Nemesis at Raynham Parva (A Clinton Driffield Mystery)

by J. J. Connington

  “It’s all right, Elsie,” he reassured her, as he guided her gently to a chair. “You’ve nothing to be afraid of—nothing. I want you to tell the sergeant here the whole story.”

  He felt her wince in his clasp.

  “I can’t,” she said, “Oh, I can’t!”

  Sir Clinton had the key to that lock.

  “Rex is cleared,” he assured her.

  Elsie half-started from her chair at the words.

  “He can’t be,” she cried. “I saw him with the pistol in his hand. . . . Oh! What have I said!”

  “Nothing that’ll do any harm,” Sir Clinton reassured her. “All you’ve got to do is to tell us everything you know”—he corrected himself suddenly but naturally—“everything that’s happened since you left the house about four o’clock, so far as you know it. It’s all right; you know I wouldn’t lead you wrong. You must trust me then it’ll be all right. You’re quite safe.”

  Ledbury suddenly interrupted.

  “I’ve got to caution you . . .”

  Sir Clinton swung round, his face white with anger.

  “Damn you, man!” he said in a fierce undertone. “You’ve nearly ruined everything. Be quiet!”

  He turned back to Elsie, and gradually he was able to soothe her. She made a gallant effort to pull herself together, and under the influence of his voice she seemed to gather courage. At last he succeeded in bringing her to the state of mind that he wanted.

  “You came out of the front door . . .” he suggested, to give her a starting-point in her story.

  “I came out of the front door,” she repeated, keeping her eyes on her uncle’s as she spoke. “Then I went along towards the verandah. I wasn’t feeling quite well . . .”

  “Never mind about that,” Sir Clinton interjected.

  Something in her eyes suggested that here they might be on thin ice, though he could not understand what she actually meant.

  “Tell us what you saw, and what you did—nothing more.”

  Elsie nodded faintly to show she understood. Quite obviously she was nearly at the end of her nervous strength.

  “I sat down on the garden seat just below the steps leading up to the verandah. I wasn’t feeling . . . I wanted to be alone, I don’t know how long I sat there. I don’t, really.”

  “Never mind about that,” Sir Clinton advised her. “What was the next thing you did?”

  “The next thing that happened was I heard the sound of a shot. It seemed to come from the smoke-room. There was a horrible cry, too. I thought someone had had an accident.”

  In the pause that followed, Sir Clinton heard Ledbury turn over a page of his notebook in which he was evidently writing furiously in an attempt to keep pace with the narrative. Sir Clinton dared not take his eyes away from Elsie’s for fear of directing her attention to the uniformed figure.

  “And then?” he asked gently.

  “When I heard the shot, I ran up the verandah steps and along the verandah to the nearest window of the smoke-room. The curtains were drawn.”

  “Yes?” Sir Clinton encouraged her, for he knew the next sentences would be the worst.

  “Then suddenly one curtain was torn back—and there was Rex face to face with me at the window. I saw a black pistol in his hand. He tried to keep me from seeing what was on the floor; but I could see it was Vincent’s body. Then Rex said: ‘Go away! At once!’ or something like that.”

  She stopped abruptly and seemed to collapse in the chair. It was some time before Sir Clinton, even with all his efforts, could bring her back again to a state in which she could give a coherent narrative.

  “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she continued at last. “I knew Rex had shot Vincent. I couldn’t tell why. Everything seemed to be happening in a nightmare . . .”

  “Don’t bother about that,” Sir Clinton urged soothingly. “Keep to what you did.”

  “I ran away along the verandah, down the steps, and down one of the paths—the one that leads to the summer-house. I just got to the summer-house. Then I expect I fainted. I can’t remember anything after that for a long time. When I came to again, I was in the summer-house. I tried to walk, but I was too sick and faint to do it. The police found me there.”

  She halted for a moment.

  “Are you sure . . . are you really sure no harm’ll come to Rex?”

  Sir Clinton seized the opportunity to divert her mind from the main tragedy.

