The Boathouse Riddle

by J. J. Connington

  “And what’s that?” Wendover asked suspiciously.

  “Why, the happy reunion of the Keith-Westerton family. Your charming young friend is back again at the Dower House, you’ll be pleased to learn.”

  “Oh, is she?” said Wendover, rather blankly.

  “Starting a second honeymoon,” Sir Clinton volunteered in a neutral tone.

  “Second honeymoon? What d’ you mean?”

  “Well, isn’t the first month after a marriage generally called a honeymoon? She was married in the Catholic chapel here this morning. The Abbé Goron officiated, Severn tells me. A very quiet affair.”

  Wendover seemed puzzled by this news.

  “But . . .”

  “It’s quite all right, Squire,” Sir Clinton explained blandly. “They were married under the Registrar’s certificate and licence. Two days ago, Keith-Westerton gave notice to the Registrar. There was no publication of the names—it’s not required with that particular procedure. One clear day elapsed—that was yesterday. This morning, Mrs. Keith-Westerton arrived from London, went straight to the Catholic chapel, was married in due form by my friend the Abbé Goron, and she and her husband went back to the Dower House to enjoy what I think must be described as a honeymoon. As I said, the whole affair was very quiet—almost clandestine, one might say; but it’s quite sound legally. And as that rather rigid ecclesiastic, the Abbé Goron, presided over the nuptials, I think I’m safe in saying that it’s morally all square and aboveboard.”

  “Well, I’m damned,” Wendover ejaculated.

  “You say that so often and so assuredly that I begin to think you must have a straight tip on the subject, Squire.”

  But Wendover refused to be drawn. He hunched himself up in his chair, instead of answering, and very obviously plunged into consideration of the case in the light of this fresh evidence. At one point, his face lighted up as though he had seen a fresh aspect on the face of things; but immediately it clouded again, as though his new ideas had furnished merely a partial illumination of the affair. When at length he broke silence, his tone showed clearly that he found himself still befogged on the main issue.

  “If you are married, you don’t get married again—not to the same girl, at any rate.”

  “There’s nothing legally against it, if you want to make a hobby of it,” Sir Clinton commented.

  Wendover disregarded this.

  “Then if they got married this morning, they weren’t married before,” he pursued. “But they were married before, unless . . .”

  “Unless they weren’t?” Sir Clinton interjected to fill the gap which Wendover’s perplexity had left in the sentence. “You can go through a form of marriage without getting married, you know, Squire.”

  “Yes, yes, I see what you’re driving at,” Wendover retorted testily. “I’m not such a fool that I can’t spot an obvious thing like that. But it doesn’t seem to clear up much, even when one does see it. Where does Horncastle come in?”

  ‘“How now! A rat?’ ‘Hamlet’, Act III, Scene 4,” Sir Clinton quoted, instructively.

  “What’s Polonius got to do with it?” Wendover demanded indignantly.

  “Well, he blundered in where he wasn’t wanted, Squire. And my impression is that if you could recall Horncastle from the Beyond, he wouldn’t be able to give you much information about the real complications in this case.”

  Wendover digested this suggestion for a few moments before speaking again.

  “You mean that he saw Cincinnati Jean’s body being sunk in the lake? Of course it was dropped in quite near to where Horncastle’s own body was found. That’s true. And he had to be silenced? Is that it?”

  “That’s somewhere near the truth, I expect,” Sir Clinton confirmed. “But I doubt if Horncastle even knew whose body was being put out of the way.”

  “Just a pawn in the game, you mean?”

  “Some pawns have a trick of turning into queens,” Sir Clinton reminded him. “They’re more important potentially than actually, at times. Horncastle may be a pawn of that sort.”

  “Oh, indeed,” Wendover observed cautiously, in an attempt to conceal the fact that Sir Clinton’s remark had not proved very enlightening.

  The Chief Constable evidently decided to put his cards on the table.

