by E.
The manager eyed the cast intently. “Yes, it should be remembered,” he agreed, “but I do not think it was done by us. However, if you will wait a few minutes I will take it over to the repair shop. They will know if we did the repair.”
The quest proved abortive. “Quite definitely we did not do it,” the manager reported. Thanking him for his trouble, Manson proceeded to the second of the addresses on his list, repeating his request to the shopkeeper. Again he was unsuccessful, and he had reached the sixth repairer without any satisfactory result. This man, however, eyed the cast with interest. “Somehow, sir, I don’t think it would be a fishing brogue,” he said. “We should not put hobnails in the heel, or for that matter in anywhere else, of a fishing brogue since, in wading, if the wearer trod unexpectedly forward on a piece of granite sloping away, the nails would send his feet sliding from underneath him, and throw him off his balance and into the water. Would the wearer be a Tremarden man?” he asked.
“That is what I want to know.” Manson smiled at the inquiry. “All I can say is that the boot was being worn in Tremarden three days ago.”
“Well, I assure you, the owner did not have it patched or nailed here, sir.”
And with that the scientist had to be content. “You will have to get a constable or somebody to carry it round the locality, into the villages and see if the patching was done there,” he told Superintendent Burns later.
When he came to the spectacles, however, Manson had rapid and satisfactory results. There were only two firms in the town who tested eyesight and corrected it with glasses. And it was at the first of them that he found the owner of the damaged spectacles. Once again explaining his official position, he passed the prescription over to the manager of the establishment, at the same time showing him the reconstructed lenses.
“That’s a clever piece of reconstruction, if I may say so, sir,” was the comment. He consulted a drawer of filed cards and turned back to the scientist. “Yes, we tested the eyes and made a pair of glasses to that prescription,” he said. “As a matter of fact, we are just completing a new pair to the prescription for the same customer.”
Manson felt the glow of the experimentist at the successful end to his search. “And the customer is . . . whom?” he asked.
The manager hesitated. “I am not sure that I am at liberty to give the name of a customer,” he said. “My principals would not, I think, view such a practice as desirable.”
Manson eyed him sharply. “I am not making idle inquiries,” was his reply. “I am asking for the name of the person for whom these glasses were made, and I am doing so in the interests of justice. There is no suggestion, at the moment, that we have anything against this person, but the presence of the fragments of glass which I have shown you in their reconstructed form, is a stumbling block to investigations we are pursuing. When we get that obstacle out of the way we shall be able to proceed. The glass may, and most likely was, lying where it was found by pure accident. We want to prove whether that is so, or not. The only way it can be proved is by asking the person to whom the glasses originally belonged. I could, of course, call on you in the name of the law for the name, but I don’t want to expose you to that.”
The manager conceded the point with, however, no great show of enthusiasm. “The spectacles,” he said, “were made to the order of a Mr. William Trepol, of this town.”
“You mean the joiner and undertaker?”
“I mean Mr. Trepol, the undertaker,” the manager agreed.
“I suppose Mr. Trepol is having new lenses fitted into the old frames?”
“That is so.”
“And the frames are having to be straightened slightly?”
“Yes.”
It was not until he carried this piece of news to Inspector Burns that Doctor Manson heard of the denials of Trepol and Ann Trepol that they had been on the riverside on the day of the colonel’s death. The notes of the interviews made by Sergeant Barrett were read over to him; and the superintendent waited anxiously for his views.
“I am afraid that he, at any rate, is lying, Burns,” was the scientist’s verdict. “I don’t know about Ann; she might not have been there. But Trepol was certainly at the spot.”
“Might not the glasses have been there for several days, Doctor? I mean to say, they could have been dropped previously, could they not?”
Manson shook his head. “Not a chance, Burns. Merry saw the glint of the first of the pieces of glass we retrieved on top of the trodden grass. They were, in fact, at the spot where the bruising of the undergrowth started. If the glass had been broken or dropped there previously, the struggle, which the signs show took place, would have trodden the fragments of lenses into the earth, not to mention the fact that they would have been ground into tiny particles.”
“That seems definitely to settle it then, Doctor. I suppose we had better get Trepol back again.”
The undertaker, glumly gruff, and this time also a little short-tempered, repeated his denials. “I’ve told you already, Superintendent, I wasn’t down on the river that day. I had no call to go down.”
“Where would you have been about one o’clock, dinner time, Willie?” the superintendent asked.
“In my shop, planing some boards.”
Doctor Manson took up the questioning. “Mr. Trepol, you suffer with your eyes, do you not?” he asked. “I mean that, while you can see very well at a distance, you cannot see so well close to?”
“I wear my spectacles, sir?” was the reply.
Manson took a wallet from a pocket and, extracting a card passed it over to the man. “Read me what it says on there, Mr. Trepol,” he asked.
The undertaker peered at the card, his eyes only a few inches away. “Try your glasses,” Manson suggested.
“I haven’t brought them with me.”
“In point of fact, Mr. Trepol, you have broken them, have you not? And you are having a new pair made up in this town?”
“What if I am? It isn’t against the law to break a pair of spectacles, is it?”
