Death at Swaythling Court

by J. J. Connington

  “‘And Eugene Aram walked between . . .’” Colonel Sanderstead’s memory threw up this fragmentary quotation from the literature of his early school-books. “No gyves visible; but the situation’s clear enough. They’ve collared the beggar.”

  The Colonel paused and looked round at the dejected back of the butler as it receded down the road.

  “I wonder what’s at the bottom of this. It’s funny that Bolam never mentioned the matter to me. It must be someone else’s warrant. And that third man isn’t any of our local lot, for I know the whole of them. Plain clothes, too. I must ask Bolam what it all means. Perhaps they’ve got more evidence and roped him in for the Hubbard affair.”

  Though frankly eaten up by curiosity as to the meaning of what he had seen, Colonel Sanderstead did not allow himself to be diverted from his self-appointed task. He walked on, keeping a sharp look-out on either side of the road; and at last, just beyond the lodge gate, he encountered Sappy Morton. The idiot was lying flat on his stomach by the side of a brook, watching intently the ripples which crossed the surface of the water. The Colonel was able to approach him without startling him.

  “Well, Sappy? Nice sunny day this.”

  Sappy laboriously gathered himself together and executed his pitiful imitation of a military salute.

  “Sappy likes sunny days. Dark frightens him.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t worry about the dark, you know. Nothing to hurt you then any more than in broad daylight.”

  The imbecile made a strongly dissenting gesture.

  “Dark frightens Sappy. Things in the dark. Frights.”

  The Colonel tried reasoning with his protégé.

  “What is there to be frightened of? Things in the dark are just the same as in the daylight. You aren’t frightened of your hand in the dark, are you?”

  “Daylight keeps Things away. Keeps Green Devil away. Green Devil comes in dark. Sappy saw Green Devil in dark.”

  The Colonel had tumbled upon the very situation he wanted.

  “Green Devil! You saw the Green Devil? Why, I’ve never seen it; and I’ve lived longer than you have, Sappy. Tell me all about it.”

  The Colonel would have scorned psycho-analysis if he had even heard of it; but he was unconsciously applying the psycho-analytic method. “Get the poor beggar to talk about it and I may be able to track down the thing that gave him such a scare.” He assumed his most sympathetic manner—the Colonel could be very sympathetic when he chose—and began to elicit all the details that Sappy could furnish.

  “How did you come to see the Green Devil, Sappy?”

  “Looking for butterfly.”

  “Ah, while you were looking for butterflies? But butterflies don’t come out at night. How could you see the Green Devil in daylight when you’ve just told me you saw it in the dark?”

  The imbecile took some time to get at the Colonel’s meaning; then he shook his head vehemently.

  “Not butterflies. Butterfly. Hubbard’s butterfly.”

  “Hubbard’s butterfly? What about it?”

  “Sappy heard—Hubbard—great lovely butterfly—wanted to see it.”

  “Oh, now I understand. It was Hubbard’s butterfly you were after. Where did you hunt for it?”

  Sappy pointed vaguely towards Swaythling Court.

  “And how did you go about the business?”

  The idiot scratched his head, thought for a time, evidently assembling his recollections as best he could, and then broke into a stream of disjointed phrases.

  “Took candle—dark, don’t like dark—climbed fence—creep, creep amongst bushes—front door—dog—Sappy likes dogs—patted it—dog follows Sappy—round house—window—Sappy took big stone—crash!”

  He beamed on the Colonel. Even the mere recollection of that prodigious clatter of a broken window served to amuse him as he remembered it.

  But now the Colonel knew where he was. This staccato story which he was hearing was a recital of the missing section in the Swaythling Court drama. Sappy, of all people, had been on the spot that evening; and that bemused brain, perhaps, held the key to the mystery. But first of all, it was essential to check Sappy’s narrative; and that was a difficult matter. If he were pressed too closely, he might turn shy; and then it would perhaps be impossible to elicit anything from him at all. Colonel Sanderstead thought he saw a possibility; he recalled Sappy’s interest in the church chimes.

