The Castleford Conundrum

by J. J. Connington

  “Oh, well, I’ve been at Carron Hill a good deal, you know,” Stevenage explained. “One picks up general notions of things from seeing people together.”

  “What about Mr. Castleford?”

  Again Westerham saw that uneasy look on Stevenage’s face; but this time he thought he was able to account for it.

  “Castleford?” Stevenage repeated. “Oh, Castleford’s just . . . well, to tell you the truth, I never had much to do with him. He seems a very quiet sort, rather under his wife’s thumb, if you know what I mean. He was . . . as a matter of fact, he was pretty well negligible at Carron Hill. That’s the impression I got.”

  “He has a daughter, hasn’t he?”

  “Miss Castleford? Yes. A pretty girl,” Stevenage commented with an assumption of carelessness which did not quite deceive the Inspector.

  “There were two brothers-in-law, I gathered?”

  “The Glencaples?” Stevenage was evidently delighted to keep the talk in this channel lest it should veer back to his own doings. “I’ve met them from time to time. I couldn’t stand Kenneth, myself. He’s a thick-skinned type that says outrageous things to one without any care for one’s feelings. Laurence, the doctor, is all right, although he’s apt to pull one’s leg and turn ironical at times. Of course they were both as mad as hornets at losing their brother’s money and seeing it made over to Castleford, and they were doing their best to set that business right. So I gathered.”

  “From Mrs. Castleford?”

  “From her, yes. She mentioned it casually. I wasn’t prying into their family affairs, of course. But she happened to speak of it.”

  “At the Chalet?”

  Stevenage thought for a moment. Evidently he did not want the Chalet to crop up if he could avoid it.

  “Yes, at the Chalet yesterday, and once or twice before that. I think that in the last week or so the Glencaples have been doing all they could to get her to change her will.”

  “While you were with her, Mrs. Castleford was sitting beside the tea table? She didn’t shift her chair?”

  Stevenage seemed surprised by the suggestion.

  “No, why should she? She was talking to me until I cleared out.”

  “That’s all right,” Westerham hastened to say. “You left her sitting at the table with her tea still untouched. I thought so.”

  Stevenage evidently wanted to hear more of this, but decided not to reopen the question of his own doings at that period.

  “Did you meet anyone on your way home?” Westerham inquired in a casual tone.

  Stevenage hesitated for a moment or two.

  “I saw Mr. Castleford coming along one of the field-paths, but he didn’t see me, I think. I didn’t stop to speak to him.”

  “You can’t give me the time when you saw him?”

  “Well, as it happens, I can, roughly. It was about five to five. I was going to set my watch by the village chime, and I happened to look at it then, to see how time was getting on. He was coming up the field-path across Ringford’s Meadow to the stile that lets you out onto the road—you know the place I mean.”

  “You were past that point before he came up onto the road? Is that what you mean?” the Inspector inquired.

  “Yes, I must have passed the stile a minute or two before he came up to it.”

  “You met nobody else?”

  “Not till I got to Thunderbridge.”

  Westerham rose, to Stevenage’s relief.

  “That’s all you wish to say?” the Inspector asked, formally. “If you’ve anything to add . . .”

  “No, that’s all I can tell you,” Stevenage hastened to assure him. “I’ve been perfectly frank with you; you quite understand that, don’t you? And, by the way, you won’t call me as a witness at the inquest, will you? I’d rather not.”

  “That’s hardly my province,” Westerham pointed out. “It’s for the Coroner to decide what witnesses he’ll call.”

  He closed the interview with one final question:

  “Did Mrs. Castleford by any chance tell you exactly how her affairs stood yesterday—in the matter of her will, I mean?”

  Stevenage seemed to consider for a few moments before he replied.

