“And now, Mr. Keith-Westerton,” he said grimly, “I want the true story of your doings on the night of the Horncastle murder. Your last account was a lie from start to finish.”
The directness of the attack evidently took young Keith-Westerton by surprise; but he attempted to cover this by bluster.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never heard such a thing. Isn’t my word good enough for you?”
“No, it isn’t,” Sir Clinton replied brutally.
“I sha’n’t say anything. You’ve no right to question me. I can refuse to answer, if it suits me. Are you charging me with murder? You must be mad.”
“I’m not charging you with anything, so far. If I were, I couldn’t put questions to you. But murder isn’t the only crime in the calendar, Mr. Keith-Westerton, remember.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Keith-Westerton repeated, but his tone showed that Sir Clinton’s thrust had gone home.
The Chief Constable made a weary gesture.
“At about seven o’clock on the night of the Horncastle murder, a woman rang you up on the ’phone. You arranged to meet her at the boathouse. At nine o’clock you went out to meet her. Her Christian name was Ellen. . . . Ellen Amy, I believe. I see you remember it.”
“I know nothing about her,” young Keith-Westerton protested, but it was clear that he hardly hoped to convince his hearers.
Wendover, glancing at the Abbé’s face, noticed the faintest expression of contempt pass across it.
“Perhaps this will refresh your memory,” Sir Clinton said dryly.
He pulled out his pocketbook, extracted a newspaper cutting which Wendover recognized, and held it in front of Keith-Westerton.
“No, don’t touch it,” he said sharply, as Keith-Westerton put out his hand. “It’s plain enough, isn’t it? ‘Ellen Amy Keith-Westerton, wife of Colin Keith-Westerton, of Silver Grove, Talgarth, England.’ The game seems to be up, Mr. Keith-Westerton.”
Young Keith-Westerton buried his face in his hands.
“Oh, God,” he groaned at last. “Now it’ll all come out. I thought I was safe, and you’ve got me, after all.”
“Looks pretty black, doesn’t it?” Sir Clinton commented unsympathetically.
“You’ve got me. You needn’t sneer at me. I never meant to do it, I’ll swear that. It just happened. . . . That infernal newspaper cutting. . . . I thought it was all right. . . . I never meant any harm. . . . It just happened. . . . Everything seemed all right; and I thought. . . . Well, she’s dead now.”
Wendover was overwhelmed by this incoherent outburst, and especially by the tone of the last phrase. Young Keith-Westerton seemed to be actually rejoicing over the woman’s death.
But his amazement was doubled by Sir Clinton’s next speech.
“If I arrange to hush this up, will you promise to tell us exactly what happened, that night?”
Wendover felt that the world was upside down. He had known the Chief Constable for years and had never found him to swerve a hair’s breadth from the line of duty. Always he had acted as a mere machine, regardless of any personal factors in a case upon which he was engaged. And now, with his own ears, Wendover had heard him propose to compound a felony, as if it were a matter of no importance. A glance at Severn’s face showed the Squire that the Inspector was as much dumbfounded as he himself was.
“You can’t do that,” young Keith-Westerton said, as though he could hardly believe his ears. “You couldn’t, could you? Could you really? D’ you mean it?”
“Tell us the truth,” said Sir Clinton unhesitatingly, “and I’ll see you through. I’ve enough influence for that. But you’ll have to make a clean breast of the whole business, from the very start, remember that. Otherwise, the bargain’s off. And no lies this time,” he added sternly.
Wendover thought he saw light. From the post-mortem evidence, Cincinnati Jean was in such a state of health that very little would be enough to kill her. Slight overexertion or strong emotion might have led to her death. In that last event, young Keith-Westerton might have a fair case if he were put on his defence. The charge would be one of manslaughter at the worst; and in cases of manslaughter the police have a large discretion. A case might well be dropped on the ground that no conviction could be expected on the evidence. If there had been a stormy interview between her and young Keith-Westerton, her thymus gland might have stopped her heart’s action, and no one could say that Keith-Westerton had a hand in her death. But he might have thought himself involved beyond hope and might, on the spur of the moment, have taken steps to get rid of the body.
