‘I’m relieved to hear it, sir. I was mad with rage when I saw that fellow running across the grass to rob my Master. I didn’t intend to kill him, but I’ll tell you now, sir, I’m not sorry that I did. Will I – will I go to gaol?’
‘You will not. You were protecting your Master’s property, and considering the background of that man, you may also have been defending your own life. Besides, it would seem that the second fatal shot was fired by somebody else. You have committed no crime.’
‘It’s a dark mystery,’ said Lord Arthur. ‘Ah! Here’s another member of the household staff. You served at table tonight, didn’t you? Take this poor fellow away, and give him a glass of brandy. Meanwhile, gentlemen, we’d better rejoin the ladies, and tell them what’s happened.’
They returned to the drawing room, and Colonel Scott-James regaled his wife and Sophia Jex-Blake with an account of all that had happened.
‘A most unpleasant incident,’ said Sophia Jex-Blake. ‘But as neither Mrs Scott-James nor I had any part in the investigation, I propose that we be allowed to retire to bed. It’s twenty to eleven. I expect a police constable will arrive soon, but there will be little for the poor man to do before the morning.’
‘Quite right, ma’am,’ said Colonel Scott James. He was feeling very pleased with himself, basking in the admiring glances of his wife. And why not? That Oakshott fellow was reputedly very clever, but he was a milk-and-water kind of a man, and young Lord Arthur couldn’t be expected to take command.
‘Quite right, ma’am,’ he repeated, ‘but correct form and order must be observed. The police must know immediately. That second shot – there’s something very sinister about that— In God’s name, what now?’
A piercing scream had stopped the Colonel in mid-sentence.
It seemed quite natural for them all to line up behind Colonel Scott-James as he made his way from the drawing room and out into the great entrance hall of the castle. The butler, and all the indoor servants, were standing in a huddle at the foot of the winding staircase, looking up towards the gallery. One of the two servant girls who had waited at the table was lying senseless on the landing. Ignoring them all, the Colonel strode up the stairs, followed by Lord Arthur and the ladies.
They found Ambrose Littlemore sitting motionless in the great throne of a chair that the housekeeper likened to the Coronation Chair. He seemed to be staring thoughtfully into space, but it was obvious to them all that he was quite dead.
‘The strain has been too much for him,’ said the Colonel gruffly. ‘Over-excitement. His heart, I expect.’ His wife was quietly weeping.
Dr Sophia Jex-Blake looked closely at Ambrose Littlemore’s face. ‘No,’ she said, half to herself, ‘not heart.’
To a little cry of protest from the Colonel’s wife, she seized the dead man’s shoulders and pulled him forward in the great chair.
‘No,’ she repeated, in a firm voice, ‘not heart.’ Seizing a candle burning in a sconce set in the wall, she held it down behind the figure, and bade them look at what she had found. ‘I am sure that you can all see, quite clearly,’ she said, ‘that Mr Ambrose Littlemore has been stabbed to death. Stabbed in the back with a pair of scissors.’
The village of Hazelmere, remodelled at the same time that the castle had been built, consisted of a number of mock-gothic cottages, a medieval church, and a public house called The Farmer’s Arms. On that particular Friday night, the bar was crowded with men and women who had tired of the rain, and quitted their cold dwellings for the comforts of the village inn. The landlord understood the needs of his fellow villagers, and on nights like this ignored the requirements of the hated Licensing Act. He closed when his last customer had left. Constable Roberts never set foot in a public house, having signed the pledge; but he was a discreet young man, who always gave notice if he was calling on official business.
At half past ten, the door was flung open, and a wild stranger made his entrance. He was panting, as though he had run through the village. He put two half-crowns on the bar counter, and asked for a bottle of gin.
The locals had stopped talking, and were regarding the stranger with surly suspicion. Ignoring the glass that the landlord placed on the bar, he drank the gin straight from the bottle. Suddenly, he began to address his silent audience. He spoke with a pronounced Irish accent.
‘This night, my friends,’ he cried, ‘I have struck a blow for Queen and country. I have gunned down a Fenian man who came here to steal weapons from yonder great house. He lies dead, shot to the heart, and ’twas me that done the deed.’
