The Boathouse Riddle

by J. J. Connington

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Focus of Suspicion

  “A TRICKY business?” Sir Clinton echoed Wendover’s description as they sat with the Inspector on the boathouse balcony, later in the day. “Yes, you might fairly call it that, in both senses of the phrase. Unofficially, I needn’t keep up the George Washington pose. In dealing with a smart lad like Ferrers, it’s worse than useless to be overscrupulous.”

  He took out a cigarette, tapped it to settle the tobacco, and then turned to Severn.

  “You want to know how we groped our way through the affair? I’m not using the editorial ‘we’. You contributed as much as I did, in the way of gathering information.”

  “Yes, but you put me on the road to most of it, sir,” the Inspector amplified, honestly.

  Sir Clinton waved that aside.

  “You know what we got out of the Horncastle affair at the very start,” he continued, giving the Inspector no time for further discussion of relative credits. “The man who killed the keeper was socially a cut above a farm labourer; he was a bit of a boxer; and his shoes must have been soaked with water. And in addition, we had the pearls, which seemed to mark the case out from some ordinary village affair.

  “The murderer came on the scene either in a boat or via the shingle along the shore. It was a toss-up between the two routes so far as evidence went; but the boathouse seemed likely to yield results quickest, so we went there.”

  He glanced at Wendover.

  “Your fad for tidiness served us in good stead, then, over the missing screwdriver. A man doesn’t steal a screwdriver unless he has a use for it; so clearly enough something had been unscrewed somewhere. It might have been somewhere outside the boathouse, of course; but the chances were that the unscrewed article had been on the premises. So far as visible things went, there wasn’t anything that fitted the case. Then I began to think of screws that weren’t directly visible; and the gramophone seemed to fill the bill. One could unscrew parts of it, inside the case, without betraying anything at the first glance. So I looked under the lid and found the horn and motor missing. And then we ran across the pearl on the chair, which showed we were on the right track.

  “A gramophone motor and horn can’t be used in conjunction with each other for any ordinary purpose. The only thing that’s common to them is their weight. It seemed a fair guess that what the thief wanted was some heavy article. But he could have found heavy articles lying about: anchors, spare lengths of chain, and things like that. Why didn’t he take them instead of bothering to unscrew the inside of the gramophone? Obviously because they’d have been missed at once by an owner with a fad for tidiness. So I inferred that quite possibly the thief had some knowledge of Mr. Wendover’s love of order; and if this were so, then that thief must be somebody who knew Mr. Wendover or knew about his methods.”

  Sir Clinton glanced rather impishly at the Squire as he explained this.

  “The thief wanted something heavy. What for? Well, there was the lake right under the windows. One couldn’t help thinking of a sinker, of some sort. It didn’t seem pushing things too far to assume that the gramophone works had been tied to some object or other and the whole contraption sunk in the lake. And that led on to the reason for taking out a boat, that night; and so one gets a glimmering of the connection between the boathouse and Horncastle’s body. I put that aside for the moment, but I made up my mind I’d have a shot at dragging the lake on spec, just to see if I was right.

  “Then we found that vanity bag in the boat; and in the same boat another pearl turned up. But because two things turn up in the same place, it doesn’t mean they have much connection with each other. I’ve got a driving licence and a five-pound note in my pocketbook; but that doesn’t show that they’re related to each other to any marked extent. What the pearl did show was that we were on the right track; pearls in the boathouse, pearls in the boat, pearls beside Horncastle’s body: all from the same string. But Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s bag might have been left in the boat by accident, for all one could tell. It had to be taken into account, but it proved nothing by itself.

  “But one thing was certain. Whoever murdered Horncastle had a key of the boathouse. Well, who had a key, or who had the opportunity of forging a key? Mr. Wendover’s servants are above suspicion. The only other keys were in the hands of the Keith-Westertons. A call at the Dower House was obviously necessary; and Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s bag gave us the excuse for going there. By hook or crook, we had to find out something about the Keith-Westerton ménage; for somewhere in that group lay the only chance of a boathouse key, authorised or unauthorised.

