Death at Swaythling Court

by J. J. Connington

“I’ve studied the case of the blackmailer pretty thoroughly—merely theoretically, of course, for literary purposes; and the more I think over it, the more precarious a trade it seems. You see, Colonel, if a blackmailer makes a single mistake, he’s got to pay for it, and steeply, too. If he misgauges the character of a single victim, he may find himself in Queer Street before he knows where he is. It isn’t merely at the start of any particular episode, either. He may have been blackmailing a man for years and getting paid his hush-money regularly; and then, suddenly, the man may find his resources overtaxed and may take the short way out, even at the cost of a scandal. Of course, that’s bound to be a pretty rare affair; once you start paying blackmail, you generally go on. But still, there’s always the off-chance that a victim may cut up rough.

  “And it isn’t a certainty that the police are the worst that a blackmailer has to fear. A victim may get crazed and decide on more direct methods of righting his wrongs—take the law into his own hands and save scandal in that way. It certainly looks to me a very risky business. I’ve often wondered if some of these apparently aimless murders—cases where there seemed to be no traceable motive—hadn’t that at the back of them if the truth were only known.”

  Colonel Sanderstead had no need to feign interest at this point. Angermere, whether intentionally or not, was coming very near to the possible inner history of the Hubbard case; and the Colonel was on tenterhooks to see what turn would come next in the exposition. Here, in spite of all the talk about “theoretical” and “professional rearrangements,” was a detached observer approaching the case with an unbiased mind; and his host was disturbed to find how close he seemed to be getting to the solution of the mystery.

  “The only one of the male servants whom I saw,” continued the novelist, “was the butler, Leake. How did he strike you?”

  “Hang-dog fellow,” blurted out the Colonel, voicing his original impression of the man.

  “Quite so; that’s how he appeared to me. I had the feeling that all his frankness wasn’t quite the right stuff, somehow. As soon as I set eyes on him while he was giving his evidence, I made up my mind that he was the sort of person one might cast for the villain of the piece. He was so infernally suave, you know; and yet somehow one got the impression that he wasn’t naturally a suave person at all. He’d put on a kind of mask; but underneath that there was a pretty tough character.”

  “I agree with you there,” the Colonel concurred. “When he turned up at the Court that morning he showed a good deal less surprise than one might have expected under the circumstances.”

  “Ah,” the novelist commented. “That’s a useful point if I ever use this affair in print. I like to have things right, even in a shocker.”

  He jotted something down in his ever-ready notebook.

  “Now we’ve been a long time getting down to dots,” he continued, replacing the book in his pocket, “but you asked me to explain how I went about things; and I’ve taken you at your word. I think we can go straight ahead after this.

  “Suppose that our hang-dog butler has gone astray from the path of rectitude at some earlier period. From the look of the man, I’d say it was a highly probable assumption. And suppose, further, that he fell into the grip of the late Hubbard as a consequence. Quite obviously Hubbard would not be able to make much out of him pecuniarily; butlers aren’t big game financially. But one may have other uses for a man beyond merely bleeding him white. A blackmailer might quite well require help in one form or other: say a cat’s-paw to do the preliminary go-between work in a ticklish case, or a spy who could do some of his dirty business for him in certain eventualities. I can quite see the possibility that Leake may have been a blackmailer’s tool. He doesn’t strike me as a man who would revolt against that sort of thing merely for moral reasons.”

  “That’s a pretty sound suggestion,” the Colonel put in. “Now that you’ve stated it, I wonder I didn’t see the possibility myself. But I certainly didn’t.”

  “Well, suppose we assume that as a starting-point. If you think over it for a moment you may see more light still. As I told you, blackmailers are in a ticklish position if their victims cut up rough. But suppose that the victim who cuts up rough chances to be every bit as big a scoundrel as his persecutor, what then? Assume that he rids himself of his tyrant once for all, what about the tyrant’s assets? Hasn’t every blackmailer a mass of compromising documents in his safe? Certainly, if he’s a big man in his line, papers are the thing he must have gone after—compromising letters, and so forth. Wouldn’t that be the very swag to attract his late victim? Wouldn’t it be a fine double stroke of business to rid yourself of a blackmailer and then set up in his place with his documents and carry on where he left off? I should think it would.”

