A Grave Case of Murder

by Roger Bax

  “It must have been rather an encumbrance, surely, at that stage of the quarrel? What did you do—politely hand it back to him?”

  There was a moment of uneasy silence. Then Barbara said, “As a matter of fact, I threw it down at his feet.”

  “Really? A loaded gun? Wasn’t that rather dangerous—and you familiar with guns?”

  “It was stupid,” she admitted, “but he’d just said something unbearable and I was so angry I didn’t think. Anyway, it didn’t go off.”

  “No,” James agreed, “it certainly didn’t go off then.” He looked more worried than ever. “You didn’t, I suppose, actually come to blows with him during this scene? Forgive me—but I was thinking of the scratches on his hands.”

  “Those were caused by the brambles—I told you. I had nothing to do with them.”

  “H’m.” James thoughtfully took stock of her. “Well, I’m sorry about all this, Miss Rutherford. I won’t say that I find your account of what happened improbable—it may easily be true—but the fact remains that you did quarrel with your fiancé just before his death and you were seen with the gun in your hand. If you were beginning to believe that Mrs. Thornton’s story might be true after all, you had a very strong motive for wishing to do him harm.”

  Barbara met the inspector’s probing gaze without flinching. “Nothing on earth would have made me shoot him because of a contemptible thing like that.”

  “That’s what I have to establish,” said James. He puffed moodily at his pipe for a while. “You may know yourself to be incapable of such an act, but all I know about you is that you were infatuated with this man and that you were suddenly disillusioned. It wouldn’t be the first time that a passionate woman in a temper had killed a lover who had grossly deceived her. We all know that infatuation can turn to its opposite in a moment if the provocation is sufficiently great.”

  He sat quietly, mentally reconstructing the scene as it might have been. There was only her word for it that she had flung the gun down and departed. In fact, the quarrel might still have been going at full blast while she was still holding it. They might have walked down together to the churchyard, still quarreling. When people were agitated they often paid little attention to where they were going. At the edge of the grave, Hutton might have said something to produce a climax of anger in her, and she might have pushed him in and shot him on the spur of the moment. She would naturally have said afterward that they had parted amicably—not for complex emotional reasons but simply from the desire to protect herself. On the evidence, it was certainly impossible to rule her out.

  “Of course,” he said, “if by any chance you did do it, in anger and without premeditation, I think in all the circumstances you would be well advised to make a frank statement.”

  She was silent so long that he began to think his words had made some impression on her, but he was mistaken.

  “I tell you I didn’t do it. It’s too ridiculous. Good heavens, do you think I would have gone back to the house and behaved in a perfectly normal way if I’d just shot Neville?”

  He shrugged. “Did you behave in a perfectly normal way? I don’t know. You appear to have taken good care not to be seen by anyone as you entered the house. You went immediately to take a bath, and from then on you closeted yourself in your bedroom.”

  “That was only because I was tired out after all the quarreling. You twist everything.”

  “I have to try to wring the truth out of the facts,” said James wearily. At that moment it seemed to him a particularly distasteful job. The girl was in a wretched enough state without his adding to her troubles.

  He got up. “You see, Miss Rutherford,” he said apologetically, “if I’m to find out who killed Neville Hutton I can’t take anyone at their face value. As I look at you now, I see a young, attractive girl who I’d say would be most unlikely to commit a murder and cover it up afterward by lies and inventions. But how do I know? A face is so often a mask—as you yourself must be well aware after your experience with Hutton. However, you needn’t distress yourself—if you had nothing to do with Hutton’s death, in the long run you have nothing to fear. As for being under suspicion—well, you’re very far from being the only one.”

  He knocked out his pipe and stumped off toward the churchyard.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Once again he stopped by the grave, staring down as though trying to read its secret. A fresh doubt was gnawing at him now. It had been all very well to talk airily about someone having pushed Hutton into the grave before shooting him, but James wasn’t at all sure that in practice it would have been possible to do that. The hole, after all, was little more than two feet wide.

