“But Arkwright Jones—” I protested.
“You see the papers regularly,” he rejoined drily, “watch them and you will see…”
I don’t know when he went, but a moment or two later I found myself sitting alone at the table in the blameless teashop. The matter interested me more than I cared to admit but, for once, I was not altogether prepared to accept the funny creature’s deductions.
Twenty-four hours later, however, I had to own that he had been right, when the following piece of sensational news appeared in the Evening Post.
TRAGIC SEQUEL TO THE CLIFF MURDER
An extraordinary sequel to the mysterious tragedy of the Dog’s Tooth Cliff, near Broxmouth, occurred last night, when on the self-same spot where Miss Janet Smith met her death three months ago, General Sir Arkwright Jones lost his footing and fell a distance of two hundred feet on to the rocks below. It was a beautiful moonlight evening, and the tide being low, a number of visitors were down on the beach at the time, but those who immediately hurried to the General’s assistance found life already extinct. The distinguished soldier, who will be deeply mourned, must have been killed on the spot.
Indeed now general public opinion as well as every inhabitant of Broxmouth will bring pressure to bear upon the Borough Council to see that a suitable barrier is erected along the dangerous portions of the beautiful “Lovers’ Walk.” The double tragedy of this year’s season renders such an erection imperative.
I was probably the only reader of that paragraph who guessed that the once distinguished soldier had not come accidentally by his death. No doubt the police had followed up the clue of the man with the muffler and were actually on the track of the miscreant, when the latter, guessing that exposure was imminent, preferred to put an end to his own miserable life.
I have since heard from friends at Broxmouth that Marston has gone to the Malay States, and that Gubbins is doing something in Germany. Curious creature Marston must have been! Imagine after Jones had returned from his infamous errand and told him that the hideous deed was done, imagine Marston walking back to Broxmouth along the “Lovers’ Walk” in the rain and the darkness, past the Dog’s Tooth Cliff, at the foot of which the body of the murdered girl lay! I wonder what would be the views of the Man in the Corner on the psychology of a man with nerve enough for such an ordeal.
VII
The Tytherton Case
I
“What do you make of this?” the Man in the Corner said to me that afternoon. “A curious case is it not?” And with his claw-like fingers he indicated the paragraph in the Evening Post which I had just been perusing with great interest.
“At best,” I replied, “it is a very unpleasant business for the Carysforts.”
“And at the worst?” he retorted with a chuckle.
“Well…!” I remarked drily.
“Do you think they are guilty?” he asked.
“I don’t see who else…”
“Ah!” he broke in, with his usual lack of manners, “that is such a stale argument. One doesn’t see who else, therefore one makes up one’s mind that so and so must be guilty. I’ll lay an even bet with anyone that out of a dozen cases of miscarriage of justice, I could point to ten that were directly due to that fallacious reasoning. We all admit that there is a motive underlying every crime, and my argument is that public and police alike are far too ready to presuppose a motive that is half the time of their own creation, and, having done that, they start working upon a flimsy foundation, waste a vast amount of time, and in the meanwhile give the real criminal every chance of escape. Now take as an example the Tytherton case, in which you are apparently interested. It was an unprecedented outrage which stirred the busy provincial town to its depths, the victim, Mr. Walter Stonebridge, being one of its most noted solicitors. He had his office in Tytherton High Street and lived in a small, detached house on the Great West Road. The house stood in the middle of a small garden, and had only one storey above the ground floor; the front door opened straight on a long, narrow hall which ran along the full depth of the house. On the left side of this hall there were two doors, one leading to the drawing-room and the other to a small morning-room. At the end of the hall was the staircase, and beyond it, down a couple of steps, there was a tiny dining-room and the usual offices. The back door opened straight on the kitchen, and on the floor above there were four bedrooms and a bathroom. Mr. Walter Stonebridge was a bachelor and his domestic staff consisted of a married couple—Henning by name—who did all that was necessary for him in the house.