  “Rex thought you’d fired the shot yourself. And when we questioned him, he stood in and allowed the blame to be thrown on his shoulders instead. No one could have done more for a . . . friend.”

  As Sir Clinton had hoped, this swung Elsie’s thoughts into a fresh channel. Manifestly it threw the whole affair into a new light, and her mind concentrated on a re-interpretation of the facts.

  “Rex did that for me?” she asked half-wonderingly.

  “Rex did that,” Sir Clinton echoed. “Now that’s all we want with you just now, Elsie. Go upstairs and lie down. You’re absolutely worn out. I’ll come up to you very soon and tell you all about it if you wish.”

  He gave her his hand and helped her to her feet. Then, as he was about to lead her to the door, a thought struck him.

  “Get me that picture from the wall there,” he ordered Ledbury, pointing to a sketch framed in passe-partout. “Clean the glass carefully and keep your fingers off it.”

  Ledbury obeyed; and Sir Clinton took the glass from him.

  “Now, Elsie, I want you to grip this—first with your right hand, and then with your left—as if you were catching the end of a door and swinging it open.”

  He held the little frame vertically in the air, ready for her to catch. Elsie hesitated for a moment, as though in sudden mistrust. Then, after a glance at her uncle’s face, she did as he wished. Her exhaustion touched her attitude with a trace of the unquestioning obedience of a little child, and Sir Clinton found something uncomfortable in the reminiscence.

  “Now, that’s all, Elsie. I’ll see you upstairs,” he said, putting the passe-partout carefully on a table. “You’re not fit to go up yourself.”

  Ledbury seemed for a moment inclined to object to this, but after a look at Sir Clinton’s face he decided to let things take their course. Even yet, he had not been able to see a plain solution of all this tangle; and he could not repress the feeling that some gigantic game of bluff was being played upon him. Here was a man murdered, and two people on the very spot—within a couple of yards of the body—and Sir Clinton was trying to persuade him that neither had a hand in the crime. Absurd on the face of it! And yet . . .

  He was still pondering over the problem when Sir Clinton returned, bringing Rex Brandon with him.

  “Now, Rex, the plain truth and the whole truth, please. I’ve cleared you completely; and we need your evidence to clear Elsie. Tell us exactly what happened from the time you went into the smoke-room up to the moment when Staffin looked through the doorway.”

  Rex listened with a heavy cloud of suspicion on his face.

  “I think I’ll say nothing,” he said bluntly. “You’ve no power to force me to make a statement?”

  “None at all,” Sir Clinton agreed. “But Elsie has told her story—after she learned that you were cleared—and we need your confirmation of it in the details. If we don’t get that, it’ll be more difficult to prove that she had no hand in the thing. The only way you can do her harm is by refusing to tell us the whole truth—leaving out nothing whatever.”

  Rex scanned Sir Clinton’s face for a moment.

  “Well, I can trust you, I suppose,” he said at last. “Only, I hope you’re not making a ghastly mistake over it. I’ll tell you what you want, now you’ve put it that way. Where do I begin?”

  “You went into the smoke-room . . .” Sir Clinton prompted.

  “Yes, I went into the smoke-room and shut the door. Francia was reading some papers in the chair by the window. I didn’t interrupt him. I sat down at the telephone and called
up the Black Bull. There was a message I wanted to leave for a man Yarrow, so I spoke to the girl at the desk in the hotel!”

  Sir Clinton nodded.

  “That’s all been checked already,” he told Rex. “Now, go on with what happened next.”

  “I was in the middle of talking to her,” Rex continued, “when suddenly there was a bang—a pistol-shot—and a cry. I swung round in my chair just in time to see Francia’s body fall to the floor. He writhed a bit . . .”

  “What did you do?” Sir Clinton demanded, bringing him back to the main line.

