by E.
The sun sank lower, until only one thin shaft could peer through a window of a room in the grey, square building across the moors at Bodmin. Three men sat enclosed within its whitewashed walls. Two were in uniform—the uniform of the Law. The third wore a tweed suit that spoke of the open fields, and rising birds from the stubble, or the smell of hay in the newly built ricks, or the plops of trout as they come up for the fly. For three weeks two men had never left the side of the other. Night and day they sat near him; hour in and hour out; and now their task was nearly done. To-night, they watched for the last time. To-morrow, at eight o’clock, the sands of time would run out for the man they guarded. He, himself, stood watching that last thin shaft of sunlight grow smaller and smaller, and then, in a flicker, withdraw from the window of his cell, and vanish from his sight—for ever.
* * * * *
In the smoking-room of the Tremarden Arms eight men sat in a semi-circle round the fireplace. They had eaten an early dinner, and as the other hotel guests wandered into the dining-room at the sound of the gong, the eight had filed out and made for the room prepared for them. Within the inside curve of the semi-circle, Franky had loaded a coffee-table with bottles of liqueur, a box of cigars and another of cigarettes. A waiter added to its burden a coffee-pot and cups, and as he made his exit, Franky crossed to the door and turned the key in the lock.
That makes certain that we shall be able to spend the evening by ourselves, he promised and, turning waiter, he poured out the coffee, placing by the side of each cup a glass of Benedictine. “Very special this is, Doctor,” he said. “It’s some of the real stuff and there isn’t another hotel in Cornwall that has any, I can tell you that.”
“In honour of the occasion, eh, Franky?” Sir Edward Maurice suggested.
“That be it, Sir Edward,” was the reply in the drawling tones of the Cornishman.
Licking tongues of fire from the log in the great open fireplace, threw up shafts of yellow, to light up the ancient glory of the room. From floor to ceiling it was, and still is, panelled in blackened, carved oak. In the ceiling the huge rough hewn beams, themselves dark with the smoke of ages, stared down as they had stared at gatherings of men for 900 years. The great table was nearly as old, as was the chest which stood beneath the window. Strange and diverse were the men who had sat round that table in its many days. Cavaliers had dined there; the Roundheads had followed them. Once, the Norman had put his legs beneath it and ate and drank, while his Captains stood, silent, alongside its length. That was when William had come to inspect the Castle that his chief captain had built high above the Inn—the castle that to-day stands in ruins above the same room.
The eight men sampled, with the appreciation of connoisseurs, the liqueur. Lighting cigars, they lay back in their chairs. Sir William Polglaze demonstrated his satisfaction by allowing his monocle to dangle at the end of its cord on to his waistcoat. Sir Edward Maurice sniffed the aroma of cigar smoke and Benedictine with the air of having been seduced. Major Smithers turned his cigar round and round in his fingers before he decided that it was perfectly seasoned and blended. Franky, Superintendent Burns and Inspector Penryn eyed each other, and Penryn whispered: “These blokes at the top do themselves well, don’t they, Super?” to which Burns made answer in the affirmative. Sergeant Merry, used to such meetings with Manson, took what the Gods sent without giving undue thanks. Doctor Manson himself, eyed his fellows in contemplative satisfaction.
It was the Chief Constable who spoke at last the words for which the company were waiting.
“Did you see him, Doctor?” he asked.
“I saw him—in the condemned cell this afternoon.” Manson twisted his cigar. A sternness seldom seen in that scholarly face accompanied the words. He flicked off a length of ash before he continued.
“You know, Sir William,” he said, “it was the first time that I have come away from such an interview without a feeling of, shall I say regretful sympathy for the unfortunate fellow inside, without the nasty thought that there, but for the grace of God, go I—I failed completely to register or experience the least compunction in having been instrumental in putting this man there. He was the worst man I have ever hanged.
“Here was a man who murdered, not because he had been done a great wrong, or for revenge for some fancied wrong. Nor did he murder in a fit of anger, or on the spur of the moment. He murdered deliberately, with careful planning—and devilish careful planning, it was too—and for what? Because he wanted money for himself which Colonel Donoughmore was about to receive in blackmail. Honour among thieves?” The scientist laughed. “It’s a fallacy. I have never yet met it. The thief, and the criminal of any kind, would sell anybody, even his own mother, to safeguard himself. The criminal has only one rule, and it is the rule of most people, from whatever society they come—the rule of self-preservation. You see it in this case as regards the thieves—one blackmailer blackmailing another!
“Nor was Braddock’s crime a sudden lapse. He was bad all through. Here he was, first a wife deserter, clearing off and leaving a woman to fight her way alone in the world. Then he becomes a blackmailer of a woman, until he graduates to murder. Who could feel sorry for a man like that?”
“Did he tell you all the missing bits, Doctor?” The inquiry came from Superintendent Burns.
Manson nodded. “At least, he asked me what I conjectured to have happened, and I told him. He listened carefully and at the end said: ‘You might have been there, laddie. If I had known I’d have rid myself of you, too.’”
“What did he do, Doctor?” Major Smithers asked the question hopefully. “The fact that he pleaded guilty at the trial robbed us of the story. I hoped to have heard from your evidence how you worked the thing out. Would it be too much to ask if it can be told, or is there any official secret about it?”
“No, Major,” Manson answered. “I think you can all hear it. It may be a warning to you. Also I think you are justified in hearing it in the circumstances—all of you. Do you not think so, Sir William?”
The Chief Constable smiled broadly. “I think so, Doctor—shall we say as a little apology and recompense.”
“Recompense?” came from Sir Edward Maurice.
A chuckle escaped Doctor Manson. “That is the word, Sir Edward,” he said. “Because you and the major, and Emmett here, were all under suspicion at one time, and we combed you all pretty thoroughly.”
“Me?” Sir Edward asked, murdering the English grammar!
“Certainly you,” Manson retorted. “It looked a toss up once between you and Emmett. Look at the position in which we were. Emmett, after threatening to pitch the colonel into the river, said the scoundrel walked back into his own beat. Within a few minutes you appear on that very beat. You told us that you did not see either Emmett or the colonel. You walked all along the colonel’s beat and even stopped to search for a cigarette case. Yet you saw nothing of them, so you said. Looked as though someone was not speaking the truth, did it not?”
“By gad, sir—yes,” the startled Baronet agreed.
“I think you would have been in a nasty spot, Sir Edward, if Doctor Manson hadn’t got you clear,” said Superintendent Burns.
“How did he do that?”
“By proving to us that the colonel did not go into the river at the spot we thought,” was the reply.
“Very nice of him,” commented Major Smithers, humorously.
“Yes?” The query came from Penryn. “Well, it made things look pretty black for you, then, Major.”
“For me? How was that?”
“You were then on the next beat to where the colonel was really killed, you know, and you said you did not see him. You were in a tighter place than Sir Edward, because whereas Sir Edward had only the slightest of motives, you had a very powerful one. We talked it over very seriously.” The inspector paused before, very diffidently, he continued: “You see, Major, we knew all about the share-pushing frauds and the words which you had used about the colonel. They had been ove
rheard. ‘One day I’ll send him the same way.’”
“I . . . I . . . see,” Major Smithers answered, and his voice shook a little. “You found that out, did you. You’re very thorough, Doctor. How did you get me out of that spot?”
“I didn’t, Major. The colonel’s fishing-rod did that. It also saved Mrs. Devereux from being arrested on suspicion of being the actual murderess. There was a time when I was almost convinced that she, alone, was concerned. Then Merry went down to the river, and his story when he returned, made me quite sure that there was someone else in the affair with her. The colonel’s rod again.”
“The colonel’s rod?” echoed Penryn. “This is the first I’ve heard of this. What the deuce has the colonel’s rod to do with it?”
The scientist lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise in a spiral to the ceiling before he answered. “When we examined the spot at which the colonel was supposed to have fallen in,” he said, “you will remember that the rod was lying in the grass on the bank. That was one of the first things to excite my suspicion, because no fisherman would lay his rod down like that; a fact upon which I remarked to the Chief Constable here, at a later stage, and to Burns.
“When we had broken Mrs. Devereux’s alibi, and there was a strong suspicion in my mind that she had, in fact, committed the murder, I sent Merry down to the water where she was fishing, with instructions to ask her any sort of questions, so long as he got her up from the water and away from fishing. I asked him to watch carefully, every thing she did, and to report all her actions to me. I did not tell him what to watch. When he returned he described how Mrs. Devereux had come up from the water at his request and had carefully rested her rod against a bush and that her second rod, a wet-fly one, was also standing upright by an adjacent bush. Then I knew that she was a fisherman, and could not have so far departed from the training of a fisherman as to lay a rod down in the grass. That meant, in conjunction with other evidence I had, that someone else—and to my mind a non-fishing someone else—was in the business. So that cut out both Sir Edward and the major, and also Emmett, all of whom would instinctively have propped their rods clear of the ground.
“Curiously enough, however,” the Doctor went on, “it didn’t let out Franky, despite the fact that he is a better fisherman than any of us. Franky did all he could to prove that he was the fellow we were after.”
Baker looked up, startled; and Manson grinned humorously at his expression. “Oh, yes you did, Franky,” he insisted. “Attached to the colonel’s dry-fly fishing-line was a wet fly. The colonel did not put it there. He hadn’t a wet fly, and he did not fish wet fly. The murderer put it there. Now I couldn’t find a wet fly in anybody’s fly-case except that of Mrs. Devereux, and we had a good look through them all. Mrs. Devereux had none of the pattern of that on the line. I showed the fly to Franky, hoping he might be able to recognise it for me, and tell me who used such a bait. He did tell me. He said it was his! He insisted that he had tied it, and that nobody but he used such a fly. He had never lent a fly to anybody, nor had he sold one. When, rather disturbed, I asked him if he was absolutely certain, he replied: ‘Sartin sure, Doctor.’
“Then I remembered that Franky had gone down to the bank the previous night to search for the colonel, and might easily have done him in, so to speak. I was in a devil of a quandary until, later, I found out that his flies were kept in unlocked drawers of the writing-desk in the lounge of the hotel, for anyone to borrow or purloin.”
“So one by one you eliminated all the suspects, Doctor,” Emmett said. He was following the recital with eager attention.
“All except one, Emmett. I had no idea whom he was, and wrote him down as ‘Mr. X.’ Although I could not put a name to him, I could follow him from the moment that he turned up on the river bank near the Pylons. I knew exactly what he did, and how he did it.”
“What DID he do?” The question came from all three fishermen. The police officers, of course, were already aware of the story.
“Well,” responded the scientist, “it was pretty obvious from a footprint in the copse nearby that he stood, hidden behind the bushes, and watched the quarrel between the colonel and Mrs. Devereux, who had invited Donoughmore to meet her on her beat. Mrs. Devereux herself confessed to us that she had struck the colonel unconscious with his own priest and, believing him to be dead with a fractured skull, became terrified and fled. That was her story and I believe it to be true. When she had disappeared, Mr. X, or as we now call him, Braddock, came out of his hiding place. The colonel was still unconscious; in fact he never regained consciousness. Now, although the major here did not see Braddock, Braddock caught a sight of him, and that settled the colonel’s fate. Braddock could not be sure that the major had not recognised him. He did not dare, therefore, to have the colonel found dead at that spot. So he tipped him into the cattle drinking pool.
“That was the mistake that will hang him to-morrow morning. Except for that, I should never have known the spot where the colonel was drowned. If Braddock had only carried or dragged him into the river, detection would have been pretty well impossible.
“Fortunately for us, he did not do so. Fortunately, every murderer makes a mistake, and thereby leaves a clue for those of us who trail after him.”
Emmett broke into the Doctor’s soliloquy with a question. “How was pushing the colonel into the pool instead of into the river a mistake, Doctor?” he asked.
“And why should that have led you particularly to the Pylons,” added Sir Edward.
Doctor Manson bent forward eagerly. He loved these questions, not because they revealed his abilities, but because they justified science in the eyes of the man in the street as a means of detection of wrong-doers. And he liked to describe the process. It was his one weakness, or vanity, if you like that word better. So he proposed to impress the company with the recital.
“Well, it was like this,” he began. “At the post-mortem on the colonel we found in the throat a few fragments of weed. There were a few more fragments in the liquid taken from the lungs. As a precaution, I took samples of the liquid and collected a piece or two of the throat fragments. That was purely careful routine on my part. I had no reason to suspect that they would be of any use, but it is a precaution I always take. You cannot have too much detail when investigating crime. I identified the weed later as Elodea Cunardensis. The jars containing them I placed on the mantelpiece of my room.
“The following day—I think that was the date—the superintendent, Merry and I, made a thorough inspection of the banks of the Tamar. That, by the way, was the day I definitely proved that the colonel had not fallen in the river at the fancied spot. As we walked along the bank, we spoke of the water, of its crystal clearness, by reason of which we could see the shale and gravel-lined bed of the stream. And we spoke of the smallness of the trout compared with those in the Devon or Berkshire waters. The superintendent gave us the reason. There was no feed in the water, he said. The swiftness of the stream would not allow green stuff to grow. It was swept away as soon as it got to any length. Now, no green stuff, no food, and therefore small fish,” he explained. “I really ought to have seen the anomaly then, but I didn’t,” the scientist digressed.
“However, back in the hotel the superintendent, in putting a glass of beer on my mantelpiece clinked it against one of my jars of exhibits. I looked across at the sound, and my eyes caught sight of the jar in which was the liquid taken from the colonel’s lungs. At the bottom was a thin layer of sediment, the result of the jars standing there for a considerable time undisturbed.
“It staggered me. Merry and I at once tested it by filtering the liquid out and drying the sediment. It was mud.”
He eyed the three fishermen. “No?” he queried. “Well, well, I’ll have to go into more detail. When a man has been underwater while breathing, he draws water into his mouth, lungs and stomach. Whatever is in that water goes inside him with it.
“How did the colonel come to have water with a mud deposit
in it from the crystal clear waters of the Tamar and its shale and gravel bottom. And how did he come to have specimens of Elodea Cunardensis in his throat and lungs, when there isn’t any Elodea Cunardensis in the Tamar river?”
NOTE: The reader is referred back to the problem set him in Chapter IX.
“Well, I’ll be dashed!” The major slapped a thigh. “So then you were sure that . . .”
“That the colonel had not been drowned in the Tamar at all,” broke in Sir Edward.
Manson nodded. “That is so,” he agreed. “And I began to look for somewhere he could have been drowned—somewhere where there was mud and Elodea Cunardensis. Now Elodea usually grows in ditches and small, still streams. Merry and I spent an entire day trudging over the fields round the Tamar without finding any. Then, we dropped on the cattle drinking pool, practically by accident. And it was there, also, that we found the footprint in the copse which gave us the complete story. It was more or less conjecture still—until Braddock confirmed it to me this afternoon. That’s all there is to tell”—and Doctor Manson sat back in his chair.
There was a protest from the Chief Constable. “Oh, no, Doctor, we aren’t having that!” He shook a disapproving head. “We know the fellow was the killer. We know why he killed. But how did he come to kill. That’s what we aren’t sure of. Only he and you know, because you said just now that you told him what you conjectured to have happened and that he confirmed it. What DID you conjecture, and what DID he confirm? Out with it! Give him another drink, Franky. It will make his tongue wag a bit more.”
There was a ripple of laughter, in which the scientist himself joined. The silence which followed was an appreciation of Franky’s Benedictine, that amber nectar of the Gods, growing less and less plentiful as the great monastery on Monte Cassino, overlooking the plains in Rome, find its distillation harder and harder. It was some minutes before Manson replaced his empty glass on the coffee table and resumed his story.