  “She was never very clear in her explanations of things like that,” he explained, slowly, “but I got the impression that she had cancelled one will and intended to make a fresh one. She kept putting that job off from day to day. She had a sort of morbid horror of anything connected with death, you know; and even making a will was a reminder that she might die sometime. She didn’t like it, and so she put it off and off. She didn’t say that to me in so many words, you understand? I’m simply giving you my interpretation of the thing. But I certainly got the idea that the new will hadn’t been fully considered. She hadn’t called in her lawyer about it, I know.”

  The Inspector took his leave; and, as he walked away from the villa, he began to collate the impressions left on his mind by that interview.

  One side of Stevenage’s character gave him little trouble. That sanctum of his might be anything else, but it was not a work-room. The Inspector knew enough recognise the signs of work, and there were none there, despite the warning that “Mr. Richard is busy.” The whole of that side of the man’s life was obviously mere camouflage to cover laziness. “That fellow would do almost anything for a living—except work,” was Westerham’s mental verdict.

  Of more immediate importance were the symptoms of uneasiness displayed by Stevenage at various times during the interview. They fell into three groups. In the first place, he was obviously desperately eager to cover up the employment of his time between 3.30 and 4.30 p.m. Anyone could see through his lies about that. Secondly, he was almost equally desirous of pretending that he knew nothing about the contents of the telegram, though quite plainly he must have learned its purport. Thirdly, he was ill at ease when Castleford’s name cropped up. The Inspector had no difficulty in finding the key to this minor problem. Stevenage, now that Mrs. Castleford was dead, had no desire to see his relations with her dug up and examined. He was cutting loose from that part of his past as quickly as he could. Once again, as at Carroll Hill, the Inspector got the impression that, as a human personality, Mrs. Castleford had counted for remarkably little with even her intimates. In the circumstances, Stevenage would naturally not advertise that he felt her loss keenly; but Westerham guessed that there had been little to suppress. This Romeo would not destroy himself on the tomb of his Juliet. Most likely he had somebody else in his eye already. Perhaps he’d grown weary of Mrs. Castleford long before the crash came.

  And at this point there flitted across the Inspector’s mind the recollection that Stevenage had jibbed slightly at the suggestion that he was intimate with Miss Lindfield. And the only other woman mentioned—Hilary Castleford—he had dismissed cavalierly from the conversation: “A pretty girl.”

  On two counts, the Inspector could give him a clean bill. Quite obviously, he had not been uneasy in the matter of the shoes; and his statements of the course of events at the tea table had been quite accurate, with the exception of the affair of the telegram.

  Finally, he seemed to know as much as anyone else about the Castleford will problem.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Coroner

  Mr. Oliver Renishaw, the local Coroner, was a dry, precise little man with a pair of alert eyes in an expressionless, leathery face. In private life, his talent was for monologue rather than for conversation; but his talk was objective and not subjective, so that even his longest speeches failed to reveal much of his intimate thoughts. In his official capacity, caution was his most salient characteristic. He confined himself to his allotted task—to ascertain the cause of death in the cases which came under his attention—and he had not the slightest desire to borrow the mantle of Sherlock Holmes and discover the identity of a criminal. That, in his view, was entirely a police affair; and his only duty in that connection was to do nothing which might make the task of the official det
ectives more difficult.

  He had assembled a jury, taken the evidence of Stevenage, Mrs. Haddon, Miss Lindfield, P. C. Gumley, and Inspector Westerham, and had then adjourned his inquiry until a later date when the results of fuller expert investigations might be available. It was when he came into possession of these results that he decided to take Westerham into consultation.

  The Inspector, calling one evening at Mr. Renishaw’s house in response to a summons, was shown into a room where he found his host, apparently deep in thought, with a lighted cigar between his fingers. On a table beside his armchair lay a small pile of papers. Renishaw greeted his visitor with a certain dry courtesy and motioned him to take a seat.

  “This conversation, you understand, Mr. Westerham, is to be regarded as hardly official. I have some information which may be of use to you. As against that, I look to you to tell me how much of that information—if any—can be made public without endangering the ultimate success of your investigations into this Castleford affair.”