His audience watched, fascinated, as he proceeded to take further great gulps from the gin bottle. Then he burst into song.
‘Sure I’m an Ulster Orangeman, from Erin’s isle I come,
To see my British brethren all of honour and of fame,
And to tell them of my forefathers who fought in days of yore,
That I might have the right to wear, the sash my father wore!’
The Irishman seized the gin bottle, and staggered towards the door. The landlord picked up the two half-crowns, and said, ‘I’ll get your ninepence change.’
‘Keep it, keep it,’ said the Irishman. ‘Have a drink on me. It’s a grand work that I’ve done this night!’
In a moment he had gone, and the drinkers in The Farmer’s Arms broke out in a gabble of speculation. More beer was drawn from the casks, and the fire was banked up. It was scarcely half an hour later that Constable Roberts, accompanied by a groom from the castle, looked in at the door to tell them that a Fenian man had been shot dead while trying to steal guns from Mr Littlemore’s gun room.
9
Sophia Jex-Blake
Sophia Jex-Blake stood at the window of Arabella Cathcart’s bedroom, and looked out across the dew-covered pasture. It was just after six o’clock, and the sun had begun to tint the enveloping trees with morning gold. How quiet it was! She could see the carriage-road curving away towards the hidden entrance gates of the demesne.
The local constable had told her that detective police from Oxford would be arriving at the castle before seven. She wondered whether one at least of those detectives would be her newfound friend, patient, and collaborator, Inspector James Antrobus.
Son of a grocer, he had attended a grammar school until the age of 14, when he was obliged to leave, owing to his father’s becoming trade-fallen. He had worked on a farm for a while, and then had joined the Oxford City Police when he was twenty. A widower, he had a daughter who was working as a pupil-teacher in Battersea.
Constable Roberts, to her way of thinking, was little more than a boy, unable, as yet, to realize his own potential. She and Colonel Scott-James had insisted that the body of Mr Ambrose Littlemore should be left sitting in the chair until the constable had arrived. The young man had examined the wound, and then carefully traced a trail of blood along the dim corridor and into the dead man’s bedroom.
‘I think he was stabbed there, ma’am,’ he’d said, ‘and then walked out of the room and along the passage until he began to feel faint, and sat down on that chair. I expect he died almost immediately after that.’ She had agreed, and told him that people who were stabbed in the back often didn’t realize what had happened to them, and would walk quite a distance until they collapsed.
While it was still dark, the body of Ambrose Littlemore was removed from the chair, and carried to the bedroom, where it was laid on the bed, and covered with a sheet.
Dr Jeremy Oakshott, the dead man’s nephew, had volunteered the information that his Aunt Arabella had a pair of scissors similar to those that had been used to kill Mr Littlemore. A search of that lady’s room showed that the scissors in question had disappeared.
It was strange how Sophia and Colonel Scott-James had, as it were, assumed command of the house and its inhabitants after the tragedy of Ambrose Littlemore’s death. The Colonel had placated the servants, and had placed his own carriage and swift horses at Constable Roberts’s disposal to make the te
n-mile round journey to Oxford and back in order to report the two deaths to the duty officer at High Street Police Station, there being neither telegraph nor electric telephone in Hadleigh village.
For her part, Sophia had devoted herself to tending the stricken Miss Arabella Cathcart, who, on being told the news of her cousin’s murder, had first had a fit of hysterics – in the medical, not the vulgar dismissive sense – in which she had wildly accused herself of Mr Littlemore’s murder, and then had relapsed into what Sophia recognized at once as a catatonic spasm. Assisted by the resident nurse, who had shown great relief at her presence, she had administered a soporific – she always carried her ‘doctor’s bag’ with her – that settled the unfortunate woman down, and then had sent the nurse to ask Mr Jeremy Oakshott to come and talk to her.
He was still there now, sitting in a chair beside Miss Cathcart’s bed. He looked pale and shocked, and when he had accepted a glass of Hoffman’s Drops that she had prepared for him, his hand had shaken almost uncontrollably. Unless he took great care, he would suffer a nervous convulsion.