  Angermere paused for a moment or two, as if to let the Colonel assimilate this fresh idea; then he continued:

  “That was how I looked on the case after I had seen all the witnesses. And that’s why I paid very little attention to the verdict. I can’t quite see a blackmailer suiciding until he’s absolutely in the grip of the police. Why should he, since he has always the chance of escape? And any man with the cunning to carry on the blackmail business is sure to have enough liquid assets stored away somewhere, a nice nest-egg which he can get at on short notice if he has to make a bolt for it.”

  The novelist seemed to have dropped the pretence that he was merely “rearranging” the case for literary purposes. From the tone of his voice, Colonel Sanderstead got the impression that this was Angermere’s real opinion on the business; and it came as a considerable relief. Besides, Angermere’s theory had a good deal to recommend it. It fitted the “hang-dogness” of the butler into the sequence of events; and in so doing, it chimed in with the Colonel’s own prepossessions with regard to Leake. He had always had an uncomfortable feeling about the fellow, although he could not assign any specific reason for his dislike.

  “Now suppose we look over the evidence from this new point of view,” Angermere continued. “Let’s assume that it really was a case of murder and not of simple suicide. The man was undoubtedly poisoned. Who could have done it? Obviously someone in the house. I think one may take that for granted as a start.”

  The Colonel fastened on this point. He felt a certain desire to show Angermere that he was not the sort of person who would accept the easiest solution simply because it was easy.

  “But Hubbard died about midnight, according to the medical evidence; and at that time he was alone in the house. How are you going to get round that? Cyanide kills almost instantaneously.”

  Angermere evidently had his reply ready.

  “You’ve raised two points there, two points of very different bearing. Let’s take ’em seriatim, if you don’t mind. You say he was alone in the house at midnight; but how do you know that? What you really know is that nobody came forward to testify that they were there then; but you don’t expect the murderer to put that into his evidence, do you? If the murderer were on the premises during the night, it’s the last thing he’d want to advertise in the newspapers or anywhere else. Therefore, there’s no evidence that Hubbard was alone.”

  The Colonel acquiesced, though with mental reservations on the validity of Angermere’s assumption.

  “Then your second point,” continued the novelist. “It was that cyanide killed instantaneously; and therefore, since by your way of it Hubbard was alone at midnight, no one could have administered the poison to him. But … I think I’d better give you my reconstruction of the business. You’ll see an easy way round these difficulties.”

  Angermere took a fresh cigarette, lit it, and leaned back in his chair.

  “Here’s my idea of the train of events that night. We can begin at the point when the chauffeur and the maids went off to the dance. The butler serves dinner, as per evidence. Hubbard goes into his study, ditto. Then Leake goes to his pantry, and he doctors the decanter of whisky with cyanide before bringing it in. He takes it and the soda in on his tray
and leaves it on Hubbard’s desk, ready to his hand. Then Leake goes off to the dance on his motor-cycle. The next stage of the evening passes as per evidence: Hubbard doesn’t touch the whisky; he goes out to call on young Leigh; he returns and rings up his clerk. Now comes the critical point. He pours out some whisky and squirts in his soda. Then he feels wakeful; and he thinks of a dose of a sleeping-draught—that paraldehyde which he kept in his bedroom, as per evidence, though the evidence was more than foggy on the point. He has filled his tumbler on the tray, so he goes off and digs out a second tumbler in Leake’s pantry on the way upstairs. He pours out his dose, leaves the bottle up there, and comes down with the tumbler in his hand. When he gets to the study again, he puts a dash of whisky into the paraldehyde to disguise the taste, which is a chronic one, I can tell you. He swallows down the dose; and then he sees his whisky and soda on the table, so he gulps that off—including the cyanide. Result, almost instantaneous death.”

  “But there was only a single tumbler on the tray when we found him; and this theory of yours needs two glasses,” objected Colonel Sanderstead.