“It was on the last evening of February. The weather was fair and bright. The Hennings had gone upstairs to their room as usual at ten o’clock. Mr. Stonebridge was at the time, sitting in the morning-room. He was in the habit of sitting up late, reading and writing. On this occasion he told the Hennings to close the shutters and lock the back door as usual, but to leave the front door on the latch as he was expecting a visitor. The Hennings thought nothing of that, as one or two gentlemen-friends, or sometimes clients of Mr. Stonebridge, would now and then drop in late to see him. Anyway, they went contentedly to bed. A little while later—they could not exactly recollect at what hour because they had already settled down for the night—they heard the front door bell, and immediately afterwards Mr. Stonebridge’s footsteps along the hall. Then suddenly they heard a crash followed by what sounded like a struggle, then a smothered cry, and finally silence. Henning was out of bed and on the landing in an instant and he had just switched on the light there when he heard Mr. Stonebridge’s voice calling up to him from below:
“‘That’s all right, Henning. I caught my foot in this confounded rug. That’s all.’
“Henning looked over the bannister, and seeing nothing he shouted down:
“‘Shall I give you a ’and, sir?’ But Mr. Stonebridge at once replied, quite cheerily: ‘No, no! I’m all right. You go back to bed.’
“And Henning did as he was told, nor did he or his wife hear anything more during the night. But in the early morning when Mrs. Henning came downstairs she was horror-struck to find Mr. Stonebridge in the dining-room, lying across the table to which he was securely pinioned with a rope; a serviette taken out of the sideboard drawer had been tied tightly round his mouth and his eyes were blindfolded with his own pocket handkerchief. The woman’s screams brought her husband upon the scene; together they set to work to rescue their master from his horrible plight. At first they thought that he was dead, and Henning was for fetching the police immediately, but his wife declared that Mr. Stonebridge was just unconscious and she started to apply certain household restoratives and made Henning force some brandy through Mr. Stonebridge’s lips. Presently the poor man opened his eyes and gave one or two other signs of returning consciousness, but he was still very queer and shaky. The Hennings then carried him upstairs, undressed him and put him to bed, and then Henning ran for the doctor.
“Well, it was days, or in fact weeks, before Mr. Stonebridge had sufficiently recovered to give a coherent statement of what happened to him on that fateful night, and—which was just as much to the point—what had happened the previous day. The doctor had prescribed complete rest in the interim. The patient had suffered from concussion and I know not what, and those events had got so mixed up in his brain that to try and disentangle them was such an effort that every time he attempted it nearly sent him into a brain fever. But in the meanwhile his friends had been busy—notably Mr. Stonebridge’s head clerk, Mr. Medburn, who was giving the police no rest. There were, even without the evidence of the principal witness concerned, plenty of facts to go on to make out a case against the perpetrator of such a dastardly outrage. That robbery had been the main motive of the assault was easily enough established—a small fire- and burglar-proof safe which stood in a corner of the morning-room had been opened and ransacked. When examined it was found to contain only a few trinkets which had probably a sentimental value, but were otherwise worthless. The key of the safe—one of a bunch—was
still in the lock, which went to prove either that Mr. Stonebridge had the safe open when he was attacked, or what was more likely—considering the solicitor’s well-known careful habits—that the assailant had ransacked his victim’s pockets after he had knocked him down. A pocket-book, torn, and containing only a few unimportant papers lay on the ground; there had been a fire in the room at the time of the outrage and careful analysis of the ashes found in the hearth revealed the presence of a quantity of burnt paper.
“But robbery being established as the motive of the outrage did not greatly help matters, because while Mr. Stonebridge remained in such a helpless condition, it was impossible to ascertain what booty his assailant had carried away. Soon, however, the first ray of light was thrown upon what seemed until this hour an impenetrable mystery. It appears that Mr. Medburn was looking after the business in High Street during his employer’s absence, and one morning—it was on the Monday following the night of the outrage—he had a visit from a client who sent in his name as Felix Shap. The head clerk knew something about this client who had recently come over to England from somewhere abroad in order to make good his claim to certain royalties on what is known as the Shap Fuelettes—a kind of cheap fuel which was launched some time before the war by Sir Alfred Carysfort, Bart., of Tytherton Grange, and out of which that gentleman made an immense fortune, and, incidentally, got his title thereby.
