Crossword Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “Miss Raby came by the afternoon train,” the other answered. “I remember telling her she must hurry to catch the ’bus for Suffby Cove, and she said she would walk along the cliffs. I sent her suit-case on by the next ’bus.”

  “Rather jolly walk by the cliffs. I must go back that way,” Bobby observed, and, after a little more talk, went off to the call-box which stood at the entrance to the station, just outside it.

  But, then as he was approaching it, he heard his name called softly, and, looking round, saw a hand waving to him from a car that had just drawn up. He went towards it, and saw in the driving-seat his chief, Superintendent Mitchell, who told him briefly to jump in.

  “Bit of luck meeting you like this,” Mitchell remarked as he drove on. “Major Markham’s been worrying; got the wind up; I don’t know why. He was afraid of compromising you if he tried to get in touch direct, so he asked me to have a try as being less known about here. Well, got anything to report?”

  “Heaps, sir,” Bobby answered. “I was going to ring you up.”

  He began to tell the whole story of his experiences since his arrival at Fairview. He told it in detail, omitting nothing; no incident, however trivial; no theory, however quickly discarded; he told all, and Mitchell listened intently, his face growing very grave. When Bobby at last finished, he was silent for a time, and then said slowly:

  “Do you know what I am wondering? Whether it was George Winterton himself put his brother through it. There seems to have been some sort of big money deal between them.”

  “Yes, sir, but,” Bobby pointed out, “the evidence of the Coopers seems to provide an alibi for him. Unless they are lying – and I don’t see why they should lie simply to protect him – he was in bed at the time his brother was drowning.”

  “I had forgotten that for the moment,” Mitchell admitted. He had been taking notes while he listened to Bobby, and now he referred to them. “There’s this Mr. Shorton, the City man,” he remarked. “So far as I can see, he is about the only person with any motive for wanting Archibald out of the way. Apparently he had sunk a good bit of money in this scheme of his for a seaside hotel Archibald Winterton was holding up, and apparently he had some reason for thinking he hadn’t been treated very fairly. Archibald seems to have got in ahead of him with buying the land lying across Suffby Point, and he may have suspected the real object was to squeeze him out and carry on afterwards. Perhaps it was, too. But you don’t often get murder in the City, though you do get sharp practice all right. There seems to have been a good deal of money at stake, though, that Shorton is threatened with losing.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Bobby; “and, now that Archibald is dead, George is the obstacle in the way. If anything happened to him, I suppose the scheme would go through at once.”

  Mitchell stroked a reflective chin and looked more worried than ever.

  “Did you say,” he observed presently, “that Shorton was a champion swimmer?”

  “At any rate, exceptionally good,” Bobby answered.

  They had halted the car, for their talk, at a spot whence a good view out to sea was to be had. Gazing at it reflectively, Mitchell murmured, half to himself:

  “It keeps many secrets; perhaps it means to keep this one, too. Drowning or murder, I wonder which?” He roused himself from his thoughts and said: “We shall have to check up on him. About this nephew, Colin Ross. You say you think Mr. Winterton seems afraid of him?”

  “Once or twice I’ve thought I saw him looking at him in a funny sort of way. I thought perhaps it meant he was afraid or nervous of him in some way. That’s all.”

  Mitchell made a fresh note.

  “Betting man,” he said. “We’ll have to try to find out if he is pressed for money. But it doesn’t appear that his uncle’s death – the death of either of them for that matter – was going to be any benefit to him. Then there’s this secretary girl, Miss Raby. You say the other nephew was cleared out for flirting with her?”

  “Yes, sir; but she seems a very quiet, gentle sort of girl.”

  “Sometimes they’re the worst when they once get going,” observed Mitchell. “God help the man who comes between a woman and the thing she wants when she wants it bad. An elemental lot, the women. If she was really keen on this nephew – what was his name, Miles Winterton? – and the uncle came between them, that might account for a lot.”

  “But Archibald had nothing to do with all that,” Bobby pointed out.