  He stood a little way from the edge and tried to put himself in the position of an intended victim. Hutton had presumably been quite unsuspecting, and it would therefore have been a simple matter to throw him off balance. But how would he have reacted? James had a pretty good idea what he would have done if he had suddenly been given a mighty shove toward the grave. He wouldn’t, he felt sure, have dropped neatly to the bottom. He would more probably have thrown out his hands, clawed at the pile of earth on the other side, and straddled the hole. He might even have managed to step across it and fall on the heap. Of course, one could never be sure. It was possible to fall in scores of ways—on this one occasion Hutton might have dropped plumb to the bottom. But a theory of murder ought not to be based on long odds.

  There was Hutton’s actual position in the grave, too—that had worried James from the beginning, and it still worried him. Even if he had fallen in, was it likely that he would have fallen lengthways and in that peculiar position, with his back arched and his head down? Again, he might have done so. Nobody could prove that he hadn’t. But James could imagine how unlikely a skillful counsel would make it all sound. “You have the photographs before you, gentlemen of the jury. I put it to you, is it conceivable … ?”

  Then there was the gun. It was one thing to push an unsuspecting man into a grave, and quite another to snatch a gun from him first and then push him in. By the time he had lost the gun, he would be on his guard. Almost certainly, the murderer must have been carrying the gun—and there was only one person who would have been likely to do that. Profoundly dissatisfied, James turned away to continue his search for the weapon.

  This time he tried to put himself in the position of a man who had just committed a murder at that spot. The killer would have shot Hutton in a fit of temper, so he coudn’t have decided beforehand what to do about the gun. He’d be standing there with the weapon in his hand and the echoes of the shots still ringing in his ears. He’d feel horribly conspicuous. He’d know that members of the family were not far away, and that at any moment someone passing along the road might see him. What would he do? Walk nonchalantly away from the scene with the gun under his arm, trusting to luck and the fact that the sound of shots was commonplace in the country? Or fling it away with panic speed, as Maddox had suggested?

  The notion that the murderer might have dropped the gun into the grave as a temporary measure no longer seemed plausible. There would have been too great a chance of someone arriving on the scene almost immediately, in which case the discovery of the gun, with possible fingerprints, might have been fatal. No, the most natural thing to do, James felt, would have been to look round quickly for the best bit of cover and get the gun hidden as soon as possible.

  Where was the best cover? Hardly in the church itself, even temporarily, for all the approaches led across open ground visible both from the road and from the house. The same thing applied to much of the churchyard, and anyhow it had all been thoroughly searched that morning by Maddox’s special squad.

  The Twenty Foot was handy, of course, and must have been tempting. As James looked toward the bank, wondering if it would be worth while to drag that part of the stream, he was struck by a new idea. That trail—could it have been made by the murderer going away? Then he remembered that the woman’s print had been pointing towa
rd the grave, not away from it. Of course, that print might have had no connection with the murder. But what would the murderer have done after reaching the water’s edge and casting away the gun? Had he, after all, come by boat and gone by boat? Speculations were endless.

  In any case, to reach the Twenty Foot the murderer would have had to carry the gun across an open field in full view of the house windows. James felt that he himself wouldn’t have done that. He would have gone straight for the nearest bit of cover that didn’t involve going out into the open at all.

  He looked carefully around. Through the iron kissing gate and just inside the Farm grounds, there was a small wood of ancient oak trees, interspersed with low bushes. To anyone who knew the terrain, that must have seemed attractive. He made his way through the gate and strolled up to the wood, being joined en route by a couple of Welsh sheepdog puppies that yapped at his heels. After twenty paces or so he found himself cut off not only from the house but from the road as well by the belt of leafy bushes and the obstructing tree boles. Yes, to a killer with a gun this would have seemed like sanctuary.