  “Oh, by the way, Sappy, are you still keeping a note of the time, like a good boy? Suppose you tell me what time it was when you broke that window.”

  Sappy Morton’s great moon-face became contorted by the effort of memory. Some moments passed, while the Colonel waited on tenterhooks.

  “Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong! Dong . . . Dong . . . Dong . . .”

  The idiot slowly counted up to nine strokes and then stopped short.

  “Nine o’clock? All right! You’re sure about that, Sappy?”

  “Sappy quite sure.”

  “Nine o’clock,” thought the Colonel. “That was when Hubbard was away at the Bungalow. So that would account for no one being disturbed by the smash when the glass fell in.”

  Sappy continued his tale without further prompting:

  “Climbed in—food!—chicken!—Good—ate it!”

  He gave a wolfish pantomime of ravenous eating.

  “Candle made light. Sappy brave. Into house. Door. Opened it. Big light in room. Hubbard. Sappy . . .”

  “What’s that?” demanded the Colonel. “Hubbard, you say?”

  The idiot was taken aback by the Colonel’s brusqueness and it required some little persuasion to get him to resume his story. At last he went on.

  “Hubbard—asleep at table. Sappy looked round. Little bright thing near door—touched it—snap!—light out. Candle bright. Sappy brave, not frightened. Tiptoe, tiptoe. Glass cage. Butterflies. Lovely big butterfly. Sappy wanted it. Broke glass.”

  “And Hubbard didn’t wake up?”

  “No. Hubbard still sleeping. Sappy put hand in and take big butterfly. Lovely. All gold. Great wings. Pretty. Sappy look at it.”

  He mimicked his actions in taking out the butterfly, and then a sudden horror overspread his face.

  “Butterfly. Pin through it. Butterfly hurt!”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Hubbard pinned down his butterflies in their case, Sappy.”

  “Pin through it! Hubbard sleeping. Sappy tiptoe over. Sleeping. Big pin on table. Pin like this.”

  The idiot indicated a length of about a foot with his hands.

  “Took pin. Stuck pin through him, so!”

  He imitated the action of a vicious stab downwards.

  “Hubbard put pin through butterfly. Sappy put pin through Hubbard! Good!”

  The Colonel was getting more information than he had expected, but what he had got only whetted his appetite for more.

  “And then, Sappy?”

  “Sappy sorry. Poor Hubbard. Pulled out pin. Threw it in fire. Sappy very sorry. Poor Hubbard.”

  “Did he cry out when you put the pin through him?”

  “No cry. No wriggle. Just lay still. Sappy not like it. Not like sight of Hubbard. Took cloth. Covered up Hubbard. Turned round. Oh! the Green Devil! Great gnarled claws. Big angry eyes. Grapped at Sappy. Sappy ran. Out of house. Away. Green Devil called after Sappy. Angry. Sappy frightened. Ran. Ran. Home at last.”

  One phrase in the idiot’s description cleared up the Colonel’s difficulties at a stroke.

  “It called after you? By Jove—the parrot! What a fool I was not to think of that before.”

  Then Colonel Sanderstead turned to soothe Sappy, who was evidently overwrought by the mere recollection of his fright.

  “Look here, Sappy, I know your Green Devil; he’s quite an old friend of mine. Some day I’ll take you up in daylight to see him; you won’t be frightened of him then. You’ll find him able to talk to you and make you laugh. Don’t you worry about him in the dark. He’s quite a nice Green Devil. Why, Sappy
, he’s only a bird—and a pretty bird at that. Lovely green feathers. You’ve never seen a parrot yet. Just you wait till you’ve had a look at him in daylight and then you’ll laugh at yourself for having been frightened by him.”

  A fresh thought crossed the Colonel’s mind.

  “By the way, what did you do with the butterfly?”

  “Lost. Fell out of Sappy’s hand. Scrambling through bushes. Never found it again.”

  “That’s clear enough. Well, Sappy, cheer up. Look forward to seeing the pretty bird. I’ll take you up some day soon. And don’t you worry about the dark, there’s a good boy. Nobody’d hurt you.”