  “Here’s the trouble, Squire,” he admitted frankly. “I’m not bluffing when I say that I believe I can see my way through this case fairly well. I’ve a pretty clear idea of all that happened on that night at the boathouse. It’s not so very difficult to fit together, after all; for we seem to have got most of the really necessary evidence. But, you’ve got to convince a jury, finally; and some jurymen are not bright. I could give a prosecuting barrister a very pretty tale to work on; but—well, the jury might not swallow it. And where would we be, then? Short of screwing a confession out of somebody, I don’t see how we can go into court with a cast-iron case. The only problem is: what lever can we use to extract that confession? I’ve got a notion about that; but these psychological factors are the very devil to handle properly. That’s what’s giving me trouble just now.”

  “You mean the motive?” Wendover asked.

  “No, I don’t mean the motive,” Sir Clinton dissented, rather to Wendover’s surprise. “The motive has nothing whatever to do with it.”

  He seemed to regret his momentary indiscretion, and Wendover could see from his expression that further revelations were not to be expected.

  “My friend, the Abbé Goron, seems to be in charge of the moral affairs of the Keith-Westerton family,” Sir Clinton said, after a pause. “You’ll be interested to hear, Squire, that he has been visiting the Sisterhood of the Good Hope; and, as a result of that, I suspect, Mrs. Keith-Westerton was persuaded to come back here and go through a form of marriage this morning.”

  “A form of marriage?” Wendover demanded, pricking up his ears at the wording.

  “Well, I can only guess,” Sir Clinton said, with a pretence of caution. “I wasn’t there, you know. But that’s what I think it was.”

  “You’re an infernal mystery monger, Clinton,” Wendover protested plaintively, when he found that he was to get no further enlightenment.

  “I don’t know, you see,” the Chief Constable retorted. “I make a guess, and I tell you it’s a guess, and now you want more. What more can you get?”

  Before Wendover had time to pursue the subject, a maid came into the room with a message.

  “Oh, send her in here,” Wendover ordered. And when the maid had gone out, he turned to Sir Clinton.

  “This is an old woman from the village. She ‘wants to know something about the law.’ Half the countryside seems to think that since I’m a J.P. I ought to give them legal advice. They get my opinion for nothing and probably they get just what they pay for. She’s quite a decent old soul, Mrs. Tetbury. Does a bit of cheap dressmaking and runs a sort of secondhand clothes exchange in the village.”

  The maid showed into the room a rather shabbily dressed old woman, obviously slightly perturbed at the sight of Sir Clinton. In her hand she carried a neat brown paper parcel.

  “Well, Mrs. Tetbury, what’s the trouble?” Wendover inquired, as he placed a chair for her. “This is Sir Clinton Driffield. He’ll give you his advice. It’s better worth having than mine.”

  Mrs. Tetbury evidently found it difficult to get to grips with her subject. She fumbled with her parcel, fidgeted in her chair, and then, as the two men sat silent, she was at last driven into an explanation.

  “Well, sir, really I’m sorry to bother you, I am really; but I don’t quite know what I ought to do, really, and I thought most likely you’d be able to give me a bit of advice that I’m in need of, for I don’t want to be doing anything without knowing just what I ought to do, you see? It’s this coat. . . .”

  She attacked the parcel feverishly, got confused with the knots, and at last wrenched the string off and opened out the paper.

  “It’s about this raincoat, sir, that I wanted
to ask you.”

  She disengaged it from its wrappings and held it up for them to examine. Wendover had no difficulty in seeing that it was of good material and well cut.

  “Well, what about it?” Wendover asked, without impatience. “It seems a good enough coat, nearly new.”

  “Yes, sir, it is nearly new, a very good bargain indeed, really. Once I’ve put some stitches into it, it’ll make a really nice coat for somebody.”

  “Then what’s the trouble?”

  Wendover knew Mrs. Tetbury quite well enough to remember that little would be gained by hustling her.

  “Well, you see, sir, I bought this coat about a week ago from Mr. Ferrers, him that’s Mr. Keith-Westerton’s valet. It’s Mr. Keith-Westerton’s coat, really; but Mr. Ferrers had orders to get rid of it.”

