The Boathouse Riddle

by J. J. Connington

  “Instow and Gower, Bond Street.”

  “Thanks. By the way, have you been using a screwdriver at the boathouse recently?”

  “No, I haven’t. I’d no earthly reason for using a screwdriver there. I told you I hadn’t been near the boathouse.”

  “You were there yesterday afternoon, weren’t you?” Sir Clinton reminded him. “Well, it’s not of much importance. And now, I think, the Inspector had better interview your staff.”

  Keith-Westerton rose and, with a suspicious glance at his unwanted guests, walked to the door.

  As soon as he was out of the way, Sir Clinton stepped over to the empty grate and bent down.

  “Just look here for a moment, Inspector.”

  Severn, coming to his side, found him examining the ashes of a sheet of paper. Beside them was a crumpled and unburnt envelope which the Chief Constable gingerly fished out and smoothed delicately. Wendover, with an internal grumble about “Russian methods”, glanced over Sir Clinton’s shoulder and read on the envelope the single word “COLIN” in a large feminine hand.

  Sir Clinton, putting the envelope down, returned to the examination of the ash fragments.

  “Nothing much to be made of those,” he said regretfully. “The pieces are too small. But I think, if you look carefully, you’ll see one word on that bit. The ink shows up very faintly as grey on the black of the ash, and if you get the light in the proper quarter, you’ll be able to read it.”

  Severn went down on his knees and moved about until he came into the right line.

  “I see a capital G,” he reported slowly. “Then there’s a letter missing. And after that I can see RON. And just in front of the G I think I can see something that might be an E at the end of the word before.”

  “The Abbé Goron?” Wendover exclaimed. “Is that it?”

  “Not so loud,” Sir Clinton cautioned. “It may be either ‘Pére Goron’ or ‘Abbé Goron’; they come to much the same thing, so far as we’re concerned. Goron is the word; that’s the main point. It seems as though you’d have to look up my friend the priest, Inspector, and see if he knows anything helpful. You’ll find him a tougher nut than young Keith-Westerton, though, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You think that priest’s mixed up in the business?” Wendover demanded, all his latent distrust aroused. “What makes you think that?”

  Sir Clinton put the question aside without offence.

  “I’ll talk about it afterwards as much as you like; but just now we ought to be interviewing these people before they have time to compare notes. Once the police come in, every one starts chattering, you know; and if we don’t hurry, they’ll have fogged each other’s recollections completely. Just ring the bell, please, Inspector.”

  Chapter Six

  The Telephone Call

  THE girl who had opened the door to them answered the Inspector’s ring; and now she seemed even more flustered than before.

  “I’m Inspector Severn and I want to ask you some questions,” Severn said baldly. “How many of you are there on the staff here?”

  “There’s me—I’m house-parlourmaid—and there’s Mrs. Featherstone, she’s the cook; and there’s Sandeau, Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s maid; and there’s Hyde, the chauffeur; and there’s Ferrers, he’s Mr. Keith-Westerton’s gentleman’s gentleman, but he’s partly butler too, till we move over into Silver Grove; and then there’s Disley, she’s a sort of scullery maid and helps generally; and that’s all that’s here now.”

  Severn had pulled out his notebook and jotted down this list, an action which seemed to disturb the girl still further.

  “You needn’t get flurried,” said Sir Clinton kindly. “All we want is a little information which can’t do you any harm. Just answer Inspector Severn’s questions as well as you can. He won’t eat you.”

  The Chief Constable’s smile reassured the maid slightly. Sir Clinton evidently thought it better to put the next question himself, as she seemed terrified of the Inspector.

  “You waited at table last night, I suppose? I’m asking that just to test your memory. You did? Was any one else there?”

  “Ferrers, sir.”

  “No guests, I suppose? Just Mr. and Mrs. Keith-Westerton?”

  “Just the two of them, sir.”

  “Did you see anything out of the common during dinner?”

