The Boathouse Riddle

by J. J. Connington

  “You’re going north of the lake?” he asked. “Why not have gone through Talgarth village? That’s a mile or two shorter, isn’t it?”

  “I wanted to let you have a look at that new boathouse of mine. There it is, just across the lake—yonder.”

  The new boathouse was much more commodious than Sir Clinton had expected: a big red-roofed building with a light balcony overlooking the lake.

  “I’ll show you it later on,” Wendover said, as a belt of trees shut off the view. “It’s really built on piles over the lake. In the summer, the boats lie in shelter under the building itself; one doesn’t need to pull them up out of the water, and they’re always dry even after a shower, that way. It saves the bother of shifting cushions under cover and all that sort of thing. And, another thing, nobody can get at them without a key. You’ve no notion of the damned cheek some people have, Clinton. The last boathouse was easy enough to get into; and one infernal scoundrel of a poacher—Cley’s his name—had the nerve to take out one of my own boats at night when he wanted to net my trout. What do you think of that for sheer insolence?”

  “Where was your keeper all that time?”

  “Ill in bed, poor devil. No blame of his. No evidence, of course, except a boat sticky with fish scales in the morning. But there was no doubt who did it; only one sweep in the neighbourhood would have the nerve to try that on.”

  “An enterprising fellow, Mr. Cley, evidently. What sort of person is he?”

  “Oh, one of these jaunty devils—Jack’s as good as his master and a damned sight better, you know: the sort of thing all this cheap education’s producing, I suppose. Very popular with silly girls—got one or two of them into trouble. Altogether a regular bad hat. I wish we were back in the old days of Botany Bay when you could get rid of people of that sort at one fell swoop; catch ’em with a rabbit in their pocket and give ’em a free passage to the Antipodes. I don’t like his influence about the place.”

  “Can’t you turn him out? You needn’t have him as a tenant if you don’t want him.”

  “He lives on Keith-Westerton’s ground—just up there behind that rise. There’s a whole family of them, two other brothers of much the same kidney, and they all live together in one cottage. Very convenient when you want an alibi sworn.”

  “I’ll stir up my local minions, if you like,” Sir Clinton suggested.

  “It’ll take more than your minions to catch Master Cley,” said Wendover in a despondent tone, as he turned the car into the avenue which led to Talgarth Grange.

  Chapter Two

  The Death of the Gamekeeper

  LONG ago, Wendover had been attacked by what his friends unkindly termed “that telephone-extension craze.” At Talgarth Grange, a plug had been planted in every room which could, by any stretch of imagination, be supposed to require telephonic connection; and, for a time, the instrument accompanied Wendover about the house with the fidelity of Mary’s lamb.

  Gradually, he and the telephone grew less inseparable, until at last only a single plug was in regular use. Every night, when going to bed, he picked up the machine, carried it upstairs, and solemnly plugged its connection into the socket in his bedroom. No one had ever disturbed him with a night call. The ceremony had degenerated into the purest formality. But it had established itself as an integral part of the evening routine; and Wendover had grown so accustomed to it that a break-away would have caused him disquiet. “You never know, you know,” was his slightly confused defence when chaffed on the subject. “Somebody might want to ring me up.”

  And now, at long last, he was awakened in the dawn by the trill of the telephone bell. Somebody did want to ring him up. In fact, to judge from the vehemence of the bell hammer, someone meant to ring him up as thoroughly as possible.

  Wendover sleepily stretched out his hand for the receiver at his side. The message over the wire roused him even more effectively than the bell had done. After a breathless reply, he leaped out of bed; disconnected the instrument; and hurried, telephone in hand, along the hall and into his guest’s room.

  “I say, Clinton, wake up! Wake up, will you? Your people from Talgarth have just ’phoned to say a man’s been shot dead and they want to speak to you. Here, I’ll plug in the ’phone and you can talk to them yourself; they asked for you.”

  Long before Wendover’s fumbling hands had got the telephone connected, the Chief Constable was alert, as though he had been awake for hours. Taking the instrument from Wendover, he gave his name and listened with an impassive face to a communication over the wire.