  “I must have dropped the telephone when I started up out of my chair. The shot had come through the window. By the way, I forgot that. Just as Francia fell out of his chair, I heard the pistol drop on the floor. I got up and went over. Francia was done for—anyone could see that at a glance. My eye caught the pistol lying behind his chair, and I stooped and picked it up. I wasn’t very quick in thinking just then, a bit dazed by the suddenness of it all, I expect. It was a second or two before it dawned on me that the murderer must have been behind the curtain—the curtains over the window, I mean. So I jerked one of them aside and looked out, hoping to see the beggar running away.”

  He halted abruptly.

  “Is that enough?”

  Sir Clinton shook his head.

  “The next is the important bit.”

  Rex paused for some moments, evidently in grave doubt.

  “Elsie told you what happened next?” he demanded.

  “We know all about it,” said Sir Clinton impatiently. “The only thing that counts is that your story and hers should check each other. Don’t fake a single detail. You understand?”

  “Oh, very well,” Rex answered. “I’m in the dark about it all; but I’ll take your word for it. When I pulled back the curtain, Elsie was standing behind it, out on the verandah.”

  “We know that,” Sir Clinton repeated.

  “Well, what was I to think?” Rex continued. “On the face of it, she’d shot him. The noise of the pistol would bring a crowd in no time. I hadn’t much time to grasp the affair and I blurted out: ‘Clear out!’ or something of that sort to her, to get her off the spot before anyone came. She seemed frozen or numbed or something. Couldn’t act herself, it seemed. But she took what I said, and she went off along the verandah towards the front of the house.”

  “That fits perfectly,” Sir Clinton assured him. “It’s all right. Now what next?”

  Sir Clinton’s manner seemed to satisfy Rex that he was doing no harm.

  “Well, there I was left standing with the pistol in my hand. I had enough wits left to see what things would look like if anyone came into the room. So I hove the pistol clean out of the window amongst the bushes, meaning to collect it later on and bury it, or something.”

  Rex saw Ledbury start slightly at this last phrase; but a glance at Sir Clinton’s face revealed that the ex-Chief Constable attached no importance to the point, and Rex continued:

  “I’d hardly got it out of my hands than the maid poked her head in at the door. There was the body on the floor—no sight for a girl—so I said: ‘Get out!’ and off she went, screaming ‘Murder!’ for all she was worth. That fairly started me thinking. There I was, the only person in sight, alone with the body. If I told the truth, I’d be giving Elsie away. I wasn’t going to do that. If I faked up a yarn, it would go to pieces under the very first half-dozen questions they put to me. I hadn’t time to make up a decent set of lies—I was too flurried to think clearly at all. The only thing to do was to keep my mouth shut and refuse to say anything. That would give me time enough to think out a yarn that would hold water, when I had to talk. Whatever happened, I wasn’t going to give Elsie away. I drew the line at that. You did your best to draw me—in different ways. But quite obviously you didn’t know anything about Elsie having been there, so I fended you off.”

  He seemed afraid that he had been too frank, but a glance at Sir Clinton’s expression of relief evidently reassured him, though he could not understand what the ex-Chief Constable was driving at.

  Sir Clinton turned to Ledbury, whose facial control had failed completely under the revelations of the last few minutes. The sergeant was manifestly amazed by Sir Clinton’s action in forcing out this apparently damning series of facts.

  “If Mr. Yarrow’s still busy with his writing, I think we’ll have him in again, sergeant, just to test his memory on a point or two.”

  Ledbury, his face a mask of bewilderment, went and fetched the naturalist.

  “Now, Mr. Yarrow,” Sir Clinton began suavely, “we should like to be sure of one or two minor points in the evidence you gave us. You didn’t notice the report of a pistol—or a cry?”

  Yarrow shook his head.

  “No,” he admitted, as though he feared he was making a mistake, “I can’t say that I heard anything—at least, at the time I didn’t think of a pistol-shot, so it doesn’t look as if I heard the report, does it?”

  “Another point,” Sir Clinton pursued hurriedly, in order to cut short the naturalist’s habitual verbosity. “We’d like to know how much detail your telescope showed. Could you see the rings on the girl’s hand, for instance?”

  “No, I couldn’t have done that,” Yarrow protested. “The image was far too small to see things of that sort.”

