The Castleford Conundrum

by J. J. Connington

  Mrs. Stevenage seemed to have no objection to supporting her son out of her moderate income. She described herself in a hearty fashion as “a broad-minded old fool”; but she would have been much disgusted if she had heard this paraphrased into “a silly old ass,” which was the version given by some people. Caught up in the swirl of new ideas which followed the War, she had assimilated everything without digesting anything, and she prided herself especially on her complete freedom from prejudices where the love affairs of the younger generation were concerned. Free love, unofficial honeymoons, trial unions, companionate marriages: all had her enthusiastic approval.

  Only at one point did the rock of Victorianism show itself above the waves. “Of course, Dickie, I’d strongly object to anything of that sort under my roof.” And Dickie, with that frank smile of his which women liked so much, reassured her at once. No girl would ever come into her house except at her own invitation; that was quite understood. In point of fact, this arrangement suited him admirably. “If a woman once gets her foot over your doorstep,” he confided to a male friend, “it’s deuced difficult, deuced difficult, to drop her when you want to. And one always wants to, sooner or later.”

  After his unfortunate incursion into commercial life, Dickie announced that he meant to devote himself to literature, an occupation which could obviously be conducted at odd moments without interfering with golf, tennis, badminton, or his other amusements. He said little about it himself; but in the early years his mother kept her friends posted on his progress. “Dickie is writing a play, and he’s half-way through the first act already.” That play never seemed to get any farther towards completion. Eventually it vanished from Mrs. Stevenage’s bulletins and was replaced by a novel, which in its turn occupied many months without making any appreciable advance. Finally, even these vague details ceased to flow from Mrs. Stevenage, and the communiques to her friends took the form of: “My son Dickie’s very busy just now—this literary work of his, you know, my dear.” The public had to content itself with this, for nothing from Dickie’s Workshop ever appeared in cold print. If any tactless person asked questions, Mrs. Stevenage smiled tolerantly and murmured that “Dickie is very thorough in his work, very thorough, not easily satisfied—like some writers.”

  Inspector Westerham, wasting no time after his interview with P. C. Gumley, went straight to the Stevenage villa; and, brushing aside all excuses that “Mr. Richard is busy just now,” made his way into the author’s study. He had never seen a writer’s work-room before, and this one failed to impress him: an untidy flat desk littered with papers, an armchair at it for the author, a shelf of novels, a wireless set, one or two chairs, and a long comfortable settee on which a thinker might recline while he turned over in his mind the fate of his characters or on which he might even snatch forty winks when intellectual strain grew too acute.

  When the Inspector was announced, Dickie was stretched out on the settee, a pipe held slackly in his mouth and an expression of unusual worry and gloom upon his face. At Westerham’s name, he looked round with a smile which the Inspector judged to be mechanical. He sat up quickly, smoothed his hair with his hand, and eyed the newcomer for a moment before he rose to his feet.

  “Well, what can I do for you?” he inquired, with a rather forced attempt at geniality and unconcern.

  He motioned Westerham to a seat, while he himself dropped into the armchair behind the untidy desk. The Inspector ran a shrewd glance over his involuntary host. “The sort of fellow women would like better than men would,” was his judgment, based on something slightly theatrical about his victim’s air.

  “I’ve come to ask a few questions with regard to the death of Mrs. Castleford,” he began in a businesslike tone. “When did you see her last, Mr. Stevenage?”

  Dick Stevenage appeared to be slightly shocked by the abrupt opening. He picked up a piece of india-rubber from the desk and toyed with it for a moment before answering.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” he said at last. “When I heard the news of the accident, I was stunned. I was quite stunned by it. Dreadful, isn’t it? A terrible affair.”

  “You were an intimate friend of hers, of course,” the Inspector answered, infusing something of apology into his tone. “I quite understand that.”

  He contrived to invest this simple phrase with a peculiar significance.

  “You saw her frequently, no doubt,” he continued. “When did you see her last?”

  Dickie hesitated for a moment, looking down at his india-rubber. Then, as he raised his eyes again, he found the Inspector consulting a notebook as though verifying some specific entry. How much did this damned policeman know? Westerham read the question in his face, just as easily as if it had been voiced. It did not surprise him; for even an innocent person is apt to be flustered in such a situation.

  “I met her yesterday at half-past three—half-past three or thereabouts, I think,” Stevenage admitted, hesitatingly.

  “By appointment, perhaps?”

  Stevenage pondered over this question for some seconds. Then with an air of a man trying to be perfectly exact, he explained:

  “Well, yes, by appointment, if you like to put it so. Or rather, at any rate, I expected to see her round about then.”

  The Inspector jotted down a note.

  “Half-past three. At the Chalet?”

  “Yes, at the Chalet,” Stevenage confirmed. “I want you to understand that I’ll give you all the information that could help you, Inspector Westerham. You quite see that, don’t you? I’ve nothing to conceal, nothing whatever. But I saw nothing of the accident, and I don’t see how anything I say can be of use to you.”

  Westerham ignored this completely and stolidly continued his interrogatory.