“Where do you want me to start?” Keith-Westerton asked Sir Clinton.
“Tell us how you met this woman in the first instance.”
“It was after the War. I’d come of age and got my income into my own hands. I went up to London. I’d no friends to speak of. Everybody seemed to be having a good time. I wanted to have a good time too. There wasn’t much difficulty in getting to know people. Lots of them seemed very friendly, took me up, you know, and introduced me to other people, and so on. I liked it. I’d lived a pretty dull life, before that; and I liked the excitement and the night clubs, and all the rest of it. I’d enough money to play about with.
“I told you how it was. Somebody introduced me to somebody else and they passed me on further. Amongst the lot, I came across Ellen and her father and mother. He was a rather pompous old devil, just a shade strait-laced in some ways. The mother was good-looking for her age, but nothing out of the common and not a bit like her daughter.”
“The real mother died long before the War,” Sir Clinton put in, “and the real father is a spinner in one of the Lancashire mills—a decent working man, by all accounts. What you met were a couple of the gang—no relation to each other or to the girl.”
“Well, I didn’t know that, of course. One took people as one found them, in those days. And I was pretty green. I just accepted their story. Things went pretty fast in those days in scraping acquaintance with strangers. These people didn’t strike me as being out for anything. They didn’t sponge on me, like some of the others. In fact, they seemed rather decent, on the whole. The girl seemed to take to me. I wasn’t in love with her or anything of that sort, you know. But she was uncommonly good-looking; and I liked taking her about. She didn’t lead me on. We just seemed to be pretty good friends. She was . . . amusing; but there was no hanky-panky of any sort.
“Then one night, they asked me to dinner at their flat. I’d taken her about a good deal and this was the first time I’d been to dinner with them. When I arrived, the two old people apologised. They’d forgotten an engagement, had to go out. But it would be all right. I could stay and keep Ellen company at dinner. Well, I saw nothing amiss in that. I stayed.
“I don’t really know quite what happened. I’ve never been able to remember. But next morning I woke up in the girl’s room with the father and mother raising Cain.”
“She drugged you, no doubt,” Sir Clinton interjected.
“I expect she did. Certainly I couldn’t remember much about the end of that dinner, though I tried hard enough afterwards. But just at the moment they didn’t give me much time to think about that. The mother was weeping over her daughter; and the old man was talking to me like a polite bargee. And there I was, only half-awake, and absolutely unable to say anything for myself. You couldn’t explain away a situation of that sort very easily. And the girl herself was in a dreadful state, too, which made it all the worse.
“Well, there it was. I suppose any cub with the least knowledge of the world would have smelt a rat. But I’d been brought up by two old aunts. They’d dinned a lot into me about chivalry and not letting a girl down. And that came up and hit me just at the wrong moment. Besides, I was a bit at a disadvantage, even if I’d known what was what.
“The end of it was that they came over me completely. The girl’s reputation had to be patched up, and quick too. Now I wasn’t fond of the gi
rl in that way; but from all I’d seen of her she was a good sort. I’d never been in love—didn’t know what it meant, even. I was just a kid, really. So what with one thing and another, they got me to agree to marry her at once. It sounds a bit incredible, I expect; but then you haven’t been through that sort of thing, and . . . well, I knew nothing about the world and I thought I’d pretty well committed an unpardonable sin and ruined a decent girl. It was up to me to repair the damage. And although I wasn’t fond of the girl in that way, still, I’d liked her, liked going about with her, and all that sort of thing. It wasn’t such a dreadful prospect, getting married to her, for we’d got on so well together.
“That was how it was. They kept me in hand at the flat until they got a licence. The old man never let me out of his sight. He was a terror, I found, when one came to scrape the top layer off his character. He and his wife managed to give me the impression that I was deuced lucky to get off so easily. And they never mentioned money from start to finish. Their whole idea was to see that their daughter wasn’t landed—quite natural, I thought.