  “She may have thought he had,” answered Mitchell; “anyhow, we shall have to try to check up on her and on Mr. Miles, too. You say she came back from Town by the afternoon train but pretended it was the late one she had arrived by.”

  “Yes, sir. The station-master told me that when I was talking to him just now.”

  “May mean something or may not,” Mitchell reflected. “Probably not; but you can never tell. But somehow or another we must find out what this Laura Shipman was doing talking to Winterton in the middle of the night. That must mean something. You can’t suggest what?”

  “I can’t even imagine any explanation, sir,” Bobby answered. “There’s no suggestion he ever takes any notice of the village girls, as it seems Archibald used to do, and there would be plenty of opportunities of meeting in the daytime if they wanted to.”

  “Seems to be all cross purposes, this case,” sighed Mitchell. “Some of it must mean something, but a lot of it can’t, but how on earth to pick out what matters, I can’t see. Though I don’t say the Assist. Commish., when I tell him how you identified the Laura Shipman girl by that trick of yours with the watch, won’t put a good mark against your name – unless he forgets. Wonderful poor memory a man develops, somehow, when he becomes Assist. Commish. Owen,” he added, with a sudden change of manner, “I’m worried about the killing of that dog.”

  “I don’t like that part one little bit myself,” agreed Bobby, “only I don’t understand it either... If the poor brute gave no alarm when there happened whatever did or didn’t happen to Archibald, why should it be necessary to knock it on the head now? It seems going out of the way to put us on our guard.” Mitchell nodded.

  “The dog’s silence the one time and its being killed now are both hard to understand, hard to fit together,” he repeated, still worried. “The worst is, if Archibald was drowned by accident, there may be no fitting together needed and we may be merely beating the air. Anyhow, I think we shall have to have a talk with Miss Laura. To come back to Jennings’s wireless you were talking about, you say it was bought in Norwich somewhere.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bobby, and gave the name of the shop he had been careful to note.

  “It’s a long shot,” observed Mitchell, “but well see what they have to say. The attack on him was made before Archibald was drowned, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. He bought the wireless set a fortnight after the attack on him, and nearly a month before Archibald’s death.”

  “I think those are the chief points,” Mitchell remarked, again consulting his notes. “There’s the swilling down of the summerhouse, too, but I don’t see that that concerns us – unless you have a theory that the dog was killed there and the swilling down was to remove any signs of blood.”

  “There’s that,” agreed Bobby, “but why should anyone use an old tumbledown summer-house, with a dangerous roof to it, for killing a dog in ? Besides, I saw no tracks of any dog, and those I did see had been made after the rain, while the dog was almost certainly killed before.”

  “Difficult to see where swilling the floor of an old summerhouse comes into the picture,” repeated Mitchell, “and yet I’ve a sort of feeling that it does. About the telegram Winterton received at lunch. You say you got them to repeat it?”

  “Yes, sir. The good lady didn’t much want to, I think, but I suppose she decided it was all right. I think she wasn’t quite sure whether it was regular.”

  Mitchell looked at him.

  “I daresay she would have done it for me, too,” he remark
ed, “when I was as young as you and just as beautiful. But I never had a permanent wave like yours in my hair. Personally, I am rather inclined to call a curl like that just plain cheating; hardly fair, at any rate.”

  Bobby wriggled. He always wriggled when anyone talked about that curl he had done so much, and so ineffectually, to straighten out by means of soap, combings, and brushings ad lib.

  “She knew I was staying with Mr. Winterton,” he protested. “It was that did it.”

  “Not it,” said Mitchell with decision. “Let me look at the thing again.”

  Bobby took the telegram from his pocket, and Mitchell smoothed it out thoughtfully.

  “‘You know who released gaol yesterday morning; you can expect him soon’,” he read aloud. “Handed in at Charing Cross, where there’s no chance of its being remembered. Well, anyhow, it gives us a clue we ought to be able to follow up easily enough. We’ll check up on every living creature who was let out of gaol in these British Isles yesterday and find out which of them has anything to do with Mr. George Winterton, and, when we know that, it ought to put us on the right track. Nothing else?”