  “You reached the Chalet at 3.30 p.m., you say, Mr. Stevenage. Just tell me what happened next.”

  Stevenage was evidently far from anxious to go into details. He hesitated, boggled over his opening, and at last made a pretence of frankness:

  “Oh, I met her on the verandah; you know the verandah? She was painting, out there, when I came up; had her easel set up and all her stuff scattered about. I sat down and talked while she painted; we just talked of this and that, you know, nothing of any importance.”

  “And she was painting all this time?”

  “Oh, yes,” Stevenage asserted, and then looked as though he wished he had not been so quick.

  The Inspector turned over a leaf or two in his notebook and marked a certain place with his thumb.

  “How long did this conversation last, between you?”

  “I really don’t know,” Stevenage admitted, with obvious confusion in his voice. “It lasted a good while, I should say. Quite a long time, probably. You know how time passes when one’s talking?”

  The Inspector had a shrewd belief that this part of the story was untrue; but he had no desire to go too far. As the case stood, Stevenage was a witness like any other, and browbeating might raise trouble. He bethought himself of a side-issue which would disarm his witness’s suspicions.

  “You heard some shooting?” he asked.

  “Yes, a few shots in the spinney. Young Frankie, it was.”

  “By the way,” the Inspector asked, as though in curiosity, “what shoes were you wearing that afternoon?”

  Stevenage, obviously, could see no point in this question.

  “What shoes was I wearing?” he repeated. “A brown pair with crêpe-rubber soles.”

  “Do you mind if I have a look at them?” Westerham inquired. “Don’t ring,” he added, as Stevenage made a movement towards the bell. “If you don’t mind, I’ll go along with you and see them.”

  Stevenage was plainly at sea over this. He led the Inspector to a cloak-room where shoes were laid out on shelves.

  “These are the ones,” he pointed out.

  The Inspector picked them up and turned them about in his hand as though gauging their size. Then, casually, he lifted one or two of the other shoes as if
in search of something.

  “They usually stamp the size on the sole,” he explained, as if accounting for his proceedings. “Ah, here it is!”

  He had ascertained that none of the shoes bore any trace of a paint-mark.

  “That’s all right, Mr. Stevenage. It’s a matter of a foot-print; but it doesn’t fit your shoes at all. Most likely it’s of no importance; but with a coroner’s jury . . . well, they might ask any absurd question, and we have to be ready to answer.”

  He put down the shoes, brushed his finger-tips to together, and led the way back to the study.

  “Now, would you go on with your story, please? You talked for a time with Mrs. Castleford. Did you go into the Chalet with her?”

  “No, I didn’t!”

  Stevenage’s denial was over-prompt; and again he seemed to reconsider. This time he decided to retract what he had said.

  “That’s to say,” he went on, “yes, I did. I went in to carry out the tea things.”

  Westerham could not resist the temptation to give Stevenage a jar; but he did it in so silky a tone that his statement sounded almost like a confirmation of the evidence.

  “Quite so, Mr. Stevenage. And you drew the curtains of the Chalet sitting room so that you wouldn’t be dazzled while you were carrying out the tea things. Very wise, no doubt. And when did you bring out the tea tray?”

  Stevenage glanced sidelong at the Inspector, as though weighing whether or not he should take notice of the thrust. This damned policeman must have been primed, or else he was putting two and two together and coming near four in his answer. Better let sleeping dogs lie. No use saying anything which would throw him open to awkward questions.

  “About half-past four, I think,” he answered at length. “I’m almost sure it was about that time, because Mrs. Castleford suggested it was tea-time, and she’d looked at her watch. She liked her afternoon tea at half-past four. I didn’t look at my own watch.”

  “You carried out the tea tray and so forth?”

  “Yes, everything was set ready for carrying out. The caretaker looks after that. The kettle was boiling in the scullery-place. You know it: the little room off the sitting room.”

  “Was Mrs. Castleford on the verandah when you carried out the tea tray?”

  Stevenage obviously hesitated here, and it was only after some seconds that he decided to take the plunge:

  “No, she was inside the Chalet, in the sitting room. I remember that,” he went on with an air of frankness, “because I called to her that everything was ready; and she told me to go ahead and pour out the tea. I remember that quite well, for she asked me to get her saccharin phial out of her vanity-bag and put three tabloids in her cup.”

  “And you did that for her? How many tabloids were in the phial when you picked it up?”

  “Just three, as it happened,” Stevenage replied quite promptly. “I remember I took out the three and thought how lucky it was that there were three left; for the bottle was empty then. I shook it to make sure there weren’t any more.”

  “And you put sugar in your own cup at the same time?”

  “Yes, I always take sugar in my tea. Two lumps, if it’s of any interest to you,” he added with a faint air of insolence.

  “Everything’s of interest if one looks at it the right way,” said the Inspector, cryptically. “And now, what happened after that?”

  Stevenage pondered for a moment as though joggling his memory.

  “Mrs. Castleford came out of the Chalet and sat down at the table. Then . . . let’s see . . . Oh, yes, she filled up the teapot from the kettle, to be ready for another cup or two if we wanted it. And she lighted the spirit lamp. I’d blown it out while I was carrying the tray from the scullery.”

