The Castleford Conundrum

by J. J. Connington

  He got into the car and started the engine before continuing.

  “By the way, Squire, here’s the Stop Press News, fresh off the ’phone after lunch. I rang up Headquarters; and I find that Miss Lindfield bought a Colt automatic pistol lately, which wasn’t mentioned on her firearm certificate. She may have forgotten to notify it; but we’ll need to pull her up about it.”

  “Good Lord!” ejaculated Wendover, as the implications of this flashed into his mind, “Do you mean to say . . .”

  “Calm yourself, Squire,” Sir Clinton advised. “It was a .22 automatic that she bought, not a .32. Don’t jump to conclusions too quickly.”

  “What could she want an automatic for?” Wendover ruminated aloud.

  “To protect herself against the Castlefords, for all one can tell,” Sir Clinton suggested. “They don’t seem to love her much. And now, Squire, we proceed to the Chalet, where we shall find our energetic Inspector, a sergeant, probably Constable Gumley, and also some husky agricultural labourers with spades and other tools. I’m starting a Back-to-the-Land movement, and you mustn’t miss the inaugural ceremony.”

  At the Chalet, the group he had described was waiting for him, and he led the way into the spinney where the dead cat had hung. There he marked out on the ground a rough circle of some six feet radius, with its centre under the string from which the tin can target had been suspended.

  “I should dig up the soil inside that, first of all,” said to the Inspector. “You’ve got these riddles I told you about? Good. See that every spadeful is put through the sieve. We must find these things, if they’re here. If you don’t find them in that circle, extend the digging a bit. And another thing, turn the sergeant and the constable on to hunt for empty cartridge-cases on the surface of the ground—anywhere within ten yards of this. I want every solitary specimen they can get. There must be plenty of them. That boy was shooting at both the can and the cat—probably at quite close range.”

  “I’ll see to that, sir,” Westerham assured him.

  “Let me know this evening what luck you’ve had,” the Chief Constable ordered.

  He watched the digging operations for some time, but nothing seemed to come of them. Sergeant Ferryhill and P. C. Gumley meanwhile were searching among the grass and undergrowth with intermittent success. Each cartridge-case when found was submitted to Sir Clinton, who examined it cursorily and placed it in an envelope.

  At last P. C. Gumley brought up his fourth find, and Sir Clinton inspected it like the others before putting it into storage. Wendover noticed that he paid particular attention to the base of the case.

  “The things are there, right enough, Inspector,” Sir Clinton said with a slight touch of elation, as he put the envelope back into his pocket. “Stick to it, and I can promise you that you’ll find them, all right.”

  He glanced at his watch and then turned to Wendover. “It’s getting near closing-time. I think we ought to be on the road again.”

  And with a final admonition to the Inspector, he led Wendover back to the car.

  “Now for the Public Library again,” he explained. “Things are going not so badly.”

  “What did you find in the spinney there?” Wendover demanded.

  Sir Clinton put his hand in his pocket and passed the envelope across.

  “Have a look at them, Squire.”

  Wendover examined the tiny cartridge-cases one by one. They were all, he judged, of .22 calibre. One of them differed slightly from the others in having a deep groove at the rim. Another had been slightly deformed, apparently by someone treading on it.

  “I had a suspicion that some of them might be different from the rest,” Sir Clinton commented. “Nice to find one’s notions justified. By itself, unfortunately, it proves nothing.”

  “It proves somebody was using an automatic pistol in that spinney,” said Wendover.

  “Of course. But when? And she was killed with a .32 pistol and not a .22 automatic,” Sir Clinton pointed out. “Well, we can only hope that friend Tenbury has not been labouring in vain.”

  In one sense, he certainly had not, for he met them with several sheets of typescript in his hand, when they were shown into his office.

  “This is the list you asked for, Sir Clinton,” he said, with obvious satisfaction at having got through his task so soon. “I’ve had several carbon copies made, in case you wanted them.”

  He handed over the ribbon copy of his list, and Sir Clinton, after thanking him, fell to studying it with attention. After a while, he put it down on the desk and turned to Tenbury.