  “No, sir.”

  Mitchell fell into deep thought again.

  “Well,” he said, rousing himself, “there’s one thing you’ve noticed that must mean something, because a discrepancy always does.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Bobby gravely.

  “Well, then,” said Mitchell, “remember it, and now you had better get along back to Fairview. Your instructions are,” he added, his voice suddenly stern and official, “so far as possible, don’t let George Winterton out of your sight. Be on your guard every moment – more especially to-night.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bobby once more, and this time more gravely still.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Murder!

  Mitchell put his young colleague down at a lonely spot on the road and then drove on alone, so that no inquisitive eyes might notice them together. The rest of the distance to Suffby Cove Bobby accomplished, therefore, on foot, hurrying a little now, for an obscure apprehension drove him on.

  Likely enough, he supposed, that in fact no real danger threatened, and yet he felt he would be easier in his mind, once he were back at Fairview and knew that nothing had happened during his absence, and knew that if anything threatened in the future, it would be while he was on the spot to check and meet it. Yet still it remained likely enough that Archibald’s drowning had been purely accidental; and, indeed, how could murder have been carried out with no sign left and the Airedale lying there and making no sound? Besides, who had benefited in any way whatever by his death? A possible hint about as yet unproved semi-flirtations with one or other of the village girls was no sufficient background for so grim a picture as premeditated murder makes. And yet there was always the difficulty of understanding why the sea should have had its way with so strong a swimmer on so quiet and calm a morning.

  At any rate, Bobby reflected, there was now a good solid clue to work on. Mitchell’s methods were thorough, the C.I.D. organisation complete; soon there would be a separate report on every living creature, man, woman, or child, released from any gaol in the British Isles during the last day or two, and it would be a very funny thing if they could not find out to whom the recent telegram referred. Once that was known, progress would be easy, and it would be possible to form some idea of what all these happenings meant, if indeed they meant anything at all. For that, Bobby’s sense of logic and reasoning powers, and his sense of the reality of things, led him to doubt, while yet some instinct, deeper and more profound than logic, told him that things evil and horrible were brewing. There came into his mind a memory of the opening scene in Macbeth where the three witches brew mischief together, and he fancied that perhaps, somewhere very near, that same scene was being repeated, though it might be in a different shape and form, with all the difference there is between the society of to-day and that of a thousand years ago. Nor could he quite get rid of the teasing memory of the recently swilled floor in the half-ruinous summer-house built like a Greek temple, for somehow he still had the impression that if only he knew why that had been done, then he would know all.

  Then, of course, there was the “discrepancy,” as Mitchell called it, so noticeably occurring in his narrative of his experiences. He supposed that must have some significance, and, as now he was near the village, he left the main road to take the path leading through the cottages. One or two of his acquaintances of the morning he met and nodded to, and he noticed old Mrs. Shipman standing on her threshold with her “unlucky” black cat in her arms. But she scowled when she saw him, and went indoors, and he walked on till he came to the cottage occupied by Adams, the Fairview chauffeur and gardener, and his wife, with Miss Raby for a lodger. Mrs. Adams, of course, knew who Bobby was, and as he saw her in her garden he stopped to chat for a moment. Turning the conversation on to sea-bathing, he learnt that Miss Raby, though no great swimmer, generally went for a dip in the sea before breakfast. Her alarm-clock roused her at six every morning, Mrs. Adams explained in answer to a leading question of Bobby’s, and, when he suggested that perhaps she kept it slow on purpose, Mrs. Adams laughed at the little joke and explained that they “had the wireless” and that Miss Raby’s alarm-clock and their own and the kitchen clock were put right by it every evening. Bobby made one or two other little jokes and aimless inquiries so that Mrs. Adams should not suspect any special meaning was hidden in his questions about the alarm-clock, and then took his leave. In his pocket-book he made a note in the private cypher he used, to remind him to put in his report that he had checked up on Miss Raby’s alarm-clock and had evidence that it was always kept right.