  “Very well,” he said at last in reply; and then he replaced the receiver on its bracket.

  Wendover, unable to extract any definite meaning from Sir Clinton’s three syllables, could not restrain himself even for a moment.

  “What’s it all about, Clinton? Who is it?”

  “Horncastle’s the name they gave,” the Chief Constable replied, as he began to dress himself.

  “Horncastle? That’ll be one of young Keith-Westerton’s keepers. Poor devil, what a pity!”

  Sir Clinton seemed faintly surprised by Wendover’s emotion.

  “Strange attitude, this, for an amateur criminologist, even in pyjamas, Squire. I’ve never seen you blench at a death or two, in pursuit of your hobby. You saw four of them at Lynden Sands and never turned a hair, so far as I remember.”

  “Yes, but that was different. I didn’t know any of the people. This is a bad business. Why, I was speaking to the poor beggar not three days ago. I knew him quite well.”

  “I didn’t,” Sir Clinton put in brutally. “So I can approach the affair as it ought to be approached—without sentiment and without bias. I say that lest you should expect me to suspect your poaching pal, Cley, merely because he gave information that he’d found the body.”

  “Cley?” Wendover exclaimed, and his tone was heavy with suspicion.

  “It’s not a criminal offence to find a dead body,” Sir Clinton pointed out. “I’ve done it myself and escaped without a stain on my character. You’d better wait for details before swooping to conclusions. All that I’ve heard, so far, would fit quite well with a shooting accident.”

  “Then why did they ring you up?”

  “Because Severn, the Inspector here, hasn’t handled a case of this sort before; and he’s not quite sure of his ground. Since I happened to be on the spot, he asked me as a favour to give him my advice. It may be necessary to detain Cley, or it may not. Severn wasn’t too proud to consult me about it. That’s all. And now, if you’re thinking of coming with me, I think you’d better put on something warmer than these pyjamas. It’s a bit chilly just after sunrise.”

  While Wendover was hurriedly dressing himself, the Chief Constable went down to the garage and brought a four-seater around to the front door. It was, as he had said, a chilly morning, even though by this time the sun was well above the horizon. There was not a breath of wind; some white clouds hung high in the blue; and on the lawn the dewdrops sparkled like a host of tiny gems.

  “Severn and a constable are cycling up. They’ll meet us on the road,” Sir Clinton explained, when Wendover joined him. “Your friend Cley and another constable will follow on foot.”

  “Where did it happen?” Wendover demanded, as the car moved off.

  “Just off the Ambledown-Stanningleigh road, down by the lakeside, at Friar’s Point, I gather.”

  “You can see it from the boathouse, on the other side of the lake. It’s young Keith-Westerton’s ground. Cley was most likely taking up night lines when the keeper caught him.”

  “Set your tie straight, Squire,” Sir Clinton advised, with a touch of asperity in his tone. “I suppose it must have got disturbed in that last leap of yours to an unjustifiable conclusion. How they ever put you on the Bench, if you go on like this, is a mystery to me. A bit too much like Lewis Carroll’s dog:

  ‘“I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,’

  Said cunning old Fury.

  ‘I’ll try the w
hole cause

  And condemn you to death.’

  “Let’s hear what happened, before we start theorising as to how it happened.”

  Wendover suppressed a sharp retort. After all, the Chief Constable was a tired man, and tired people are apt to be impatient. Besides, there was no denying that Sir Clinton was perfectly justified in his criticism.

  On the road opposite Friar’s Point, they came upon the Inspector and the constable standing beside their cycles. Sir Clinton stepped out of the car, nodded to his subordinates, and then, without speaking, surveyed the lie of the land. A slope covered with thick grass descended from the road towards the lake and terminated at a pine spinney which covered the Point itself and concealed the shingle at the waterside. To the left of the spinney, the red roof of the boathouse could be seen across the lake. Wendover, descending in his turn from the car, gazed at the scene. The familiar background, the green slope, the fine tracery of the firs against the sky, the iron mirror of the unruffled lake, seemed an incongruous setting for a tragedy.

