Murder in the Maze (A Clinton Driffield Mystery)

by J. J. Connington

  Rather to Wendover’s surprise, Sir Clinton showed no great eagerness to be gone. He pulled from his pocket the tin box which had been found in the Maze and slowly removed the cover.

  “You’re an expert with air-guns, I think, Mr. Hawkhurst?” he asked pleasantly, as though appealing to an authority. “Would you mind having a look at these things and telling me what you make of them? Don’t touch the points,” he added quickly. “They’re very dangerous.”

  Arthur Hawkhurst had been listening with a frown to Sir Clinton’s negotiations for the pot of curare; but he seemed to be flattered by the Chief Constable’s direct appeal to him. He came forward, took the box in his hand, and examined the contents minutely.

  “May I take one out to look at it?”

  “Of course—but be careful,” Sir Clinton agreed.

  Arthur removed one of the darts and inspected it.

  “They seem to be just ordinary pattern air-gun darts. They’d fit any of the guns we have. But someone seems to have been monkeying with them—boring holes in them and filling up with some dirt or other. And the feathering’s all filthy, too.”

  He completed his examination and handed the box back to Sir Clinton.

  “Anybody else claim to be an expert?” asked the Chief Constable.

  Sylvia looked at the tiny missiles with a shudder.

  “They’re just ordinary darts so far as I can see,” she said. “And was it one of these things that killed my uncles? They seem such harmless little things. I’ve fired them often and often at targets myself. One would never dream they could be deadly.”

  Sir Clinton closed the box and put it down on the mantelpiece behind him. He seemed suddenly to have been struck by a fresh idea.

  “You said ‘any of the guns we have,’ Mr. Hawkhurst. I’d like to know how many air-guns you have on the premises.”

  Arthur looked at him distrustfully.

  “I can’t tell you on the spot,” he admitted, grudgingly. “We have half a dozen that I could lay my bands on; but we’ve got more than that lying about somewhere or other. They get left in odd places. The gardeners sometimes use them for shooting rats for amusement and so on, and one never knows where the guns are till one asks for them.”

  Sir Clinton seemed rather taken aback.

  “You seem to have a regular armoury,” he said.

  “I’m keen on air-guns,” Arthur explained. “You’re not going to take them away, are you?”

  Sir Clinton waved the suggestion aside at once. “Of course not. I only asked out of curiosity. I knew you were interested.”

  Arthur seemed to be relieved by this.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he said in a much more cordial tone. “So long as you leave me one of them, it’ll do all I want.”

  “Now, Dr. Ardsley, if you’ll just show me where this pot used to stand, I think we shall be able to go,” Sir Clinton said, turning to another matter and dismissing the air-gun question.

  At this, Ernest came forward.

  “I think I can show you where it stood,” he volunteered. “I remember Roger bringing it back from South Africa. He used to keep it on a shelf in his study in his last house, I remember; the third shelf from the top, to the right of the door. Then when he came here, he had such a lot of stuff that he’d collected that he found he’d got to make a museum of it; so he put it all together in this room. I’ve been over it all with him—I helped him to arrange it, I remember. But it seemed to me very dull. Not a bit interesting. But, of course, if you like, I could show it to you and tell you all about it. Perhaps it might interest you, though I found it dull. People’s tastes differ so much. One never can tell, can one?”

  Ardsley had paid no attention to Ernest’s flood of information. He had gone down to the proper shelf and now he pointed out the empty space to Sir Clinton. The Chief Constable examined the place carefully, but said nothing.

  At length he went to the windows of the room and inspected the catches.

  “Anyone could have got in here without much trouble,” he commented. “You don’t seem much afraid of burglars, Mr. Shandon.”

