“Or else the curtain was waving in a draught. Either would fit. So much for the curtain. Now for the telephone. What’s the length of the cord attaching the mouthpiece to the desk-stand?”
Ledbury extracted a measuring-tape from his pocket and took the length of the cable.
“Three and a half feet, sir.”
“How far is it from the stand to the dead man’s chair—the back of the chair—roughly?”
Ledbury measured the distance with his eye.
“Close on thirty feet,” he estimated.
“So no man could stand behind this chair and talk into the mouthpiece at the same time?”
“No.”
Sir Clinton’s questions evidently suggested a fresh idea to the sergeant, and he looked more uncomfortable than ever.
“You mean, sir . . .?”
“I mean this. If you’ll go down to the Black Bull, as I did just now, and ask for the girl who answered Mr. Brandon’s telephone call, you’ll learn this. In the middle of a sentence, and while Mr. Brandon was still speaking, she heard a bang. Then there was a jar as if the transmitter had been slammed down. She didn’t know what it all meant, of course; but she’s put two and two together now that she’s heard the stir in the village about the murder. What she heard was the firing of the shot. And at that very moment Mr. Brandon was speaking through the ’phone. Grasp the inference? If I were you, I’d pick up that ’phone and offer Mr. Brandon your humblest apologies immediately. It doesn’t do to waste time. Every minute he’ll be getting angrier, if I know him.”
Ledbury saw the ground cut completely from beneath his feet by these new facts. Sir Clinton hadn’t been far out, after all, when he had termed it the biggest bungle of the sergeant’s life; and the prospect of having to straighten out the results of his rashness was anything but pleasant.
“You’re quite sure of your evidence, sir?” he asked in a very dejected tone.
“Quite,” said Sir Clinton definitely.
Ledbury took the hint. He picked up the telephone, rang up the police station, and gave orders for Rex’s release. He added some instructions about the removal of Francia’s body from Fern Lodge, in readiness for the necessary inquest. When he put the telephone down, he found Sir Clinton inspecting the pistol which the sergeant had laid down on the table when he came into the smoke-room.
“Do you make anything of that, sir?” he asked, rather humbly. “Does it suggest something to you?”
Sir Clinton gave an almost imperceptible shrug, as though the matter were almost outside his purview.
“On the face of it, one or two things look clear enough,” he said. “The shot wasn’t fired by Mr. Brandon; and yet Mr. Brandon’s are the only finger-prints on it, so far as one can see. Therefore the man who handled it before Mr. Brandon took special care not to leave his prints on it. Premeditated crime, evidently. And done by someone who takes trouble to think things out.
“The bullet came through the curtain; the cartridge-case was on the floor; and the window was open. One might infer that whoever fired the pistol was just outside the window, leaning in over the sill, perhaps. The pistol itself must have been inside the window at the moment of firing, or else the cartridge-case would have been on the verandah, since the ejector works backwards and sideways in its throw. That seems to dispose of the possibility of the shot having been fired from any distance outside the window, quite apart from the fact that a man at a distance couldn’t see through the curtain to aim, whereas a man actually at the window would be able to peep through any gap between the drawn curtains. By the way, know anything about these automatics, sergeant?”
Ledbury shook his head.
“Never had much to do with them,” he confessed.
“They’re neat bits of machinery,” Sir Clinton explained. “See that little pawl that can be moved up to engage in the notch in the sliding jacket? If that’s home, you can’t fire. Safety-catch No. 1. Now, see that moveable bit on the pistol-grip? Safety-catch No. 2. It’s depressed when you grip the butt of the pistol for firing; and the gun won’t go off unless it’s pressed down. So even if you drop the pistol on the floor, the jar won’t set it off.”
“Can’t be fired unless someone’s holding it?” the sergeant said, to show that he had grasped the point. “So that’s why it didn’t explode when it fell out of the murderer’s hand immediately after he’d fired the shot? For of course it was the pistol falling that made the noise the maid described, wasn’t it? The noise like a candlestick falling?”
Sir Clinton nodded in agreement.
“Suppose you take out the magazine and count the cartridges,” he suggested. “That is, if you can do it without finger-marking the pistol.”
