The Castleford Conundrum

by J. J. Connington

  “I expect he would,” Dr. Glencaple agreed shortly.

  “I know that I should, myself,” Sir Clinton admitted. “It was my own ignorance that suggested the mannikin to me. Then I looked into some books of recipes to see if I could find anything about the fireproofing of paper. You can manage it, in a way, by soaking a sheet of paper in alum solution, according to one recipe.”

  “Oh, alum?” Dr. Glencaple interjected, with a curious look in Miss Lindfield’s direction. “Yes?”

  “Then there was a firework book,” Sir Clinton proceeded. “That, of course, was in your young nephew’s province. It gives some directions for making slow-match or touch-string. Did he make any of that, by the way?”

  “Yes, I remember his showing us some, one night,” Dr. Glencaple confirmed.

  “I thought it likely,” Sir Clinton said in a rather indifferent tone. “Then there were three legal books—again a curious choice in literature. I read through them myself, to see what I could find. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that they throw some light on Mrs. Castleford’s death. Here’s a quotation from Kenny’s Outlines of Criminal Law.”

  He drew a sheet of paper from his pocket and read:

  ‘“As regards the effect of felonious homicide upon rights of property, it should be noted that both murder and manslaughter debar the killer from receiving any benefit under his victim’s Will.’ And it goes on to quote Crippen’s case. Crippen tried to convey his rights in his dead wife’s estate to someone else by making a will before he was executed. But it’s a principle of English Law that a criminal may not profit by his crime, and the Court therefore decided that Crippen had no rights at all in the estate of his murdered wife. Something of the same sort turned up in the Maybrick litigation over an insurance policy.

  “That principle of English Law lies at the root of what I called ‘a case within a case.’ The object of that well-planned manoeuvre was to get Mr. Castleford convicted of murder. Had that happened, Mr. Castleford would have lost all rights in his wife’s estate. He could not have touched a penny of it, nor could he have disposed of any of his rights in it by will. It would have gone to the next-of-kin, whoever that may be.

  “Now here again, the Carron Hill reading list covers the ground; for on it I found Shebbeare’s Administration of Estates Act, which discusses that very question in detail. In the Appendix, there’s a table showing the order of inheritance in the case of intestacy. There’s a similar account in Jenks’s Book of English Law, by the way; and it also is on the Carron Hill list. Here’s the order as given in Shebbeare’s book:

  1. Spouse.

  2. Spouse and Issue.

  3. Spouse and any of the persons specified below except Issue.

  4. Issue.

  5. Parent.

  6. Brothers and sisters of the whole blood.

  7. Brothers and sisters of the half blood.

  8. Grandparent.

  9. Uncles and aunts of the whole blood.

  10. Uncles and aunts of the half blood.

  11. The Crown.

  Mrs. Castleford had no issue, no grandparents alive, no surviving uncles and aunts.

  “Thus in case of intestacy on Mrs. Castleford’s part, her estate would pass to Mr. Castleford for life. But if he had been condemned for murder, he could not dispose of his interest in the estate in any way. The next heir would come in at once. Miss Lindfield was good enough to point out to me herself, at an earlier interview, that she was the next claimant.”

  Miss Lindfield’s coolness did not forsake her even under this reminder.

  “That is so,” she said, briefly. “Naturally, I looked the thing up, just to see how we stood.”

  “After the murder?” Sir Clinton inquired suavely.

  Miss Lindfield lost something of her equanimity. She thought for a moment or two, as though weighing something important.

  “No, not after the murder,” she admitted finally. “Before it, when the change in her will was mooted.”

  “So I suppose you were the person who borrowed Shebbeare’s book and the other legal ones from the Library?”

  “Yes,” Miss Lindfield admitted, and immediately looked as if she could have bitten her tongue.

  “And the volumes of The Times dealing with the lawsuits over the Crippen and Maybrick estates, too, perhaps?”

  “No,” Miss Lindfield contradicted coolly. “That must have been someone else. I didn’t.”

