“Very neat,” Westerham commented. “But the solution’s plain enough to my mind. Indict A for administering poison with intent to commit murder; and indict C for murder. It would be hard lines on C, if A got off with penal servitude for life while C was hanged; but that’s how I’d read the situation.”
He suddenly recalled a question which he had meant to put earlier.
“By the way, have you the exact figure for the morphine which your expert found in the stomach of the body?”
Mr. Renishaw consulted his papers.
“He puts it down as seventy-five milligrammes—equivalent roughly to a grain and a quarter. The ordinary fatal dose, I understand, is three to six grains; but this varies considerably from person to person, and even half a grain has been cited as fatal in one case. One gram of morphine may be regarded as a dangerous dose; and in the case of this woman, with the complication of diabetes entering into the problem, it seems difficult to say what dose would actually have proved fatal. In her case, I should be inclined to think—though I am no expert—that a dose of a grain and a quarter was quite possibly near the fatal quantity.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Anonymous Letter Writer
Despite the cautious attitude of the police, the general public had little hesitation in making up their minds about the affair at the Chalet. They spoke of it bluntly as “the Castleford murder,” without troubling themselves greatly about the burden of proof. And, as a result of this, Inspector Westerham had not lacked unsolicited help. Letters flowed in to him: some well-meant, others mere vehicles of spiteful suggestion, yet more containing wildly improbable solutions of the problem. One man even surrendered himself and made a full confession. Unfortunately, he turned out to be an epileptic; and his friends had little difficulty in proving an unbreakable alibi for him. By that time, Westerham had grown weary of his self-constituted helpers; for even the wildest statements had to be sifted lest some truth should be missed, and this had added very considerably to his work.
It was therefore with a cynical eye that he observed on his desk a cheap yellowish envelope addressed in a sprawling hand to “Mister Westerham.”
“Another of ’em!” he commented, as he slit open the cover and extracted the contents.
Dere Mister Westeram,
I write to tell you a Few things you clever blokes in the police Dont know for All youre smartness. You make me laff. You Dont know Casselford knew all About his wife and young Stephenage. i Know he did becaus I took the Trubble to write and tell him About there goings-on Myself. thats Number 1. and dere Westeram you dont Know Casselford was in the spinnie just before the Murder hapened and thats number 2. Youre very clever no dout but not so clever as i expec you think you Are. you Dont know that Casselford came back from the Shally after the shot was fired with a Face like a Sheet and made Off for all he was worth and thats number Three. Hurra for the clever fellows In the police i say dere mister Westeram. I dont blame Casselford for doing the piece in for she desdeserved to get it. he has my simpathy and Ill Wear a black tie the Day hes hanged altho he is a misrable little sqirt as we all know like all the rest of the boergoises. hang the lot dere mr Westeram.
One who Knows a thing or Two
Westerham leaned back in his chair and re-read this unsolicited contribution to the evidence in the case.
“It sounds more genuine than some of them,” he conceded, rather against his inclination.
He examined the dirty envelope and found that it was postmarked in the village.
“Plenty of fingerprints to identify him by, at any rate, if we run him down,” he mused disgustedly, as he took up the letter again with care. “Now, let’s see. He’s probably a local man, from the postmark. The notepaper’s fairly distinctive, cheap yellow stuff with faint ridges on the surface to keep the writing straight: most likely bought at the village shop, and easy to identify. He leaves no margin on the left-hand side of the paper; writes up to the very edge of the sheet on that side. His spelling’s got some consistent errors in it. And, from the whole tone of the stuff, he’s a disgruntled devil with his knife in the police and the upper classes. With just a bit of luck, we might be able to lay our hands on him fairly easily. It’s worth trying, if he knows as much as he pretends to do.”
It turned out to be the Inspector’s lucky day. On calling at the village shop, he learned that some packages of that peculiar paper had come into stock within the last month. Very little had been sold, and the shopkeeper remembered the names of most of the buyers.