  “What day did you buy it from him?” Sir Clinton asked in a casual tone.

  Mrs. Tetbury named the day, two days after the Horncastle murder. Sir Clinton seemed to pay no special attention to this answer, but his glance encouraged the old woman to continue her tale.

  “Well, you see, sir, it has a tear in it—here.”

  She opened out the coat again and showed a cut in the fabric near the shoulder at the back.

  “Mr. Ferrers told me that Mr. Keith-Westerton found he’d ripped his coat on some barbed wire and it was no use to him any more after that, of course, so he’d given instructions to Mr. Ferrers to dispose of it. It’s not stolen goods, sir, really; I’m quite sure of that, for I’d never dream of doing anything of that sort at all, as I’m sure Mr. Wendover would tell you at once. I’ve bought one or two things from Mr. Ferrers before, and I’m quite sure he wouldn’t sell me anything he hadn’t a right to sell.”

  “That seems all right,” Wendover confirmed. “But I don’t see what your trouble is, Mrs. Tetbury.”

  “Well, you see, sir, when I got this coat, I was busy with other things; so I just put it aside amongst some other old garments I’ve got, meaning to look over it again by and by and see if I would put a few stitches into the tear and make it look all right again, which would be easy enough, as you can see, sir. And what with one thing and another, I’ve never had a minute to look at it until to-day. But this afternoon I found I’d more time on my hands, and as it’s just a few minutes’ job to put a tear like that to rights, I went and got out the coat from amongst the rest of the things.”

  She fumbled for a moment or two in a battered old handbag and produced from it a small screw of paper which she held as though she feared she might lose it even at this stage.

  “Well, sir,” she continued, addressing herself to the more familiar of her two listeners, “I never like to take advantage of people; and before I sell anything, I like to go through the pockets and see that the last owner hasn’t overlooked anything when he parted with the garment. You’d be surprised how careless some people are, really. So when I got out this coat, I thought to myself, ‘Now, I just wonder if Mr. Keith-Westerton hasn’t left something in the pockets. I’ll have a look.’ So I felt in the pockets—not really expecting to find anything, you understand? but just by way of precaution, because I like to be sure of things. And, lo and behold! When I put my hand into one pocket I felt something like a couple of peas. And when I pulled them out, this was what they were.”

  Steadying the coat on her knee with her elbow, she unrolled the paper screw and held it out towards Wendover.

  “What are these, sir?”

  Wendover suppressed a movement of astonishment, for there before him were two more pearls which might easily have come from Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s necklace.

  “May I look at them?” Sir Clinton demanded, putting out his hand for the paper.

  A very short scrutiny sufficed.

  “These are two pearls, I believe, Mrs. Tetbury. And fairly valuable ones too.”

  “Now are they, really, sir? That’s one thing I wanted to know, and I’m glad to hear it, for all along I’ve been afraid I’ve been coming here on a bit of a wild-goose chase and taking up your time with nonsense. I was afraid they might be just these Woolworth things, the sixpenny stuff; and yet, I thought to myself, what would Mr. Keith-Westerton be doing with rubbish like that in his pocket. And then, besides, there’s been some talk in the village about pearls and I just wondered . . . And then Mrs. Napton dropped in. She’s an old friend of mine, sir, and lives next door, and often she pops in to tea with me, or I go around to have a cup with her. So when she came in, I showed them to her and asked her what she thought about it. And we talked it over and talked it over, and at first she was all for thinking they were just rubbish and I’d be making a fool of myself if I went to Mr. Ferrers with them; and then she swung around and began to think they might be real. ‘And if they are,’ these were her very words, ‘you’ve got something there, Nancy, that’ll add a bit on to your Old Age Pension when you come to draw it.’ Then we talked it up and down for a bit longer, and at last Mrs. Napton says: ‘This is the way of it, Nancy. You bought that coat in the open market, including anything anybody was fool enough to leave in the pockets. So if these pearls are pearls, then they’re yours at this very moment. And if you don’t believe me, then you take my advice and go up and see Mr. Wendover this very night, after his dinner when he won’t be busy, and he’ll tell you the ins and outs of the thing and he’ll see you get your rights.’ And, really, sir, that seemed to be the best thing to do, though I’m sorry to trouble you about it. I don’t want to be doing anything I oughtn’t to do. So I just tied up the coat straight away in a parcel and put it aside to bring with me, just to let you see it so that you’d understand everything; and as soon as I thought you’d be quite finished with your dinner, I came up to the Grange to ask you what you thought about it, for really I don’t know what’s the best thing to do.”