  “Before we got there, that Salvationist fellow bobbed up. A rum cove on a peculiar errand at that hour of the morning. My impression was that he was a genuine fanatic. There was no clear connection between him and the murder. Barring the fact that he had been a wrong ’un in earlier days, there was nothing of interest in him; and he let out his previous character himself, which did not look suspicious, to say the least of it.

  “We went to the Dower House, and there we picked up a good deal more than I’d expected, I admit. Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s hurried flight . . . I don’t suppose you made any more of it than I did myself, and that was exactly nothing at the moment when we got the news.

  “Then we interviewed Keith-Westerton. What struck me at once was that he seemed to think we’d got something against him; and yet when the Horncastle murder was mentioned as the reason for our visit, he was obviously relieved. A good actor might have carried off a thing like that; but Keith-Westerton’s one of the poorest actors I’ve seen. The inference is obvious. Keith-Westerton was guilty of something or other, but it most certainly wasn’t the Horncastle murder. In fact, I’d have been prepared to stake a fair amount that he’d never heard of the Horncastle affair when we dropped on him out of the clouds. But when you put his hang-dog looks in relation with his wife’s flight, it gave something worth thinking over.

  “What that something might be, came out very shortly. We heard about that telephone call in a woman’s voice, and the effect it produced on Keith-Westerton. Happy family; incursion of strange woman; sudden departure of wife: there’s no great difficulty in fitting that together, normally. But in this case, at first, it seemed that Mrs. Keith-Westerton had no obvious means of learning anything about the lady of the telephone. She hadn’t seen her husband after he went out; she’d received no message; and yet she decamped before her husband got home again.

  “The necklace suggested something, there. She had it on at dinner. In the course of the evening, its fragments got distributed between the boathouse, the boat, and the shingle beside Horncastle. On the face of it, she might have been at the boathouse—her bag had been left there, either at night or in the afternoon.

  “Then came that little scullery maid’s evidence—that Keith-Westerton’s shoes were soaked. We saw them; they were soaked in a way that was quite beyond any mere wetting on dewy grass. But if Keith-Westerton’s manner went for anything, he was not the murderer of Horncastle; and therefore he was not the man who trudged through the water splash. Now you can soak a pair of shoes under a domestic tap, if you happen to have access to the shoes. Who had access to Keith-Westerton’s shoes? His man Ferrers, or perhaps some one else on the domestic staff. But no valet or any other servant would play that sort of joke idly. Who knew that it was an important point that Keith-Westerton’s shoes were soaked? Only one person besides ourselves—the actual murderer. Therefore, if Keith-Westerton himself wasn’t the murderer—which was neither proved nor disproved at that point—then the murderer was either Ferrers or the chauffeur.

  “Any one of the three—Keith-Westerton, Ferrers, and the chauffeur—would have fitted the characteristics of the murderer as we knew them: good physique, some knowledge of boxing, and middle class at least in the social scale. I didn’t let myself be swayed much, one way or the other, by this kind of reasoning; but obviously it made me try to see how things fitted together with regard to th
e three men.

  “Keith-Westerton’s tale of his night’s doings was obviously a pack of lies. That was a pity from his point of view. As to the chauffeur, if he was lying about the earlier part of the evening, then the house-parlourmaid was lying also. Again, if Ferrers was lying about his movements, then the French maid was lying also. Altogether, it looked as though truth might be hard to find amongst the taradiddles.

  “The chauffeur came out of it best, for his story about Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s departure from the garage rang true enough—the more so since we might obviously be able to check it sooner or later. That fixed him as being at the Dower House up to half-past eleven—if we could check his yarn; and if he were the murderer, he’d have had to move fairly quick before midnight. Also, it was hard to see how he could have got hold of the necklace. If Mrs. Keith-Westerton left it behind in her room and he stole it from there after she had gone, that meant a few minutes occupied. Even by the short cut, it’s ten minutes’ walk from the Dower House to the boathouse. Add that to the time it would take to unscrew the gramophone parts, and you run the thing very fine indeed, if Hyde was the man who shot Horncastle at midnight.