“Six cartridges, sir,” Ledbury reported after a second or two. “That makes seven in all, with the empty case we found on the floor.”
“If eight’s a full load, it looks as if more shots than one were fired,” Sir Clinton pointed out. But we needn’t bother about that just now.”
He moved towards the open French window, passed out on to the verandah, and stepped up to the window from which the fatal shot had come. From that position, he looked to right and left for a moment or two; then, without explaining his actions, he re-entered the room. In the short interval a change had come over Ledbury’s expression.
“There’s just one point I’ve overlooked, sir,” he said, with a light recrudescence of suspicion in his tone. “You’ll mind what the maid said? What d’you make of her hearing Mr. Brandon say: ‘Go away! At once!’ That’ll want explaining.”
A flash of comprehension lighted up his face.
“You’ve explained away Mr. Brandon very neatly,” he said slowly. “Mighty neatly indeed, you’ve explained him away. But p’raps I was a bit hasty in taking your advice and letting him out of the jug. What about his being an accomplice, ex post facto—shielding the real criminal, like? How would you look at that, sir?”
“I shouldn’t look at it at all,” Sir Clinton said, taking hardly any trouble to conceal his contempt for the idea. “Use your brains, sergeant.”
The flame of suspicion was blazing up in Ledbury’s eyes now even stronger than before. With a complete disregard of Sir Clinton’s implied warning, he picked up the telephone, rang up the police station, and made some inquiries. From what he heard, Sir Clinton gathered that Rex had been set at liberty and had immediately set off for Fern Lodge.
The sergeant put the telephone back on its bracket with a gesture of relief.
“No harm done yet,” he said half-aloud. “I’ll lift him when he turns up here.”
At that moment there came a knock on the door of the smoke-room; and, in answer to Ledbury’s summons, one of the constables put his head into the room.
“There’s a Mr. Yarrow wants to speak to you, sergeant. He says he’s got some important information to give you. It won’t keep, he says.”
“All right, I’ll see him—in the drawing-room, say.” He turned to Sir Clinton with a politeness which seemed rather forced. “I suppose you’ve no objection to our using your room, sir. Perhaps you’d like to hear this new evidence?”
If the last sentence was ironical, Sir Clinton was apparently obtuse, for he took it at its face value.
“Certainly, sergeant,” he agreed, following Ledbury from the smoke-room.
Waiting in the hall was the amateur naturalist, dressed in his incongruous loud tweeds. Ledbury ushered him into the drawing-room; and, almost before the door was closed behind them, Yarrow had launched eagerly into a long, detail-encumbered narrative.
Stripped of its irrelevancies, his story ran thus. That afternoon, taking advantage of Sir Clinton’s permission, he had come up to the lake to study the habits of the water-fowl—“Gallinula chloropus”; and for that purpose he had brought his new telescope. He installed himself under cover of some trees and kept a look-out on the lake. About four o’clock, he noticed two girls on the landing-stage. Shortly afterwards, Sir Clinton joined them, and the par
ty went out in one of the boats. Yarrow confessed quite frankly that he had spied on them through his telescope—“merely with the friendliest interest.” Then, tiring of this, he turned his glass towards Fern Lodge.
From his position, he could see the verandah and also the porch of the house; and when he brought the front door into his field of view he caught sight of a girl standing on the steps—“a very pretty girl, brown-haired, and dressed in a flimsy frock—a tennis-costume or something of the sort.” She had riveted his attention immediately, and he tried to keep her in sight. “But I am unused to my telescope, or any telescope, and I find difficulty in holding the instrument steady and in keeping my second eye closed.” From the spasmodic glimpses he obtained, he got the impression that she was disturbed about something. “She seemed, if I may put it so, agitated—nervous.”
This natural phenomenon had fixed the attention of the amateur naturalist. He watched the girl walk along the front of the house towards the lake, and sit on a garden seat which stood a yard or two away from the foot of the stair leading to the verandah. Then, for a few seconds, his telescope wavered; and when he picked up the seat again it was empty. He wasted a moment or two before he found the girl’s figure, and by this time she was at the window of the smoke-room. He described the window with an accuracy sufficient to make it manifest that he had identified it correctly.