“Mrs. Allgreave, Miss Kelbrook, old Mr. Hingham, Mrs. Haddon, and young Munslow?” the Inspector repeated, as he checked them off in his notebook. “Mrs. Allgreave? Who’s she?”
“She’s old Jim Allgreave’s widow—three doors down the street,” the shopkeeper explained. “You must have seen her, Mr. Westerham. She’s very frail, nowadays, and hobbles about with a stick.”
“What’s young Munslow like? I seem to remember something about him,” the Inspector lied blandly. The shopkeeper smiled knowingly.
“I know what he bought that paper for—he writes to his girl about twice a week. She’s in service over in Bolsted Abbas. But she won’t be there long. Young Munslow’s a good lad, saves every penny towards the wedding. She’s a lucky girl, she is, to get as nice a young chap as that.”
“Miss Kelbrook, what’s she like?”
“A parson’s lamb—or mutton, more like. You’ll see her any time you like to drop in at a service. Dresses always in black and white, she does, and won’t see forty again. You’ll recognise her easy enough if you want her. She lives in the little cottage with the creepers on it, along the road a bit in that direction.”
“And this old man Hingham?”
“Holy Joe? Well, if you like to go to the ‘Pheasant’ at closing time any night, you’ll see him being helped out, as like as not, in a manner of speaking. Not just drunk, you understand, but near enough it to make the landlord uneasy at times. He stays in bed on Sunday. It’s a blank day for the likes of him, for the ‘Pheasant’ only got a six-day license. That’s why they call him Holy Joe.”
“H’m!” ejaculated the Inspector, as though this item had been what he was looking for. “A pub-crawler, is he?”
“Well,” the shopkeeper said cautiously, “you can’t exactly accuse him of crawling from pub to pub, seeing as there’s only one pub in the village. But he does crawl to that one, as regular as clockwork, as one might say.”
“I’ve got what I wanted,” Westerham said disingenuously. “And of course,” he added with a wink, “this is between the two of us, eh? We’ll not go talking about it just yet?”
“Just as you say,” the shopkeeper agreed, putting on his spectacles and taking up a newspaper which he had laid down when Westerham came into the shop.
The Inspector had a very fair idea of what that vow of secrecy was worth; but he felt pretty safe in the matter. Holy Joe did not seem a person likely to be injured by gossip.
His next victim was P. C. Gumley, whom he hunted down on his beat.
“I want to know something about Mrs. Haddon,” he began. “What sort of person is she? Reliable, do you think?”
“I’ve never known her to tell me a lie,” P. C. Gumley answered, grudgingly. “But I don’t see her once in a blue moon, sir. She lives a very—a very secluded life, if you understand what I mean, sir.”
“I can make a guess at it. Lives alone, does she?”
“No, sir, I didn’t mean it in that way. She lives with that husband of hers—a rank bad lot, sir. What I meant was that she lives in a lonelyish sort of place and doesn’t come much about the village.”
“The husband’s a bad lot, is he? Hard lines on her.”
“He’s a bad ’un, sir. Never a civil word out of him, and always sneering at us—at the Police, I mean, sir. One of these Red Raggers, sir: a red-hot Bolshie with a grouse against anyone better than what he is—and that’s most of the human race, to my mind.”
“Well,
it takes all sorts to make a world,” said the Inspector tolerantly. “Hasn’t he got a human side—some hobby or other that would keep him busy in his spare time?”
Even this side of Mr. Haddon’s character failed to please P. C. Gumley.
“He breeds and trains whippets, sir, if you can call that a hobby. Hares are getting scarce, hereabouts,” he added, darkly.
“Educated man, is he?”
“Educated, is he?” P. C. Gumley took no pains to conceal his contempt. “Why, sir, that man’s never opened a book since he left school. What he reads is the starting prices and the results in the newspaper, nothing else. Whippets and horses: that’s all he cares for, sir.”
“Hard lines on his wife,” the Inspector repeated mechanically. “Well, it’s no concern of ours unless he goes over the bounds. You think she’s a reliable person, that’s the main point.”
