The Castleford Conundrum

by J. J. Connington

  “That’s a rum start,” was Inspector Westerham’s reflection, which he took care not to utter aloud. “Presumably this visitor, whoever it was, must have shifted the chair. But why didn’t she get up while it was being shifted? That would have been easier on the visitor and a sight more comfortable for her, too.”

  A fresh interpretation occurred to him, and he examined the concrete round the original site of the chair, close to the table.

  “No blood here,” he reflected finally. “So she wasn’t shot here and then shifted into the other position after that. And yet she didn’t shift for the sake of looking at the view. She’s still side-on to that, and must have been looking along the verandah just the same as if she’d stayed at the table.”

  Still puzzling over this problem, he walked over and tried to enter the Chalet. A Yale lock baulked him. He recollected that when he had looked into Mrs. Castleford’s bag in search of the cigarette-case, he had noticed a Yale key there, to which he had paid no attention at the moment. He picked up the bag, extracted the key, tried it on the door and found that it turned the lock. Then he remembered the Yale key he had seen in Miss Lindfield’s bag.

  “Go and ask Miss Lindfield how many people have keys of this door,” he ordered.

  In a moment or two the sergeant returned.

  “She says that Mr. Castleford, Mrs. Castleford, Miss Castleford, and Mrs. Haddon have keys, as well as herself. There may be more, she says; but that’s all she knows of, definitely.”

  The Inspector nodded in answer, and then entered the Chalet, followed by the sergeant.

  He found himself in a sitting room. The curtains were drawn close, and only a twilight pervaded the place. Cautiously the Inspector parted them and let in more light. One glance at the floor and rugs satisfied him that there was no need to spend time hunting for footprints, especially for the kind of footmark which interested him at the moment. The person who had stepped on the paintbrush had left no traces inside the Chalet.

  A big comfortable settee filled one corner of the room, its cushions tumbled in disorder.

  “That would be Miss Lindfield’s doing,” suggested the sergeant. “Miss Haddon, she says Miss Lindfield had a bad fit of hysterics after they found the body. I expect she tossed and tumbled about on that settee there while she was carrying on the way they do in hysterics.”

  “Very likely,” Westerham agreed.

  He turned to examine the contents of the room. Three chairs were placed carelessly about the floor, but these had obviously not been used, for their down cushions remained just as they were after Mrs. Haddon had given them a shake-up that morning. The ashtrays on the little table were clean, and there was no tang of tobacco in the air of the room. The grate contained some ashes of burnt paper; but the fragments were tiny; and although Westerham went down on his knees and examined them closely, he could see no trace of any writing on them. The waste-paper basket detained him longer; but even a zealous hunt through its contents yielded nothing which seemed likely to help him. A torn-up invoice from one of the village shops took some time to piece together, and then turned out to be a bill for tea and sugar. He identified, easily enough, the bits of two golf scoring-cards, similar to the one he had seen in Miss Lindfield’s pocket. Another crumpled-up piece of paper had nothing on it except what seemed to be a series of games of Noughts and Crosses, apparently the last resource of someone detained at the Chalet on a rainy day. The final document was obviously a shopping-list, with the items erased as they were purchased.

  “Nothing much here,” he commented as he rose to his feet again and dusted his knees.

  A tiny writing desk raised his hopes; but on examination it yielded nothing but a stock of unused writing paper and envelopes.

  “We’ll try the back premises—the scullery, or whatever it is.”

  Pushing open a door, he found himself in a tiny room, hardly bigger than a large cupboard, fitted with a sink and some shelves for tea things.

  “They’ve filled the kettle here,” said Sergeant Ferryhill, whose strong point was the detection of the obvious. “See the bit of water splashed on the edge of the dish-board?”

  The Inspector ran his finger along the surface of the cake of soap in the dish beside the sink, and then felt the towel hanging from a hook.

  “Somebody’s been washing their hands here, not so long ago,” he pointed out.