She had asked him bluntly to tell her whether or not his relative had ever suffered from a mental disease, and he had told her the whole story. Miss Cathcart had been confined to an asylum for many years, and had only recently been released to her family. He told her about her killing of a young woman by stabbing her in the back with a pair of scissors.
She was relieved that he had made no futile attempt to protest Miss Cathcart’s innocence. To do so would have sounded like a disguised accusation.
When the nurse had handed Miss Cathcart the little glass containing the soporific, she had had difficulty in grasping it; two of the fingers of her right hand seemed to be partly paralysed. She had unconsciously thrust her right shoulder forward, which had seemed to make her grasp more sure. Something stirred in Sophia’s mind.
‘Dr Oakshott,’ she said, ‘do you recall the name of the physician who tended your aunt during her confinement in the asylum?’
‘What? Yes. Dr Samuel Critchley.’
Well, well, thought Sophia, that’s very interesting. I knew it must have been he before ever I asked.
Suddenly, a carriage appeared on the drive, a light vehicle furiously driven by a police constable sitting high on the box. Her heart gave a sudden leap of pleasurable anticipation when she glimpsed its occupants as it turned towards the main entrance of the castle. Yes! It was bringing to their aid Detective Inspector Antrobus, and his irascible sergeant, Joseph Maxwell.
As the two detectives climbed down from the carriage, they were accosted by a gentleman whose anguished face suggested that he was burdened with a secret that had to be told immediately.
‘Inspector Antrobus? My name’s McArthur … oh, hello, Mr Maxwell, it’s nice to see you again. Inspector, there’s something that I must tell you before you embark on any investigation of this dreadful crime. You see—’
‘I’m sure you realize, Dr McArthur,’ said Sergeant Maxwell in the stentorian tones that he adopted when wanting to spare his guvnor from unwelcome attentions, ‘that Mr Antrobus must consult the police constable before questioning members of the family and household. But we’ll certainly talk to you later.’
At that moment Constable Roberts appeared, and saluted. Both Antrobus and Maxwell raised their hats. Dr McArthur slipped unobtrusively back into the house.
‘Sir,’ said Roberts, ‘I’ve made my headquarters in the gun room, which we can enter from this terrace. There are two murders, the first one of a man said to have been a Fenian, and the other of Mr Ambrose Littlemore, the owner of this castle. Here we are, sir. Let’s go in, so that we can talk in private.’
‘And so we meet again, Constable,’ said Antrobus, ‘and once more it’s murder.’
Once settled in the gun room, the constable gave the detectives a full account of the shooting of the Fenian, and his suspicion that the man had been fatally shot by an unseen assailant immediately after the gamekeeper had hit the man in the leg. And then he told them about the letter that the gamekeeper had received, a warning of trouble to come from someone signing himself ‘Orange William’.
‘These murders, Constable,’ said Antrobus, ‘do you think they are connected?’
‘At first, sir, I thought not. But then I wondered whether the first murder – the murder of the Fenian man – was in some way designed to create a diversion. When the shots were heard, everybody rushed out on to the terrace to see what had happened. This left some person unknown free to stab Mr Littlemore fatally in the back.’
They listened while Constable Roberts gave them a full account of what had happened. He had seen the body sitting dead in a great chair on the balcony overlooking the entrance hall. He had followed a trail of blood back to Mr Littlemore’s room, and had concluded that he had been stabbed there.
‘After I examined Mr Littlemore’s remains, sir, I had his body taken to his room, and laid under a sheet on his bed. I was accompanied by a very remarkable lady, one of the guests, who covered and strapped up the wound in Mr Littlemore’s back.’
‘A remarkable lady. I wonder… . And the Fenian, out in the pasture?’
‘I had him taken on a handcart into the castle court, and put on a table in the harness room next to the stables. The body was soaking wet, and has been covered with a horse-blanket.’
‘Hmm… . I like your idea of a diversion, Constable. Two murders at more or less the same time, although apparently unconnected, does seem a mite contrived. Have you prepared lists of the household and the guests for me to look at?’
‘Yes, sir. This one’s a list of the household servants. You’ll want to question Robert Freeman, the gamekeeper, who shot the Fenian man in the leg, and Albert Stead, Mr Littlemore’s valet. He’s very upset, sir, as he was much attached to his master. And this is the list of family and guests who were present. I’ve not allowed anyone to leave the premises until you have given the word.’
