The Castleford Conundrum

by J. J. Connington

  “Anybody else on your list of correspondents?”

  “Well, I told Stevenage what I thought of him, too.”

  “That the lot now?”

  “That’s the lot.”

  “H’m! You seem to have been working on the mass-production basis.”

  Haddon, now that he felt his own skin safe, was cheerfully insolent.

  “Oh, just holding up the mirror to Nature, as might say,” he explained jauntily. “If they hadn’t been playing around the way they was doing, I’d have had nothing to write about, would I? I was just letting ’em see they wasn’t as smart as they thought they was. They’d be none the worse of a bit of a jar, none of them, to my mind.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Brace of Pistols

  Inspector Westerham had not seen the study at Carron Hill before, and he let his glance run round it as he took his seat in response to Castleford’s gesture. Then his eyes came back to the dark-clothed figure before him, and he plunged into his business.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you again, Mr. Castleford,” he said in a faintly apologetic tone, “but the fact is, some fresh information has come into my hands, and I’m trying to check it. You can help me there, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll give you any assistance I can,” Castleford answered in a tone which mingled caution with reluctance, so far as the Inspector could interpret it. “It’s a painful subject, as you can well understand, a subject that I’d rather keep my mind off, if I could. But I’m quite ready to tell you anything I can.”

  “Very well, then,” said Westerham, a shade less sympathetically, “I’ll come straight to the point. I’ve reason to believe that, not long before your wife’s death, you received an anonymous letter from someone or other. That’s correct?”

  Castleford’s reluctance became obvious. He hesitated quite perceptibly before he spoke, as though he were trying to gauge his best course.

  “That’s correct,” he echoed at last. “I did get an anonymous letter. But how does that concern you? I’ve made no complaint on the subject, and I don’t intend to bring any charge in the matter even if I could do so. It seems to me a private matter which concerns no one except myself.”

  “It’s hardly that,” the Inspector said bluffly, without deigning to explain. “What did you do with it?”

  “What does anyone do with anonymous letters?” Castleford asked. “I burned it, naturally. One pays no attention to things like that.”

  “You can remember its contents, though, even if you burned it,” the Inspector suggested in a tone that brooked no denial. “What did it contain?”

  “It contained some vulgar abuse of myself, and I hardly see how that is a matter which concerns you.”

  “Was that all there was in it? There was no reference to Mrs. Castleford, for instance?”

  Castleford made an obvious effort to appear annoyed at this suggestion, but his attempt failed completely to deceive Westerham.

  “Really, this is disgraceful! You don’t expect me to listen quietly to insinuations of that sort, do you, Mr. Westerham? What grounds have you for attacking my unhappy wife’s character in this way?”

  “Allow me to point this out, Mr. Castleford,” said Westerham severely. “In the first place, I made no attack on Mrs. Castleford’s character. I asked the plain question: Was there any reference to Mrs. Castleford in that letter? There’s no insinuation of any kind in that. And, in the second place, I’ll point out that you haven’t answered that question yet.”

  “There was nothing about her in the letter,” Cast ford said doggedly.

  The Inspector mentally recorded the fact that Castleford was a very poor hand at lying. His manner gave him away completely, even if Westerham had not already known the truth about the contents of the anonymous letter.

  “Very well, Mr. Castleford, I’ll take a note of that,” he said in a neutral tone. “Now, another point. Have you, recently, had any disagreement with Mrs. Castleford, any serious difference of opinion on any important matter?”

  “What are you hinting at now?” Castleford demanded, in a voice which betrayed both nervousness and anger. “You seem to be taking a roving commission to pry into all sorts of affairs, and I can’t see how they concern you in any way. No, I had no serious difference with my wife on any subject. Is that clear?”

  “Quite clear,” Westerham said, with a certain hint of triumph in his tone which made Castleford glance sharply at him. “You had no disagreement with Mrs. Castleford on the matter of her proposed alteration in her will, for instance?”