  “That would be Miss Lindfield, I expect,” volunteered the sergeant. “That Mrs. Haddon, she told me she’d heard her—Miss Lindfield I mean—at the sink after she’d had her hysterics.”

  “Bathing her face, perhaps,” the Inspector hazarded. “I thought she looked pretty trim when we saw her first, considering what she’d gone through. Well, there’s nothing more to look at, here.”

  As they re-entered the sitting-room, they caught sight of P. C. Gumley standing at the door of the Chalet.

  “The surgeon’s come, sir. He’s outside looking at the body.”

  “Take that cap of yours off,” snapped the Inspector. “Do you usually stump about with your hat on in presence of the dead?”

  P. C. Gumley sullenly removed his headgear and stepped aside from the doorway to allow them to reach the verandah.

  Chapter Eight

  Dr. Ripponden’s Contribution

  The police surgeon was kneeling beside the chair, but he rose to his feet as the Inspector greeted him.

  “I left the body just as it was when I came on the scene,” Westerham explained. “It hasn’t been moved.”

  The doctor made a faint gesture as though to indicate that he had expected these ordinary precautions.

  “What do you make of it, doctor?” the Inspector inquired, as the surgeon remained silent.

  Dr. Berkeley Ripponden shrugged his shoulders slightly. He disliked a general question of this sort. His Court experience had implanted in him a habit of saying as little as possible in answer to queries. He seldom volunteered information. “Yes,” “No,” and “I can’t say,” were his favourite responses. His manner had just a shade of touchiness in it, as though at the end of every reply he added mentally: “And if you don’t like that, then go and find out for yourself.”

  “She’s dead, of course,” he said curtly.

  “You’ve seen the two wounds, the entry one in her back and the exit one in front?”

  “Yes.”

  “The bullet seems to have gone clean through her,” Westerham pointed out. “I found it farther along the verandah.”

  He fished the envelope from his pocket and showed the projectile to the surgeon, who nodded without comment.

  “She’s shot through the heart, isn’t she?” Westerham persisted.

  “It looks like it.”

  “That would kill her almost at once?”

  “I’ll be able to say more when I’ve done a P.M.”

  Westerham tried again.

  “Did you notice anything about her eyes? A lot of iris showing?”

  Dr. Ripponden seemed to bestow some tacit commendation on the Inspector’s observational powers.

  “You noticed that, did you? The pupils are much contracted.”

  “Is that usual in deaths by violence?”

  Dr. Ripponden shook his head.

  “Can you suggest any cause for it, then?”

  “Some miotic drug, perhaps. Pilocarpine, picrotoxine, morphine, physostigmine—any of them would produce the effect. What they call ‘pin-point pupil’ is a well-known symptom with morphine.”

  “You think she’s been drugged?”

  “It looks like it,” Dr. Ripponden admitted, cautiously. “Would you like to have her shifted into the Chalet, so as to make a fuller examination?” the Inspector asked.

  Dr. Ripponden nodded affirmatively.

  “Well, just a moment before we alter anything,” Westerham said.

  He chalked round the four feet of the chair, to mark its position on the verandah. Then, taking a Coddington lens from his pocket, he went round to the back of the body
and made a close study of the dress near the wound, continuing his exploration to include the hair about the nape of the neck.

  “No sign of any singeing,” he reported. “That’s what one would expect, from a shot fired at a distance, obviously. Now I won’t keep you waiting more than a minute or two.”

  From another pocket he extracted a small prismatic compass. Walking along the verandah and stationing himself at the point where the bullet had been found, he took the bearing of the body. Then, replacing the compass in his pocket, he summoned the sergeant and P. C. Gumley.

  “We’d better carry chair and all, inside,” he suggested to the surgeon. “It’ll be easier, that way.”

  Dr. Ripponden offered no objection. As the Inspector was turning away, however, he stopped him.

  “You’d better lend me that bullet for a minute or two,” he said. “It’s a bit battered; but the base is intact. I want to compare it with the entrance wound, once I can get at the skin.”

