“Quite so,” Sir Clinton answered, but the tone of his voice left it in doubt whether he agreed with the sergeant or was merely amusing himself by turning Ledbury’s favourite non-committal expression against its author.
Ledbury showed no sign that he had noticed the faint caricature of his own manner. He rose to his feet and went across to the window which looked out on the verandah.
“You were in here with the deceased, weren’t you, before Brandon came in?” he demanded. “Is this window just as it was when you were in the room?”
“I was in the room before Mr. Brandon entered it, certainly. When I left it, both curtains were drawn across the window, which was open. Your eyes will assure you, sergeant, that one of these curtains has been slid aside since then, leaving a clear view out into the garden. It was in that state when I came back into the room after being summoned up from the lake. Quite clear, I trust?”
Ledbury seemed to take the hint about Rex’s name.
“Then it must have been drawn back by either the deceased or Mr. Brandon?”
“How should I know, sergeant? It’s drawn aside; I see that with my own eyes. I didn’t see who drew it.”
“Has anything else been disturbed that you know of?”
Sir Clinton noticed a distinct change in the sergeant’s manner, which was reflected in the tone of his voice. In their previous intercourse, Ledbury had been in the position of a more or less docile pupil; but now it was only occasionally that he interjected “sir” into his sentences; and his general air was one of dissatisfaction.
“The receiver of the telephone was off its bracket when I came into the room after the shot,” Sir Clinton explained, with no outward sign that he noticed anything peculiar in Ledbury’s attitude. “I replaced it after telephoning to you. It was lying on this exact spot on the table.”
He put his finger on a place about two feet from the telephone stand.
“That fits in with the maid’s evidence, all right,” Ledbury admitted. “He’d been telephoning. Then he put the receiver down, came over here to the window, and shot the deceased through the back of the chair. Um! That would be it.”
He flashed a glance from his sharp little eyes at Sir Clinton’s face as he spoke, evidently hoping to surprise some expression which might give him a key to the views of the ex-Chief Constable on this particular point; but his hopes were disappointed. Sir Clinton seemed to accept the statement as the most natural thing in the world, though he refused to be drawn into any verbal comment on it. Ledbury’s glance travelled on till it reached the figure of the constable on guard, who was standing in one corner of the room, evidently much interested in the whole affair.
“You can wait outside now,” Ledbury ordered, much to the manifest disgust of his subordinate. “We don’t need you.”
The constable retreated and closed the door behind him; and, as soon as his steps showed that he had moved away along the hall, the sergeant brought his eyes back to Sir Clinton’s face.
“Isn’t it a rum sort of coincidence the way you seem to have got mixed up with all this business?” he asked in a voice which showed that he was making a tentative move. “There was Quevedo, now. Who was the last person to meet him on the road before he was done in? Sir Clinton Driffield. Then there was Roca, him that was killed up at the Bale Stones. Didn’t you strike up an acquaintance with him at the Black Bull? So they’re saying, anyhow. And I’ve got a sort of notion it was one of your cars that was up at the Bale Stones that night, too. That’s a lot of coincidences. And now, here’s another man murdered, and who was on the spot again? You! If one was a fanciful sort of person, now, wouldn’t these strike you as being things that wouldn’t be the worse of some explanation?”
Throughout the whole of his speech ran an undercurrent of doubt which evidently prevented him from saying more plainly what he was evidently thinking. Rather to his confusion, Sir Clinton laughed heartily instead of taking offence.
“You’ve struck a fresh parlour game, sergeant,” he said rather cruelly when he stopped laughing. “Find the coincidence! Causes shrieks of laughter from young and old, eh? Well, let’s play it, if you insist. My move? Isn’t it remarkable that all three victims should have been foreigners? There’s a coincidence worth noting. And another coincidence is that I never set eyes on any of them before the night I came to Raynham Parva. Now it’s your turn to guess, I think.”
Ledbury flushed angrily, but seemed in difficulty about his next move.
“Can’t go on?” Sir Clinton inquired with mock sympathy. “Then it’s my move again.”