  As though to mark the unofficial character of the interview, he solemnly drew the Inspector’s attention to a box of cigars. Westerham helped himself. While he was lighting his cigar, Mr. Renishaw picked up the papers from the table at his side.

  “I need not, I think, recapitulate the evidence given at the opening of the inquest, as that is already public property.”

  Westerham nodded in agreement. He knew the man he had to deal with, and he had resolved to interrupt as little as possible. It was quicker to give Renishaw his head and let him deal with matters in his own way, even if it meant listening to some things which the Inspector knew already from other sources.

  “By my instructions,” Renishaw went on, “Dr. Ripponden conducted a post-mortem examination of Mrs. Castleford’s body. I have his written report here. He found, as you know, that a projectile had entered the skin at the back, had traversed her heart, and had emerged at the front of the body, inflicting in its passage a wound likely to be almost immediately fatal.”

  Again Westerham nodded. This was all familiar to him.

  “Measurement of the diameter of the entrance wound suggested that it had been produced by a projectile of .22 calibre,” Renishaw continued, “since the orifice was very slightly larger than the diameter of such a projectile and was less than that of a .32 projectile. Dr. Ripponden, in view of the fact that a .22 rook-rifle had been mentioned in connection with the case, was inclined to assume that a weapon of this calibre was actually responsible for the injury. He reported in that sense.”

  Mr. Renishaw tapped the bundle of papers on his knee.

  “I was not, however,” he continued, “entirely satisfied with this inference. Take a sheet of india-rubber; stretch it; punch a clean hole in it; and then allow it to contract to its normal dimensions. You will find, as I did, that the diameter of the orifice in the rubber is less than the diameter of the punch which you used. Now the human skin is resilient like india-rubber, though of course not to so great a degree. In the case where the skin over a soft part of the body is struck by a high-velocity bullet, the skin first gives way before the bullet—stretches, in fact—and then, in that extended condition, it is pierced by the projectile; after which, when the bullet has passed through, it contracts again; with the result that the orifice is less in diameter than the bullet which has passed through it.”

  Mr. Renishaw’s leathery face was hardly capable of beaming, but he nearly succeeded in doing so as he finished this part of his exposition.

  “Very convincing, sir,” Westerham admitted. “I was greatly struck by the force of the argument when Dr. Ripponden told me what you had said to him on the matter. In fact . . .”

  A slight movement of Mr. Renishaw’s hand arrested him.

  “A further point is worth mentioning,” the Coroner pursued without giving Westerham time to finish, “a further point is this. On looking up the matter in my reference books, I find that such behaviour is to be expected only from high-velocity weapons. It would not occur, apparently, in the case of revolver-shots. Thus as an alternative to the .22 rook-rifle, it is possible that the weapon used was an automatic pistol of slightly larger calibre—such as a .32, which seems to be the most likely.”

  “That’s a wonderful bit of deduction, sir,” Westerham broke in. “And it’s right, too. Dr. Ripponden mentioned the point to me some time ago; and I’ve been on the hunt for a bullet of the sort ever since then. The line of fire was plain enough—I’d taken its bearing—and it was simply a question of making a thorough search. This afternoon Constable Gumley found the bullet embedded in a pile of old leaves and rubbish, just inside the boundary of the spinney, among the trees. It must have been fired into her at fairly close quarters”—he hesitated a moment, as though something had occurred to him—“and gone clean through her and then landed, nearly spent, in this mound of soft stuff. What’s more, when the bullet turned up, I began to search for the cartridge case which must have been jerked out after the shot by the pistol’s ejector. It’s flung out to the right of the firing-position, and I found it among the grass below the verandah. The two of them prove your idea up to the hilt, sir, for they turn out to be .32 calibre.”

  Mr. Renishaw attempted to conceal his gratification with a dry little cough.

  “That is very satisfactory, Mr. Westerham,” he declared. “Now this brings me to my first question. Is it advisable that this matter should be referred to in any shape or form at present?”

  Westerham’s reply was immediate.