  “I thought so,” said the Inspector absently.

  Stevenage glanced sharply at him. Evidently this damned fellow knew more than one bargained for.

  “What happened next?” Westerham pursued.

  “I don’t know that anything happened, just then,” Stevenage answered. “We talked over the tea table for a while, about one thing and another, you know: just casual conversation. I can’t remember what we talked about. It wasn’t anything special.”

  “Did she eat anything?” Westerham demanded suddenly, as though he attached importance to the point.

  “No, nothing at all. She was diabetic, you know, and had to diet herself specially, on that account.

  “She drank her tea, though?”

  Something in the Inspector’s tone seemed to put Stevenage on his guard. He reflected before he answered.

  “No, she didn’t drink her tea. She had a habit of leaving her tea to go tepid before she drank it—cold, almost. I finished my cup before she’d even tasted hers. In fact, now I come to think of it, she didn’t drink any tea while I was there. A telegram came for her, just then, and interrupted us.”

  “Ah?” ejaculated the Inspector, as though this item was fresh to him. “A telegram? What was it about, do you know?”

  “I don’t know,” Stevenage declared with an emphasis which went far to suggest that he had something to conceal. “I’ve no idea at all. She didn’t show it to me.”

  The Inspector feigned a certain doubt.

  “H’m!” he said. “A telegram, you say? Well, Mr. Stevenage, I found no trace of any telegram-form anywhere at the Chalet. How do you account for that?”

  “I don’t know; I can’t account for it at all. Perhaps she threw it away or burned it, or something like that. I know nothing about it, I can assure you. She didn’t show it to me. She didn’t tell me who sent it, or anything.”

  “Well, that’s as it may be,” Westerham retorted in a sceptical tone.

  Mrs. Castleford might, of course, have burned the telegram. But the ashes he had seen in the Chalet grate had no sign of writing or printing on them; and in quantity they equalled the remains of half a dozen telegram forms. Besides, from the evidence of the telegraph boy, Stevenage was obviously lying when he insisted that he had no idea of the wire’s contents.

  “What happened after that?” Westerham demanded.

  “I came away shortly afterwards,” Stevenage explained. “I left almost on the heels of the telegraph boy.”

  “You haven’t told me why you left so quickly,” the Inspector pointed out. “Is it usual, when you’re having tea with a lady, to get up and go away before she’s even begun to drink her tea?”

  Stevenage was evidently unprepared with an answer. He played with his india-rubber, averting his face from the Inspector and obviously trying on the spur of the moment to concoct some fiction which would pass muster.

  “She asked me to go,” he said at last in a halting way. “She wanted to get on with her painting, I expect.”

  “Although she hadn’t finished her tea? Curious, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, there’s nothing in that,” Stevenage hastened to explain. “She had a habit of drinking a whole cup of tea at a gulp. It wasn’t as if she would have dallied over it after I was gone, you see?”

  The Inspector pretended to be satisfied with this account. He felt himself in an awkward position. Except for the financial complications revealed to him at Carron Hill, he had no grounds for assuming that Mrs. Castleford’s death was due to anything but accident; and on that basis his sole concern was with the immediate circumstances of her decease. He had no valid excuse for embarking on a roving commission and investigating collateral issues which might well turn out to be mere mare’s nests.

  Given a free hand, he would have probed further without hesitation; but, as it chanced, there had been an awkward case not long before which had filled the newspapers of the country and focused attention on the limits to which police questioning could reasonably be carried. With that in the background, Inspector Westerham had no desire to be held up as a busybody making impertinent and irrelevant inquiries into people’s private lives.

  He decided to steer a middle course, so far as it was possible; and to begin with, he made up
his mind to trap Stevenage in some further lies in the hope that this would throw him off his balance.

  “Let’s see,” he continued musingly. “You came to the Chalet at 3.30 p.m. and you had tea at 4.30 p.m. An hour, eh? And Mrs. Castleford was painting all that time, while you talked with her?”

  The Inspector had a shrewd idea that Stevenage would endorse this in order to escape from more direct inquiries about the employment of that time.

  “Yes, she painted and we talked while she was doing it.”

  Westerham knew that this was a lie. He had examined the canvas and made up his mind that ten minutes would have sufficed to put on all the fresh paint which it carried.

  “She didn’t say that she expected Miss Lindfield, or anyone else, to drop in at the Chalet during the afternoon?”

  Stevenage shook his head.

  “You know Miss Lindfield?” the Inspector went on “She’s the main witness we have in this affair. What sort of person is she?”

  Westerham’s tactics bore the fruit he expected. Stevenage was only too glad to ride off on a side-issue.

  “She practically runs Carron Hill,” he explained. “She’s Mrs. Castleford’s half-sister, I think. I know Mrs. Castleford relied on her in everything. She’s very efficient, you know; the sort of person who can run things without letting you think she’s running them. She had a lot of influence with Mrs. Castleford.”

  “I see you know her intimately,” commented Westerham, and he was surprised to catch a look of uneasiness on Stevenage’s face as he spoke.