“This man Shap—a Dutchman by birth—was, it appears, the original inventor and patentee of these Fuelettes, and Mr. Carysfort, as he was then, had met him out in the Dutch East Indies and had bought the invention from him for a certain sum down, and then exploited it in England first and afterwards all over the world at immense profit. Sir Alfred Carysfort died about a year ago, leaving a fortune of over a million sterling, and was succeeded in the title and in the managing directorship of the business by his eldest son David, a married man with a large family. The business had long since been turned into a private limited liability company, the bulk of the shares being held by the managing director.
“The fact that the patent rights of the Shap Fuelettes had been sold by the inventor to the late Alfred Carysfort had never been in dispute. It further appeared that Felix Shap had at one time been a very promising mining engineer, but that in consequence of incurable, intemperate habits he had gradually drifted down the social scale; he lost one good appointment after another until he was just an underpaid clerk in the office of an engineer in Batavia, whose representative in England was Mr. Alfred Carysfort. The latter was on a visit to the head office in Batavia some twelve years ago when he met Shap, who was then on his beam-ends. He had recently been sacked by his employers for intemperance and was on the fair way of becoming one of those hopeless human derelicts who usually end their days either on the gallows or in a convict prison.
“But at the back of Shap’s fuddled mind there had lingered throughout his downward career the remembrance of a certain invention which he had once patented and which he had always declared would one day bring him an immense fortune; but though he had spent quite a good deal of money in keeping up his patent rights, he had never had the pluck and perseverance to exploit or even to perfect his invention. Alfred Carysfort, on the other hand, was brilliantly clever, he was ambitious, probably none too scrupulous, and at once he saw the immense possibilities, if properly worked, of Shap’s rough invention, and he set to work to obtain the man’s confidence, and, presumably, by exercising certain persuasion and pressure he got the wastrel to make over to him in exchange for a few hundred pounds the entire patent rights in the Fuelettes. The transaction was, as far as that goes, perfectly straightforward and above board; it was embodied in a contract drawn up by an English solicitor, who was the British Consul in Batavia at the time; nor was it—taking everything into consideration—an unfair one. Shap would never have done anything with his invention, and a clean, wholesome and entirely practical fuel would probably have been thus lost to the world; but there remains the fact that Alfred Carysfort died a dozen years later worth more than a million sterling, every penny of which he had made out of an invention for which he had originally paid less than five hundred.
“Mr. Medburn had been put in possession of these facts some weeks previously when Mr. Felix Shap had first presented himself at the private house of Mr. Stonebridge; he came armed with a letter of introduction from a relative of Mr. Stonebridge’s whom he had met out in Java, and he was accompanied by a friend—an American named Julian Lloyd—who was piloting him about the place, and acting as his interpreter and secretary, as he himself had never been in England and spoke English very indifferently. His passport and papers of identification were perfectly in order; he appeared before Mr. Stonebridge as a man still on the right side of sixty who certainly bore traces on his prematurely wrinkled face and in his tired lustreless eyes of a life spent in dissipation rather than in work, but otherwise he bore himself well, was well dressed and apparently plentifully supplied with money.
“The story that he told Mr. Stonebridge through the intermediary of his friend, Julian Lloyd, was a very curious one. According to his version of various transactions which took place between himself and the late Sir Alfred Carysfort, the latter had, some time after the signing of the original contract, made him a definite promise in writing that should the proceeds in the business of the Shap Fuelettes exceed £10,000 in any one year, he, Sir Alfred, would pay the original inventor out of his own pocket a sum equivalent to twenty per cent of all such profits over and above the £10,000, with a minimum of £200. Mr. Shap had brought over with him all the correspondence relating to this promise, and, moreover, he adduced as proof positive that Sir Alfred had looked on that promise as binding, and had at first loyally abided by it, the fact that until 1916 he had paid to Mr. Felix Shap the sum of £200 every year. These sums had been paid half-yearly through Sir Alfred’s bankers, and acknowledgments were duly sent by Shap direct to the bank, all of which could of course be easily verified. But in the year 1916 these payments suddenly ceased. Mr. Shap wrote repeatedly to Sir Alfred, but never received any reply. At first he thought that there were certain difficulties in the way owing to the European War, so after a while he ceased writing. But presently there came the Armistice; Mr. Shap wrote again and again, but was again met by the same obstinate silence.