  “None whatever,” Castleford said boldly. “I knew that she had cancelled her will and that she proposed to make a fresh one. That was entirely her affair, since her money was her own. I had no right to dictate to her if she proposed to leave her money to her brothers-in-law. After all, as I knew well enough, it was originally Glencaple money; and I had no grievance if it went back to them.”

  “You didn’t discuss the matter with her?”

  Castleford obviously hesitated before answering.

  “No,” he said, uncertainly. Then in a firmer tone he added: “I certainly don’t remember discussing it with her. It was a subject which, naturally, I would avoid.”

  “You had no other possible cause for disagreement?” the Inspector pursued.

  “None whatever,” Castleford declared emphatically. I can see what you’re hinting at, and I may as well put a stop to this sort of thing. I had every confidence in Mrs. Castleford.”

  “I wasn’t hinting at anything,” the Inspector explained smoothly. “What did you imagine I meant?”

  “Some scandal or other, I gathered from your tone; but if you say you meant nothing by it, then let it go at that, if you please. I had, as I say, perfect confidence in Mrs. Castleford. I hope that is sufficient.”

  “Quite sufficient,” the Inspector acquiesced in a tone which suggested a double meaning. “And now I come to another matter. I’m looking for a firearm with a calibre about .32—an automatic pistol, I believe. Have you any knowledge of such a thing on the premises here?”

  Westerham had merely been trying a long shot, and he was surprised to see a curious expression pass over Castleford’s face at the question. There was a momentary pause before the answer came.

  “Y-e-s,” Castleford admitted reluctantly, “there’s a brace of automatics here, though I know nothing about calibres and they may not be what you’re looking for. But you don’t imagine my wife was wounded by an automatic, do you? It was the rook-rifle that killed her, I understood.”

  “You might let me see them, please,” Westerham requested, without taking any notice of Castleford’s last sentences.

  Castleford got up, went to the cupboard, and lifted down the box which he had placed there some time before. He brought it to a table and laid it down.

  “Don’t touch!” Westerham exclaimed, as Castleford put his hand into the box to pick out the pistols.

  The Inspector went over and examined the two weapons, which he recognised as being of the calibre he wanted. Very gingerly, he shifted one of them, screwed up the corner of his handkerchief, and inserted it in the barrel. Then giving it a twist, he extracted it again and examined the dirt on the handkerchief. He repeated this in the case of the second pistol, and this time he recognised from the traces that the pistol had been discharged and had not been cleaned after firing. He sniffed the barrel of each pistol in turn: in the first case he detected a strong odour of cleaning-oil, whilst the second weapon had a peculiar smell of its own, due to the residue of the discharge, and there was little scent of oil.

  “You have a firearms certificate for these?” he asked, as he put down the pistols again.

  “I?” said Castleford, in some surprise. “No, I’ve got no certificate. They don’t belong to me. They belonged to my wife’s first husband. They’ve nothing to do with me.”

  “They’re in your charge, apparently,” the Inspector pointed out. “How did you get them?”
r />   There was no hesitation in the reply this time.

  “That young cub that was staying here unearthed them in the garret, where they must have been lying for years. Miss Lindfield was afraid he’d do some damage with them if they were left within his reach, so she asked me to put them into that cupboard for safety. They’ve been there ever since then—that was a day or two before Mrs. Castleford’s death, I remember.”

  “Well, I’ll have to take charge of them for the present,” the Inspector said casually.

  He was considerably elated by his discovery, though no trace of this showed in his face. There was little doubt in his mind that he had come upon the very weapon with which the shooting had been done.

  “Now there’s another question I want to put,” he went on, as he replaced the lid on the box. “Do you know if Mrs. Castleford had any access to morphia?”

  Castleford shook his head.

  “You mean, was she a drug-fiend?” he queried. “Not that I knew of, certainly. Besides, how could she get the stuff? No, I know nothing about that, whatever you’re driving at.”