  “Finally, there was Ferrers. He could have soaked those shoes easily enough; and the scullery maid vouched that she got them from him, so they’d passed through his hands. Keith-Westerton is a careless type, so there was an obvious possibility that Ferrers had more than one opportunity of taking a wax impression of the boathouse key, from which he could get another one filed. In fact, in that line a valet has chances which no other person could have. Ferrers might very easily have picked up information about Mr. Wendover’s orderly habits.

  “Then, again, Ferrers had to admit that he was out very late on the night of the murder; but he relied on Louise Sandeau for his alibi. He was quite frank about his row with Horncastle; but that was a thing which might have come to light anyhow, and his openness might have been forced on him as the best policy, if he were the criminal. Better to admit it voluntarily than have it cropping up from an independent source, later on. As to his relations with the Sandeau girl, any one could see at a glance that he was enamoured of her; his whole behaviour pointed to that. He and she had far more motive for supporting each other’s stories than the other pair, the chauffeur and the parlourmaid, had. But if Ferrers was lying, then the French maid’s evidence was suspect immediately. At that stage in the affair, if I’d been asked what I thought about the chance of Ferrers’ guilt, I’d have taken refuge in the Scots verdict: ‘Not Proven.’ It wasn’t certain that he was the man; but it was quite certain that he wasn’t cleared.

  “Then friend Sawtry bobbed up again and supplied us with a fresh link in the chain. After we had done with him, we knew Mrs. Keith-Westerton had been at the boathouse and had gone straight from there to the Abbé Goron’s house. And with that in hand, it didn’t take much finesse to discover that she’d gone to the Abbé to make a confession. Obviously something had happened at the boathouse to give her a bad jar: either she’d committed a sin there, or else she’d discovered something which made it impossible—with her Catholic principles—to go on living with her husband.

  “The facts we collected at Ambledown showed plainly that she wasn’t on the spot when the murder was done. Further, the Abbé’s evidence about her movements fitted neatly with the chauffeur’s story about seeing her drive away from the garage at 11.30. That cleared her in the matter of the actual murder and it also established Hyde as a credible witness.

  “Why had she gone off in such a hurry? Well, there was no definite evidence; but when you put her doings into relationship with the woman’s voice on the ’phone, and Keith-Westerton’s behaviour, it didn’t seem stretching things much to assume that there was a woman in the business. Further, Mrs. Keith-Westerton’s a Catholic, therefore she wasn’t going to bring a divorce action, no matter what information had fallen into her hands at the boathouse. And my rigid friend the Abbé aproved of what she had done. One couldn’t help feeling that, somewhere, there was a screw loose in the Keith-Westerton matrimonial affairs, and that Mrs. Keith-Westerton had just discovered it—at the boathouse. But she didn’t learn it from her husband, or she wouldn’t have needed to write him that note. Whence I inferred that probably at the boathouse she met the woman in the case. And that made me quite determined to drag the lake and see what was tied to the gramophone motor. The abandoned car in the wood made it practically certain that some person had come on the scene from outside, that night, and had not gone away again.

  “Then you had the evidence of that amusing person, Mr. Oliver Thewles. It built up the picture a bit further, but the really important point, to me at least, was the fact that there was a boat on the lake at the very moment when the fatal shot was fired.

  “Of course, we saw at the very start that there were two people mixed up in the proceedings which ended in Horncastle’s death: one of them—the actual murderer—made the track over the grass, whilst the other party took the boat back to the boathouse. The point of the boat incident was this: it seemed to offer a chance of driving a wedge in between the two confederates, if one of them was an innocent accomplice.

  “Immediately after that, we fished up the body of Cincinnati Jean; and thanks to you, Inspector, we got all the facts about her very quickly indeed. When these were filled in, the main outline of the whole business was clear enough, so far as the Keith-Westertons were concerned. Further, somebody had supplied Jean with the topography of the district and had written to her suggesting the boathouse as a suitable rendezvous with Keith-Westerton. The only person who would do that was a confederate who had his own key of the boathouse. Put the whole data together, and suspicion lights pretty hard on Ferrers, with Louise Sandeau as his accomplice.