  The Colonel walked back towards Fernhurst Parva in a brown study. This new evidence worried him; for while it cleared up some parts of the Swaythling Court drama, it left the main problem still unsolved, and it seemed to conflict with other bits of evidence. If Sappy’s tale were true, then Hubbard was dead before nine o’clock; and yet Mickleby had been very definite in his evidence that the death must have taken place about midnight. Again, if Sappy were accurate, then the whole story of Hubbard’s visit to Jimmy Leigh at the Bungalow was false; Mrs. Pickering could not have heard the visitor, Lonsdale could not have come across him, the telephone call could never have been made, and, finally, Stella Hilton could not have heard his voice in the study at Swaythling Court.

  Then the parrot came back into the Colonel’s mind coupled with the butler’s description of its imitation of Hubbard’s voice.

  “Of course, it might have been that infernal bird speaking. She would mistake it for Hubbard easily enough.”

  But that still left the evidence of the housekeeper, the gamekeeper and the clerk intact. And against these three witnesses what was there? Only the chance that Sappy had made no slip when he counted out the strokes of the chimes. Quite likely the imbecile had made a mistake. And there was no way of checking him. For a moment the Colonel thought of inquiring from Sappy’s mother when the idiot returned on the night of Hubbard’s death; but he recognized that there was not the slightest chance that the woman would remember anything definite about her son’s movements on that particular night. That was a blank end, evidently.

  Still, Sappy was usually wonderfully accurate in matters of time. Suppose that he were correct in his story. That still left it possible that Hubbard had either died by his own hand or had been poisoned by someone. Possibly Angermere’s idea was right in essentials, even if the novelist had gone wrong in his full reconstruction of the night’s events. Perhaps Leake was the murderer after all. And then the arrest of the butler came back to the Colonel’s memory and he hastened his steps.

  “Perhaps the police were on to him all the time and said nothing until they had collected enough evidence to lift him. I must, see Bolam now and find out what the charge is.”

  A few minutes’ walk brought him to the police station; and he was fortunate to find the constable still there.

  “Well, Bolam, you’ve been arresting Mr. Leake, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I heard nothing about a warrant.”

  “No, sir. It’s the London police who are after him. They had it all fixed up, sir, without our hearing about it. A London man arrived here this morning with a warrant in his pocket, sir, and merely asked me to go with him to the Court.”

  “Ah! I suppose you know what the charge was?”

  “Yes, sir. It seems Leake was a rank bad lot, sir. They’d been looking for him for a longish while; but he’d been lying doggo here and they hadn’t managed to find out where he’d gone. A very bad character, sir. Mixed up in the dope traffic and White Slave business, the London man told me. He’ll get a long stretch, sir.”

  “H’m! I always distrusted the look of the fellow. So it had nothing to do with the affair at the Court?”

  “Nothing, sir. The London man was much interested to hear about Hubbard, sir. He asked a lot of questions about the case. It seemed to be fresh to him.”

  “And what happened to Leake?”

  “The London man took him away, sir, by the first train. He’ll be brought up in court in a day or two. They’ve got all the evidence filed, sir.”

  “We seem to have had a couple of discreditable characters in the village. Let’s hope we get no more like them, Bolam.”

  “I hope not, sir.”

  “Well,” the Colonel nodded his good-bye. “Let me hear if anything fresh turns up.”

  He turned away and walked leisurely through the village to his avenue gate; and as he went he pondered over this last piece of information which he had gained. Leake was a bad lot, evidently; and it seemed unlikely that Hubbard was in complete ignorance of his butler’s past. If he knew of it, then that was the precise situation that Angermere had postulated: one scoundrel blackmailed by another. And if Angermere were right to this extent, perhaps he was right all through, except in details. Leake might have returned in the night, after Snappy’s incursion, and cleared up the traces of poisoning, just as the novelist had suggested. And that would account for the motor-cycle belt-fastener.

