Death at Swaythling Court

by J. J. Connington

  Cyril Norton knitted his brows for a moment as if considering the point:

  “The paraldehyde’s a snag, sure enough, in a plain, straightforward suicide case. But was it a case like that? You seem to take it that he was never in doubt about his choice between the two alternatives: arrest or suicide. But suppose Hubbard was in two minds about the best course. One minute, say, he thinks suicide’s the only way out; next minute he believes he sees a chance of brazening out the business and getting off scot-free—by putting on the screw harder than ever. He sits down at his typewriter and begins his last letter to Jimmy Leigh, in the hope that one final bluff will scare Jimmy stiff and pull the business out of the fire. Then, in the middle, he changes his mind; goes into the cold fit again; and sees suicide as the only way out. Suppose he gets hold of his killing-bottle, to be ready. Then suppose he thinks matters over again. Perhaps he changes his mind once more; decides he’ll see the thing through and hope for an acquittal. But in that case, he’ll need to be fresh in the morning: no good facing the final racket when he’s jaded from lack of sleep. So off he goes to his bedroom, with his tumbler in his hand; gets the bottle of paraldehyde off his wash-hand stand; pours his last dose into his whisky and swallows it down. Then, before it has time to act—perhaps while he’s muzzy with the stuff—he changes his mind for the last time; gets the wind up completely; and swallows the cyanide. It seems to me that that fits the whole case all right. You seem to think that suicide’s a straightforward business; but I’ll bet every prospective suicide wobbles a bit when he gets to the edge; and a good few of them draw back at the last moment.”

  The Colonel was forced to admit that Cyril’s suggestion had a good deal in its favour. It fitted the unfinished letter on the typewriter neatly into the scheme of things; and it seemed to be based on a very reasonable reading of psychology.

  “He must have been in a rather frantic condition at the tail-end of things, if your interpretation’s correct,” he commented. “But I suppose he was really in a pretty awkward fix either way. Gaol would be a change from Swaythling Court.”

  As they made their way into the entrance hall, Colone. Sanderstead noticed Bolam on guard at the door of the room into which the jury had retired. The constable’s face betrayed a feeling of extreme annoyance.

  “Well, Bolam,” inquired the Colonel, “you seem to be worried over something? What is it, eh? Anything I can help to put right, by any chance?”

  “Sir, I was fair taken aback by that woman’s evidence.”

  “What woman?”

  “The chambermaid, sir. I questioned her most carefully, sir, at the time I found the drug-bottle in his bedroom; and when I spoke to her about it, she gave me definitely to believe that the bottle was quite familiar to her. By her way of it, she’d seen it often. I reported that to the coroner, sir. And when he puts her on her oath, she goes right back on what she said to me. She swears she never saw the bottle before. I feel fair affronted, sir. Making me look a fool before the coroner.”

  “I shouldn’t worry too much over it, Bolam,” advised the Colonel, tolerantly. “I expect she was flurried, or something, when you showed her the bottle first of all, and just agreed with anything you suggested to her by your questions. Then when she was on oath, she’d had time to think over things; perhaps she thought over them so much that she got completely muddled up—one does confuse one’s memory if one thinks too hard about a thing; and so quite probably she was honest enough both times. Anyway, it’s no fault of yours. I’ll mention it to the coroner, though, if you still feel sore about it.”

  Before Bolam could reply, the door opened and the jury began to file into the dining-room where the coroner was waiting. Cyril Norton and his uncle followed them in.

  “Well, gentlemen, have you considered your verdict?”

  Simon rose to his feet, inflated to an even greater bulk than usual by the dignity of his position:

  “We find that William Blayre Hubbard died from the effects of cyanide poisoning; and that the poison was self-administered.”

  “You have nothing to add to that verdict? Nothing to suggest as to his state of mind at the time he took his life?”

  Simon looked puzzled. The coroner thought it well to explain:

  “The verdict you have brought in amounts to felo-de-se. If that verdict is given, the body of the deceased can be buried in a churchyard, but not in consecrated ground; and the question of holding a religious service at the interment is left to the clergyman responsible for that burial-ground. He may object, if he chooses, to take part in a religious service over the corpse of a suicide. If you add a rider to the effect that the deceased was of unsound mind at the time when he took his life, then the body can be buried in consecrated ground. But unless you are quite satisfied as to the state of mind of the deceased at the time when he took his life, you should not offer an opinion on the point.”

  The jury hastily consulted among themselves in whispers for a few moments; and finally Simon intimated that they had nothing to add to their verdict.

  “Then these proceedings are now closed, gentlemen.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Theory of the Novelist

  DURING dinner, Colonel Sanderstead avoided the subject of the inquest; but when he and Angermere settled down in the study after their coffee, Hubbard’s death crept into the conversation almost immediately. Angermere was free from all prepossessions in the matter; he was a casual visitor who had chanced to be on the spot in time to see the unfolding of the Hubbard affair: and the Colonel felt a keen curiosity to know how the problem presented itself to a detached observer. Nor was he without hope that Angermere, with his long practice in mystery-concocting, might throw fresh light on the problem.