  “Well, sir, Mr. Keith-Westerton didn’t seem in his usual spirits, perhaps; he wasn’t so cheery as he usually is, I thought, a bit moody, as if he was thinking about something different from what he was talking about. I did notice that, I must say, and I just wondered if . . .”

  She pulled up sharply.

  “You needn’t be afraid to tell us anything you remember,” Sir Clinton reassured her. “You just wondered if . . .”

  “Well, I just wondered, sir, if that telephone message had anything to do with it. That was all.”

  “Let’s keep to what happened at dinner, for the present. Mr. Keith-Westerton wasn’t moody because of any disagreement with Mrs. Keith-Westerton, I suppose?”

  “Oh, no, sir; no, indeed. I wouldn’t like you to think that. He was every bit as nice to her as he usually is. She was in very good spirits, I remember that quite well, and it wasn’t a case of putting a good face on things or anything of that sort, I’m quite sure. They talked quite a lot at dinner, about this and that, and he just seemed a bit absent-minded, once or twice. It was so unusual with him that I happened to notice it, though it was really nothing.”

  “Now about this telephone message you mentioned. What was that?”

  “That was about a quarter past seven, sir. I answered the phone, and I heard a lady’s voice asking for Mr. Keith-Westerton. He was upstairs; I heard him whistling; he usually whistles about the house, it’s a habit of his; so I went and gave him the message. And now I think of it, he said something about it at dinner to Mrs. Keith-Westerton. A friend had rung him up, he said, and he’d have to go out for a short time after dinner.”

  Sir Clinton evidently wished to put no further questions, so Severn took his turn.

  “After dinner, what did you do?”

  “I went out for a walk; Mrs. Keith-Westerton gave me permission.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. I went out with Hyde.”

  “The chauffeur? And when did you get back?”

  “About ten o’clock, I think. Yes, it would be about then.”

  “And after that?”

  “I went to bed.”

  Severn finished his jottings.

  “Now I’ll read this over to you and you can sign it.”

  The maid, evidently startled by this formality, glanced at Sir Clinton as though to ask if this was usual; but when he had reassured her, she made no difficulties over her signature.

  “Now, that’s all we need from you at present,” Sir Clinton explained. “But . . . don’t tell any one what questions you were asked, you understand? No use running into trouble.” He let this sink in, and then added, “Let’s see. Mrs. Featherstone is the next person we want to see. Ask her to come here, please.”

  Mrs. Featherstone proved to be a rather stolid matron from whom Severn extracted nothing whatever that seemed to bear on the case. She had gone to bed early. On being pressed, she confessed that, having feared that she had caught a chill, she had taken “something hot” before retiring, and this had sent her to sleep almost immediately.

  “Who brushes the shoes in this house?” Sir Clinton inquired, when Severn had given the cook up in despair.

  “Disley, sir.”

  “Well, I should like to see Disley. And, by the way, if you have a couple of deep soup plates among your crockery, I should like to see them. Disley can bring them. Mr. Keith-Westerton won’t object.”

  Severn stared at his superior when he made this request, but Sir Clinton vouchsafed no explanation at the moment. They had not long to wait before a small maid bustled into the room with the two plates in her hand.

  “Please, sir, Mrs. Feat
herstone wants to know if these’ll do, sir.”

  Sir Clinton gravely took them from her, examined them with a solemn air, and put them down on a table.

  “These will do excellently. You’re Sarah Disley, aren’t you? And you clean the shoes?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Did you clean Mr. Keith-Westerton’s shoes this morning—I mean the ones he wore last night when he was out after dinner?”

  “No sir. When Mr. Ferrers brought them to me, sir, they were soaked through, sir, so I couldn’t clean them till they were dried, sir.”

  “I’d like to see them for a moment. Can you bring them? And remember. You’re not to repeat anything that’s been said to you, except about the soup plates.”

  Sarah Disley was obviously delighted with this caution. It apparently gave her a feeling of importance. Wendover, amidst his preoccupations, found time to smile. Perky little creature! She evidently was seeing herself as a minor star in some film drama.