Then something happened which he had not understood at the time. The girl had her left hand on the window-sill when he saw her again. Where her right hand was, he could not see. Suddenly, the curtain of the window was drawn aside and he caught a glimpse of a man standing within the room. The girl appeared to have had a shock of some sort, for she tottered for a moment and caught with both hands at the leaves of the open window in order to support herself. Then, in obedience to an abrupt gesture of dismissal from the man in the room, she ran along the verandah towards the front of the house and disappeared out of Yarrow’s field of vision. Meanwhile, the man in the room made another gesture—” as if he were throwing something out of the window.” After that, he turned away from the casement into the room and Yarrow lost sight of him.
The amateur naturalist kept his telescope fixed on the window to the best of his ability, in the hope of seeing more; but in this he was disappointed; and at last he turned his attention once more to the front of the house. He witnessed the meeting of Staffin and Mr. Scotswood, and followed the maid’s arrival on the landing-stage and her signalling to Sir Clinton in the boat. After this, the house yielded nothing of interest to him, and he had finally given up his spying, feeling very much puzzled by what he had already seen.
Not venturing to trespass near Fern Lodge, he had made the best speed he could back to Raynham Parva, frankly in the hope of picking up some gossip. When he reached the village, the whole place was astir with the news of the third murder; and he saw that his evidence was vital. He resolved to volunteer it at once—“as a mere matter of public duty.”
To his credit, Ledbury refrained from any display of exultation during Yarrow’s narration. He had no need to question the amateur naturalist; all the details he wanted were poured out upon him to the last tittle. Occasionally he stole a glance at Sir Clinton to see how this latest turn of the wheel was affecting him, but the face of the late Chief Constable had fallen into its habitual impassiveness. Only when Yarrow had exuded his last item of evidence did Sir Clinton open his lips.
“This is the telescope you were using?” he asked, as though the matter was one of casual interest only. “May I look at it?”
Yarrow handed it over, and Sir Clinton drew out the slides. He walked over to the window, turned the telescope towards the lawns, and brought it to the focus. Ledbury, obviously unable to see the bearing of this experiment, waited rather impatiently for the end of it.
Sir Clinton shut up the telescope and turned to Yarrow.
“Magnifies a good deal, doesn’t it? I suppose you couldn’t get much into your field of view?” he asked. “The window itself, and a bit of the wall on either side, perhaps?”
“Yes,” Yarrow confirmed, evidently flattered by the praise of his instrument’s power. “That’s just what I saw; the window with the girl’s figure and perhaps a yard of wall on each side of it, just as you say.”
Sir Clinton turned to Ledbury.
“If you’re thinking of calling Mr. Yarrow as a witness, sergeant, you’d better impound that telescope. It’ll be an important exhibit at the trial.”
Yarrow began at once to protest against the confiscation of his telescope; but the sergeant made short work of his objections. Ledbury had got all he wanted from Yarrow, and now he practically turned him out of the room under the pretext that he had better put his statement in writing immediately. A constable took charge of the naturalist and led him off in search of writing materials so that he could put his narrative on paper in another room.
Closing the door, Ledbury came back and confronted Sir Clinton. He made no effort to conceal his satisfaction with the latest development of the case.
“Greatest bungle of my life?” he said softly, as though merely thinking aloud. “‘A very pretty girl, in a tennis-frock, and brown-haired.’ There was four girls here this afternoon. Two of ’em was on the lake when the shot was fired. Another of ’em was Miss Scotswood—and she’s fair-haired. So that leaves Mrs. Francia. She’s ‘a pretty girl, brown-haired, in a tennis-frock.’ I begin to see a bit o’ light in this case.”
He paused in his soliloquy and stared hard at Sir Clinton with an expression of triumph on his face.
“She was the one your young friend Brandon was shielding with his: ‘Go away! At once!’ That explains why he kept his mouth shut so tight and wouldn’t tell us anything. She was the one that fired the shot!”
Chapter Nineteen
THE FRENCH METHOD
“She was the one that fired the shot!”