  He searched the wood with the greatest care, the puppies romping playfully at his feet. The ground was carpeted with leaves and there were traces of footmarks, but these had probably been made that day by the search squad. It was unlikely, he felt, that where they had failed he would succeed, but he went on looking. He made sure that no weapon had been poked into the spreading branches of the bushes or into one of the many rabbit holes. He examined the knotted roots of the great oaks and found one or two hollow places—but no gun.

  The puppies were a nuisance. He had no desire that his movements should attract attention from the house, and wished they would go and yap elsewhere. He tried ordering them away, but they thought it was a game and squealed more excitedly than ever. He threw a stick for them, but one of them brought it back and ran round in a romping circle. The other scrambled and clawed its way up the fallen branch of an oak, sprang up on to the next branch as though from long habit—and disappeared into the trunk.

  The inspector’s curiosity was aroused and he went over to the tree. It was lightning-struck and half-dead, but from the ground there was no indication that the trunk was hollow. James swung himself up to the spot where the puppy had vanished and peered into the dark cavity. The puppy stuck its head out and licked his hand. He gently pushed the dog’s head aside and put his arm into the tree up to the elbow. At once his fingers touched cold metal. A moment later he was looking at the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun.

  He let the weapon drop back into the hole and stepped down. It was, he saw, a perfect hiding place, in no way apparent to anyone walking past the tree; yet, by simply reaching up, a person of medium height who knew what he was about could have slipped the gun down inside the trunk without bothering to climb. The murderer need hardly have paused as he went by; it would have been as easy as dropping an umbrella into a stand. James looked around for footprints, but here were none—further evidence, if any had been needed, that the murder had been committed before the rain.

  Tense with excitement, he debated what to do. He was eager to get the gun away and start work on it, but if he took it with him now he might be observed. He didn’t particularly want the family to know that he had found it—at the right moment, the disclosure might be productive. Better, perhaps, to come back for it at dusk. In the meantime, he could get hold of a gun case, and then there’d be no danger of spoiling any fingerprints that might be on it.

  He stopped to light his pipe, and then sauntered over to the road. A jerk of his head brought the uniformed constable to his side and he gave him some instructions. The constable unostentatiously took up a new position from which he could keep a closer eye on the oak wood. The inspector, his hopes running high, returned to his car.

  Chapter Twenty

  At nine o’clock that evening, James and Maddox were sitting in their little room at the police station, waiting for important news. The atmosphere was thick with smoke, and on Maddox’s side of the table there was a strong smell of the beer that he had dutifully imbibed in the interests of justice.

  Between them lay the gun, which they had recovered from the wood an hour earlier. It was, as William Appleby had said, a very fine gun, but nothing helpful had emerged as a result of the close examination to which they had subjected it. They had confirmed that both barrels had been fired, and the two empty cartridge cases lay beside it. Traces of dusting powder on the barrel, stock and trigger told of methodical testing for fingerprints, and it was the outcome of these tests that was now awaited.

  James sat drumming on the table top, hardly able to control his impatience. One stroke of luck—one clear print in the right place—was all they needed now. However, he wasn’t very hopeful. Photographic enlargements might show something, but to the naked eye the marks hadn’t looked too good. You couldn’t really expect, of course, to find a clear print on a double-action trigger that fired two barrels—the second movement was practically bound to blur the mark left by the first. In any case, murderers knew too much these days and wiped the things they touched. Whatever other blunders they made, they nearly always seemed to be on their guard against that one. Except when they were in a great hurry.…

  James picked up a report that had just arrived from the Yard and glanced through it again with a disgruntled expression on his face. “It’s very odd that they haven’t found any trace of Mrs. Thornton’s car yet.”

  “They’ve only had a day on it,” Maddox reminded him. “It’s bound to turn up. P’ raps she stuck it in a wood or something.”

  “Why on earth should she? If she was going abroad she’d have done just as well to park it in a street somewhere.” He tossed the paper aside. “By the way, were there any prints on that bailer?”