  “No,” Ernest admitted, refixing his eyeglasses with care and looking wisely at the window fastenings. “You see, we’ve never had any burglary here. It may seem strange, for of course Whistlefield’s a bit isolated and it might be a good place to burgle. I never burgled myself, you know, so I don’t really know about these things. There’s a lot of silver, of course,” he added. “Perhaps it is strange that we never had a burglary. Now I come to think of it, it would be quite an easy house to get into. We ought to have burglar alarms put on. Really, things are an awful bother. Can you recommend a good burglar alarm, Sir Clinton?”

  The Chief Constable deprecated the proposed task with a smile.

  “Really, Mr. Shandon, I’ve had no particular experience. You’d better have a look at a few and choose the one you think most satisfactory.”

  Ernest’s face expressed as clearly as print his inward comment: “More trouble!”

  “I don’t know, Sir Clinton; perhaps I’d better get some. But then, you know,” he added with a touch of relief, “we’ve never had a burglary yet. Hardly worth while fitting alarms, perhaps. It’s such a nuisance getting the things, and then getting workmen up to fit them—turn the whole place upside down and all that—and then having to remember to set them at night before one goes to bed. You don’t think it’s worth while, do you?” he ended, hopefully.

  Sir Clinton shook his head.

  “You’re in charge now, Mr. Shandon, you know. You must do what you think best yourself.” He turned to Ardsley and Wendover.

  “I think we must be getting on the road again.”

  They took their leave and got into Wendover’s car again.

  “We’ll drop you at your house,” said Sir Clinton to the toxicologist. “It was very good of you to take all this trouble to help us. I feel a good deal easier in my mind now that I’ve got this.”

  He tapped the little jar of curare which he had brought away with him.

  Chapter Eight

  Opportunity, Method, and Motive

  Wendover picked up the decanter and poured out some whiskey for his guest.

  “You can’t complain that I’ve worried you with questions, Clinton, but I think you might tell me something about this business at the Maze. You seem to have definite ideas, and I’d like to know what they are.”

  He glanced at the tumbler as he spoke, then added:

  “In vino veritas, you know.”

  Sir Clinton looked up with a quizzical expression on his face:

  “Truth at the bottom of the decanter, eh?” he inquired. “Well, if that’s the method you can give me just two fingers and all the soda. The truth’s sometimes dangerous when it’s undiluted. And, remember, I warned you frankly that it might not be convenient to tell you very much just at present. The arrangement was that you were to give your views and I was to say what I thought of them.”

  Wendover acknowledged the accuracy of this.

  “At least you might give me something in the way of general principles, though. They aren’t hush-hush matters, at any rate.”

  Sir Clinton came over, lifted his tumbler, and went back again to his seat before replying.

  “That’s true enough,” he admitted. “But I don’t think general principles are likely to take you far in this case. I can make you a present of them without giving much away.”

  Wendover poured out his own whiskey and soda and returned to his chair.

  “Go on,” he said. “Make a lecture of it, if you like. The night’s still young.”

  “I’ve a good mind to take you at your word, and you’ll have only yourself to thank if it bores you. To begin with, then, there are three basic points on which a prosecutor has to satisfy the judge—or the jury, if it’s a jury case. These are: opportunity, method, and motive. It isn’t absolutely necessary to prove motive; but one does what one can to establish it if possible. A jury might be chary of
convicting unless they saw something of the sort.”

  “You might expand that a bit,” Wendover suggested. “All you’ve given me is three words.”

  “Take them one by one,” Sir Clinton went on. “First of all, opportunity. The accused man must be somebody who had a real chance of committing the crime—somebody who isn’t excluded by ordinary physical impossibilities. If a body with its throat freshly cut were to fall into this room at the present moment, it would be no use trying to bring a case against the Mikado or the President of the United States. We know that they’re thousands of miles away at this time. It would be physically impossible for them to have done the trick.”

  “That’s self-evident,” said Wendover. “A murderer’s bound to have been on the spot when he committed his murder.”