  “No, sir. Certainly not. I’m glad you take this line, because with this card up our sleeve we’ve a better chance of finding the pistol than we should have if its owner were put on his guard. It’s quite evidently a case of murder, now; and I’d rather not put more cards on the table than we’re forced to do.”

  “I note what you say,” Mr. Renishaw answered in a formal tone, “and I shall, of course, frame my proceedings in accordance with the public interest, which naturally comes first. I now come to another matter. As you know, the appearance of the body suggested the administration of some miotic drug. Dr. Ripponden, though an able man, is not versed in the technique of detecting and identifying such things; and I therefore, without in any way disparaging his ability, decided to exercise my powers under the Coroners (Amendment) Act of 1926, Section 22, by calling in an expert in such investigation, and submitting to him various organs of the body, for his examination. This has been done, and I have the report of the expert before me.”

  Mr. Renishaw turned over the papers on his knee and picked out one document to refresh his memory.

  “From this report, it appears that morphine is present in the body. The stomach alone contained a fair quantity. The brain, and some other organs also, showed traces of the drug.”

  The Inspector was about to interrupt, but Mr. Renishaw restrained him with a gesture and proceeded with his exposé.

  “I submitted to the expert not only the various organs of the body, but also the dregs of liquid left in the cups on the tea table, asking him to test these for morphia and for saccharin. Further, I provided him with the cigarette-stubs which you discovered and asked him to examine them for opium. He detected no opium in the tobacco. One teacup showed traces of saccharin; the second one yielded traces of cane-sugar. In neither cup did the expert succeed in identifying morphia.”

  “That’s very funny!” ejaculated the Inspector mechanically, as he tried to harmonize these new facts the evidence he had already gleaned from other sources.

  Mr. Renishaw suppressed any symptom of the elation which he no doubt felt.

  “This is the second question on which I wished to have your opinion with regard to the public interest,” he explained mildly. “Would it be undesirable that these facts should be divulged at present?”

  “Most undesirable, I should say,” the Inspector assured him. “I don’t see my way through the tangle yet, but . . .”

  The Coroner gave him no time to elaborate his ideas.

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p; “I come now to yet another point,” he went on. “If the morphia in the body did not come from the teacup, we may have to look elsewhere for an alternative source. Mrs. Castleford, as we know, was undergoing treatment with insulin, which was injected by means of a hypodermic syringe. That suggested—purely as an hypothesis—that possibly the syringe had been the channel for the introduction of the drug. I submitted the syringe you obtained at Carron Hill to the expert; and he reports that it shows traces of morphia.”

  “This gets worse and worse,” the Inspector broke in. “If it was done with a syringe, then how did the morphia get into . . .?”

  Mr. Renishaw waved this aside rather peremptorily.

  “These are the facts, whatever be the explanation,” he said hastily. “I quite appreciate the objection which you were going to bring forward. I am not concerned with it at present, however. Public policy is the principal factor in my mind just now; and I merely wish to ask whether this evidence also should be held in abeyance for a time.”

  “There’s no doubt about that, in my mind,” Westerham. “These points which you’ve brought to light, sir, are far too important to the police to be broadcast just at present.”

  “That was my own impression,” the Coroner admitted drily. “And as you have made it clear that none of them can be safely used in public, I think the best course will be to adjourn the inquest still further. I can hardly call the jury together to listen to Dr. Ripponden telling them that some fibres of cloth were embedded in the wound; and that appears to be the only remaining piece of evidence which we have to give them.”

  His leathery face creased in a faint smile and his eyes twinkled at the suggestion.

  “It is outside my province to make suggestions, I think,” he went on. “But these facts brought into my mind a rather amusing problem. Suppose that A administers to B a fatal dose of a drug; and that then, before the drug causes actual death, C shoots B and inflicts an immediately fatal wound. I put the conundrum to you; Mr. Westerham. How would you proceed to indict A and C respectively if you could prove the case against each of them?”