  Sir Clinton’s manner betrayed nothing of his thoughts on this reply. He dropped the subject and took up a fresh line of evidence.

  “Inspector Westerham impounded the jacket which Mr. Castleford was wearing on the afternoon of the murder. There was a large stain of blood on one sleeve, which looked suspicious, especially as Mr. Castleford could give no explanation of it. This was another of these neat little touches which helped to build up the case within the case and implicate Mr. Castleford. Fortunately, it represents merely another slip on the murderer’s part.”

  Castleford gave vent to a tittering laugh at this.

  “Dr. Pendlebury tells me that there are four distinct types of blood. The blood on Mr. Castleford’s sleeve belongs to Group IV. Mrs. Castleford had Group I. blood, so that obviously the stain was not her blood. Mr. Castleford and Miss Castleford both have Group III. blood, which shows that it was not either of them who made the stain. That stain was put on the coat while it hung in the wardrobe upstairs, with the object of strengthening the case against Mr. Castleford; and the person who put it there was someone with Group IV. blood. Such people aren’t over common. Only one person in every twenty has Group IV. blood.”

  Despite himself, Wendover found his eye seeking Miss Lindfield. He saw her glance down at the bandaged hand in her lap. Then, with a feline movement, she braced herself like an animal at bay, and turned to face Sir Clinton. Wendover recalled the Shakespearean quotation which Sir Clinton had used, and now he could see the real interpretation of it. “I must be cruel, only to be kind.” The cruelty was for Miss Lindfield, the kindness for the Castlefords. “Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.” It required very little imagination to see the meaning of that, now.

  “I don’t think there will be much difficulty in finding this person with Group IV. blood,” Sir Clinton continued. “We can put that aside, at present, and come to another slip made by the murderer. The crime was actually committed with a .32 pistol; but the murderer purchased a .22 calibre Colt automatic, which played its part in the tragedy. The slip here was in forgetting that any gunsmith who sells a firearm must report the sale within forty-eight hours to the chief officer of police who issued a firearm certificate to the purchaser. Thus, although that .22 automatic was bought in an obscure gunsmith’s in London, the police here had a report of the purchase inside a couple of days.

  “You remember the vagueness in the appointment made with the boy in the spinney; and Miss Lindfield will recall that she was much later in reaching the spinney than the boy had expected. Naturally, being the kind of boy he was, he got tired of waiting and went away, taking his rook-rifle with him. That got him off the premises, quite naturally. But from the murderer’s point of view, it was essential to suggest that he was still in the spinney at a much later period. This is where the .22 pistol became indispensable. The murderer removed the nickel-cased bullet from a .22 automatic cartridge and substituted for it one of the .22 rook-rifle bullets. Then a shot was fired through Mrs. Haddon’s window to make it appear as if the boy were still firing in the spinney. But here the murderer made yet another slip. The rook-rifle’s barrel has grooves with a right-hand twist, whereas the Colt automatics have a left-hand spiral in their rifling. The shot struck the window-curtain and was checked to some extent before it hit the wall of the room; and although it was deformed, the type of the rifling is easily distinguished. That shot was not fired from the rook-rifle at all, and is no proof that the boy was in the spinney at that time.

  “Then there was the shot which went through Miss Lindfield’s cardiga
n which she was carrying over her arm in the spinney. That also, I suspect, came from the .22 automatic.

  “But this does not finish the work that .22 pistol had to do. It had to provide a perfect alibi for the murderer by going off—to represent the fatal shot—when the murderer was safely away from the Chalet after the real killing had been done under cover of earlier shots. Inspector Westerham found two strings tied to tree-branches in the spinney and one of these strings was charred at the end. We know that the boy Frank had been making fireworks, a slow-burning string amongst them. That inevitably suggests a use of touch-string to bring about the firing of the pistol. I don’t profess to give you exact details, but I think it was done in this way, more or less. A long piece of twine was tied to the tree-branch. At the lower end, it had a slip-noose which enclosed the trigger and the back trigger-guard of the pistol. The twine was then looped up and tied with touch-string, so that the pistol now hung say three feet higher than before. When the touch-string burned down, the knot in it would be broken and the original twine would straighten out, allowing the pistol to drop to its original lower position. Naturally, as the jerk came at the end of the fall, the slip-noose would tighten round the trigger and trigger-guard; the trigger would be pulled back to explode the pistol. Of course the safety-grip in the butt of the pistol must have been tied down to put it out of action. And since there were two shots reported by Mrs. Haddon while she was at her cottage-door, I take it that the twine had been twice looped up, each loop being fitted with its own piece of touch-string—one short piece for the first shot, and a longer length for the second shot. I gave you that merely as a surmise just now. I’ll come to the evidence immediately.