  “Not necessarily,” Sir Clinton contradicted at once. “A poisoner needn’t be near his victim when the victim dies. He might have sent poisoned chocolates by post or something like that. But he must have had the opportunity of committing the crime, whether he was on the spot or not. You couldn’t have accused Robinson Crusoe in a poisoned chocolates case; he was outside the postal radius.”

  Wendover nodded in agreement.

  “But in this particular case at the Maze,” he commented, “it’s pretty plain that the murderer was on the spot all right. The person who killed the Shandons was somebody who was in or near the Maze between three and four o’clock this afternoon.”

  Sir Clinton passed to his second point.

  “Method is the next thing. It’s an axiom that the more ordinary the method of killing is, the more difficult it is to spot the murderer. Suppose you find a body in a by-street and it turns out that the man has been stabbed to death. What have you to go on? Not much. But if you find somebody poisoned with some fairly out-of-the-way alkaloid, then you limit the number of possible murderers very considerably. You remember the Crippen case. Divergence from the normal is the weakest link in a murderer’s chain mail.”

  “Well, you ought to be happy in this affair. You’ve got a sufficiently out-of-the-way method.”

  “That’s so,” Sir Clinton admitted. “But what you gain on the swings you sometimes lose on the roundabouts, you know. The method in this case was one that either a man or a woman could have used. Even a child can pull a trigger. That extends the range a bit.”

  “But a child would need to have had the chance of getting at the curare.”

  “And the curare has been lying open to anyone for the last year or two. Don’t forget that.”

  “Then you think it was the stuff up at the house that was used?”

  “I don’t think anything about it at present. All I wanted was to shut off that possible source of supply.”

  “Then you must be expecting more murders?”

  Sir Clinton appeared not to hear the query.

  “Suppose we come to motives now. Barring very exceptional cases, there are really only five motives that make it worth while to commit murder: women, money, revenge, fear, and homicidal mania. And I should think that in most cases if you go deep enough you’d find either women or money at the back of the business.”

  Wendover reflected for a time, evidently conning over the possibilities.

  “It doesn’t seem to be women this time, so far as things have gone,” he suggested at last.

  Sir Clinton refused to be drawn.

  “I must confess,” he said, “that I have a sneaking admiration for the Shandons’ murderer—at least so far as his brains go. Could you imagine a better place for murder than the Maze? Absolute privacy guaranteed by the nature of the affair. No one could see through those hedges. The murderer can creep up to within lethal distance, come almost face to face with his victim, and yet remain absolutely invisible. And when the job’s done, he can sneak off in perfect safety. No one can swear to seeing him. If he’s found in the Maze, he can explain that he heard a cry for help and rushed to assist. It was a brainy lad who hit on that locale for his crime.”

  Wendover thought he had put his finger on a weak spot.

  “But that limits the number of possible murderers still further, surely. It would need to be a fellow who knew the Maze intimately, otherwise he’d have got tied up in it.”

  Sir Clinton smiled a trifle derisively.

  “Didn’t you hear me inquire about that at Whistlefield? The Maze is open day and night. Anyone could learn all about it, and no one would be much the wiser, since it’s in an outlying part of the grounds. A man could come up the river in a boat, drop into it, and cut a whole series of private marks on the hedges to guide him to the centre—bend twigs or something like that, which wouldn’t give away the fact that he’d been at work. Or he could even bring in a thread and trail it behind him to help him out again, and roll it up as he retreated. No, you can’t bank much on that point, Squire.”

  “Well, who did it, then?” demanded Wendover, exasperated by the upsetting of his idea.

  Sir Clinton looked up with something suspiciously like a grin on his face.

  “It might have been anybody,” he said, oracularly. “But it seems more likely that it was somebody, if you catch my meaning.”

  Wendover betrayed no pique at this indirect discomfiture.

  “One doesn’t get much out of you, that’s clear,” he responded ruefully.

  Sir Clinton seemed to feel that he might say something further without breaking through his self-imposed limitations.