  Sir Clinton glanced down at the pearls in his hand.

  “Will you take my advice, Mrs. Tetbury?” he asked kindly.

  “Oh, yes, sir, I would, really. You ought to know about these things, if any one does, I’m sure.”

  “Well, if these are Mr. Keith-Westerton’s pearls, I think I could arrange the matter on terms more favourable than you might be able to get if you handled the matter yourself.”

  “I’m sure you could, sir.”

  “That’s settled, then. I’ll take charge of the pearls. Got an envelope, Wendover? Thanks. Now I’ll seal up the pearls in this envelope and you’ll write your name on it.”

  Mrs. Tetbury did so, evidently much impressed by this formality, and Sir Clinton slipped the envelope into his note case.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” he said, as he returned his note case to his pocket. “I think I’d better have the coat too. By the way, what price were you thinking of putting on it?”

  Mrs. Tetbury named a very moderate figure.

  “Well, I may have to keep it for a while, so the easiest way will be to take it off your hands for good. I’ll give you ten shillings more than you thought of asking for it, just to cover the chance that you might have made a good bargain with some one for it. That do? By the way, did you go through all the pockets?”

  Mrs. Tetbury seemed almost overwhelmed by this generosity.

  “Well, really, sir, it’s very good of you indeed. I don’t know what to say about it, really. No, sir, I didn’t go through all the pockets. When I was going through them and came on these pearls, I was all taken aback, you know, at thinking what I’d come across if they really were real pearls, you understand? And when Mrs. Napton came in, we talked the thing up and down so much that we never thought of going through the rest of the pockets, though it seems funny that we didn’t, now I come to think of it. But I was bringing the coat up to Mr. Wendover anyhow, and I never thought of looking to see if there was anything else in the pockets.”

  “I think that’s everything, then, Mrs. Tetbury,” Sir Clinton said, as he rose to his feet. “I’ll let you know how I get on with Mr. Keith-Westerton about the pearls. It may take a day or two, you understand
? But I’m sure you won’t be the loser.”

  Mrs. Tetbury expressed her relief at coming so well out of the affair and took her leave with many protestations of thankfulness to them both.

  “And what do you make of that, Squire?” Sir Clinton demanded, when the old woman had gone.

  Wendover’s face betrayed both perplexity and apprehension.

  “I don’t much like it,” he admitted frankly. “These pearls look suspiciously like another fragment of that infernal necklace; and . . .”

  He left his sentence unfinished; but it was plain enough that he saw the pointer of suspicion swinging around once more toward the Keith-Westerton ménage. The necklace was Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s. Part of it had been found beside Horncastle’s body. Another pearl had actually been discovered on the corpse of Cincinnati Jean. Further fragments had been brought to light in the lounge of the boathouse. And finally, another pair of pearls had turned up in the pocket of Keith-Westerton’s raincoat, the coat which he had apparently been wearing when he went out on the mysterious errand. On that fatal night, at dinner, Mrs. Keith-Westerton wore the necklace; and now its jewels ran like the trail of a paper chase throughout the case, until the chain ended in Keith-Westerton’s pocket. And yet, if the evidence was to be believed, Keith-Westerton had never seen his wife again on that evening, after he had left her at the Dower House.

  Sir Clinton paid no attention to Wendover’s aposiopesis. He picked up the raincoat and began methodically to go through the pockets. In the right-hand pocket his fingers encountered a small piece of paper which he drew out and examined.