After a few moments’ further talk on other subjects, he left the constable to walk his beat while he himself busied himself with another matter. He had obtained the information he needed; and as it had come to him almost without exertion, he was correspondingly pleased. Quite evidently, Haddon was the most suspicious character connected with that particular brand of notepaper. It was worth while going further on the strength of what had come out.
The Inspector set himself to draught a letter dealing with whippets and their purchase, a letter which would demand a fairly full reply. When he had finished this task, he wrote out a fair copy and scribbled a covering note to an unofficial friend of his in a neighbouring town. Then, putting the documents into an envelope, he dropped them into the post-box.
Three days later, he got a reply from his correspondent; and when he opened the envelope an enclosure dropped out—a letter on the familiar cheap yellowish note paper.
“Got him, first shot!” the Inspector commented delightedly, as he examined this fresh document with its sprawling signature “J. Haddon.”
“Same note paper, same writing, same habit of starting at the very left-hand edge, same blunder in spelling ‘youre,’ same sprinkling of capital letters at random, and same trick of underlining here and there. And enough fingerprints to amuse a dozen experts. There’s going to be no difficulty about this bit, anyhow.”
Examination of the fingerprints revealed a thumb-mark crossed by a scar, which occurred on both the anonymous letter and the letter from J. Haddon. The Inspector made no pretence of expertness in fingerprint identification; but this piece of evidence was enough to satisfy him. He made some inquiries as to Haddon’s habits, and presented himself at the cottage when he knew the master of the house was sure to be at home.
When he knocked at the door, Haddon himself opened it: a tall, surly man with a slight cast in one eye. At the sight of the Inspector, he seemed taken aback for a moment, but soon recovered himself.
“Want to see my wife?” he demanded, gruffly.
Westerham shook his head.
“No, it’s you I want to see. It’s a matter of maliciously publishing a defamatory libel.”
“What does that mean?” Haddon asked, in a rather shaken tone.
“Fine and imprisonment not exceeding one year,” the Inspector answered, with wilful misunderstanding.
Haddon drew back a step and rubbed an unshaven chin with his hand.
“Oh. Indeed? And what’s it got to do with me?”
“Come off the perch,” Westerham suggested vulgarly. “It didn’t take long for clever blokes in the police to run you down, did it?”
“D’you mean that letter?” Haddon asked, unguardedly.
“I do mean that letter,” the Inspector assured him sardonically.
Then he changed his tone to one of a man speaking in confidence.
“Come out into the spinney,” he suggested. “We can talk easier there. You’ve got yourself into a bad hole, Haddon, and there’s only one way out of it. I’m not going to be hard on you; I’ll give you a chance.”
Haddon, plainly thunderstruck at being detected so quickly, was evidently growing more amenable.
“All right,” he agreed and followed the Inspector out of the garden where they were out of earshot o f the cottage.
“Here’s the way I look at it,” Westerham explained in a less official tone. “You wrote me a letter making certain statements about Mr. Castleford. If I choose to take it as it stands, you’ve run yourself in for a charge of criminal libel; and you’ll get it hot. I can prove it against you, up to the hilt. That’s one way of looking at it; and you can have it that way if you like. Here’s another way. Well suppose that you’re an honest witness, anxious to give evidence, and we’ll overlook the slight informality of the way you’ve gone about it at the start. In that case, there’s nothing against you. Now, which is it to be? It’s all one to me. We’ll put you in the witness-box and wring your evidence out of you, either way.”
Haddon considered for a few moments, eyeing the Inspector with more respect than he had shown at the beginning of the interview.
“Well,” he admitted at last, “you seem smarter than what I gave you credit for, and that’s a fact. I don’t see how you got on to me. And it looks, sure enough, as if you’d got me in a corner. But that don’t matter to me. I’m no friend of Castleford’s and there’s no reason, that I can see, why I shouldn’t give him away. What I wrote in that there letter was Gospel truth and I’m ready to take my oath on it any time you like. I was just having a game with you God-Almighty coppers for the fun of it.”