  Angermere’s gesture restrained him from further comment.

  “We’ve now come to midnight or thereby. But what happened at midnight? That Cinderella dance broke up. And so Leake passed out of ordinary observation. He went straight to bed at the inn, by his way of it. But I’ve been over to the ‘Cat and Fiddle’ in Micheldean Abbas; and I’ve made a few cautious inquiries—very cautious inquiries—on my own hook. And the result was that I found Mr. Leake’s bedroom on the ground floor of the place, a little room away from the main run of traffic in the hotel. And after midnight, there’s not much traffic at the best in a tiny pub of that sort.”

  “You mean he might have got out of the window in the night?”

  “Exactly. And he had his motor-cycle with him. Ten minutes would bring him back here; and there’s no one on the roads at that hour to identify him.”

  “I can tell you one thing, though,” Colonel Sanderstead interjected, “he didn’t come up the avenue on his motor-cycle, for I went over all his tracks and there wasn’t the extra pair needed by your theory.”

  “Of course not,” the novelist countered, “he’d never bring his machine inside the lodge-gate. The noise of the motor might have wakened the lodge-keeper. My notion is, for what it’s worth, that he left his motor-cycle parked in a field beside the road somewhere and then cut across country straight to the Court, so as to leave no tracks whatever on the avenue.

  “Then came the problem of getting into the house itself. If he’s as smart a man as I take him to be, he wouldn’t go to the front door, although he had a key of it. He might have left tracks there on the soft ground of the approach. No, he cut along by the paved path that runs under his own pantry window; and he got into the house by that window, which he’d left open.”

  “Why assume he left it open when the glass was smashed to smithereens?” demanded the Colonel.

  “Let’s take things as they come,” returned Angermere. “I’m giving you a chronological yarn; and I don’t think the window was broken at that stage of the proceedings. Now let’s see what Leake came back to the house for. The only thing that connected him with the murder was that doctored decanter of whisky. Even that wasn’t a fatal bit of evidence, for he could always have argued that Hubbard—with cyanide in his killing-bottle—had shoved the stuff into the decanter himself when he intended to commit suicide. Leake’s whole procedure was based on making it look like suicide, you know. So he had to wash out that poison and refill the decanter with plain whisky.

  “But when he crawled through the window, I suspect that he saw something that set him thinking on a new line. The constable told me about the upset tray and the dog you found outside. Leake probably saw the dog—it would be all over him as soon as he appeared—but the tray was the thing that gave him his sudden idea. Why not make it appear that the house had been burgled and Hubbard murdered? He himself had his alibi all right already; he was supposed to be snoring at the ‘Cat and Fiddle,’ you know.

  “These last moment improvements are the death of most murderers; but Leake seems to have pulled it off, more by luck than anything. He’d have been far safer to leave the business in its initial simplicity. However, in he crawls, gets a candle and drips a liberal trail of grease through the house to the study. That represents the arrival of the murderer. In the study he finds, as he expected, the body of Hubbard. He sticks his candle down on the desk—a good bit of evidence for investigators and with the merit, also, of leaving no finger-marks on the wax, which is bound to melt away altogether as the candle burns out. Then he picks up the paper-knife and sticks it into Hubbard’s back. The finger-mark question presents itself again, so he draws it out and pitches it into the fire. Being steel, it will be there all right in the morning—he can find it himself if no one else spots it—and his finger-marks won’t survive the flames.

  “Then he sets about his main business. Much to his astonishment, no doubt, he finds a couple of tumblers there instead of the single one he left. Both contain whisky; but one smells of something else—paraldehyde, of course. He doesn’t quite know what to make of it, so decides to leave it alone. One never can tell what may turn up, you know. He washes out the decanter and replaces it, refilled to the same level, on the tray; and he cleans up the poison-tumbler and puts it back in the pantry. That clears him, personally, of any future trouble.

  “Next he begins to make hay while the sun shines—or at least by starlight. He gets the keys of the safe out of Hubbard’s pocket—I expect he wore gloves while he was in the house; and he collars all the blackmailing material in the safe. To account for it, I dare say he shoved a lot of old unimportant letters into the fire, so as to make enough ash for investigators.”