  “That’s a very mixed bag,” he observed. “But I suppose that’s natural, since four people’s tastes are included. H’m! It seems to be roughly made up of books on fine arts . . .”

  “That’s Mr. Castleford,” Tenbury explained.

  “Gardening and the countryside?”

  “Miss Lindfield takes an interest in them.”

  “Travel?”

  “Miss Castleford sometimes reads travel books.”

  “One or two books on spiritualism?”

  “I think that’s probably Mrs. Castleford. I’ve a sort of recollection that Miss Castleford took them out and laughed at them when I gave them to her. She didn’t want me to think they were for herself, I think, and she mentioned Mrs. Castleford.”

  “Then there’s fiction. Some fairly decent to begin with. Who read that, do you know?”

  “Miss Lindfield and Miss Castleford. They’ve both got fairly good taste.”

  “Then I see some cheap sex novels and a few of the Sheik brand of thing.”

  “These would be for Mrs. Castleford, most likely. She seldom came for them herself. Miss Lindfield or Miss Castleford would ask me for ‘some novel that would do for Mrs. Castleford,’ and I gave them something of the sort, because I knew she liked it. She hardly ever asked for a book by name, unless it was being advertised as ‘daring’ or ‘outspoken’ or some tosh like that.”

  “Quite a lot of detective stories, I see.”

  “They were for Mr. Castleford.”

  Sir Clinton turned over a page in the list.

  “Here’s a peculiar group,” he said. “I wonder if you remember anything about them: law-books, forensic medicine, workshop recipes, fireworks, and some volumes of The Times.”

  Tenbury glanced at the dates, which came all together, and shook his head.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t remember anything about them. The fact is, I had a temporary assistant at that time—about two months ago—and he must have given out these books, for I certainly don’t recall anything about them. He was a bad lot, that assistant. I had to sack him, because money and stamps were disappearing. I couldn’t prove it, but when I sacked him without a character he made no great fuss.”

  “Where’s he gone, do you know?”

  “I never heard of him again. He drank a bit, too. I doubt if he’d get another job easily.”

  “That makes it a bit more difficult,” Sir Clinton said, without making clear his exact meaning. “Now there’s another matter. You see these dates—when these law-books were taken out. Can you give me any notion of what the weather was like, in that week?”

  “I’ll look up our records,” said Tenbury obligingly.

  “The sunshine and the maximum day-temperature will serve my purpose for the present,” Sir Clinton explained.

  In a few minutes, Tenbury returned with a slip of paper.

  “It was a very hot week, that,” he declared. “Here are the maximum temperatures: 72.2°, 84.9°, 85°, 73.4°, 79.2°, 80.9°, 74.8°. And now the sunshine record: 9.3 hours, 14.4, 13.4, 9.8, 12.5, 10.2, 12.8.”

  “Thanks, I’ll keep that note of yours, if I may,” said the Chief Constable. “And now these volumes of The Times for 1889-90 and 1910-11. Wendover, can you think of anything that happened in 1889?”

  “The Crippen case was in 1910, if that’s any help, but I can’t think of anything in 1889, at the moment.”

  This suggestion s
eemed to jog Sir Clinton’s memory.

  “The Maybrick case was in 1889, of course,” he recalled. “And after that, there was an action brought against an insurance company. Mrs. Maybrick’s solicitor wanted to get his fees out of the proceeds of a policy on Maybrick’s life, or something like that. H’m! That’s the only thing I can remember which seems to fit.”

  Now that he had been reminded of it, Wendover recalled the outline of the Maybrick case; but as it was a matter of arsenic poisoning, he could not see its relevance here. Sir Clinton dropped the subject abruptly, picked up the list of books again, and ticked off some items in it, naming them as he went along:—

  “Smith, Forensic Medicine; Hookham, The Young Firework-Maker; Shebbeare, Administration of Estates Act; The Standard Physician, in four volumes; Kenny, Outlines of Criminal Law; Henley’s Twentieth Century Home and Workshop Formulas; Smith and Glaister, Recent Advances in Forensic Medicine; The Scientific American Encyclopædia of Formulas; and Jenks’s Book of English Law. I’m afraid I’ll have to impound these particular volumes, Mr. Tenbury. And would you mind writing your initials on the title-page of each of them, so that you’ll have no difficulty in swearing to the particular copies, if need be?”

