Murder Adrift
Page 16
She pointed to the two metal pedals on which her feet were resting under a rug.
There was a pause.
‘And then. . . .?’
‘The shot awoke Lucy who hurried down. Dorothy, the maid, sleeps in the attic and slept through everything. The pair of us were alone with Hector and he had died at once.’
And then, as though all her controlled, pent-up feelings had been released, she put her hands to her face and wept bitterly. She quickly recovered, wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and grew composed again.
‘I’m sorry. I despise exhibitions of this kind. The threats to ring up the police and brandishing the gun were parts of a charade whereby I hoped to persuade Hector to give up the idea of stealing my jewellery. I was in a rage. I must say the jewels were, to me, a sort of mysterious talisman and assurance that I would never again suffer the poverty we endured in my poor father’s time, when with his miserable pittance as dean of the cathedral, we had to scratch and scrape to keep up with our so-called social equals in the cathedral close. I must hurry. Kenneth will be back any minute. He’s been away quite a time. He and Lucy are very fond of each other.’
‘And then. . . .?’
‘. . . I made up my mind that Hector wasn’t going to take away the stones. However, there we were . . . I decided that Kenneth must come home at once and ran the risk of telephoning his hotel and telling him to return immediately as I was feeling very ill. Which was true in the circumstances. The rest you know. The idea of taking Hector to his boat and turning the boat adrift was Kenneth’s. A sort of Viking’s funeral. Judging from results, not a very bright one. We knew Hector was mixed up in some underhand immigration affair. Lucy had overheard him telephoning once when he came here before to take away my diamond ring. Kenneth said that the police would think one of the gang had killed him. Kenneth, even as a boy, was no use at cloak-and-dagger games. Not enough imagination or ingenuity.’
‘But how did you get the body from here to the boat?’
‘In my wheel-chair. There was nobody to help us. We couldn’t risk it. At first we thought of making a clean breast of it to the police, but we were afraid of local scandal. We’ve had enough in our family mainly due to Hector, without that final horror. It was a terrible risk. There is a paved path behind the property opposite this house. It was made up by Sam Pollitt when he started his unsuccessful building venture on the seafront. Now it is neglected and out of sight of most of the houses. It ends quite near the harbour where Hector’s boat was tied up. Lucy and Kenneth wrapped the body in a rug and wheeled it to the boat. It must have been a nightmare, but they did it unobserved. Then Kenneth tumbled poor Hector in the dinghy, rowed to the large boat, and put him in the cabin. That was all. I must ask you to be merciful about Kenneth and Lucy. They did it for me and we were all so panic-stricken. . . . ’
‘What happened to the revolver?’
‘I gave it to Lucy. She threw it in the river.’
‘I see. I’m sorry, Mrs. Todd. I’ll need your full statement. . . .’
The door opened and Kenneth Todd stood there, dishevelled, as though returning once again from his nightmare journey with his brother’s body.
‘Lucy collapsed again when we got to her room. Dorothy’s with her now and she’ll be all right, I think.’
Hopkinson appeared, anxiously looking from one to another, wondering what had happened in his absence.
‘What have you been telling the police, mother?’
Kenneth seemed to sense that the climax had been passed, a solution had been reached, and was uneasy about it all.
‘I have told the Chief Superintendent that it was I who shot Hector accidentally and I’ve also told him how the body got on board the boat. . . . ’
‘You’ve what!!’
‘Now don’t be silly, Kenneth. Don’t go and say that you did it, because you’ve got an alibi. You were in the hotel when it all happened and can prove it. I’ve promised Mr. Littlejohn that I’ll sign a statement.’
Hurrying steps came down the stairs, Dorothy shouted from the landing, and Lucy appeared in the doorway and pushed past Kenneth.
‘What are you doing here, Lucy?’
Kenneth sounded annoyed as though Lucy was playing truant. And then, in a disappointed petulant tone :
‘Mother’s confessed to killing Heck.’
Lucy obviously didn’t share his depressed mood. She seemed quite recovered from her previous timidity and ready to take a hand in the queer confessions which were flying about.