  “The reappearance of Mrs. Keith-Westerton and the marriage ceremony both dropped neatly into place in the scheme. It was obvious that Keith-Westerton had been trapped into going through a form of marriage with Cincinnati Jean in earlier times, and that once she was out of the way, the thing had to be regularised. Take the pearl we found on Jean’s body, and it was obvious that she and Mrs. Keith-Westerton had met at the boathouse, where Jean had scored double by blackmailing the wife as well as the husband, and had taken the pearl necklace as an advance or as a pledge of payment. A child could have fitted in the missing bits in that part of the puzzle.

  “Every criminal makes one bad mistake, at least, if you’re going to have a chance of catching him. Up to that point, in this case, there was only one mistake—the nonreplacement of the screwdriver on its clip. But Ferrers was finding that we were too slow for his liking, so he decided to spur us up a bit and the way he chose to do it was to plant some pearls and the newspaper cutting in the pocket of the torn coat and sell it to Mrs. Tetbury. The cutting was to supply clear evidence of a motive involving Keith-Westerton in the murder of Cincinnati Jean. But where Ferrers slipped a cog was in forgetting that Keith-Westerton’s fingerprints weren’t on that cutting and that therefore Keith-Westerton hadn’t handled it.

  “That move made it practically certain that Ferrers was a party to the blackmailing scheme; and if he was in that, his general character wasn’t good enough to make his evidence reliable. The bother was to get definite proof that he had killed Horncastle. And the only way around that difficulty was to drive a wedge between him and Louise Sandeau, who evidently had been the person who brought back the boat at the time of the murder. I gauged that he was fond of her, very fond. The question was, how fond was he? To what lengths would he go to save the girl?

  “The P.M. evidence showed that Jean’s death wasn’t a sure case of murder. In her state of health, it might quite well have been accidental entirely. It wasn’t likely that Ferrers would quarrel with Jean: their interests ran together in the affair. But suppose the interview with Mrs. Keith-Westerton and the other one with Keith-Westerton had strained Jean’s emotions a bit, she would hardly be in a fit state to stand a third scene with some one who would be less restrained than t
he Keith-Westertons. If that person were Louise Sandeau, then one could see at once why Ferrers would take a risk to hush the whole affair up. And no other explanation seemed to fit the facts, so far as I could see.

  “In that case, there was a very fair chance of driving a wedge in between the two accomplices, provided that Ferrers was really deeply in love with the girl. And he must have been, on the face of it, or he wouldn’t have murdered Horncastle merely to shield her—which was how I read the facts. I made up my mind to stake everything on that. If it failed, we were no worse off than before. If it came off, then we had him beyond any dispute.

  “The first thing was to get the pearl necklace connected definitely with Jean. The only person who could prove that was Mrs. Keith-Westerton, so we tackled her and got what was wanted. Then came the problem of the other two. Louise Sandeau’s a Catholic, and I guessed that she would make her confession to the Abbé Goron. He’d been attached to the family and he was one of her own people, to whom she could confess in her native language—a much easier business than trying to make things clear to an English priest. I’ve a considerable respect for the Abbé’s force of character. I was pretty sure that with his eye on her that girl would be more likely to tell the truth—since he already knew the whole story and could check her statements, though he couldn’t give us his information. So I invited him to be there when I examined her; naturally it was easy enough to plead that she ought to have a fellow countryman to watch over her interests.

  “I stopped her before she got to the Horncastle episode for two reasons. First, it wasn’t fair to let her incriminate herself if she was guilty. It might have had a bad effect at a trial—poor girl, foreigner, bullied by brutal police in a strange land, didn’t know the language and made mistakes . . . you can guess what a sharp lawyer might have made of that. And, secondly, I wanted to leave her free to tell Ferrers that she hadn’t given him away. I didn’t want to risk his feeling that she’d let him down. That might just have tipped the scale in his mind. But when she was able to protest her loyalty . . . well, what could he do? He’d been prepared to kill a man to shield her, as he thought; he had to go through with it, if he was going to save her. That was made pretty clear. We’d have got him in any case, I think; but it was surer to get him to tell his story.”