  “You might reasonably ask: Why all this manoeuvring? It had a double object. The first was to provide a perfect alibi for the criminal; the second was to make the case against Mr. Castleford more deadly by suggesting a carefully-thought-out crime, a long-pondered murder and not merely a shooting done in sudden exasperation. A jury might pity a man driven momentarily beyond endurance; but they would have no mercy in the case of a murder thought out in cold blood. And the essential thing was to ensure the conviction of Mr. Castleford. That was the big gamble in the whole affair.

  “Now I come to the evidence I mentioned. For whom did the .22 automatic provide an unassailable alibi? Obviously for the person who was talking to Mrs. Haddon when the shot was fired. Who heard a cry—from a drugged woman!—at the moment of the shot? Miss Lindfield, and no one else. Who had the best chance of removing and hiding the .22 pistol between the time of the murder and the arrival of the police? Miss Lindfield, since she was alone at the Chalet then. Finally, matches were needed to light the touch-string. Miss Lindfield does not smoke; and yet she had a box of matches in her cardigan pocket that afternoon. I suppose she took them out of it when she hung up her cardigan to shoot a hole in it.”

  He turned to Miss Lindfield, who had now thrown off her mask and was staring at him with an expression of rage and dismay.

  “That’s a very pretty story,” she sneered. “You’ve supposed this and suggested that and hinted at something else. But it’s all guess-work. It’s all lies.”

  “I haven’t told you everything,” Sir Clinton returned, in an unruffled tone. “There was a spell of hot weather when you consulted these books in the Library, and your fingers were slightly moist. We had no difficulty in developing up fingerprints with osmic acid on all the crucial pages and they tally exactly with specimens of your fingerprints which I took the trouble to obtain.”

  Miss Lindfield shrugged her shoulders with an affectation of contempt.

  “That kind of evidence wouldn’t carry you far,” she said.

  For a second or two Sir Clinton looked her over speculatively, as though he were gauging something in his mind. Then, apparently, he decided to deliver the finishing stroke.

  “One bit of evidence I did not mention,” he said deliberately. “It’s this. Inspector Westerham made a search in the spinney where the twine was hanging. Imbedded in the ground under the twine, he found the cases of two exploded .22 automatic cartridges. My ‘guess-work’ accounts for the presence of these things rather neatly. They correspond to the two shots fired while you were at Mrs. Haddon’s cottage.”

  “That doesn’t prove I had anything to do with them,” Miss Lindfield pointed out.

  “No, it doesn’t. You’re quite right,” Sir Clinton admitted instantly. “But we can settle that question, one way or the other, without much difficulty. Each automatic leaves its own peculiar marks on an ejected cartridge-case: the mark of the extractor-hook, the impression of the striker-pin, and some smaller marks due to imperfections in the breech. I have the empty cases from the spinney in my pocket. If you’ll be good enough to bring down your Colt automatic, we can fire a shot or two from it and make comparisons.”

  Miss Lindfield went suddenly white under her make-up. At this decisive moment, her mask of indifference slipped aside and Wendover glimpsed the real woman who had moved in such apparent detachment across the stage of the Carron Hill drama. Behind that unruffled screen had raged a turmoil of emotions: hate, envy, greed, malice, ruthlessness, fear; and now, in a flash of revelation, that sinister brotherhood stood unveiled. Fear was in her eyes, all the others were on her lips. But, though baffled, she kept her head high and looked Sir Clinton in the face. She seemed to be putting some unspoken question and seeking the answer in his eyes.