  The Inspector handed over the little missile. The body was transported into the Chalet, when Westerham dismissed his men and assisted the doctor to make the necessary preparations for his examination. That done, he left Dr. Ripponden to his task and went on to the verandah again.

  Miss Lindfield was still sitting where he had left her; but she seemed to have recovered control of herself. She was leaning forward in her chair, elbow on knee and chin in hand, staring out at the scene in front of her, but obviously paying no heed to it whatever.

  The Inspector left her alone for the moment and went over to Mrs. Haddon.

  “I want you to show me the exact path you took when you came here from your cottage,” he explained.

  His real intention was to get her completely out of earshot of Miss Lindfield while he put one question to her; but he could kill two birds with a single stone by utilising this opportunity to see the cottage and learn the lie of the land in that direction.

  Mrs. Haddon had no objection to showing him all she could. She led him along the path, exhibited her broken window, surrendered the bullet which had smashed the pane, and gave him a full account of the afternoon’s events as seen by herself. Skilfully interleaved into her flood of information he managed to place his question in such a way that she would attach no particular importance to it.

  “Miss Lindfield hadn’t slipped in coming through the wood, had she? Her hands weren’t soiled in any way?”

  “Soiled? No, they weren’t soiled, for I saw them when I was handing her that bullet to look at. Miss Lindfield keeps her hands just perfect, always—beautiful shiny nails, she’s got. I wish I had hands like hers. But she hasn’t my work to do. What made you think her hands would be soiled?”

  The Inspector smiled broadly to intimate that a joke was coming.

  “Well, if anyone put a shot through my coat, I guess I’d be down flat on the ground before he’d time to shoot again. She must be a well-plucked one,” he added with a certain admiration in his tone.

  “Trust her to keep her head,” Mrs. Haddon advised. “She always keeps cool, never flies into a temper over anything—not so’s you would notice, anyhow.”

  Westerham had got what he wanted and he let Mrs. Haddon continue the outpouring of her grievances.

  “I’ll take charge of that bullet,” he suggested as he turned to leave her. “And I think I’d better have your key of the Chalet, too. You won’t be allowed to go in there just at present, you know, and the key’s safer with me.”

  When he had stowed the two articles in his pocket, a fresh idea seemed to strike him.

  “By the way, Mrs. Haddon, just let’s have a look at the soles of your slippers, if you don’t mind.”

  Mrs. Haddon, after a slight hesitation, allowed him to do so. He seemed quite satisfied with his examination and took his leave of her. She watched him disappear into the wood and then in turn she removed her slippers and inspected each sole minutely without finding anything abnormal to reward her for her trouble. After staring at them for a considerable time, she came indignantly to the conclusion that the Inspector had “been having a game with her.”

  Meanwhile Westerham had made his way back to the Chalet with his eye on his watch. He hurried on his way, with the idea of getting a rough estimate of the time taken by Mrs. Haddon when she went through the spinney to the discovery of the body. Miss Lindfield was his next quarry.

  “I hope you’re feeling better now,” he said sympathetically as he approached her chair. “No, don’t get up, please!”

  “I’m still a bit shaken,” Miss Lindfield admitted. “But if you want to ask any more questions, I’m quite ready.”

  “I’m not going to worry you,” Westerham assured her. “I’m really thinking of the risk to the carpets at Carron Hill,” he added with a smile. “The fact is, someone’s trodden on a paint brush on the verandah, and most likely some paint will have stuck to the sole of the shoe. I merely wanted to warn you, in case you walked into the house with paint on your shoes.”

  With a lithe movement which delighted the Inspector’s aesthetic side, Miss Lindfield crossed her knees, removed one shoe, and held it up.

  “Nothing here, apparently.”

  She removed the other shoe and held it up in its turn. “Or here, either. Still, I’m glad you mentioned it.”

  “I’m sorry I troubled you,” Westerham apologised. “It was just in case you’d trodden on the paint while you were walking about up there.”