His voice lost its tinge of amusement and grew colder.
“Final amazing coincidence. I wasn’t on the spot when any of these murders was committed. That seems an interesting fact, doesn’t it?”
Ledbury still remained obstinately silent; but the increasing redness of his ears showed that he was feeling far from comfortable. If he thought the worst was over, he was mistaken.
“It’s evidently time I did some plain speaking,” Sir Clinton said, with a complete disregard for the sergeant’s feelings. “You’ve got a bit above yourself lately—perhaps with getting your name into the papers. You seem to think you can run about throwing out insinuations all over the place, and no one may dare to pull you up. It’s not done, sergeant. You’ve made two howlers already this afternoon, and that’s quite enough. If Mr. Brandon chooses to make it hot for you, I shouldn’t care to be in your shoes. These stripes of yours aren’t tattooed on your skin, remember. A pair of scissors will soon bring them off.”
Ledbury’s little eyes betrayed his anger, but they showed also that the suggestion about his stripes had gone home. What if he had been a bit hasty in arresting young Brandon? But when he reflected on the evidence, he felt reassured.
“You think he didn’t do it?” he demanded, with only the faintest tinge of a sneer in his tone. “The man that tries to prove that to a jury’ll have his work cut out for him, he will.”
“I haven’t got all the evidence yet,” Sir Clinton admitted frankly, “but I expect to secure it very shortly. You’ve made a muddle of it, sergeant.”
The certainty in his manner convinced the sergeant against his will. Quite unconsciously he glanced at the stripes on the arm of his tunic. If he had “made a muddle of it,” as Sir Clinton said, and if Rex Brandon (with Sir Clinton to advise him) chose to cut up rough . . . a lot of unpleasant things might happen.
Sir Clinton evidently felt that he had given Ledbury a much-needed lesson; but he had no desire to push the man into a corner. The sergeant had forgotten, evidently, that he himself had very little claim to any credit in the unravelling of the Quevedo and Roca affairs. He had discounted the help which had been given him and had allowed his conceit to get the better of him. That, after all, was nothing out of the common.
“Here,” he said. “Run your hands over my flannels. Find the pistol there? No? Well, then, add to that the fact that, when the thing happened, I was out on the lake in a boat with the two Miss Anstruthers. Does that seem enough to keep you from flinging insinuations about at random in future, so far as I’m concerned? If it doesn’t, then I’ll point out that from the time I got out of the boat I’ve been under the eyes of people, and so had no chance of disposing of a pistol if I’d had one.”
“You didn’t find the pistol when you looked for it?” Ledbury inquired in a much more polite tone than he had been using before.
“No. Neither Mr. Scotswood nor I could see it anywhere. You’d better look for yourself.”
The sergeant seemed only too glad of the excuse to do something. The positiveness in Sir Clinton’s manner carried conviction to his mind, and he began to have more than a glimmering of how his bounce must have appeared to the man who had gone out of his way to help him earlier in the week. He moved over to the window overlooking the verandah and began to search the floor in that neighbourhood. Sir Clinton, manifestly letting bygones be bygones, walked across the room and swung himself up on to the
table which held Johnnie’s Meccano, from which position he could overlook the sergeant’s proceedings.
“What’s that you’ve got hold of?” he demanded, after a moment or two.
“Seems like one of the nuts off those toys up there,” the sergeant suggested, passing up the tiny object.
From the tone of his voice it was clear that he also was inclined to let bygones be bygones, possibly in the hope that if he conciliated Sir Clinton he might have a friend to help him should Rex Brandon’s arrest turn into an awkward matter.
“Meccano nut,” was Sir Clinton’s verdict.
He turned and compared it with facsimiles on the piece of machinery which Johnnie had abandoned before completion. Then, putting it down on the table, he was just in time to see Ledbury make another find.
“One of the bars out of that toy,” the sergeant declared as he passed it up.
He returned to his minute search of the floor.
“Your housemaid doesn’t half seem to do her job,” he complained. “There’s a regular litter of bolts, and nuts, and odds and ends scattered about here.”