  “When shall I get them back?” Tenbury demanded, his librarianship coming uppermost at the request.

  “Never, most likely,” Sir Clinton assured him cheerfully. “I’m going to have them treated with iodine or osmic acid; and I’m not sure they’ll be pretty, after that. You won’t lose by it. I’ll see you get other books in their places, in any case. Would you get them for me now, please?”

  Tenbury hurried off to the shelves and in a remarkably short time he was back, wheeling the collection along before him on a little waggon. Sir Clinton picked up the two volumes of recipes and hunted up a reference in each.

  “H’m!” he commented, after reading the passages. “Borax, boric acid, and ammonium sulphate? I hardly think so. Alum’s more likely.”

  He glanced casually over the remaining volumes on the waggon and then his interest seemed to kindle again. Four heavy red tomes attracted him and he picked up one of the set.

  “The Standard Physician,” he read, from the title-page, “A New and Practical Encyclopædia . . . Especially Prepared for the Household. Edited by Sir James Crichton-Browne, Sir William H. Broadbent, and a lot of other eminent men. You really must buy this for your library, Squire.”

  He turned over a page or two and then opened the book at the back.

  “Hullo! Here’s a cardboard mannikin, no less. Five copies of him, superimposed one on the other. No expense spared, evidently. One for blood-vessels, respiratory apparatus, etc.; another for the muscles; another for the skeleton; then the skeleton again, from the back; and finally one for organs, vessels, and nerves. Just look at this, Squire. It would be invaluable when you had a pain in the tummy and wanted to know if it was appendicitis or . . .”

  He broke off abruptly. Wendover, who had been leaning over to look at the book, could see what had startled him. Clean through the cardboard mannikin, a pinhole had been drilled; and Wendover, recalling the Inspector’s demonstration on his own back, saw at a glance that the pinhole corresponded exactly to the fatal wound in Mrs. Castleford’s body.

  “. . . or merely stomach-ache,” Sir Clinton concluded, making his pause seem merely rhetorical. “And now, Mr. Tenbury, when you’ve initialled these things, we must tear ourselves away.”

  Between them, they carried the books to the car and Sir Clinton again thanked the Librarian for his assistance.

  “I’m just going to stop for a moment at the grocer’s, if he’s still open. You needn’t come in, Squire.”

  When he came out of the shop, he seemed pleased with the result of his interview.

  “What did you pick up there?” Wendover demanded.

  “I merely inquired if anyone had bought alum, lately. Only one person did. Mrs. Castleford called there a couple of days before her death and asked for a couple of ounces.”

  Wendover was too exited about the previous discovery to pay much attention to this.

  “What do you think of that pinhole?” he demanded. “Did you expect to find anything like that?”

  “What a fine reputation I could get by a small lie or two,” Sir Clinton said, chaffingly. “No, Squire, that was a gift from the gods, pure and simple. I’d hoped to find something in the anatomy section of that book; but the pinhole was far beyond my expectations. It clears things up remarkably and saves a lot of time barking up wrong trees.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Not Proven

  After his bustling weekend at Thunderbridge, Wendover found Talgarth Grange dull. As he came down to his solitary breakfast, a few mornings later, he was conscious of a certain dissatisfaction; and in his methodical way, he set about tracing this to its sources.

  In the first place, Sir Clinton had disappointed him. He had expected to see the Castleford mystery cleared up, or, if not cleared up completely, then at least sufficiently clarified to let him see some path through the jungle of evidence. But nothing of the sort had happened. It was plain to him that Sir Clinton was still groping for crucial data and that the case was still unsolved.

  Then, again, there had been a fresh atmosphere between the Chief Constable and himself in this case. In other affairs, Sir Clinton had treated him as a collaborator and had discussed the evidence as it turned up. This time, Wendover had felt himself a not-over-welcome intruder. The machine had functioned almost independently of him, and any intervention on his part had been frowned upon.