  In a couple of minutes she returned with the shoes. Sir Clinton took them from her, walked over to the window and turned his back so that she could not see what he was doing. Severn joined him. When they came back again, Wendover saw, from the Inspector’s expression, that something definite had been found. He put out his hand and, as Sir Clinton passed him the shoes, his fingers encountered the humid inside surface. No man ever got his footgear so wet as that by merely walking for a short time through dewy grass.

  Sir Clinton turned to the scullery maid again.

  “And what did you do with yourself last night?”

  The girl’s sharp young eyes opened a little at the inquiry. She was obviously quite at sea as to the meaning of this incursion of the police and she could not quite make out the drift of the question.

  “Me, sir? After dinner I washed the dishes. And then I did some sewing for a while. And then I went up to bed, sir.”

  “When was that; can you remember?”

  “About ten o’clock, sir. I always go to bed then; I need a lot of sleep, sir.”

  “And you sleep sound? You don’t wake up in the middle of the night?”

  “No, never, sir. The alarm wakes me in the morning, sir.”

  “By the way, what’s the name of the house-parlourmaid?”

  “Holland, sir. Ida Holland.”

  “Then that’s all I want to ask you. Send Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s maid here.”

  When Louise Sandeau presented herself, Wendover mentally compared her with the house-parlourmaid. Holland had behaved like a normally sedate girl who had been flustered by unexpected happenings. The lady’s maid, on the other hand, struck him as an alert, high-strung type, holding her excitability in check behind a superficial coolness. Holland was the prettier girl of the two, but the Frenchwoman had more strength of character in her expression.

  “She’d grow on you more than the other one,” Wendover commented to himself. “But there’s more of the glad eye about her than I care about,” he added, on further inspection.

  Sir Clinton left the Inspector to handle this fresh witness; and Severn began his inquiries by asking the maid’s name and how long she had been in Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s service. In her replies, Wendover noted, her English was fluent, almost correct, though her accent betrayed her at once as a foreigner.

  “I have been with Madame Keith-Westerton for quite a long time—some years before she was married.”

  “Was she wearing a pearl necklace at dinner last night?”

  “Yes, she wore it.”

  “She’s gone away on the spur of the moment, it seems. Did she say anything to you, last night, which throws any light on that?”

  The maid considered for a moment, then shook her head.

  “No, no. She said nothing about that to me.”

  “Was she worried in any way when she was dressing for dinner last night? Did she seem not in her usual spirits?”

  “No, indeed. She was just the same as she always is.”

  “She gave you no instructions to pack a suit case, or anything like that?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. I had not an idea that she was going away.”

  “Have you any idea of what she did take with her?”

  “She changed her dress before she went away, and she took some necessaries in her suit case—enough for a week-end visit, perhaps. But she took no evening dress with her.”

  “You can write out a list of what she did take, by and by, so far as you can make it out. Can you describe the dress she must have worn when she went away, the one she would travel in, if she took more than one?”

  The maid described a travelling costume in some detail.

  “The other dress which is missing is an afternoon one,” she explained. “She would not travel in it, I should suppose. The other things I shall write down for you,” she added, with a faint touch of archness in her manner.

  “Did you see her after she went down to dinner?”

  Severn demanded.

  “No, not at all. She does not expect me to be in attendance on her when she retires at night, so I am free in the evening.”

  “H’m! Well, after you were free, what did you do last night?”

  “I?” the maid exclaimed, with an air of surprise. “I went for a walk. Perhaps I should say that I am fiancée to the valet of Mr. Keith-Westerton. We went out together, naturally.”

  “When did you leave the house?”

  “It would be about half-past eight,” the maid replied, without any hesitation. “We walked up through the woods behind the house, here, and then along the shore of the lake.”

  “Did you go near Mr. Wendover’s boathouse?”