“My young nephew has a compact with her that she’s only to sweep up this particular bit of the floor once a week—under his personal supervision. It seems he was losing components right and left in the daily sweeping until he made his bargain,” Sir Clinton explained.
“H’m!” was Ledbury’s comment. “It doesn’t make the job of hunting through it any easier. Here’s a bit of spring. I suppose that’s one of the Meccano bits too?”
Sir Clinton took it from his hand and examined it.
“No,” he reported. “That’s a broken bit of an old air-gun spring. Here’s the other bit lying on the table.”
“A fish-hook and two ordinary pins,” Ledbury continued, handing up his prizes for examination. Then his voice shot up a couple of tones. “Ah! here’s something! A cartridge-case!”
“Let’s have a look at it,” Sir Clinton requested after the sergeant had inspected his catch in the light from the window. “H’m! A .38 by the look of it.”
He threw a glance at the body on the hearth-rug.
“An ordinary .38 wouldn’t have made a mess of him like that. They must have filed the tip off the bullet and turned it into a dum-dum, to judge by the results. That seems suggestive, sergeant.”
Ledbury welcomed the return of Sir Clinton’s earlier tone.
“What do you make of it, sir?”
Sir Clinton shrugged his shoulders faintly.
“One might make a guess. If it had been an ordinary bullet, Francia might have lived long enough to say something. The makeshift dum-dum didn’t give him much opportunity to split on anyone, if he’d a mind to.”
This was evidently a fresh light on the situation to Ledbury. He made no reply, however; but went down again on his knees and resumed his search.
“Here’s the stub of a cigarette, sir.”
“What’s the make?” Sir Clinton asked, with a certain eagerness in his voice.
“Abdullah’s the word on it, sir. Turkish blend.”
Sir Clinton’s eagerness died out.
“Too common in this house to be much help,” he said, with a tinge of disappointment in his tone. “There’s another one of the same brand lying on the hearth, and another in that ash-tray. You’ll not get much help there.”
Ledbury resumed his grovelling on the floor, extending his search wider and wider; but, except for two more pieces from a Meccano outfit, he discovered nothing further. The pistol was nowhere in the room.
“Well, you were right enough, sir,” the sergeant admitted, rubbing his dusty hands together as he got to his feet at last. “There’s no pistol here. And there was none on his person, either; for I gave one of my men the tip to search him in the hall, and he’d have brought me the gun if he’d found it. It’s a rum start, that is!”
His eyes wandered round the room until they came to the open window, and at the sight of it the expression on his face altered suddenly.
“Ah!” he ejaculated. “That would be it!”
Without a word to Sir Clinton, he went across to the French window, drew back the heavy curtain which screened it, and let himself out on to the verandah. Sir Clinton, with a faint tinge of amusement in his expression, watched the sergeant’s figure disappear over the balustrade.
“So he’s seen it at last,” he reflected. “Well, he took the deuce of a time over it!”
Without troubling to follow Ledbury, he left the room and made his way to the garage. Taking out his car, he drove straight into Raynham Parva.
Chapter Eighteen
THE MAN WITH THE TELESCOPE
It was not long before Sir Clinton returned to Fern Lodge; and, as he pulled up his car at the front door, he found Sergeant Ledbury waiting for him with a look on his face which betrayed mingled feelings of triumph and a malicious joy at having scored a decisive point. In his hand he held a dinner-plate, on which rested an automatic pistol; and quite evidently he was far too cock-a-hoop to consider how incongruous a spectacle he presented.
“I’d just like to hear what you think about that, sir,” he said, in the tone of an unsporting player putting down a trump with open satisfaction.
“Anything to oblige you, sergeant,” Sir Clinton answered as he got out of the driving-seat. “I think it’s a pistol. And I think it was thrown out of the smoke-room window into the bushes.”
“Just so!” said Ledbury, slightly taken aback by this. “And perhaps you’ve been thinking something more about it?”