“We got married almost before I’d time to sit down and think about the thing at all. They didn’t leave me much to myself in the interval, you see. And then they suggested that I’d better go back to my rooms and pack up for my honeymoon while she did the same at their flat. I was absolutely dazed by the whole affair. I did as I was told. I packed up some stuff, got a taxi, and drove round to their flat. And when I got there, they’d gone.
“The girl had left a letter for me. Quite a nice letter, you know, and it struck me as just the kind of letter a nice girl might have written in the circumstances. She’d been shocked by the whole business. Her parents had persuaded her to marry me to put things straight. But she felt she didn’t care for me in just that way, though she liked me—just my own feelings about her, which made it sound genuine—and she felt she couldn’t face me just then, as things were. She was going away with her parents, and by and by, perhaps, when she’d had time to think things over, she’d write to me and give me her address. That would mean that she’d got to care for me, really; and then it would be all right.
“The whole business left me completely stunned. Looking back, with the letter in my hand, it seemed like one of these things that one wakes up out of in the night—damnably vivid and yet growing more and more incredible as one thinks it over. And yet, incredible and all, it had actually happened to me. There were my suit cases in the taxi outside, real enough. I went back to my rooms. I’d nobody I cared to consult about the affair. The less said, the better, until the whole business got shaken down. If they’d even so much as hinted at money, I’d have guessed where I was. But they hadn’t come anywhere near that.
“You can guess that the thing pulled me up with a round turn. I hadn’t much heart for amusement, just then. And there was no way of getting into touch with them. It dawned on me that I knew absolutely nothing about them except their names. I inquired at the flat—no good. Nobody knew anything about them. I advertised cautiously in the papers. Nothing.
“And nothing more turned up until some years later. Then an envelope came, with an American postmark, and inside it was that cutting you showed me—the one that advertised her death. Well, in a way, it was a relief. I’d never been really fond of the girl. I was sorry she was dead, of course; but there it was. The whole thing was over and done with, once and for all. By that time I knew a bit more about the world than when I was twenty-one; but this final bit of information wasn’t the kind that would suggest anything wrong. Even if I’d been suspecting anything, that newspaper cutting would have taken away my doubts. From start to finish, remember, money had never come into the affair.”
“Most ingenious,” Sir Clinton admitted, with the air of a connoisseur examining some rare work of art.
“There I was,” Keith-Westerton went on, in a rather less nervous tone. “My hands were free again. The whole business was wiped out. And a while after that, I met my wife. I want to be clear about this. As soon as I fell in love with her, I felt I ought to be sure about the other thing. I got some inquiries made in America. It seemed all right. A woman had really died in that hospital and her name had been given as Ellen Amy Keith-Westerton. It was an old story by then and nobody had much recollection of her. Besides, you know, I didn’t care to advertise the real story. I didn’t want it to be blazoned in the American papers: ‘Aristocrat’s Romance. Strange Story of Marriage That Didn’t Come Off’ and all that sort of thing. But I got enough information to satisfy my mind, and that was all that mattered to me. I’m telling you the plain truth and keeping back nothing.”
“You had a copy of that advertisement,” Sir Clinton interrupted. “Have you got it still?”
“Yes, I have. It’s in one of the compartments of my desk.”
“You might let me see it.”
Rather puzzled, Keith-Westerton left the room and returned in a few minutes with the slip of paper.
“That’s all right,” Sir Clinton said, after a glance at it. “Now will you go on with your story?”
“Well, all that matters is that I got married. We came back here to settle down while Silver Grove was being put in order for us. You know that. Everything seemed all right. I never gave a thought to the old affair. It was closed.
“And then, one evening, just before dinner, some one rang me up on the ’phone. At first I didn’t recognise the voice, but she soon let me know who she was. It was my first wife.”