  “Can you suggest anyone connected with Carron who might have been able to procure morphia?”

  Castleford reflected for a moment or two.

  “Nobody that I can think of . . . unless . . . well, of course Dr. Glencaple could get morphia—as a doctor. In fact, I believe he’s treating a man Heckford for the morphia-habit just now, so he’s sure to have some of the drug. But he’s the only person who could lay his hands on it easily. But what’s morphia got to do with the case? There seem to be a lot of things I don’t understand about this business, to judge by these questions of yours.”

  “We get bits of information here and there,” Westerham said lightly, “and we’ve got to check them all up. Half of them lead to nothing, of course. Still, we have to go into them all. Now, there’s another matter I want to ask you about. On the day of Mrs. Castleford’s death, you and she left Carron Hill together at about three o’clock. You walked together to the point where the path to the Chalet turns off, I understand. What did you talk about while you were together?”

  “Really, I don’t quite see what business that is of yours, Mr. Westerham, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Castleford answered abruptly. “We discussed a number of matters, general topics of conversation which it would be hard to recall now: something about a new flower-bed, how she was getting on with her painting, the card she had put in for her golf-handicap, things like that. I don’t really remember exactly.”

  “And her will wasn’t mentioned at all?”

  Castleford seemed annoyed by this persistent harping on the subject.

  “No, nothing about her will. I’ve told you so already.”

  “Think again,” Westerham advised.

  “I don’t remember anything of the sort.”

  The Inspector hesitated over the line which he should take. His industrious combing of the countryside had yielded several pieces of evidence which would enable him to check Castleford’s story; and here, at the very start, he had come up against a flat lie. He made up his mind to show his teeth just once, even at the cost of disclosing part of the case which he was building up in his mind. Turning over the pages of his notebook, he came to a very rough diagram drawn to a time-scale instead of one of distance. It represented crudely the time which would be taken by a man walking at three miles per hour from point to point over the crucial routes.

  “At 3.10 p.m., Mr. Castleford, you and Mrs. Castleford reached the little stone bridge over the stream to that road. You remember it? As it happened, just under that bridge a boy was busy netting minnows. He wasn’t a child; he was getting the minnows for a young brother who happens to be ill and couldn’t go and get them for himself. This boy, then, with his net and his pickle-bottle, was out of your sight as you crossed the bridge; but he had seen you as you came along the road up to the bridge. According to his account, you and Mrs. Castleford were talking rather heatedly then, and he caught one or two sentences. He remembers something about your saying, ‘You’ve gone back on your promise’ and ‘You’ve made this new will?’ and he heard Mrs. Castleford say, ‘No, not yet. But after this I’ll do it.’ Is that story accurate, Mr. Castleford?”

  Castleford seemed completely taken aback by the attack. He paused for some seconds before answering.

  “If you’re going to take that line, Mr. Westerham, I don’t propose to follow you,” he said at last, with a feeble attempt at dignity. “I’ve told you what happened, or rather what didn’t happen. If my word isn’t enough for you, I see no point in any further dealings.”

  The Inspector decided to leave the matter as it was, without comment.

  “At 3.15 p.m., you reached the turn-off; and Mrs. Castleford parted from you, going along the path towards the Chalet. That’s correct?”

  “I told you that before.”

  “I’m not querying it,” Westerham assured him soothingly. “I’m merely trying to get facts and figures down definitely. You went on to the clubhouse. You go there on that particular day each week, you said, to read the weekly reviews, I think. Can you remember at what time you reached the clubhouse?”

  “It must have been somewhere about a quarter to four, I think. Somebody had switched on the wireless and I heard a man giving a lesson in French. There was a woman’s voice also talking. I recognised it as a French lesson from Daventry which I remembered came on shortly after half-past three. Somebody in the clubhouse said ‘Switch that thing off, please.’ I happened to be near the set and I switched it off. About a quarter of an hour later, when I was in the reading-room, somebody else switched on the set again and I heard the announcer giving out the programme of a concert. That would be at 4 p.m.”