  “Oh, no. We could not go there. Besides, there was some one in the boathouse last night. I saw the lights illuminated.”

  “About what time was that?” Severn demanded.

  The maid considered for a few moments.

  “I cannot say precisely,” she admitted. “I was not looking at my watch, you can figure to yourself”—she gave Severn a coy look—“but it was perhaps half-past nine . . . or possibly a little before then . . . that I saw the lights switched on. We had turned back again by that time. After that, we sat down. The lights remained on for a long time . . . perhaps an hour.”

  Severn reflected for a moment before putting his next query.

  “Did . . . Do you know a man Horncastle, one of Mr. Westerton’s keepers?”

  “Yes, indeed! He has given me trouble, that one. He tried to—what do you call it?—pick me up, more than once; and it gave me great trouble with my fiancé, who is jealous of any man.’”

  Wendover had little difficulty in surmising that quite probably Ferrers’ jealousy had, in this case, a fairly substantial basis. Louise Sandeau, with her glad eye, was hardly the sort who would discourage attentions, no matter how casually they were offered. And, in a flash, Wendover linked this with the murder. Cooler reflection, however, persuaded him that he was on the wrong track. If there was no more in it than this, the motive was too slight to be worth considering. If Ferrers had been one of those foreigners who can be strung up to any pitch by jealousy, then there might be something in it. But an Englishman of that class would never turn a casual flirtation into a murder drama.

  “When did you see Horncastle last?” Severn demanded.

  The maid reflected for a moment or two.

  “It was last week—last Wednesday,” she replied. “I had to be very severe with him then. He was much too enterprising.”

  Her manner suggested that in her case this was quite to be expected; obviously she did not underrate her own attractions. Severn, apparently to her disappointment, dropped this line of inquiry.

  “When did you get home last night?”

  The maid shrugged her shoulders suggestively.

  “I really cannot tell. When one is with one’s fiancé, time flies, does it not? One pays no attention to the clock. But I imagine that it would be near midnight when I arrived here.”

  “He came with yo
u?”

  Louise laughed with a musical trill.

  “No, he did not. Imagine now, he is a slave to tobacco. And I, I do not like smoky kisses, no, indeed. When he is with me, he does not smoke. But he must smoke before going to bed, it seems—one last pipe. So I say to him always, ‘Say good night, now, mon chou, and then you can smoke that pipe you long for.’ And he stays out, while I come in. That is better than quarrelling, is it not? A much pleasanter arrangement.”

  Severn nodded. Then a thought seemed to strike him.

  “Mrs. Keith-Westerton had gone before you came in?”

  “That I do not know,” the maid replied at once. “I went straight to bed. Naturally I did not come into this part of the house at all.”

  Severn appeared to have come to the end of his inquiries. Sir Clinton seemed to feel that he should say something.

  “Mrs. Keith-Westerton paints pictures, doesn’t she? Has she taken her paint box with her, do you know?”

  This inquiry obviously puzzled the maid.

  “I did not think of that,” she confessed at once. “Shall I go and look?”

  “If you can find it, I should like to look at it,” Sir Clinton said in a casual tone. “That’s all you want to ask, Inspector?”

  Severn nodded; and the maid accepted her dismissal with a final flash of her rather fine eyes.

  “You might ask your fiancé to come here,” Sir Clinton said, as she was leaving the room.

  Wendover had already seen Ferrers at the railway station on the day when the Keith-Westertons arrived home from their honeymoon. Now, under the sedate mask of the well-trained man-servant, he thought he detected something abnormal; and the man’s first words gave a clue to its nature. Ferrers turned at once to the Inspector.

  “What right have you to badger Miss Sandeau with a lot of questions?” he demanded.

  Sir Clinton, evidently fearing that Severn might be drawn into a retort, intervened swiftly.

  “You can take it that Miss Sandeau was treated perfectly politely by the Inspector,” he said, in a tone which seemed to smooth away Ferrers’ grievance. “We have, unfortunately, to ask all of you some questions.”