  Finally, Wendover had to admit to himself that he had been disappointed in the Castlefords. He had gone to Thunderbridge in answer to the girl’s call of distress, only to find on his arrival that he was apparently unwelcome. The complete Don Quixote, in fact, as Sir Clinton would say. Castleford himself had impressed Wendover unfavourably. Hilary had been entirely different from what he had expected. Even his natural chivalry had not been proof against the obvious fact that she had been something more than merely disingenuous in her evidence. He was simple enough to expect candour from a young girl, and he had been shocked by the difference between his anticipations and the reality which had met him at Carron Hill.

  He turned to the letters which lay beside his plate, and the sight of Sir Clinton’s familiar handwriting aroused him from his rather painful researches in psychology. The first sentences of the letter served to clear away one of his grievances. As usual, Sir Clinton went straight to the point.

  My dear Squire,

  I may be wrong, but I got the impression that you felt rather hurt by the way in which I treated you at Thunderbridge. I could see that you had expected to come into the Castleford case on the same footing as in earlier affairs and that you resented my tacit refusal to discuss the thing with you as we went along. If you think over it, I think you will see my reasons. In other cases, you were an impartial onlooker with no axe to grind and no particular interest in the result. In the Castleford case you went into the affair with a watching brief for the Castlefords, which put you in an entirely different position. You would have given nothing away, of course; but your bias would have made frank discussions awkward to both of us, perhaps.

  Wendover felt considerably relieved by this plain statement. He could see the force of it; and he recognised that there had been nothing personal in Sir Clinton’s motives. The Chief Constable had kept him in the dark on grounds of pure policy.

  There seems no reason [the letter went on] why you should not have all the evidence. You can think it over; and when the case is settled up finally, we can go through it together and compare notes on what each of us has made of it. Here, then, are the remaining points which you have not yet heard.

  1. You remember the ash found in the grate of the Chalet? I submitted it to a man who specialises in micro-analysis, and he finds in it a much greater quantity of aluminium than should normally be present.

  2. I submitted some of the fibres foun
d in the wound to a microscopist who is an expert in that field. According to him, characteristic pine wood “pores” and some ribbony structure are visible in the specimens.

  3. The .22 lead bullet found on the verandah had certain markings on its apex. These correspond to the pattern of the canvas facing on the old archery target which I took from Carron Hill. The weapon from which this bullet was fired had a right-hand twist in its rifling.

  4. Westerham and his acolytes unearthed two nickel-covered .22 bullets in the ground where they were digging.

  5. The leaden bullet fired through the Haddons’ window had a rifling impress on it corresponding to left-hand rifling in the weapon.

  6. The two .32 Colt automatics from Carron Hill have left-hand twists in their rifling. The rook-rifle has a right-hand twist in its rifling grooves.

  7. Dr. Pendlebury’s blood tests gave the following results: Philip Castleford, Group III; the blood from the coat-sleeve, Group IV; Hilary Castleford, Group III; the blood from Mrs. Castleford’s blouse, Group I; Miss Lindfield’s blood from my handkerchief, Group IV.

  8. The examination of the books from the Public Library is not yet finished. I think my reference to the weather data probably showed you one of the things I expect to find there; and the other thing is, I hope, in the text, though I am still busy with the matter.

  9. I have looked into the Maybrick case, which seemed to be the interesting thing in the 1889-90 volumes of The Times. Maybrick took out an insurance policy which vested in himself and, on his death, in the trustees for behoof of his wife. After his death by poison, Mrs. Maybrick assigned the policy and her interest in it to her solicitor, to secure payment of his costs. The insurance company claimed that the policy was void; but Mrs. Maybrick and her solicitor claimed that the murder of Maybrick did not affect the interest of the assignee; whilst Maybrick’s executors claimed that the murder did not affect the insurance company’s liability, but only the person to whom the money was actually to be paid. The Court upheld the executors’ view, on the general principle that a criminal may not profit by his crime and that therefore Mrs. Maybrick’s beneficiary interest had lapsed on her conviction for the murder of her husband. Something similar turned up in the case of Crippen’s estate.