  This part of the story had the ring of truth to the Inspector. He had found two witnesses: one who had seen Castleford at 3.25 and the other who had noticed him at 3.40, quite close to the clubhouse. He entered up “3.45 p.m.,” at the point on his diagram representing the clubhouse.

  “Did you stay long at the clubhouse?”

  “As it happens, I can tell you that precisely,” Castleford answered with what seemed a tinge of malicious triumph. “When I finished reading and came out of the reading-room, the woman who looks after the clubhouse, gets teas for members, and so on, was hanging about. I said good-afternoon to her as I passed; and she asked me if I’d seen my daughter. I said I hadn’t. Then she told me Miss Castleford had left the place ten minutes ago and that I’d be able to catch her up without difficulty if I wanted to. That made us both look at the clock, and it was thirty-five minutes past four. I set out after her.”

  The Inspector nodded. This part of the tale was true enough, he knew, for he had already extracted all these facts from the woman at the golf clubhouse himself.

  “Did you ask which way Miss Castleford had gone?” he asked.

  “No, why should I? I took the usual road to Carroll Hill, the one that she was sure to take herself.”

  “Which is that?” the Inspector inquired doubtfully.

  “Up by Peppercorn Ridge and along the right-of-way across the chicken farm and then by the field-path through Ringford’s Meadows.”

  That sounded true enough, the Inspector had to confess to himself. One of the people on the chicken farm had noticed Castleford passing over the public right-of-way which cut across the grounds of the farm. He had been seen there at a quarter to five, just about the time that the three-quarters chimed from Thunderbridge. But the Inspector had not been able to discover the time when Miss Castleford passed the farm ahead of her father. No one had noticed her. Ten minutes would bring Castleford from the chicken farm to Ringford’s Meadow; which meant that he would be there at 4.55 p.m.—and this tallied neatly with Stevenage’s account of seeing him there at that time.

  “And what did you do after that?” the Inspector demanded.

  This was the crucial time—the quarter of an hour during which the murder had been committed.

  “Very s
hortly after leaving Ringford’s Meadow, I made up on my daughter.”

  “Where, exactly, did you make up on her?”

  Castleford answered this question promptly.

  “In a little pine copse about due east of the plantation round the Chalet. She had sat down there. She had nothing to do, and she thought there was a chance that I might make up on her. So she tells me.”

  “And what time would that be?”

  “It would be just after five o’clock; I should say about five minutes past five, roughly, for I heard five o’clock chime in Thunderbridge shortly before I met my daughter.”

  The Inspector strove his hardest to show no particular interest in these statements. Here, for the second time, he had caught Castleford in a flat lie about the affairs of the afternoon. At ten past five, according to Haddon’s evidence, Castleford was in the neighbourhood of the Chalet, behaving in a highly suspicious manner. Then a further thought struck Westerham. If the girl had been just ahead of her father, Stevenage might well have been expected to catch a glimpse of her as he came down from the Chalet. It was quite on the cards, of course, that she had crossed Stevenage’s track and got up to the pine copse before his arrival. In that case, there was nothing in it. Or Stevenage might have seen her and left her name out of the business. The net result was that there was no confirmatory evidence bearing on her movements after she left the clubhouse.

  “And what happened after that?”

  Castleford at this point showed no hesitation.

  “We sat in the copse together for quite a long time. We had a number of things to discuss, things which required a good deal of talking and which kept our attention entirely. I really can’t say how long we stayed there. Afterwards, I went on to Carron Hill and reached there very shortly before you yourself arrived at the house.”

  “Didn’t Miss Castleford come with you?”

  “No,” Castleford explained. “She had remembered something she wanted in Thunderbridge, and she went on into the village.”

  “I see,” said the Inspector. “So she did not get back to Carron Hill till much later?”