  The Colonel winced slightly at this description; but Angermere failed to notice it.

  “Finally, the job’s done. But here again he falls into the usual murderer’s error of trying to make things too complete. He wanted to make it absolutely certain that people would look elsewhere for the criminal. So he smashes the butterfly case and takes out the star-piece of the collection—shoves it into the fire, I’ve no doubt. Then he remembers he has a small automatic in his possession. He gets it from his room, say, and cleans off all finger-marks on it—I suspect he was obsessed with the finger-mark notion. Then he drops it on the mat. That was taking a risk; for it might have been traced back to him; but I suspect he got it in some underhand way and was pretty sure it couldn’t be identified as his.”

  “It certainly had no finger-marks on it,” the Colonel confirmed. “It was pretty carefully examined; and the last person who handled it had gloves on.”

  “So I heard from the constable,” Angermere went on. “Now we come to a pretty point. You must remember that Leake came into the house with all his plans cut and dried to make the thing look like suicide; and he must have been repeating to himself the directions he had laid down to carry out that idea. Just before he left, I suspect that he went over these directions in his head; and the principal one must have been: ‘Leave the lights burning.’ Nobody would turn out lights before committing suicide, you know. So at the last moment he forgets about the candle left burning on the table; and he switches on (or leaves switched on, rather), the study lights and the hall lights.

  “Then he goes into the pantry to get away. And when he is getting up to the window, it occurs to him that a final stroke would be to underline things a bit—smash the window in such a way that no one could help seeing the damage, and so call attention to the supposed burglarious entry. So once he’s outside, he picks up a stone and does the job thoroughly, as you found next morning. Then he cuts across to his bike and gets over to the ‘Cat and Fiddle’ without attracting any notice. And I think that covers everything.”

  “Everything except one thing,” admitted the Colonel aloud. “Everything but two things,” he would have said, if he had uttered his full thought.

  �
��And that is?” inquired the novelist.

  “Hubbard’s latchkey. I found it on the doorstep in the morning. How did it happen to come there?”

  “Oh, that!” Angermere airily waved the difficulty aside. “One has to admit ordinary possibilities, you know, even in a murder case. I’ve often left a latchkey in a lock myself out of absent-mindedness. I expect Hubbard did the same when he came back from the Bungalow; and if he slammed the front door when he came in, the key would drop out on the doorstep all right.”

  “Yes,” conceded the Colonel, half-heartedly, “I suppose one has to allow for a thing like that. And apart from it, you seem to have fitted things together very neatly indeed. Your assumption about the postmortem stabbing clears the business up. Without the medical evidence, I’d never have looked beyond the stab for a cause of the death; and I expect Leake took it for granted that nobody would go any farther either. The P.M. evidence must have been a staggerer for him when it came out. But, by the way, you’ve left out one point. If he didn’t burn the papers, what did he do with them?”

  Angermere dismissed that question with a wave of his hand.

  “Obviously the man is no fool; so he wouldn’t conceal them in the house. I expect he had a biscuit-tin ready for them and buried them somewhere on his way back to his motor-bike. He could dig them up again safely when the hue and cry was over.”

  “Well,” the Colonel summed up, “it’s been most instructive to an old fogy like myself. You’ve thrown quite a fresh light on the business, for me; and I’ll look forward to seeing the book you make out of it. I can’t tell you how much you’ve interested me.”

  But later in the evening, after Angermere had gone, Colonel Sanderstead poked up the fire with an expression on his face that might almost have been a sardonic smile.

  “A clever devil, that man. That’s the first connected yarn I’ve heard that might fit the affair. He’s smarter than the rest of us. But there’s just one thing that he didn’t account for; because he didn’t know about it. I wonder if he could have fitted in the man who drove the motor up to the Court that night. Whoever that was, I’m dead certain he must have played some part in the business; and Angermere’s story is complete without him. That makes rather an inky blot on the Angermere theory, I think.