“How did you break your spectacles, and where?” Manson’s voice became sharper and more imperative in tone.
“Dropped ’em in the workshop.”
The scientist produced a box from his pocket. Opening it, he lifted out, one at a time, the lenses he had reconstructed from the broken pieces. He placed them on the table side by side. “Here are your glasses, Trepol,” he said. “My Sergeant and I picked up the pieces from under those trees by the pylons down on the river bank, near the path along which your daughter and you were seen at one o’clock on the day that Colonel Donoughmore died. I say that they dropped from the waistcoat pocket, where you kept them for convenience, during a struggle which you had with Colonel Donoughmore in that copse. What have you to say to that?”
He saw the man’s face pale, and the look of fear which came into his eyes. The man himself sat silent . . . thinking.
“WERE you down on the river bank that day, Trepol?” The scientist asked the question insistently. But it was two long and painful minutes before the man spoke. Then:
“Ay, I suppose it will have to come out now,” he said. The hand he raised to wipe away beads of perspiration from his forehead trembled. “Well, I was there, and I saw the colonel. Damn him,” he added in an outburst of fury. “I was hoping to keep it quiet for my girl’s sake. . . .”
“She was there too, was she?” from the superintendent.
“She was. I told her I’d beat the hide off’n her if she said a word about her or me being there.”
“How did you come to be there, the two of you?”
“You’ll have heard, Super, that my girl had been seen with the colonel a night or two. I gave her a hiding when I found out, and I promised her another for every time I heard of her being with him. He wasn’t up to any good with Ann, him being a rich man and one of the gentry, as it were. Then, one day, when I was a’ driving a coffin along the top road I saw her and the colonel across the fields, talkin
g by the gorge. So I give her another hiding when I got her home.
“When I goes for dinner at twelve o’clock on day the colonel died, there was nothing ready, and Jim Reddy said he had seen Ann on her bicycle going down t’wards Tremorres’s farm. I guessed as how she was going to the colonel, cause I’d seen him setting out that way to fish at ten o’clock. So I goes down there, too. When I gets to the path over the fields I sees Ann’s bicycle in the hedge.”
“What time was that?” asked Manson.
“As near as I can say about half-past twelve. Soon as I got to the end of the path I see’s Ann’s frock through a break in the bramble bushes. I goes in the copse and there she was with him. I tells her to get off home and I’ll settle with the colonel. Ann says she’ll go when she pleases, so I fetches her a cut across the ear, and pushes her out of the copse. Then I tells the colonel what I has to say about his leading my girl wrong ways.”
“Did you hit him, Trepol?”
“Ay, I hit him all right. He called me a blasted something I didn’t know, and tried to push me out of his way. I says as how I wasn’t going till I’d had it out with him, and ef so be I caught him with my girl again, I’d call in the police agen him. He got ravin’ mad then, and came at me with his salmon priest. He might’a killed me, way he was aiming, so I hit him with my fist and knocked him down.”
“Hit him on the point of the jaw, didn’t you?” asked Manson.
Trepol looked surprised. “Ay, like I used to knock ’em out in the ring, as the Super here well knows. But how did you know I hit him on the point?”
Manson smiled. “Never mind that, Trepol,” he said. “What happened then?”
“Well, he gets up, and I says there’ll be a few more like it if he speaks to my girl again, and he went off without saying anything.”
The man ceased talking. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. Superintendent Burns moved his chair forward and looked him in the face. “You’re quite sure, Trepol, that he DID walk away?” he asked. “He didn’t by any chance, stay down, I suppose?”
“He didn’t. I said he got up.”
“And you didn’t push him into the river?”
Trepol dropped his head in his hands, but not before both men had seen the look of fear in his eyes again. They thought he was about to faint. He recovered in a few seconds, however, and looked up. “If so be you mean did I kill the man, Super, you’ll know that you haven’t any right to be saying that. You’ve known me years enough to be sure that I wouldn’t kill anybody.”
“What did you do when the colonel walked away?” asked Manson. His question was directed as much to side-tracking the superintendent as to bringing an answer.
“I just turned round and went home,” was the reply.
“How soon would that be after Miss Trepol left?”
“No more’n two or three minutes.”
“And you got back to Tremarden, what time?”
“It would be, near as I can say, just afore half-past one.”
“Could you prove that, if you had to?”
“Ay. I was talking to Mr. Westlake about a cupboard he wanted putting up in his kitchen and he said it were one-thirty and he’d come back after he had had his lunch.”
The scientist looked across at the superintendent. Burns shook his head, and rose. “All right, Trepol,” he said. “It’s a pity you didn’t tell the truth when you were first asked. You would have saved us a lot of trouble. You can go, now.”
Trepol walked slowly towards the door. He had opened it when Manson halted him. “Did you by any chance see anyone else while you were down there; either on the river bank or the path?” he asked. “No, sir. I saw nobody.”
“Did you pass anybody on the road at all?”
“No. Not a soul.”
“You are sure of that?”
“Ay,” and he went out, shutting the door behind him. Superintendent Burns stared at the door and then at the scientist. “That looks like the man we want, Doctor,” he said. “I’d never have thought of Trepol.”