  His eye was caught by a movement of Sir Clinton. Turning from the landscape, the Chief Constable looked up at the sky as though estimating the position of the sun; then, kneeling down, he seemed to be feeling for a moment or two among the grass by the roadside. Rising to his feet again, he pulled out his handkerchief and dried his hand. Then, seeming reassured, he turned to the officials beside him.

  “That will be all right, Inspector,” he said, as though to explain his proceedings. “Now, before your witness turns up, perhaps you’ll give us your story. You didn’t tell me much over the ’phone, so probably we’d better start afresh.”

  “First of all, sir, I’d like to thank you for coming. I’m just afraid I may have brought you out on a wild-goose chase,” Severn admitted nervously. “But one or two things make me a bit suspicious that there’s more in it than just an accident; and I don’t want to go either too far or not far enough in the matter of this man Cley. That was why I ventured to ask for your advice, sir, though I know I oughtn’t to have troubled you, especially when you’re on leave.”

  He hesitated for a moment; then, with a glance at Sir Clinton’s face, he added:

  “Inspector Armadale’s an old friend of mine, sir; and it was what he’s told me about the help you’ve given him in some of his cases that made me venture to ring you up and ask you.”

  “I don’t mind,” Sir Clinton said, in a tone which brightened the Inspector’s rather worried face. “Now, give us the plain facts first of all—and only the facts.”

  “This is Constable Eccles,” the Inspector explained. “You’d rather have him tell his own part of the thing himself, wouldn’t you, sir, since he was the first to hear about the business?”

  Eccles, evidently delighted at being allowed to bring himself directly to the notice of the Chief Constable, pulled out his notebook and, at a gesture of permission from Sir Clinton, launched into his tale.

  “This morning, sir, according to orders, I was patrolling this road and coming along in this direction from the Ambledown side when at twenty minutes to five about a couple of hundred yards from here, just round that bend you see there”—he pointed towards Ambledown—“a man came up to meet me and I recognised him as Bob Cley—Robert Cley, I should say, sir.”

  Constable Eccles, having terminated this masterpiece of the aperiodic style, took a much-needed breath and continued his tale:

  “I saw at once that he wasn’t quite himself, sir. He seemed to be struck all of a heap, to put it that way, as though he’d had a bad shock of some sort, but he didn’t avoid me at all and came straight to meet me.”

  “That was at twenty minutes to five—half an hour before sunrise,” Sir Clinton interjected. “You saw all this clearly?”

  “I could see him well enough when he came up to me, sir. As soon as he recognised me, he said, ‘Hullo! That you, Eccles? I want you,’ just like that, in a kind of shaky voice. So I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ Then he said, ‘Horncastle’s got his touch. He must’ve slipped an’ his gun’s gone off an’ blown his head in. He’s down there at the shore. I’ve just seen his body an’ I was on the road to give warnin’.’ So I said, ‘Is he badly hurt? Are you sure?’ And he laughed, a queer sort of laugh, like as if he was a bit in hysterics—had lost his nerve slightly, I should say, sir—and he said, ‘He’s dead, I tell ye. His skull’s blown in. You’ll never see anything deader.’ So then I said, ‘Come along with me and show me where he is.’ And at that he said, ‘I’ll see you damned first. I want to see no more of him. Go yourself, if you like. He’s lying on the shingle at Friar’s Point. It looks to me as if he’d slipped on the bank an’ dropped his gun an’ it went off an’ shot him dead. You go if you want to. I’ll wait for you here.’”

  Constable Eccles lifted his eyes from his notebook and scanned Sir Clinton’s face doubtfully.

  “I wasn’t just sure what to do next, sir,” he went on. “I didn’t want to let Cley slip away, for one thing; and for another, I didn’t want to go trampling over the ground in a poor light and perhaps making a mess of things; and for a third, I felt I ought to make sure that poor Horncastle really was past help, for Cley might’ve been mistaken, for all I knew. I was perplexed over what to do, but then it occurred to me that if I walked straight down to the lakeside and along the shingle to Friar’s Point, I wasn’t likely to disturb anything much in the way of traces, so I got out of Cley just exactly where Horncastle’s body was lying and then I did as I said, leaving Cley sitting by the roadside and telling him to wait there till I got back.”