  “Hutton’s thumb and first finger, right hand,” said Maddox. “Just what you’d expect, as it was his bailer.”

  “Any marks on the boat?”

  “Nothing, Chief. The wood’s too bare to take good prints.”

  James nodded. He hadn’t expected much. “Anyone raise any objection when you took the family’s prints?”

  “Not really. Miss Rutherford asked me what I wanted them for and looked a bit surprised, but she didn’t object. Thomas Appleby was rather snooty, but the old gentleman thought it was a great joke. I’ve still got to do Gwynn.”

  There was an uneasy pause. The clock over the mantelpiece ticked noisily. “How was your pub crawl, Maddox? Did you manage to stir up any interest?”

  “I certainly did.” A grin spread across the sergeant’s flushed face. “I reckon I’m the most popular chap in Long Wicklen tonight I don’t know what you’ll say when you see my expense sheet. Of course, the pubs hadn’t really filled up, but the locals will talk among themselves all right now the idea’s been put into their heads. They’ve got six-thirty on Saturday firmly in mind.”

  “H’m. Well, we’ve cast our beer upon the waters. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait seven days.” James looked up sharply as the door opened and the local police photographer came in with a sheaf of damp enlargements. The man avoided the inspector’s eye, as a jury returning to the box with an adverse verdict is said to avoid the eye of the prisoner. “A washout, sir, I’m afraid.”

  “Blast!” James took the photographs and examined them one by one through a magnifying glass. “Smudges!” he muttered. “Just what I thought. Our luck’s out.” He threw them disgustedly across to Maddox.

  The sergeant flipped through them. “Yes,” he agreed sadly. “Too many prints on top of each other, and all messed up. What do we do now, Chief—send the gun up for ballistics to look at?”

  “I suppose so—though Holloway won’t be able to tell us anything we don’t know already. This was the gun, without doubt. The shot is the right size for these cases. We even know the distance it was fired from, within a foot or so.” He shook his head ruefully. “As far as the gun’s concerned, I’m afraid we’re through.”

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sp; “It was pretty smart work finding it, anyway,” said Maddox, with determined cheerfulness. “A darned good hiding place—I’m not surprised the murderer was content to leave it there. I wonder who knew about the hollow tree?”

  “I should think everyone at the Farm did. The tree looked as though it had been in that condition for years. I don’t know about Gwynn. The one person who couldn’t have known about it is Wanda Thornton.”

  “That’s true,” said Maddox. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “If I’d had eight pints,” said James, “I probably wouldn’t have either.”

  “Half pints, sir. That rules her out, then, surely?”

  “As a principal, I should say it does.”

  “Then I wonder why she cleared off?”

  “That,” said James gloomily, “is one of about twenty things that are puzzling me. Still, it does mean that our choice of suspects is narrowed. In fact, one way and another, it could hardly be narrower.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t like to be an Appleby just now. Are you going to tell the family you’ve found the gun?”

  James considered. “I doubt if there’s any point. We might get some interesting facial expressions, but that’s about all. Of course, we could tell them we’d found it and keep them guessing about whether there were any useful prints on it. That might rattle them a bit.” He gazed thoughtfully at the uncommunicative weapon. “I wonder if we could use it as bait?”

  “How do you mean, sir?”

  “Well, suppose we don’t tell anyone about it—suppose we put it back in the tree, just as it is, tonight? Then tomorrow we let it be known that we’ve a pretty good idea the gun must be somewhere in the Farm grounds and drop a hint or two about the oak wood. Give the impression that we’re going to go over the area inch by inch and that we expect to find prints on the gun and clean up the case once and for all. Don’t you think that might draw somebody? If I were the murderer, and I heard anything as definite as that, and I wasn’t sure what prints I’d left, I think I’d go down to the tree at the first opportunity—which in this case will be tomorrow night, after dark—and find a new hiding place for the gun.”