‘That’s ridiculous. She knows I shot Hector and even if she is old and willing to sacrifice herself for our happiness, I’m not going to let her take on that load of guilt. I don’t know what she’s told you, Mr. Littlejohn, but it’s all quite simple. When mother and I were alone Hector came to burgle her jewellery which he knew was here, and his one chance was to get it before it went back to the bank. I don’t know what wakened me; perhaps it was the lift moving. I got out my revolver and went quietly downstairs thinking it was burglars. I found Hector there with the safe open and the jewel-cases in his hands. His mother was there and he was drunk and brandishing a gun at her. I called to him to drop it and he turned it on me. So I let him have it. How was I to know that his gun was empty? Did she tell you how Kenneth and I took Hector to his boat in her wheelchair?’
‘Yes, she told me that.’
Littlejohn felt that the direction of the case had been taken from his hands altogether and the family were going to quarrel and scrap with one another for the honour of committing the crime.
‘The gun was yours, Mrs. Todd?’
‘Of course,’ said Lucy. ‘I must admit it wasn’t licensed. My father taught me to shoot and gave me the revolver. I’d forgotten I had it until all these robberies occurred. I thought it might be useful to scare any intruder, especially when Kenneth was away for the night.’
‘And Mr. Hector had a gun, as well? Quite an unlicensed armory. Did you throw Mr. Hector’s gun in the river along with the murder weapon?’
‘I threw Hector’s gun away, yes. I kept my own. Here it is. . . .’
She opened her bag and produced the weapon.
‘Your lab. boys will find that it is the gun that fired the bullet that killed Hector.’
Littlejohn was not surprised that this new Lucy had had enough nerve to assist Kenneth in disposing of the body. Now that she had shed the listless pose she had previously assumed there was a hard core of great strength in her.
‘The gun was licensed years ago in my name and I still have the slip for it. It expired long ago. All the same, it will identify the gun as mine.’
Littlejohn rose to his feet a little wearily.
‘I have already warned Mrs. Todd senior in the official manner and I must now do the same to you, madam. . . .’
‘I’ll sign a statement whenever you like, Chief Superintendent. We had better have our lawyer handy to keep matters tidy. I hope this will be regarded as self-defence and that manslaughter, instead of murder, will be the charge.’
Mrs. Lucy Todd, with the help of a good lawyer, was acquitted. She had better luck than that of Dawson, Lever and partners, who got three years each.
By a strange coincidence, Kenneth Todd married Lucy Todd at a London registry office at the same time that Detective Sergeant Michael Hopkinson led the doctor’s secretary to the altar at a small country church in Sussex where her father was the vicar. Littlejohn and his wife were there and so were Dr. and Mrs. Macmannus. Littlejohn and the doctor met at the reception, and the conversation turned to the Todd murder.
‘What did you think of the verdict in the Todd case, Littlejohn?’
‘It was a fair one in view of all the evidence. A good lawyer, a catalogue of all Hector Todd’s crimes, his cruelty to his wife and children, and his moral degradation. To this add the fact that his death happened while he was stealing his mother’s jewels and he held her up with a revolver. Perfect melodrama. The jury were won over right away.’
&
nbsp; ‘I agree. But having lived with the family, so to speak, as you and I have done, what then? Closely knit, with one member slowly transgressing against all the accepted rules of the Big House and its financial foundations, disgracing the Todds in public, and holding back a satisfactory marriage arrangement between Kenneth and Lucy, might they not have decided to eliminate him lest even worse befell the lot of them? The Todds have a big pull with the local police and establishment and I am sure that had Scotland Yard, in the shape of yourself, not arrived on the scene the crime would eventually have found its way to the dead-letter department. A murder at sea by person or persons unknown, presumably by some disreputable associate of Heck’s.’
Littlejohn shook his head.
‘We will never know. That family played so many charades in the course of the inquiry that it was impossible to sort out the wheat from the chaff.’
A Note on the Author
Gorge Bellairs is a pen name of Harold Blundell (1902–1985), a crime writer born in Lancashire. Blundell was a prolific writer who published over 50 crime and mystery novels in his life, most of them featuring the detective Inspector Littlejohn.
Blundell also wrote regularly for the Manchester Guardian.
Discover books by George Bellairs published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/GeorgeBellairs
Death Before Breakfast
Death on the Last Train
Devious Murder
Murder Adrift
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain in 1972 by John Gifford Limited
Copyright © 1972 George Bellairs
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eISBN: 9781448214471
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