at the inquest.”

  “No doubt. But, as he told me, he couldn’t see how the purely private scandal of an affair between Lambourne and Mrs. Ellington could affect the matter. Anyhow, as he frankly admitted, it was his aim to let the inquest go as smoothly as possible.”

  Revell nodded. “He’s a cool customer, though. The curious thing is that two boys happened to see him as he paid that second visit to Lambourne’s room —they were playing chess in the Common Room. They told me about it, and I naturally wondered what on earth the Head had been up to… But please go on—don’t let me interrupt the exposition.”

  “There’s not a very great deal to go on to, now. Of course Mrs. Ellington didn’t keep her share of the compact. Lambourne took his overdose, but she only pretended to take hers, and the result we all know. But I do hold that it was a rather magnificent improvisation on a theme suggested by mere panic.”

  “She was a marvellous woman,” said Revell slowly.

  “In many ways, yes. But for that one tiny slip I might never have suspected her. Even then, if she had kept her head, I could have proved nothing. She had me on toast, if she had only known. She had YOU, too, but in a rather different way, and that’s why I didn’t make much of a confidant of you in the matter. In fact, I was very glad for you to think that I’d really been taken in by it all.”

  “Oh, you were, were you?”

  But Guthrie did not immediately reply to the rather disgruntled remark. He stared for some moments at his fingernails and then resumed: “Time’s getting on, Revell—I arranged to meet a friend here this afternoon.” He put a steadying hand on Revell’s arm as the latter moved to get up. “No, no— that wasn’t a hint for you to go—not at all. As a matter of fact, I rather want you to meet my friend. He should be here any minute now.” He took out his watch, compared it with the clock on the far side of the room, and lit his pipe again. “Yes,” he went on, reflectively, “that was a wonderful theory of yours about Lambourne confessing to save some other person. The sort of thing, you know, that would never have occurred to a practical-minded fellow like myself. But my friend’s different. He’s more like you—a bit complicated in the attic. Ah, here he comes, by Jove.”

  Guthrie rose to his feet with a welcoming smile, and Revell, turning round, was astonished to see the benign, spectacled face of Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 14. — ENTER THIRD (AND LAST) DETECTIVE

  For a moment Revell was too bewildered to speak. Then at last, taking the stranger’s proffered hand, he managed to gasp: “Mr. Lambourne? But— but—I thought you’d gone back to Vienna?”

  Guthrie placed a chair for the stranger to sit between them. “Of course, you’ve met before, you two—I can see that,” he remarked, pleasantly. “I think perhaps we’d better blow our little gaff and have done with it. This isn’t really Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne at all—in fact, so far as I know, there isn’t any such person in the world. It’s my friend and colleague Detective Cannell, of the Yard.”

  Revell found this rather more bewildering than ever. “But surely I met you at Oakington—” he stammered, staring blankly across the table at the round and absurdly cheerful face of the mystery man.

  The latter nodded. “Quite right, Mr. Revell,” he said, in that same quiet, soothing voice that Revell had liked instinctively on the occasion of their first meeting. “I WAS Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne for the time being, it is true. I gather that you haven’t explained things yet, Guthrie?” he added, turning to his friend.

  “Not altogether,” Guthrie answered. “The first part took longer than I had expected. I’m terribly hoarse, by the way—I wish you’d do the rest.”

  “Very well.” And the other turned to Revell with a smile. “We owe you a considerable apology, Mr. Revell, but we hope you’ll forgive us when you’ve heard all the details. You may wonder why we trouble to tell you about it now, but the truth is that we both dislike deceiving innocent people, and even when it has to be done we prefer, if possible, to undeceive them afterwards. Yes, that’s so—we have a conscience, though you mightn’t think so. You see we rather liked you, Mr. Revell, as well, and that made us regret having to make use of you in the way we did. So now, if we can, we shall make amends. You’ll drink another brandy with me, I’m sure?”

  Revell hardly acquiesced, but the other took his silence for acceptance and gave the order. Then he went on: “Let’s see, now, Guthrie, how much does our young friend know?”

  “I got as far as Lambourne’s supposed confession and my own supposed retirement from the case,” replied Guthrie.

  “Ah, yes. I’m afraid the plain truth, Mr. Revell, whether Guthrie told it to you or not, is that he was pretty badly stumped by this Oakington case. Here was a woman whose husband inherited a large sum of money by the deaths of two boys. The first boy was killed accidentally—therefore she thought to herself—what a fine idea if I kill the other boy and my old man gets hanged for the murder! Nothing left then but the money, which will just suit me… that was her idea, wasn’t it? But Guthrie, try as he would, couldn’t find a shadow of evidence against her. So he came to me, in the end—and not for the first time, let me say. He talked—oh, how he did talk!—all one evening and nearly all one night about the case—we both examined it from every possible angle—we theorised and wrangled and argued—and what did we discover at the end of it all?” He paused dramatically. Then, in scarcely more than a whisper, he answered: “Nothing.”

  The waiter came with the brandies, and the little interruption gave Cannell time to raise steam, as it were. “Nothing at all, Mr. Revell, I do assure you. That blessed woman had committed the almost perfect crime. There wasn’t a ha’porth of legal evidence against her. That little word ‘up’ that Guthrie has probably told you about—how a counsel would have sneered at it! ‘It is the sort of clue you read about in detective stories’, he would have said. Or else he would have denied that she’d ever used the word. Or else he would have called as witnesses the doctors who performed the autopsy and asked them if from their examination of the body they believed that the shot had been fired in an upward direction. And of course, since the head was so injured that the course of the bullet was quite untraceable, they would have had to reply that there was no evidence of direction at all.

  “We also knew just a little bit of scandal about the lady’s past, but it wouldn’t have helped us in a court of law. No, the fact is, there was simply NOTHING against her that could be proved. And, if you want the truth, there isn’t much now. But for that signed statement of hers, I don’t know what we coul
d be sure of getting her on—even an attempted murderous assault upon you would want some pretty hard proving. It may interest you to know, by the way, that the weapon that nearly killed you belonged to her husband. He had bought it quite recently in preparation for his life in Kenya.”

  “And if you HAD been killed,” put in Guthrie, “it seems quite possible that Ellington might have been hanged for it. There was method even in that woman’s madness.”

  The other detective resumed: “Ah yes—she had an extraordinary talent for improvisation. If only her nerve had equalled it—if only she had sat tight—laughed at you, Mr. Revell—put out her tongue at you—shrugged her pretty little shoulders and told you, metaphorically, of course, to go to hell! A man might have done it, if ever a man had had her type of genius to begin with. But her nerve was only a woman’s. We broke down that nerve—you, me, and Guthrie between us —and that’s about all we did do.”

  Revell shook his head despairingly. “I still don’t quite see how you come into this affair, Mr. Cannell. What made you appear at Oakington as Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne?”

  “Ah, quite right—that’s what I must explain to you. You see, when Guthrie and I found ourselves completely at a deadlock in this case, we decided to use a little guile. We knew there was no hope of a frontal attack, so we planned what the military tacticians call an enveloping movement. And with your unconscious assistance we succeeded.”