  “I haven’t brought any charge against you—yet,” the Chief Constable said slowly, with the faintest accentuation of the last word.

  Miss Lindfield nodded curtly, as though this answered her question. She glanced round the group, and when her eyes rested on Laurence Glencaple her lips twisted in a wry smile.

  “I’ve made rather a mess of your affairs, Laurie. Sorry.”

  Then she turned, still with that crooked smile on her face, and left the room. Sir Clinton glanced at Westerham, who nodded reassuringly.

  “It’s quite all right, sir. I gave the orders. She can’t get out of the house.”

  Sir Clinton made no reply. He leaned back in his chair, outwardly indifferent, but alert for a sound. Suddenly it came, the sharp crack of a small-bore pistol in an upper room. The Chief Constable was the only one of the group who did not start.

  “Sometimes a jury of one is more effective than twelve men in a box,” he said in a level tone. “And British juries have a rooted distaste for sending a woman to the drop if they can wriggle out of it with any decency. Will you go up with the Inspector, Dr. Glencaple? I had an idea we might need a medical man here.”

  Dr. Glencaple looked at him with a sudden suspicion, but apparently decided that the less said the better.

  “Poor Connie,” he said, with more feeling than Wendover expected. “In spite of it all, I’m sorry to see her end up like this.”

  “She was a devilish clever girl,” Sir Clinton admitted soberly. “It’s a pity she wasn’t clever enough to see that a few thousands in the hand are better than £40,000 in the bush.”

  He turned to Castleford.

  “I think I’d get Miss Castleford off the premises, if I were you. This isn’t a nice business, and she’s better out of it.”

  ››› If you’ve enjoyed this book and would like to discover more great vintage crime and thriller titles, as well as the most exciting crime and thriller authors writing today, visit: ›››

  The Murder Room

  Where Criminal Minds Meet

  themurderroom.com

  By J. J. Connington

  Sir Clinton Driffield Mysteries

  Murder in the Maze (1927)

  Tragedy at Ravensthorpe (1927)

  The Case with Nine Solutions (1928)

  Mystery at Lynden Sands (1928)

  Nemesis at Raynham Parva (1929)

  (a.k.a. Grim Vengenace)

  The Boathouse Riddle (1931)

  The Sweepstake Murders (1931)

  The Castleford Conundrum (1932)

  The
Ha-Ha Case (1934)

  (a.k.a. The Brandon Case)

  In Whose Dim Shadow (1935)

  (a.k.a. The Tau Cross Mystery)

  A Minor Operation (1937)

  Murder Will Speak (1938)

  Truth Comes Limping (1938)

  The Twenty-One Clues (1941)

  No Past is Dead (1942)

  Jack-in-the-Box (1944)

  Common Sense Is All You Need (1947)

  Supt Ross Mysteries

  The Eye in the Museum (1929)

  The Two Tickets Puzzle (1930)

  Novels

  Death at Swaythling Court (1926)

  The Dangerfield Talisman (1926)

  Tom Tiddler’s Island (1933)

  (a.k.a. Gold Brick Island)

  The Counsellor (1939)

  The Four Defences (1940)

  J. J. Connington (1880–1947)

  Alfred Walter Stewart, who wrote under the pen name J. J. Connington, was born in Glasgow, the youngest of three sons of Reverend Dr Stewart. He graduated from Glasgow University and pursued an academic career as a chemistry professor, working for the Admiralty during the First World War. Known for his ingenious and carefully worked-out puzzles and in-depth character development, he was admired by a host of his better-known contemporaries, including Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr, who both paid tribute to his influence on their work. He married Jessie Lily Courts in 1916 and they had one daughter.

  An Orion ebook

  Copyright © The Professor A. W. Stewart Deceased Trust 1932, 2014

  Introduction copyright © Curtis Evans 2013

  The right of J. J. Connington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook first published in Great Britain in 2014

  by Orion

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK company