Murder Jigsaw

by E.

  “Well, if you want the full story I suppose you will have to have it,” he said. “Right! Mrs. Devereux told us at the interview, when we confronted her with the fact that, despite her alibi, we knew that she had been on the river bank and had seen the colonel, that the colonel was blackmailing her. What she did not tell us was that Braddock was also blackmailing her. She did not dare do that for reasons which you will soon appreciate. The facts are that Braddock was first in the field. He had made himself known to Mrs. Devereux and her visit to the Tremarden Arms was expressly for the purpose of seeing him and arranging the terms of his silence.

  “The Arms was an unfortunate choice for him. He met the colonel there—and the colonel knew who he was. At least he thought he knew, though, as it happened, he could not be sure about it. But when Mrs. Devereux appeared in the hotel, too, he no longer had any doubts about it, and he at once put out his ‘demand with menaces.’

  “Knowing what we now do, we can realise that there was no escape for the woman. Braddock, knowing Mrs. Devereux’s resources in the way of finance, also had no delusions as to the outcome. His vision of a tidy income for the remainder of his life was going to be halved with the colonel, unless the colonel could be silenced. And it was pretty plain that there was only one way to silence him, and that was the way he planned—murder.

  “Now he must have been very exercised in his mind as to how he was to get rid of the man. Then, the colonel’s impatience spelt his own undoing. He insisted on Mrs. Devereux finding the £5,000 he wanted within twenty-four hours. Mrs. Devereux arranged to meet him on her beat the following afternoon in a last endeavour to reduce his terms. But before doing so, she sought the advice of her other blackmailer, Braddock. She told him of the appointment, the place of it and the time. Braddock told me that he arranged to be hidden there, and in the event of Donoughmore proving adamant, he was to emerge from the copse, at her signal, and the united threat of them both was to be used against the colonel.

  “What went wrong we shall never know. Whether the colonel smelled a rat or not, only he knows. But he moved away from the river bank. As we know, Mrs. Devereux hit him with his own priest. Braddock, watching from the copse, said nothing and did nothing. Mrs. Devereux, seeing no sign of Braddock in answer to her signal, concluded that he had not arrived and she fled. Braddock saw a way to turn the events to his own advantage. Here was murder put into his hands with no risk to himself. It took him half an hour to realise it, but when he did so he heaved the still breathing Colonel into the cattle pool.

  “If he had had any medical knowledge at all, he could have made himself safe. The colonel was almost dead; his skull had been badly fractured. He lived only about half a minute after he went into the water.

  “I think that had he, even then, left Donoughmore where he was, in the cattle pool, he might still have cleared himself of a charge of murder. But he dare not do it. The colonel was on Mrs. Devereux’s beat. You must bear in mind that Braddock, at this time, knew nothing of Mrs. Devereux’s morning visit to Tavistock, and could have no knowledge of the alibi which she was, even while the colonel lay in the pool, preparing. He realised that if the colonel was found dead there, suspicion would be directed against the woman—and he couldn’t trust her not to betray him to save her own skin. He wasn’t a good reasoner.

  “He told me that since he had been toying with the idea of removing the colonel, the river had been in his mind. It seemed the most likely kind of ‘accident’ to happen to the man who was on and in the water all day. He had, accordingly, spied out the land and had decided on the spot where the colonel might, some day ‘fall in.’ Carrying the colonel’s fishing-rod, he walked down the riverside and placed the rod on the grass, and made the false marks of a supposed fall down the bank. He says he was walking across the field to the road, when he suddenly remembered that he had left the colonel’s fishing-net at the side of the cattle pool. He had to go back for it; it would never do to have it found there. He unscrewed the net from the shaft, concealed it under his coat and walked into the drying-room of the hotel, swinging the stave. There, he screwed the net back on it and placed the complete landing-net with a collection of rods in the room. It was taken into the lounge with the rods when the owner picked up his belongings. That is the story.”

  “But where does my artificial fly come into it, Doctor?”

  “You would ask that, Franky!” Manson smiled, but the smile had a touch of sheepishness about it. “It didn’t come in at all. The thing that gave me almost the first inkling that the case was one of murder had nothing really to do with it. Braddock’s version of it was exceedingly simple. In carrying the rod down the bank he either snapped off the fly or the colonel had done so before he went across to Mrs. Devereux. Anyhow, Braddock thought that a trout-rod would look more natural if it had a fly on it. He had one with him, and he just tied the thing on! He had picked up Franky’s raincoat in mistake for his own, and half a dozen flies were stuck in the lapel, where, I gather, Franky usually keeps them. That’s what gave Braddock the idea of tying a fly on the line. It just shows you how one can be misled by guessing at things. Though it did serve a useful purpose in exciting my suspicions.”

  “Any more questions?” Manson concluded, after the laughter had died down.

  “How did he get the colonel’s body down to the Round Pool?” asked the major.

  “Braddock dragged it through the neck of the cattle pool into the river, and then let it drift down the stream. I worked out the run of the water with the weight of the body, and it came somewhere about right,” answered the scientist. “Braddock worked out that the colonel’s waterproofs, all in one piece, would keep him watertight, and keep him afloat.”

  “There is just one more thing, Doctor.” The speaker was Sir Edward Maurice. “How did you tumble to whom Braddock was?”

  “Ah! Now that was the one piece of the investigation for which I do pat myself on the back,” Manson replied. “In the colonel’s flat we found some reproductions of some newspaper cuttings referring to Mrs. Devereux and her dead husband. A press-cutting agency in Fleet Street had been asked by the colonel to supply them in a letter which he had written from the hotel, here, on July 15th, I asked myself what could have happened in the Tremarden Arms, on, or immediately before, July 15th to cause the colonel to write post-haste for those cuttings.

  “Franky, here, knew of nothing. There had been no quarrel, so far as I could find out, and no scenes of any sort. I came to a dead end. It was not until I thought of the hotel register that I got an inkling of the truth.

  “If you look at the hotel register for July, you will find that of the people who entered the hotel as guests between July 1st and the 14th, only two of them were still remaining there on the 15th, namely, Mrs. Devereux and Mr. Braddock. I asked myself was there anything in this. Braddock had arrived on the 8th, so there was not much in that, for a week had elapsed without any haste on the part of the colonel to dash about for Mrs. Devereux’s life story. Mrs. Devereux arrived on the 12th—and within about thirty-six hours the colonel sent for those cuttings—and wanted them urgently, so he told the agency. I began to consider whether Braddock might be mixed up with Mrs. Devereux.

  “Now, Mrs. Devereux had said that the reason for the blackmail was that the colonel knew something about her past life which, if it was revealed, would make her marriage with Sir John Shepstone impossible. She used that word; not, say, the word unlikely or doubtful, but sheer impossible. Now we knew that she had met Sir John in Monte Carlo. We also know that she was known in Monte Carlo as a woman of very loose principles as far as men were concerned. Sir John had lived in Monte Carlo. He must have known her reputation. It was hardly likely, as I saw it, that an affair with a man or with men, would make him break his promise of marriage; if he had qualms of that kind he would never have proposed to marry her.

  “I reviewed in my mind all the circumstances which it seemed to me might result in marriage being made not just unlikely or improbable between a
man of the world and a woman of the world such as these two were, but absolutely impossible. For the life of me I could conceive only one such circumstance—that the wife, or husband, of one of them was still alive. There is no other insurmountable impediment to marriage. Now, it was not Braddock who was being blackmailed. Therefore, if I was thinking along the right lines, the ‘circumstances’ had to be connected with Mrs. Devereux. Yet her husband was dead. He had died in India. Then I remembered that the body of Devereux had never been recovered and his death had to be presumed.

  “Taking all things into consideration I became certain that Braddock was Ronald Devereux. As you all know I was correct.

  “The final evidence is provided by a thumb print we were able to develop on the cork handle of the colonel’s fishing-rod. It corresponded exactly with a thumb print left by Braddock, or Devereux, on a glass which Franky placed for us on his table at the last meal he had in the hotel here.”

  There was a span of silence. Sir Edward broke it with a question.

  “What happened in India, Doctor?” he asked. “Why did Devereux allow himself to be regarded as dead. What was his reason?”

  Doctor Manson hesitated. “I don’t know whether I can tell you that,” he replied. “Devereux left behind a written confession and the full story of that episode. It was, however, written in the condemned cell, and is therefore, an official secret. The Chief Constable has the document. Whether he can tell you anything without infringing police rules I do not know.” He looked across at Sir William Polglaze.

  The Chief Constable nodded. “It is not altogether in accordance with the rules,” he said. “But I think, perhaps, that I might stretch a point, since you were all, more or less concerned in the matter.” He extracted a document from a pocket and opened it. “I will read you one or two salient paragraphs,” he continued. “It is understood, of course, that it is not mentioned outside this room.”

  There were murmurs of assent.

  “Well, here is what he said, in his own words:

  “My wife I had known when we were boy and girl in England. I’d always wanted to marry her, but her family was in County class and mine was—well—middle class tradesmen. Then one day I met her in India, again. She was a companion to a rich old woman. We resumed our boy and girl acquaintance and within a few months we had married. I thought she was in love with me, but I hadn’t been married more than a few weeks when I realised that all she had married me for was to get back into the kind of life she had known as a girl and young woman. She wanted to get back into a social standing with its advantages. I had very little private means; what I had I had saved, and we had to depend chiefly on my pay as a Lieutenant. My savings soon went. Then she pressed for more and more money. We had continual rows and when I could not provide the money she wanted she took it from other men. I knew this, but I couldn’t prove it, otherwise I would have divorced her.

  “In the end I decided to get out of the position, even though it meant giving up the Army. I wasn’t too fond of the Army, anyway. I spied out the land and made arrangements for disappearing. On the day of the hunting trip, a couple of half castes had a horse and a change of civilian clothing waiting for me at a spot we had fixed upon. Within easy reach of the rendezvous I ordered my boys to stay behind, while I went forward. I crossed the river in a native boat which was tied up to the bank. I landed on the other side, higher up, and overturning the boat, sent it into mid-stream. I knew it would go down with the current, which was pretty swift, and that my boys would see it and presume that I had gone in the river. I made my way on horseback to a station some miles down in the plains, and there took train for the coast. It was an easy matter to work my way on a ship, and eventually I reached Canada.”

  The Chief Constable ceased reading the manuscript. “The next few pages,” he said, “explain that Devereux tried mining, factory work, fur trapping, and was no great shakes at any of them. Then, one day, in a hotel in Calgary, he said, he saw in the Graphic a photograph of his wife and learned that she was about to marry the wealthy Sir John Shepstone.” The Chief Constable turned again to the manuscript.

  “I saw that I could make good use of Sir John’s fortune,” he read. “I borrowed the money for my passage and came to London and wrote to my wife, suggesting that we should meet and discuss the position. She arranged to see me at the Tremarden Arms, where she would go for the fishing. We were not to make any acquaintance or seem to know each other, but were to meet in her room at night, after the rest of the hotel had retired.”

  The Chief Constable ceased and replaced the document in his pocket. “That’s all I think I should read you,” he decided.

  “I can carry on from there,” said Doctor Manson. “Braddock, or Devereux as we may now call him, told me to-day that soon after he arrived in the hotel the colonel eyed him curiously, and even suggested that they had met somewhere before. Devereux, though he denied it, and spoke humorously of everybody having a double, said that he saw the colonel was puzzling over him. He said that he would have left the hotel except for the fact that Mrs. Devereux was coming down, and he did not know where she was, in order to stop her. He felt pretty safe, he said, in his ‘death.’

  “The arrival of Mrs. Devereux, however, despite the fact that the two did not speak or greet each other in any way, revived all the colonel’s suspicions, and then an unfortunate occurrence—for Devereux—happened. He was washing in the lavatory when the colonel entered. Through the mirror over the basins he caught sight of Devereux’s bare arms. Now, during a hunting trip Devereux had been mauled on the right arm by a tiger. Marks scored thus deeply by a jungle beast never disappear; the scar remains always. The colonel saw, in the mirror, the scar left by the Indian adventure with the tiger. Then, of course, he remembered—and was certain. He taxed Mrs. Devereux with her husband and her forthcoming marriage the next day.”

  There was a brief silence as the scientist finished the narrative. Then the Chief Constable voiced the feelings of the company. “Well, all I can say, Doctor, is that it’s the finest bit of reasoning I’ve ever heard,” he commented. “When I think how nearly we buried the colonel as an accident . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “But you nearly missed him, Doctor!” Franky Baker put in a sly dig at Doctor Manson. “He was well away before you arrested him.”

  Manson looked at the hotelier; and the friendship of years was in the look, and in his voice when he spoke.

  “Franky,” he said. “I’ve known you many years, and I knew your father before you. I know and love this hotel. I’ve spent many happy days and nights here, and I hope to spend many more.

  “I told the superintendent, here, that I had a very good reason why he should follow Braddock as far as Exeter before he took him into custody. I had! I did not want it to be reported in the newspapers that a murderer had been arrested in the Tremarden Arms Hotel.”

  He rose, and placed a hand on the hotelier’s shoulders; and thus the two walked out.

  T H E E N D

  About The Authors

  EDWIN ISAAC RADFORD (1891-1973) and MONA AUGUSTA RADFORD (1894-1990) were married in 1939. Edwin worked as a journalist, holding many editorial roles on Fleet Street in London, while Mona was a popular leading lady in musical-comedy and revues until her retirement from the stage.

  The couple turned to crime fiction when they were both in their early fifties. Edwin described their collaborative formula as: “She kills them off, and I find out how she done it.” Their primary series detective was Harry Manson who they introduced in 1944.

  The Radfords spent their final years living in Worthing on the English South Coast. Dean Street Press have republished three of their classic mysteries: Murder Jigsaw, Murder Isn’t Cricket and Who Killed Dick Whittington?

  By E & M.A. Radford

  and available from Dean Street Press

  1. Murder Jigsaw

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  2. Murder Isn’t Cricket

  Buy from
Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  3. Who Killed Dick Whittington?

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  E & M.A. Radford

  Murder Isn’t Cricket

  Why should a holidaymaker, sitting to enjoy a game of village cricket, suddenly meet with death in the shape of a flying bullet?

  That most English of sporting pastimes: a cricket match between two rivalrous village teams. The game has just ended in a closely fought draw, and the village green is emptied of all spectators, bar one. A dead man is found sitting in a deck chair on the boundary line, clearly shot during the match. The man is a stranger, with no obvious clue to his identity or that of his killer. Nobody has seen or heard the shot fired. The local police are baffled, and call in Scotland Yard. Enter Dr. Manson, investigative detective par excellence, to solve a seemingly impossible crime.

  Murder Isn’t Cricket was originally published in 1946. This new edition includes an introduction by crime fiction historian Nigel Moss.

  “A front-rank place among contemporary writers of crime fiction . . . There is no flagging in the technique of either the authors or of the Doctor” Western Morning News

  Murder Isn’t Cricket

  CHAPTER ONE