  “H’m!” Sir Clinton commented doubtfully. “I want to get this clear. Could you see her hands? Could you have seen if she’d had gloves on, or anything like that? Or if her hand was open or shut?”

  “Oh, I could have seen that sort of thing clearly enough,” Yarrow hastened to assure him. “If she’d been wearing gloves, I’d have noticed it. And I could see when she gripped the casement to keep herself from falling. That was quite obvious.”

  Sir Clinton nodded.

  “Would you mind adding these points to your written statement, Mr. Yarrow?” he asked, as he made a gesture to show that he had no more questions to put.

  The naturalist agreed effusively, and Ledbury ushered him out of the room. Rex’s face showed that all this had been quite beyond him; he had not heard Elsie’s statement and could not put two and two together. All he had gathered was that some of Sir Clinton’s questions had been of no importance and had been put in merely to avoid throwing the main point into too sharp relief in Yarrow’s mind. But which of them was the crucial one, he had not the means to guess.

  Ledbury’s face, when he returned to the room, showed that he also had been at work on the problem; and Rex thought he saw signs that the sergeant was now thoroughly uneasy. He looked as though he were on pins and needles; and his first words as he closed the door made the thing clear.

  “You seem to have got something there, sir,” he admitted to Sir Clinton. “Now would you mind telling me what it is? I can make a guess at it already.”

  “Then bring along that passe-partout thing with you, and we’ll have a look at the smoke-room window,” Sir Clinton proposed, leading the way.

  When they reached the smoke-room, Sir Clinton took them out through the French window on to the verandah; and for a short time he examined the glass of the open window at which Elsie had stood, comparing some marks on it with the finger-prints on the passe-partout. Satisfied at last, he made way for Ledbury.

  “Here are the prints of Mrs. Francia’s fingers, made when she caught at the leaves of the window to steady herself. See them? Now compare them with the prints she made on the glass of the passe-partout with her hands in the same positions. Identical, so far as one can see, aren’t they? If she left prints on the panes, she’d have left prints on the pistol if she’d ever had it in her hand, wouldn’t she? But there were no prints of her fingers on the pistol—Mr. Brandon’s were the only ones on it, as you established yourself. And Mrs. Francia didn’t strip off a pair of gloves after firing the shot; because Yarrow’s evidence proves she had no gloves and because she would hardly be likely to strip off gloves specially in order to make a finger-print on the window, would she? It fol
lows, sergeant, that she didn’t fire the pistol. And I’ve proved that Mr. Brandon didn’t fire it. So where are you?”

  Ledbury’s hand stole up to scratch his ear; but it was clear enough that this time the action was involuntary and not merely a piece of camouflage. He was apparently completely puzzled.

  “What do you make of it yourself, sir?” he demanded. “It fair beats me. There’s no denying that. I chuck my hand in.”

  Sir Clinton did not trouble to triumph over the sergeant, although the occasion might have justified it.

  “Ever hear of the French method—reconstituting the crime, they call it? Suppose we try something of the sort, and we’ll have a real test of whether this notion of mine’s practicable or not. Mr. Brandon will represent himself; you can play the part of Mrs. Francia; and, since the murderer’s rôle demands a bit of accurate timing, I’ll take it myself to save explanation. You, sergeant, will go and sit on the garden seat near the foot of the steps leading to the verandah. I’ll go down among the bushes. Mr. Brandon will go and sit at the telephone table. I’ll draw the curtain over this window, so that everything will be exactly as it was.”

  As Rex was moving off to take up his position, Sir Clinton stopped him.

  “Everything has to be just as it was when the shot was fired. Shut the French window after you, and draw that curtain across it. Now when I, representing the murderer, come up to the window, I’ll shove my cigarette-case against the curtain and say: “Crack!” That represents the firing of the shot. You’ll then act precisely as you did when the real shot was fired, making the proper allowance of time for each move. You, sergeant, will pause for a moment or two, as though you were really startled. Then you’ll run up here, following Mrs. Francia’s description as closely as you can till you’re off the verandah again. Now, away to your posts.”