  “Very good,” Sir Clinton commented, to the evident relief of the constable.

  “When I got to the body, sir, it was light enough to see pretty well, and I used my flashlight so I saw quite clearly that Cley had made no mistake when he said Horncastle was dead. I took care to disturb nothing and I only touched the body to feel whether it was cold or not.”

  “A second good mark,” Sir Clinton commended. “I don’t see that you could have done better than you did. Good work. Now go on.”

  Evidently reassured by Sir Clinton’s tone, Eccles continued his narrative.

  “The body, sir, was distinctly cold, one could tell at once that he’d been dead for a while. It was lying . . .”

  “Don’t bother about that. I’ll see it for myself in a minute or two. Just tell us what you did.”

  “I left it exactly as it was, sir, and came back along the shingle, the way I’d gone, so as to make no traces on any soft ground around about the body. There was a heavy thundershower yesterday afternoon and the ground’s soft enough to take impressions, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” Sir Clinton echoed, in a doubtful tone, which suggested that he had no great hopes.

  “Then I told Cley he’d have to come with me and repeat his story to Inspector Severn at once, before he forgot anything. He made no open objection and he and I went down through Mr. Wendover’s grounds and I knocked up the Inspector.”

  “That’s all perfectly clear,” Sir Clinton said with satisfaction. “Now, Inspector, have you anything to add to this?”

  “The constable came to my house at 5:10 A.M.” Severn explained. “He told me what he’s just told you and then I brought Cley in and questioned him. His story tallied completely with what the constable had told me, so far as that went; and in addition, he told me how he came to discover Horncastle’s body. If you don’t mind my suggesting it, sir, I’d like you to question him yourself when he turns up—he may be here any minute now—and I’ll be able to check whether what he says to you agrees with what he said to me. It’ll save time and save you the trouble of hearing the same tale twice.”

  The Chief Constable nodded his agreement with this.

  “On the face of it,” he pointed out, “the thing looks like an accident. What makes you think it’s anything else?”

  The Inspector evidently felt that he was on thin ice. He had to justify disturbing the Chief Constable and he knew that he had really
very little definite evidence.

  “The fact is, sir, that there’s been bad feeling between Cley and Horncastle for a long while. That’s not evidence, I know; but it’s notorious in the place all the same. Both of ’em were keen on the girls—sort of local Don Juans—and there’s been a lot of trouble Over one of ’em getting into the other’s road in that field, from time to time. That’s in addition to the fact that one was a notorious poacher and the other a gamekeeper. Cley and the keeper both said quite openly that the other one would get his touch sometime or other; and Cley’s got a temper that might have gone off any day and landed him deeper than he meant to go at the start. I dare say that sounds a bit feeble, sir; but there’s been enough in it to make me feel . . . well, not very sure about the whole business. They were both dangerous, and that’s a fact. Horncastle had a black temper too. In fact, he had a row with Mr. Keith-Westerton just the other day and was under notice. When you get two tempers like that coming up against each other, and one man’s found shot dead with the other in the neighbourhood of the body. . . . Well, sir, it suggests a good deal to my mind; and I don’t want to let Cley slip through my fingers. On the other hand, I don’t want to detain him unless there’s a chance of bringing something home definitely.”

  The Inspector evidently saw that he had failed to make out a case for having disturbed his superior. Sir Clinton, however, seemed to understand the position.

  “So you thought you’d like to have an impartial opinion on the point?” he suggested. “H’m! I don’t mind.”

  He turned to the constable.

  “You didn’t hear any shot while you were coming along the road? No? And Horncastle had been dead for some time, you thought, when you came to examine him. Then Cley obviously wasn’t coming red-handed from the crime when you met him. Either his tale’s true or else he must have murdered Horncastle earlier in the night and spent the intervening time somewhere or other.”