  “What’s wrong with your outlook on the business, Squire, is that you want to treat a real crime as if it were a bit clipped out of a detective novel. In a ’tec yarn, you get everything nicely sifted for you. The author puts down only things that are relevant to the story. If he didn’t select his materials, his book would be far too long and no one would have the patience to plough through it. The result is that the important clues are thrown up as if they had a spotlight on them, if the reader happens to have any intelligence.”

  He paused to light a cigarette before he continued.

  “In real life,” he went on, “there isn’t any of this kind of simplification. You get a mass of stuff thrown at your head in the way of evidence; and in the end nine-tenths of it usually turns out to be completely irrelevant. You’ve got to sift the grain from the chaff yourself, with no author to do the rough work for you. Do you remember the Map-game?”

  Wendover shook his head.

  “I don’t recognise it from the title.”

  “You must have played it sometime or other when you were a kid,” Sir Clinton continued. “One player chooses a name on a map; the other player’s got to find out which name it is. He can ask any questions he likes, provided that the first player can answer them by a plain ‘Yes’ or a ‘No.’ Now that game is something like detective work, though the problem’s much easier to solve. Curiously enough, the really clever player doesn’t choose a name in tiny type—only the beginner does that. The expert picks out some name like France, or Germany, or Czecho-Slovakia—something that stretches half-way across the map. Then When the opponent asks: ‘Is it on this half of the map?’ the expert answers ‘No,’ quite truthfully; and the beginner at once assumes that it must be in the other half and proceeds accordingly, quite forgetting that it may be on both halves simultaneously. That’s the kind of thing that may turn up in criminal-hunting. The fellow you’re after may be—in fact he generally is—playing two parts simultaneously. He’s not only a criminal; he’s a normal member of society as well—at least in murder cases he usually is. He stretches over both halves of the map, you see? And if you insist on looking at one half only, you miss him completely.”

  “That’s a long suit of talk you had in your hand,” Wendover commented. “You seem very flush of information on some points.”

  Sir Clinton laughed, admitting the hit.

  “You asked for a lecture, and now it seems you don’t care for it when you get it. Well, try your hand yourself. Let’s hear what you’ve made of the case. I’m not afraid of prejudice now.�
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  Wendover glanced at his friend with some suspicion: but he seemed reassured by what he saw. Sir Clinton appeared to be quite anxious to hear his ideas.

  “If you’re not pulling my leg, I don’t mind,” he said. “I’ve taken in most of what you said, and that limits things down a good deal. I’ll take the possibles, one by one, and consider them. The bother is that it’s difficult to find any one person who will fit into your three classes—I mean someone who had an opportunity, the method, and a motive strong enough.”

  Sir Clinton knocked the ash from his cigarette.

  “Go on,” he said. “Let’s see how you get round that snag. I’ll represent a jury of average intelligence, if I can screw myself up to that pitch.”

  “Well, first of all,” Wendover suggested, “there’s this Hackleton case looming in the background. Now that Neville Shandon’s done for, Hackleton stands to win. It was a fight between them. Shandon was depending more on his brains than on his witnesses, I take it; and now that’s out of it Hackleton will get off scot-free. There’s your motive all right.”

  Sir Clinton nodded his assent to this, and Wendover continued with rather more confidence.

  “The method used was obviously a sound one, no matter where the murder was done. An air-gun’s fairly silent; and that curare evidently kills quickly. It’s not the sort of thing an ordinary rough would think of. Even if he did think of it he couldn’t get the poison. But Hackleton’s got money enough to buy some unscrupulous fellow with brains; and this gone-under intellectual might have hit on the trick. Or Hackleton himself may have devised it and passed it on to his tool.”

  “That’s so. And then?”

  “The fact that the murder was done in the Maze may have been mere accident. They may have intended to get at Neville Shandon anywhere they could; and it just happened that he went into the Maze and gave them the best chance there.”

  “You assume, of course, that they would have got up the topography of the estate, Maze included, beforehand?”