‘Upon my word, PC Roberts,’ said Antrobus, ‘I’m very impressed with how you’ve conducted yourself over this business. I shall certainly let Superintendent Fielding know. We had little time to talk to you when we were here about the murder of Mr Sanders. Are you a native of Hadleigh?’
The constable had flushed with delighted pleasure at Antrobus’s compliment.
‘Yes, sir. I live with my wife Ellen and our new baby in Church Lane.’
‘I’d like to acquaint myself with the geography of this house, Constable. The layout of the main rooms, the bedrooms, and what leads to where. Could you take us on a very quick tour?’
PC Roberts showed them the dining room and the drawing room across the hall, then took them up the main staircase to the bedrooms. In Ambrose Littlemore’s great gothic chamber they saw the sheeted figure lying on the ponderous four-poster. There was a dressing room beyond, and then a small passage led to Miss Cathcart’s room. Returning to the gallery, Roberts opened a door in the panelling and led them down a servants’ staircase to the kitchen passage, which was filled with fitted cupboards and presses. From here, he led them back to the gun room.
‘Very interesting, Constable,’ said Antrobus. ‘There are sinister possibilities in that half-hidden back staircase. Now, I suggest you go home for a while, and see how your Ellen and the baby are doing! If I need you again, I’ll send someone down to the village to fetch you.’
When the constable had gone, Antrobus looked at the list of family and guests. Mr Ambrose Littlemore, now lying dead. Miss Arabella Cathcart. A Colonel and Mrs Scott-James. Beside their names Roberts had written: ‘Colonel a great help.’ Lord Arthur Farrell. Dr Jeremy Oakshott, nephew—
‘Ah! Here he is again, Joe! Turn up any stone, and you’ll find our Jeremy underneath it. He was here in the village on the very night that poor Michael Sanders was murdered. He’s here now, on the night that his uncle is murdered, and a man shot dead in the grounds. And all those years ago, Sergeant, he was hovering in the wings when that poor girl was done to death. Jeremy Oaksh
ott, scholar of the Crusades, and the wielder of a fine Italian hand! I don’t like that man, and I’ll tell you why. He’s—’
Antrobus’s words were driven away by a sudden violent bout of coughing. He tried to draw breath, but succeeded only in half choking himself. One of these days, thought Maxwell, he’ll burst a blood vessel. After a good deal of wheezing, the stertorous breathing abated, and he sat back in his chair with a sigh of relief. At the same time, a thin stream of blood trickled from the side of his mouth.
‘I sometimes think, sir,’ said Sergeant Maxwell, who during the attack had stood at the window whistling ‘The British Grenadiers’, ‘that you have too much of a down on Dr Oakshott. You take everything he does as a personal affront.’
‘Maybe I do, and maybe I have just cause. Now, who else is on this list? Oh! Miss Sophia Jex-Blake! I wondered… . She’s here, Joe!’
‘Indeed, sir? Your lady friend. Well, she did well by us last time – it’s just over a month since she solved that business at St Michael’s College. But I think it’s time, sir, that you flew the flag. The white flag, you know.’
Antrobus knew what this meant. He withdrew a white handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped away the congealing blood from his mouth and chin.
‘Now, sir,’ said Maxwell, ‘what do you want us to do? Shall we divide the spoils?’
‘Yes, we will. I want you to look into this business of the Fenian. Was it just coincidence that two murders took place on the same night? Or is Constable Roberts right in thinking that the first murder was a diversion? Find out all you can. I’ll concentrate on the murder of Mr Littlemore. I’ll see that doctor friend of yours first. What on earth can he want?’
The constable was panting with the exertion of running up the winding road from the gates.
‘Sir!’ he cried. ‘The mystery of the Fenian’s death is solved! Last night, soon after the man was shot dead in the pasture, a wild Irishman burst into the Farmer’s Arms and ordered a bottle of gin. He said his name was Orange William, and he boasted that he had shot the Fenian dead. He sang a Loyalist song, called ‘The Sash my Father Wore’. He paid for his drink, and made his escape.’
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