“Very well,” said Westerham, with a return to his official manner. “Now give us a plain story.”
“The afternoon of that business,” Haddon began, after a pause to gather up his recollections, “I was down at the east end of the spinney about five o’clock in the afternoon, on private business.”
“What were you doing?” demanded the Inspector.
“Urgent private affairs,” Haddon retorted with what was evidently meant to be an engaging leer. “Axe no questions and you’ll get no lies: that’s my motto.”
“Setting snares for rabbits, eh?” the Inspector suggested. “They come out of the wood on that side at dusk to feed in the meadow beyond, don’t they?”
“So you say,” Haddon returned, with a gesture as though brushing the suggestion aside. “Urgent private business is what I’d call it. Anyhow, whatever it was, I wasn’t exactly advertising myself, see?”
“You were hiding on the edge of the spinney,” Westerham translated. “Very well. What next?”
“I seen Castleford come into the spinney just about then. I ought to have said I heard somebody shooting while I was working at my private affairs before that, somebody over in the other arm of the spinney. That didn’t worry me. I guessed it was that young whelp from Carron Hill, for I’d seen him swelling around with his popgun before then. Well, as I was saying, I saw Castleford come into the spinney, and I lay low. For a man on his own ground, he seemed to be going mighty cautious, but I could give a guess at what he was after. No business of mine. I just wished him good luck to myself and hoped he’d like what he found up at the Chalet.”
The Inspector seemed about to say something, but checked himself.
“I lay low, there,” Haddon continued. “Some more shots went off, if I remember right. And then back comes Castleford—no caution about him this time. He passed quite close to me, and I could see his face—white as a sheet and his mouth working like as if he was going to cry, if you understand what I mean. He’d got a proper turn, I could see that with half an eye. Well, I supposed he’d been having a look in at the window of the Chalet and hadn’t got as much amusement out of his peep as some people might. That was what I thought about it. And by that time I’d finished my little job, so I vamoosed myself, going down into Thunderbridge through the fields. Of course, when the whole yarn came out, I put two and two together, as one might say; and so I communicated with the police,” he wound up impudently.
“What time did this happen? What’s the nearest you can come to i
t?”
“It was just before the quarter past five, I’d say. I heard the church clock in Thunderbridge chime the quarter shortly after that.”
“Did you see anyone else about there, round about that time?”
“Not a soul. Of course I couldn’t see the Chalet. I was on the other side of the spinney.”
“You said you could give a guess at what Castleford was after. What did you mean by that?”
“Spying on his wife and that Stevenage cove, of course.”
“Ah, yes, I remember now. You ‘took the trouble to write and tell him about their goings-on,’ didn’t you?”
Haddon was quite unashamed.
“What supposing I did, once or twice? Wouldn’t you have done the same, in a friendly way, if you’d seen them at their capers, eh?”
Westerham did not seem quite so amused as he might have been. A thought crossed his mind, and when he spoke again the official tone of his voice was accentuated.
“You seem to have been pretty free with your modest information, Haddon. You wrote to Castleford. You wrote to me. Now, out with it and be done. Who else did you favour?”
Haddon hesitated for a moment, not from shame evidently, but merely on tactical grounds.
“This doesn’t count against me? What I mean is, if I tell you, there’ll be no more about it, eh?”
“I’m prepared to let it go at that if you make a clean breast of everything.”
“Well, then, I dropped a note to Miss Lindfield, too.”
“Why? What’s she got to do with it?”
Haddon showed a set of yellow teeth in a malicious grin.
“Oh, I just thought I’d tip her off—let her know what her dear boy Stevenage was up to. She’s a bit interested in him, you can take my word for that. You don’t know what a rotten lot these bourgeoises is, Mr. Westerham, for all their fine airs and fine feathers. A rotten lot, and you can kiss the Book on that, any day. I know a thing or two about them, I do.”
The Castleford Conundrum Page 18