  As though to cover up his officiousness, he switched over to a fresh subject.

  “We have to ask rude questions, at times, in a case of this sort,” he said. “I’m going to ask one now. Do you know, or have you any reason to suppose that Mrs. Castleford took drugs?”

  Miss Lindfield seemed markedly surprised by this inquiry.

  “Drugs?” she echoed.

  Then an interpretation seemed to occur to her.

  “Oh, yes,” she continued, “she did take drugs. She took aspirin whenever she felt she had a headache coming on . . .”

  “What I meant was something more serious. She wasn’t a drug-addict, was she?”

  Miss Lindfield brushed the suggestion aside at once. “No, certainly not.”

  “Mrs. Castleford suffered from diabetes?” the Inspector inquired.

  Miss Lindfield looked up sharply. Evidently she could not guess how he had inferred this.

  “Oh, I’m not a Sherlock Holmes,” he added, at the sight of her surprise. “I happened to notice a saccharin phial beside her cup, that’s all.”

  Miss Lindfield’s fine eyes betrayed her respect for his acuteness.

  “Yes, she was diabetic. Her brother-in-law was treating her for it with insulin, and she had to keep off sugar.”

  “Her brother-in-law?”

  “Dr. Glencaple—Dr. Laurence Glencaple. You must have heard of him. He practices in the neighborhood, here.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him, of course. When you called him her ‘brother-in-law’ I was thinking of Castleford. I’d forgotten you told me she’d been married twice. He treated her?”

  Miss Lindfield amplified her earlier statement.

  “Well, he prescribed and looked after her generally. But usually Mr. Castleford injected the insulin. It’s done with a hypodermic syringe, you know.”

  “I see,” said the Inspector.

  The tail of his eye caught a movement at the window of the Chalet. Dr. Ripponden was drawing the curtains together, and Westerham guessed that the surgeon had completed his preliminary examination. He excused himself, and went up to the verandah. Dr. Ripponden appeared on the threshold and closed the door behind him.

  “Here’s the bullet,” he said, holding it out to the Inspector. “You’d better take charge of it. I may want it again, though I don’t think I shall.”

  Westerham stowed it away in its proper envelope.

  “Does it fit the entrance wound?” he asked.

  “They’re practically the same diameter. It’s a very clean wound, and the base
of the bullet almost covers it exactly.”

  “The exit wound’s bigger, of course?”

  “Yes. A good deal bigger, naturally, and nothing like so clean.”

  “The bullet didn’t hit a rib, did it?”

  The doctor made a cautious gesture.

  “Not so far as I can see at present. We may know definitely when I’ve done a P.M.”

  “The bullet’s not knocked out of shape much,” the Inspector pointed out. “That’s what I’m going on. There’s another thing, but it’s not very important, seeing the evidence we’ve got. She hasn’t been dead long? Can you put an estimate on that?”

  Dr. Ripponden shook his head decidedly.

  “The skin-temperature’s about 90° Fahrenheit on the abdomen. That might point to death any time up to three hours ago. One can’t gauge these things closely.”

  “I suppose you examined the skin round about the wound?” Westerham asked. “Any singeing of the skin or frizzling of the fine hairs?”

  “I could see no signs of powder-blackening, either on the dress or on the skin itself, around the wound,” Dr. Ripponden admitted.

  “There wouldn’t be any, of course, in the case of a shot fired from a distance,” the Inspector suggested.

  Dr. Ripponden stared at Westerham as much as to say: “Do you think I’m such a fool that I don’t know that?”

  “What about this pin-point pupil business?” persisted Westerham. “Did you make out anything further about it?”

  The doctor shook his head impatiently.

  “You’ll need to wait for the results of the P.M. These things take more than just guessing.”

  He paused for a moment, then added:

  “You’ll have the body taken down to the mortuary?”

  “I’ll let you know, as soon as that’s been done,” Westerham assured him.