“Perhaps I have,” Sir Clinton admitted, refusing to be drawn.
Ledbury looked at him doubtfully for a moment; but apparently he was unable to postpone his triumph.
“It’s got somebody’s finger-marks on it,” he announced in a tone which threatened a revelation.
“So I gathered, when I saw the dinner-plate,” Sir Clinton confessed blandly. “Not mine, by any chance, are they?”
Ledbury was evidently annoyed by this; and he hastened to stab at what he thought would be a weak spot in Sir Clinton.
“No, they’re not yours. As soon as I saw them, I telephoned down and got one of my men to take young Brandon’s finger-prints . . .”
“Better go cautiously, sergeant.” Sir Clinton interrupted, spoiling Ledbury’s effect completely. “You seem to be treating your prisoner rather too much like a convict. He’s not that yet, remember. There’s still a trial to come—if it ever comes.”
“Well, anyways, I had his prints sent up here with a man on a bicycle, so as to lose no time; and when I compared them with the prints on this pistol here . . .”
“They were identical, of course. When a man picks up a pistol and throws it out of an open window, it’s only to be expected that he’d leave his finger-prints on it.”
“And when a man fires a pistol, he leaves his finger-marks on it too, doesn’t he?” Ledbury suggested with more than a touch of tartness in his tone. “Brandon fired that shot. That’s my belief, and you won’t shake it.”
Sir Clinton’s eyebrows lifted slightly.
“A bit unsafe, isn’t it, when you count chickens in the shell? There’s one you needn’t reckon on, sergeant: a conviction of Rex Brandon for this murder. You’ve made the biggest blunder of your life over this business. And now come along with me, and I’ll prove it to you.”
Ledbury’s confidence was badly shaken by the certitude of Sir Clinton’s tone. Once again, uneasy feelings began to surge up in his mind; and it was with an apprehensive face that he obeyed instructions. As he passed into the smoke-room, Sir Clinton swung round on him abruptly.
“Now, let’s have no more bungling. First of all, when you left me here not long ago and scuttled off in search of that pistol, you pulled back the curtain which was hanging over the French window, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Ledbury admitted sullenly. “What’s the harm in that?”
“And you unlatched the window and went out through it?”
�
��Didn’t you see me do it?” Ledbury asked querulously. “What’s the good of asking me about it?”
“Because I want you to remember it and not go getting your souvenirs tangled up. Understand?”
Ledbury quite obviously could not see what this was meant to lead up to in the next stage; but he contented himself with nodding his acquiescence. Sir Clinton led him over to the window overlooking the verandah.
“You didn’t pull back this curtain?” he asked, pointing to the one which had been drawn back.
“No. Better to leave things as they were. I was thinking of getting the place photographed as it was when the murder happened.”
“Well, pull it forward now.”
Evidently resenting the order, Ledbury apparently thought it best to fall in with Sir Clinton’s wishes. He put out his hand and drew the curtain out to meet its companion at the middle of the window.
“See anything now?” Sir Clinton demanded.
Ledbury’s astonished eyes fell upon a small hole torn in the material of the curtain—the obvious mark of a bullet’s passage through the stuff.
“Well, I’m damned!” he ejaculated in a tone of dismay, as he appreciated the bearing of this discovery on his case against Rex. “You think that means the shot was fired from outside the room, sir?”
Sir Clinton had evidently grown tired of sarcasm.
“You’ve asked what I think about things before, sergeant. Use your own wits for a change. Anything peculiar about the position of the hole, for instance?”
Ledbury examined the tear in the cloth attentively for a few seconds, then he turned round. By this time, all trace of bumptiousness had vanished from his manner.
“Meaning that it’s low down, sir, rather below the level of the casement.”
“Yes. Can you see how that could happen?”
Ledbury pondered for some moments.
“You mean that a man was outside with the pistol, and when he pushed it against the curtain the cloth ran up on the muzzle, and the farther he pushed it into the room, the lower down on the curtain the hole would be?”
Nemesis at Raynham Parva (A Clinton Driffield Mystery) Page 23