“In the meanwhile he had come to the end of his resources; he had spent all that he had ever saved, but nevertheless he was determined that as soon as he could scrape up a sufficiency of money he would go to England in order to establish his rights. Then in 1922 he heard of Sir Alfred Carysfort’s death. It was now or never if he did not mean to acquiesce silently in the terrible wrong which was being put upon him. Fortunately he had a good friend in Mr. Julian Lloyd, who had helped him with money and advice, and at last he had arrived in England. It was for Mr. Stonebridge to say whether the papers and correspondence which he had brought with him were sufficient to establish his claim in law. Mr. Medburn remembered Mr. Stonebridge telling him all about these matters and emphasising the fact that Felix Shap had undoubtedly a very strong case and that he could not understand a man in the position of Sir Alfred Carysfort thus wilfully repudiating his own signature.
“‘There is not only the original letter,’ Mr. Stonebridge had concluded, ‘making a definite promise to pay certain sums out of his own pocket if the profits of the company exceeded £10,000 in any one year, but there are all the covering letters from Sir Alfred’s bankers whenever they sent cheques on his behalf to Shap—usually twice a year for sums that varied between £100 and £150. I cannot understand it!’ he had reiterated more than once, and Mr. Medburn, who also had a great deal of respect for the Carysforts, who were among the wealthiest people in the county, was equally at a loss to understand the position.
“However Mr. Stonebridge, after he had seen the late Sir Alfred’s bankers about the payments to Shap and consulted an expert on the subject of the all-important letter signed by the late Alfred Carysfort, sought an interv
iew with Sir David. From the first there seemed to be an extraordinary amount of acrimony brought into the dispute by both sides; this was understandable enough on the part of Felix Shap, who felt he was being defrauded of his just dues by men who were literally coining money out of the product of his brain; but the greatest bitterness really appeared to come from the other side.
“At first Sir David Carysfort refused even to discuss the question; he was quite sure that if his father had made promises of payments to anyone, he was the last man in the world to repudiate such obligations. Sir David had not yet had time to go through all his father’s papers, but he was quite convinced that correspondence, or documents, would presently be found, which would set at nought the original letter produced by Mr. Shap. But, of course, the payments to Shap up to and including the year 1916 could not be denied; there was the testimony of Sir Alfred’s bankers that sums in accordance with Sir Alfred’s instructions, varying between £100 and £150, were paid by cheque every half-year to the order of Felix Shap in Batavia. In 1916 these payments automatically ceased, Sir Alfred giving no further orders for these to be made. Mr. Stonebridge naturally desired to know what explanation Sir David would give about those payments.
“At first Sir David denied all knowledge as to the reason or object of the payments, but after a while he must have realised that public opinion was beginning to raise its voice on the subject, and that it was not exactly singing the praises of Sir David Carysfort, Bart. Although Mr. Stonebridge had, of coarse, been discretion itself, Mr. Shap had admittedly not the same incentive to silence, and what’s more his friend, Mr. Lloyd, made it his business to get as much publicity for the whole affair as he could. Paragraphs in the local papers had begun to appear with unabated regularity, and though there were no actual comments on the case as a whole, no prejudging of respective merits, there were unmistakable hints that it would be in Sir David’s interest to put dignity on one side and come out frankly into the open with explanations and suggestions. Soon the London papers got hold of the story, and you know what that means. The Radical Press simply battened on a story which placed a poor, down-atheel inventor in the light of a victim to the insatiable greed and frank dishonesty of a high-born profiteer.
Unravelled Knots Page 14