Doctor Manson returned the look. “Neither would I,” he said, with an enigmatical smile.
CHAPTER XVII
SHUFFLING THE PIECES
The chief constable slipped a monocle into his right eye, and through it surveyed the group sitting in his room. On his right, Inspector Penryn, wore an air of despondency as he gazed at a collection of notes which he had compiled on sheets of official foolscap paper, fastened together with a pin. Next to him, Sergeant Merry toyed with a pocket magnifying glass with no expression at all—Merry, we mean—not the glass! Superintendent Burns’s gaze rested hopefully, not to say optimistically, on the figure of Doctor Manson. The scientist was lying back in an armchair, his eyes fixed on something nobody else could see in the darkest corner of the room, his restless finger-tips tapping one against the other. His was the only countenance to register complete repose.
It was the first full-dress debate on the colonel’s death since the investigations had got into full swing. “I’ve called the conference,” the Chief Constable said, “because Doctor Manson wants a complete picture of the inquiries as far as they have got. So far he has had only extracts from the various officers concerned.”
“And, also, I want to point out various things I have discovered so that we can see how they fit in, in relation to the other features of the case,” interposed Doctor Manson.
Sir William conveyed, with a wave of a hand, his agreement. “Would you, then, like to start the discussion, Doctor?” he suggested.
“I think we will start with the facts, first, Sir William.” Manson was blandly emphatic. “It is always better to have the facts as a basis. There is only one fact, one real fact, and that is the spot where Colonel Donoughmore met his death. You will remember that, at the last talk we had, I said that the colonel did not fall in the river where we were led to suppose he did. And I gave you my reasons why.”
Heads nodded in agreement.
“Superintendent Burns then asked me: ‘If the colonel didn’t fall in there, where DID he fall in?’ And I said that I did not know—then. Well, I know now.” He paused—and Merry chuckled. He liked these dramatic pauses of the Doctor before the thunderbolt was launched. The Chief Constable broke the silence.
“Well, Doctor, where did he fall in?”
Manson spoke slowly and with emphatic articulation.
“Colonel Donoughmore was killed a few yards away from the pylons crossing the river. He was knocked on the head, and he either fell, or was thrown, in the cattle drinking pool fed by the river at that spot. Nothing is more certain in fact than that. You will want proof? Well, listen.”
The scientist leaned forward and detailed the points by which he had arrived at his conclusions, enumerating them one by one on his fingers.
(They included the clues given in Chapter IX, which the reader, if he has not already elucidated them, is again invited to do so, in the knowledge of the subsequent investigations.)
“That, so far, is the only fact we possess,” Manson went on. “How the body came to be in the round pool we do not know, though I can surmise several methods. With them, at the moment, however, we are not concerned. What we want to discuss is the person who had a motive . . .”
“And the opportunity?” interrupted the Chief Constable.
“Let us stick to the motive, Sir William. Logical reasoning can take only one step at a time. Motive, after all, is the first step in murder. If the motive is strong enough, the opportunity can be made. Now, who of our obvious suspects had a motive?”
“All of them. Every man jack of ’em had a motive,” Superintendent Burns snorted. “Each one of the six.”
“The six being?” inquired Sir William.
“Emmett, Sir Edward, Mrs. Devereux, the major, Trepol, and the girl.”
The Chief Constable protested. “Five I’ll grant you, Burns. But I can’t see any motive in the case of Ann. The colonel was her friend. He had been exceedingly kind to her, and genero
us as well. She’s LOST something by his death. Where is her motive? What do you say to that, Doctor?”
“I agree with you so far as we have any evidence at present, Sir William—subject, of course, to anything we may find out in the future.”
“That cuts it down to five, then. Now, let us look at the five. Take the major. How strong is his motive. What do you say to that, Inspector?”
Inspector Penryn considered his verdict. “I can hardly imagine a stronger motive, sir,” he said. “The major had lost nearly everything he had, except his pension. His home—even—and his parents had had that home, and he had been born there. The shock of the loss of his home and fortune killed his wife, and now, homeless, he is living in a hotel. Also, he had told Baker that he would send the colonel the same way as his wife some time. Now, in view of that, Major Smithers, as I see it, had an extraordinarily strong motive.”
“Agreed.” The Chief Constable looked round the company and received confirming nods.
“There is just one point I would like to raise on that,” said Manson. “You remember the peculiarity of the marks made down the bank where we were asked to believe that the colonel fell? You do? Then you will recall that there was an indentation made by a projecting nail in the boot used. Have you, Burns, or you, Inspector, examined the fishing brogues of Major Smithers?”
“Afraid I didn’t, Doctor,” from Penryn.
“Nor I,” admitted the superintendent.
“Well, I did,” retorted Manson. “Not only was there no sign of a projecting nail or a missing nail, but Major Smithers wears crêpe-soled brogues—and always has done.”
“Well, that’s the major.” The Chief Constable ticked him off the list. “Now what about Sir Edward Maurice?”
“Not much in the way of motive there that I can see,” said the superintendent. “It’s true that he was another victim of the share swindle, but Sir Edward is a very wealthy man. He lost less than a tenth of his fortune. I see no motive there for murder.”