  But, as the Colonel turned the matter over and over in his mind, he still found himself unable to fit all the pieces of the jig-saw into place. The whole episode of the Bungalow and the matter of the telephone call refused to adapt themselves to the rest of the facts. Colonel Sanderstead found that the mystery still lacked a key, so far as he was concerned.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Another Part of the Story

  FOR weeks Colonel Sanderstead puzzled over the Swaythling Court mystery; but time brought no fresh facts to light, nor did the inter-relationship of the various pieces of evidence grow any clearer to his mind. It seemed that the “plain mind of the ordinary man” was not the kind of instrument which was needed for the solution of this particular problem.

  Jimmy Leigh was still absent; and no news of his movements came to the Colonel’s ears. Stella Hilton’s decree nisi was made absolute in the normal course; and preparations for her marriage with Cyril Norton had been pushed forward; for there was no reason to delay the ceremony.

  One morning the Colonel had a visit from Cyril; and at the first glance Colonel Sanderstead thought that, for a man on the eve of his marriage, his nephew seemed anything but pleased. He looked as though he had an awkward affair on his hands.

  “Stella sent me across to see you, uncle. She wants me to tell you something. I’d rather let it alone, myself; but she insisted that as you’d heard part of the story already, you ought to have the rest of it. She thinks it can be told now. I believe in letting sleeping dogs lie, myself; but she made it a point of conscience, so I gave in. And here I am.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me herself?”

  “I quite understand that; and you will, too, when I’ve told you the thing. It’s not the sort of tale a girl would want to tell you herself. Besides, I happen to have been the chief actor; so I suppose my first-hand evidence is better than her hear-say.”

  The Colonel thought for a moment.

  “She told me something, once, about being blackmailed by Hubbard. Has it anything to do with that?”

  “Yes. She says you heard half the tale and didn’t ask any questions about the rest. But now she’s marrying into our family she seems to feel that you ought to have the whole thing before you, so that you’d know she wasn’t to blame in the matter. Keeping it dark might have made you think she’s something to conceal because it was discreditable. It’s nothing of that sort.”

  “Of course not. Stella’s straight. Nobody would suspect her of anything underhand. And I quite understand how she feels about it. Not that I’d ever have believed anything against her, be sure to tell her that. Still, I suppose she wants to let me know that there was nothing wrong. Whatever it was, it seems to have given her a nasty jar at the time.”

  “It did,” confirmed Cyril Norton, grimly.

  He sat for some seconds looking at his uncle, evidently finding it difficult to select the point at which he sh
ould begin his tale. At last he plunged into it; and as he talked, his narrative flowed with increasing ease.

  “It’s no news to you, uncle, that this divorce has been difficult to get. We’d only a single case to go on; and we had to stake everything on that. And you know that Stella and I have been pretty circumspect ourselves. We’ve been careful to have no tittle-tattle going round. If it hadn’t been for that, I’d have taken Master Hilton in hand myself long ago, physically. Well, once, as it happened, Stella and I weren’t careful enough.”

  The Colonel’s face betrayed his astonishment. Cyril saw the expression and frowned.

  “I begin to think Stella was right after all. Even you seem to misinterpret things. I didn’t mean we’d gone off the rails; Stella’s not that brand. But once, quite innocently, we did make fools of ourselves. We wanted a whole day together by ourselves. Nothing in that to be ashamed of. Quite natural, I think.”

  “Perfectly.”

  “I arranged to take her away in my car for the whole day. Picnic somewhere and get back in the evening. Get away from everything, you know.”

  The Colonel nodded.

  “As it happened, I needed some money about that time, so before taking the car for her I drove into the bank at Micheldean Abbas and drew something over £50 in notes. I can’t remember how it came about, I suppose I was thinking of something else at the time—but anyhow, I stuffed my note-case into the pocket of my driving coat instead of my jacket pocket; probably I meant to change it round when I got to the car. Anyway, I forgot all about it. Just remember that. It’s important.”

  “Go on,” said the Colonel.

  “Everything went all right till we were on the way home. We’d had a fine day, everything first class. It had been a bit of a relief to get away from anything that could remind us of things. We’d gone farther afield than we intended and we’d got clean away from high roads. Then, when we were still a long way out, right in the middle of a lonely bit of the road, the steering-gear went wrong. And there we were—stuck.