  “It’s a pretty puzzle,” Angermere admitted, “a very pretty puzzle. I’ve been turning it over in my mind since I heard the evidence; and I think that from my point of view at least it has the makings of something.”

  The Colonel made no attempt to conceal his interest:

  “And you’ve hit on the solution, perhaps?”

  Angermere’s faint gesture deprecated anything so definite.

  “No, I’d hardly like to go so far as that, hardly so far as that. You see, Colonel, I approach this affair from a very definite direction. I’m professionally interested in it, if I may put it so. What I want to get out of it, if possible, is simply the germ of a yarn, nothing more. I’m not really interested in getting at the true solution; all I need for my purpose is a solution which can be used as the basis of a ‘shocker.’ I’m a seeker after sensation, you know, and not necessarily an inquirer into truth.”

  The Colonel nodded, though he felt a certain disappointment with Angermere’s outlook.

  “I expect that we part company at the very start,” the novelist continued. “For instance, are you yourself satisfied with the suicide hypothesis? Do you think the jury hit the nail on the head when they brought in that verdict?”

  Colonel Sanderstead shifted uneasily in his chair. He had meant to question, not to be interrogated:

  “Well, frankly, I don’t see what other verdict they could have brought in. Of course, it doesn’t clear up the case; it leaves the whole affair very much of a puzzle: but so far as it goes, it seems to me a very satisfactory verdict.”

  Angermere smiled faintly at this reply, but the Colonel could see that there was no disagreeable superiority in the expression. The novelist was merely pleased to find that his opinion was verified.

  “That just illustrates what I said. You’re quite satisfied with the verdict; and from your own point of view I think you’re perfectly right. It’s a mysterious affair in many ways; but all the evidence points towards that verdict. For my particular purpose, however, that verdict would be totally useless. It makes things too simple. What I want to get out of the thing, you understand, is a good tale, a downright mystery-tangle that will keep the reader wondering about the real story which underlies the surface-presentation, if you see what I mean.
>
  “Now from that standpoint, there’s nix in a suicide case. There’s no conflict, so to speak. To make the thing readable, somebody’s got to be suspected of something; he’s got to be cleared or convicted in the end. That’s how it presented itself to me as I sat there at the inquest; and naturally, from that standpoint, the verdict was the least interesting part of the affair—rather an anti-climax, in fact. Or even worse than that, for it left no loop-hole for a possible criminal.”

  “Then you don’t think it was suicide after all?” demanded the Colonel, rather perturbed to find that Angermere’s line of thought was approaching so closely to his own.

  “For my particular purpose, suicide would be no good at all. And, remember, I’m not trying to get at the truth of the thing. All I care about is to rearrange the affair so that I can make a murder yarn out of it. The facts are all right, except that there are too many of them. I shall probably have to drop out a few of them—a good many, in fact—before I can get the thing to fit together and make anything out of it.”

  The Colonel’s good manners saved him from showing that this view of the case was a disappointment. He had hoped to get a clear analysis of the situation as it appeared to an unbiased mind; and now it seemed that the most he could hope for was a “rearrangement” of the facts, with most of the puzzle omitted during the redistribution process. However, he fought down his feelings and decided to let Angermere have his say without interruption:

  “Would you mind giving me some idea of how you go to work in a case of this kind? It’s all fresh ground to me, you know, and I’ve often wondered how that kind of thing is done.”

  Angermere had apparently failed to notice the Colonel’s slight discomfiture. He bent forward in his chair and began to study the pictures in the fire.

  “Well, of course, with my pre-conceived object, I went to that inquest in search of what we may call the First Murderer. It was of no importance whether there ever was a murder or not; all I needed was a suggestion. I wanted to look over the witnesses and find somebody I could cast for the part. By the way, you’ll remember that this was a mere academic exercise, I hope, and you won’t be offended if I give you the thing just as it happened?”

  “Of course not,” the Colonel hastened to reassure him, “I quite see your point. You can suspect me, if you like.”

  Angermere laughed softly.

  “Well, it’s not quite so bad as that. I began by ruling out the obviously impossibles from the fiction point of view; and of course you were the first to go. Your part in the yarn is evidently the part which you actually played in the real affair: the discoverer of the crime.”

  “And who else did you rule out?”

  “The constable, for one; he wouldn’t fill the bill as a murderer at all—at least not that kind of murderer. From what I saw of him, he has no great imagination; and this murder is stamped with imagination from start to finish. Perhaps I ought to say ‘theoretical murder’; but I take it that you’ll read the adjective in without my repeating it.”

  “And your next suspect, who was he?”

  “Let’s eliminate the witnesses in order. I think one can throw out the housekeeper at the Bungalow. She could hardly be dragged in on any reasonable grounds. Nor do I see any way in which Mickleby could be connected with the affair. He’s only a temporary inhabitant, a locum; and the chances of making him a probable criminal seemed to me slight. That leaves young Leigh, your nephew, Hilton, and the servants on the list of possibles, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s so,” Colonel Sanderstead agreed, cautiously. He was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Angermere’s analysis was narrowing the circle; but three of the remaining suspects were connected, more or less closely, with the dominant caste in Fernhurst Parva.