“Now I want you to be careful,” Sir Clinton cautioned him, though not unkindly. “This is the point where details begin to be important. Don’t omit anything.”
Keith-Westerton nodded.
“You needn’t be afraid of my forgetting anything,” he said bitterly. “It made a big enough impression on me, I can tell you. When I heard that voice, I was completely knocked out. Just put yourself in my place. What would you have felt like? I hardly knew what I was doing.”
“What I want is the gist of that telephone conversation,” Sir Clinton interposed. “Give us an exact account, if you can.”
“Well, she let me know that she was alive. She told me she knew I’d married again. She pointed out what a hole I’d got myself into by marrying while she was still alive. Then she began to threaten me. She’d see she got her rights, and she’d have my wife turned out and exposed to the world for what she was. It was all so sneering and malicious, just a common little shrew letting off a lot of accumulated venom. I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t care to say much at my end of the wire. Somebody might have come in and overheard something. So then she told me to meet her at the boathouse at a quarter past nine. And she rang off with a jeer about hoping I’d enjoy my dinner as much as she’d enjoy hers.”
“Is that the plain truth?” Sir Clinton demanded.
“It is. It is, really,” Keith-Westerton assured him with obvious earnestness.
“Very interesting,” Sir Clinton commented, though without seeming to pay much attention. “Go on.”
“I dressed for dinner, somehow. I was so clean knocked out that I hardly knew what I was doing. I tried to keep it under and behave as if nothing had happened. I wasn’t thinking of myself, you know, honestly.”
He glanced at Sir Clinton as though to assure himself that this statement, at any rate, was credited.
“I got through dinner somehow. About nine o’clock I made an excuse and went out.”
“You didn’t go wandering about the roads in a dinner jacket without a coat?”
“No, I put on a light raincoat. I walked up to the boathouse. When I got there, the lights were on. I went in and she was there, waiting for me in the lounge. She looked older, of course. And she seemed dowdy. It made her look common, somehow. And at the first glance, she seemed coarsened. She’d been a nice, smart youngster when I married her; and I couldn’t help noticing the change. She saw I noticed it and that made her angry, straight off. She was like a wildcat one moment, and then she turned into a jeering
harridan. And I remember I stood there, saying to myself, “Good God! I married this creature.” She was so different from my recollection of her, you know.
“Well, she made no bones about it. She wanted money to keep her mouth shut. If I paid her, nobody need know anything about my marriage to her. If not, then the whole thing would come out. She’d claim her rights and make such a scandal that my wife would be hurt as badly as could be managed. That was the gist of it all. You can guess what a jar it gave me. I didn’t stop to think. She didn’t give me time for that. My whole idea was to silence her temporarily, at any rate, until I had a chance to think things out. She’d told me over the ’phone to bring my checkbook to the boathouse; and I wrote out a check to bearer for Five Hundred Pounds. ‘That’ll do as a start,’ she said. And she made it pretty clear that she had ways of cashing checks which would be quite safe for her, even if I tried to stop the check. ‘And if you try that game, you’ll be sorry,’ she warned me. As soon as she got her hands on the check, she told me to get out. She’d arrange another meeting later on, she said. So I went away.”
“What time was that?” Sir Clinton demanded.
“I can’t say exactly. I didn’t look at my watch, naturally. I should think it would be sometime before ten o’clock—say a quarter to ten. But that’s just a guess, you know.”
“And after you left the boathouse, what did you do?”
Keith-Westerton made a little gesture indicating despair.
“I just walked about, thinking. It had been a fearful jar, and I wanted to see if I could think of some road out. I wandered about at random without caring where I was going. I was thinking all the time.”
Sir Clinton seemed dissatisfied with this vague reply.
“I daresay you were in a brown study, Mr. Keith-Westerton, but you must have some idea of where you went. No matter how hard one’s thinking, there are some things that force themselves on one’s attention. You wouldn’t have walked through a stream without noticing it, would you?”
The Boathouse Riddle Page 19