When the words had escaped him, Ledbury remembered, too late, that the girl he was accusing was the niece of the man he was addressing. He waited uneasily, expecting a verbal storm to break over his head. To his surprise first, and then to his discomfort, Sir Clinton gave no sign that he had been touched on a sore spot. If anything, his face set more firmly into a mask which the sergeant scanned vainly in an endeavour to see what mental reaction his ejaculation had produced. When he spoke, his voice betrayed no more than his features.
“Another arrest, sergeant? In your own interest, I suggest you should hear Mrs. Francia’s story before you go that length.”
Ledbury, having burned his boats, greeted this proposal with a shrug which was almost cavalier.
“You don’t imagine she’d tell anything?” he demanded in a tone that was almost contemptuous. “Why should she incriminate herself? And you’re at her elbow, aren’t you, to shut her up if she gets near a dangerous bit? You know I’m not supposed to put the screw on anyone, once I’ve made up my mind to charge them.”
“You haven’t quite caught the idea, sergeant,” Sir Clinton explained, in a tone which Ledbury vainly tried to interpret. “I shall be present, of course. And I shall do my best to persuade her to tell you everything she can, without reservation of any sort.”
The sergeant took his eyes from Sir Clinton’s face and stared thoughtfully at his own boots for some seconds. This was the last move that he had expected; and he could not help feeling that it must conceal a trap of some sort. Nobody in Sir Clinton’s place would voluntarily throw the girl open to this attack, unless he had something clearly in view which would turn the affair to his advantage. Try as he would, Ledbury could not conceive why this suggestion had been put forward at all.
“I’ll send to fetch her,” he agreed reluctantly, in the end. “But understand, sir, I’ve my duty to do. I’ll have to arrest her, whether she makes a statement or not. I’ll send someone to look for her now.”
He left the room to make his arrangements. Sir Clinton followed him out into the hall and, rather to the sergeant’s surprise, entered the smok
e-room, where a constable was again on guard. He stayed there only a couple of minutes; and Ledbury encountered him once more as he returned to the drawing-room. Just at that moment, Rex Brandon appeared in the porch and came forward to intercept them. He ignored Ledbury completely.
“What’s happened since they took me away?” he demanded, going up to Sir Clinton, with a white and anxious face. “What game are they up to now?”
“Sit down there for a little, Rex,” Sir Clinton ordered, evading any answer to the questions. “You can’t wait in the dining-room—it’s occupied by a Mr. Yarrow, who mustn’t be disturbed. Find a chair here in the hall. I’ll need you in a few minutes.”
He paused, and then added:
“You’re a good sort, Rex.”
Ledbury overheard the low-toned sentence. Evidently it gave him something to think about, for his brows knitted as though he was making a violent effort to grasp something which eluded him. The whole affair, as he saw it, had taken on an increasingly suspicious aspect. He had an uneasy feeling that all these people were in league together to hoodwink him; and yet he knew that there had been no opportunity for a private consultation between uncle and niece since the firing of the fatal shot. For all his guessing, he could not imagine what Sir Clinton had up his sleeve.
They waited patiently for a long time before anything happened. Sir Clinton seemed to have no desire to say a word; and Ledbury was only too glad to have an opportunity of reconsidering the whole case in the hope that he might be able to forestall Sir Clinton’s coming move. At last steps sounded in the hall, the door opened, and Elsie was ushered in. As she entered, the voice of Rex sounded in the hall.
“Don’t say a word, Elsie! For God’s sake, don’t tell them anything!”
Sir Clinton stepped swiftly to the door.
“Leave things to me, Rex,” he said decisively. “We’ll need you in a minute or two. Till then, keep quiet.”
He closed the door and turned to Elsie; and as his eyes fell on her, he was astonished, for all his forebodings, at the change in her whole aspect. At four o’clock she had been a care-free creature in the height of happiness; now, as she turned her haunted eyes upon him, he could almost feel in his own flesh the work that anguish, shock, horror, and terror had wrought on her in the interval. His little Elsie, the child who used to run to meet him in the old days—brought to this! She was at the end of her resources; and as he turned to her, she held out her hands in a pitiful, involuntary gesture which begged for help.
Nemesis at Raynham Parva (A Clinton Driffield Mystery) Page 24