  When he reached Fairview, he found Mrs. Cooper in the hall in the act of taking into the study, where Mr. Winterton and Miss Raby were still at work, a tray with tea and a plate of freshly baked scones of most appetising appearance, so golden-brown and crisp they looked.

  “They look jolly good,” Bobby commented; “make my mouth water. I say, if I drifted into the study should I stand a chance of getting some?”

  Mrs. Cooper laughed a little, evidently not ill pleased at the compliment.

  “I made them specially for Mr. Winterton,” she said. “I can’t always find the time, but he seems to enjoy them when I do.”

  “They look scrumptious,” Bobby repeated, and then made a wry face. “Only I don’t know if I dare eat anything at all,” he said. “I’m half afraid a hollow tooth I’ve got is starting off again.”

  Mrs. Cooper was interested. She was always interested in other people’s troubles or difficulties, and always knew just what ought to be done. In this case she knew a very good dentist; only a young man certainly, but very clever and careful, who visited Suffby Horpe once a week. Mr. Owen would do well to see him, she said, and Bobby thanked her and made a note of the name, but confessed he was an awful coward where dentists were concerned. However, those scones looked so jolly he decided that he could cadge one he would risk its setting that exposed nerve going again, so he followed Mrs. Cooper into the study, where he received a smiling greeting from Mr. Winterton.

  “While you’ve been wandering over half the country, young man,” he said, “looking for a chance to get into mischief most likely, we’ve been sitting here with our noses to the grindstone, haven’t we, Miss Raby, with nothing to disturb our labours?”

  Bobby smiled faintly, understanding that these last few words were meant specially for him, and were a teasing reference to his fears and nervousness and warnings about taking every precaution possible. Miss Raby, busy clearing a table of a mass of books and manuscript, that Mrs. Cooper might have somewhere to put down her tray, responded to her employer’s remark with some sort of muffled sound between a word and a grunt that might have meant anything, and Mr. Winterton laughed a little.

  “Miss Raby’s cross because I’ve spent all afternoon over my crossword puzzle I won’t let her help me with,” he said smilingly. “But I don�
�t want any professional expert butting in; this is my own little effort – my ewe-lamb of a crossword. Interested in crossword puzzles, Owen?”

  “I try them sometimes,” Bobby answered. “I think the clues are often a bit far-fetched, though.”

  “You can’t make them too obvious,” protested Miss Raby from the professional point of view.

  “Some of the clues in this one I’m working on might interest you, Owen, some day perhaps,” remarked Mr. Winterton, repeating an observation he had made before, and it struck Bobby that though he had taken every care to inform Mitchell of every detail, even the most insignificant, he was not sure that he had said anything of Mr. Winterton’s interest in crossword puzzles, or of his efforts to construct one to rival Miss Raby’s professional concoctions.

  However, crosswords were only a harmless pastime, without, Bobby supposed, any reference to the strange, impalpable fog of threat and menace into which it seemed they were all caught up, and Mr. Winterton was now devoting his attention to the scones.

  “Ah, your own special make,” he said beamingly to Mrs. Cooper. “They’re always first rate.”

  “I’m sure I hope you’ll enjoy them, sir,” Mrs. Cooper said.

  “You can be perfectly sure I shall,” declared Mr. Winterton, “they’re always delicious”; and, after Mrs. Cooper had withdrawn, he remarked: “She makes them from a secret recipe of her own, and very good they are, too. I only get them when she wants to be specially nice to me.”

  Bobby, in spite of his expressed fears about that tooth of his, did them full justice, and found them delicious. Miss Raby expressed a considered opinion that their secret consisted in the use of honey and cream, and afterwards Bobby got a book and sat in the garden, close to the study door, so as to be at hand in case of need, for he was still troubled by a kind of dim, unacknowledged apprehension that kept his attention less on his book than on every sound or movement near. It was always a relief to him when the steady tap, tap, tap of the typewriter, or the sight of Mr. Winterton’s figure passing to and fro near the window, told that all was still quiet and normal within.