  “I forgot one other possible,” Angermere went on, “that mysterious woman who appeared for a moment in the village and disappeared by the first train on the morning you discovered the body. Her meteoric visit seems to have stirred up Fernhurst Parva considerably, to judge by the amount of gossip I’ve heard about her. I noticed that she didn’t appear in the evidence, though.”

  “No, there was nothing to connect her definitely with the case,” the Colonel commented, wondering how much Angermere knew about the matter.

  “Village gossip is pretty unreliable,” Angermere went on, “but down in Fernhurst Parva they seem to have connected her with one of the local magnates. From all I gathered, she was rather a flamboyant person, not exactly the type that one finds in the family circle. However, we may neglect her, I think, so far as the actual murder goes; there isn’t a scrap of evidence to connect her directly with it, though she may have played a subsidiary part somewhere.

  “Now let’s continue the elimination process; and again, remember, I’m trying to make a yarn out of it and not retrace the real story. You mustn’t imagine that I’m throwing out real suspicions, you know.

  “First, there’s Mr. Cyril Norton. I must confess he played a peculiar part in the business. He struck me—you won’t mind my saying so—as a particularly tenacious person: the last sort of man that one would care to have as an enemy. But then, that very tenacity and blunt downrightness of his happen to be the characteristics that were needed for the part he played in the affair. He was just the sort of man to whom people would go for help if they got into deep water. He knew a good deal about the inside of the case; but nobody got much change out of him in his evidence. In fact, going back to the real case and not the sham one that I’m putting up, it struck me that quite probably Hubbard must have felt that he had come up against it once for all when his affairs passed into Norton’s hands. I know that if I’d been in Hubbard’s shoes and Norton had threatened to expose me, I’d have skipped on the spot; for I’d have felt sure he’d carry out his threat without the faintest hesitation.

  “I don’t mind saying that on the face of it Cyril Norton would have made a good First Murderer in some respects. But when I tried to fit the thing together on that basis it obviously fell to the ground at once. Norton had his grip on Hubbard and he had no need to go any farther. He had got him into such a corner that either flight or suicide was the only chance of escape. In that state of affairs, there was nothing to gain by murdering the creature. So I think we can drop your nephew out of consideration. Besides, his part in the drama is quite well defined—like your own and the constable’s: he pulled the trigger that set the machine in motion.”

  Angermere threw the stub of his cigarette into the fire; and the Colonel passed him the box to take another. After he had lit it, Angermere continued:

  “Hilton was the next person I looked at. He played rather a mysterious part in the business. You know the usual detective yarn—some character makes episodic appearances from start to finish and the reader’s attention is carefully diverted from him until at the last moment he turns out to be the master-crook or murderer or whatever it is. Now Hilton might quite well have filled that bill for me. Suppose that he were the mysterious person whom Hubbard was blackmailing—the man that your nephew was trying to shield. Hilton, so far as my judgment of physiognomy goes, is a person with a certain violence of temper mixed with a considerable amount of—shall we say—craft, or subtlety. He’s just the kind of man who might get into difficulties and use either violence or manœuvre to get himself out of the scrape. I must confess that he tempted me—speaking purely professionally, of course. He would have made an excellent character, with a little rearrangement. One could imagine him putting his affairs into the hands of your nephew and then, at the last moment, in a fit of temper, taking the control of the business back into his own hands with fatal result. But that won’t fit in with the rest of the facts. A violent man doesn’t use poison as a weapon. He might have stabbed Hubbard; but I doubt if he’d have turned to the cyanide. Certainly if he changed his mind at the last moment, I don’t think he’d have done the thing that way. No, whatever part he played in the business, it wasn’t that of a poisoner.”

  The Colonel was n
ow on tenterhooks. Jimmy Leigh’s name was the next for treatment; and he wondered what Angermere had made of him. But much to his relief, the novelist did not linger over that character in the drama.

  “As to young Leigh of the Bungalow, I left him out of the rearrangement almost at once. In the first place, there was nothing whatever to connect him with Hubbard, beyond a casual acquaintanceship. Then, I hadn’t seen young Leigh in the flesh, but I gather that he doesn’t look anything like a criminal but quite the reverse, rather a harum-scarum personality apart from his scientific work. And to my mind, he had a perfect alibi even if one did go the length of suspecting him.”

  The Colonel interrupted for a moment to confirm this:

  “He dined with me here that night and went straight off to the Bungalow. Hubbard was there till nearly eleven; and the housekeeper heard the two of them talking most of the time. She heard Hubbard go out; and after that Jimmy Leigh kept her awake for a long time. Hubbard died about midnight, when Jimmy Leigh was still fumbling about in his workshop.”

  Angermere sat up suddenly.

  “Just wait a moment! Suppose that it wasn’t young Leigh in the workshop at all. Suppose someone else came in and took his place! One man’s fumbling about makes the same noise as another man’s; and all that’s in the evidence is this racket. I must make a note of that idea; one could use it in another yarn.”

  He pulled out a notebook and made a jotting.

  “And so, you see,” he continued, putting his book back into his pocket, “we’ve eliminated everyone except the servants. But before I got that length, I had paid some attention to the late Hubbard himself.