The Third Mystery

by James Holding

  “The bullet that killed Lumsden went clear through his body—so much was decided at the post-mortem examination,” Crewe said. “But that fact was also evident from a cursory examination of the body, as we saw it in the chair. You will remember that I drew attention to the fact when we were looking at the body. Your theory is that the shot was fired as Lumsden was standing at the window, with his back towards his murderer, that the bullet went through him, through the window, and lodged in the arm of this man Jauncey who stated he was outside in the garden. But the course of the bullet through Lumsden’s body was slightly upward. How in that case could it strike downward and wound a man on the ground ten or twelve feet below the windows on the first story?”

  “The bullet might have been deflected by the glass of the window,” said Gillett.

  “It might have been, but it is highly improbable that ordinary window-glass would deflect a bullet—even a spent one. In any case this bullet hit the cherry-tree outside the window before hitting Jauncey. You will find that it cut the bark of the cherry-tree—the mark is 4 ft. 4½ inches from the ground.”

  “Then it was the cherry-tree that deflected it?” said Sergeant Westaway.

  “Yes and no,” said Crewe. “Certainly its course was deflected downwards after hitting the cherry-tree—I assume that Jauncey was close to the tree. But if it had not been travelling downwards, it would have hit the tree much higher up—somewhere near the level of the window. The bullet that hit Jauncey was fired in the room in which we saw the body, but it was fired by the man who took the body to the farm, with the intention of giving the impression that the crime took place there. Knowing that the bullet which killed Lumsden had gone through his body, he placed the body in a chair near the window and then fired a shot through the window. He made the mistake of going close up to the window to fire, and as a result he fired downwards instead of on a level at the height of the wound in Lumsden’s body.”

  “If that is all you have to support your theory—” began Detective Gillett.

  “It isn’t all,” said Crewe, with a slight indication of impatience. “It is only my first point. You will recall that on the stairs there were indications that a wet rag had been used for wiping away some traces or stains. Inspector Payne suggested that the rag had been used to wipe away muddy boot-marks on the stairs—the traces of these boots. These boots were not worn by the man as he went upstairs; he put them on afterwards. Presently I will tell you why he did. But the marks on the stairs were not the marks of muddy boots. They were stains of blood which dropped from the dead man’s wound, as his body was carried upstairs. These marks are in the hall leading to the stairs and on the landing leading to the room in which the body was placed. In the room itself no attempt to remove the blood-stains was made, because they were an indication that the shooting took place there. If he had been aware that there was a stain of blood on the latch-key which he took from the dead man’s pocket, he would have washed it away.”

  “If he had possession of the key in order to get the body into the house in the way you state, Mr. Crewe, why did he break into the house? Remember one of the downstairs windows was forced.”

  “It was forced by the man who took the body there. But he forced it in breaking out of the house—not in breaking into it. He wanted to give the impression that some one had broken into the house, but he was pressed for time—he was anxious to get away. In searching for a rag in the kitchen with which to wipe out the blood-stains, he saw these boots. They belonged to Lumsden, as you have said, but it was more likely that Lumsden kept them in the kitchen than in the barn or cowshed. This man—let us call him the murderer—saw in the boots a means of averting suspicion from himself. He decided to leave clues that would suggest that the murderer broke into the house. But, instead of going out of the front door and breaking into the house, he forced the window from inside the room. Then, with these boots on, he climbed out of the window backwards, and when he reached the ground he walked backwards across the garden bed to the path in order to give the impression that some one had walked forwards across the bed to the window.

  “You saw from the sash of the window that the catch had been forced back by a knife, but apparently you overlooked the fact that the marks of the knife are much broader at the top, where the catch is, than at the bottom, where the knife would enter if the catch had been forced by some one outside. It was at the top, near the catch, and not at the bottom below it, that the knife was inserted; that is to say, the knife was used by some one inside the room. The footprints outside the window showed that they were made by a person walking backwards; the impression from the toe to the ball of the foot being very distinct and the rest of the foot indistinct. A person in walking backwards puts down his toes first, and gradually brings the rest of his foot down; a person walking forwards puts his heel down first and then puts down the rest of his foot as he brings his weight forward. Our man, having made his way to the garden path from the window, walked along the path to the motor-car at the gate, probably carrying his own boots in his hand. As soon as he entered his car he drove off along the road in the direction of Staveley with the lights out. He took a risk in travelling in the dark, and in spite of the fact that he knew the road well he came to grief before he reached Staveley.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Gillett. “How do you know he had a car?” He had not given up his own theory in favour of Crewe’s, but he realized that Crewe’s theory was the more striking one.

  “In Marsland’s statement he said that his horse swerved from something in the dark as he was coming down the Cliff road, and fell lame,” said Crewe. “The horse shied at the motor-car as it passed. Marsland neither saw nor heard the car because of the darkness, intensified by the storm, and because of the roar of the wind and waves.”

  “You don’t really expect us to regard the swerving of the horse as proof there was a motor-car there?” demanded Gillett, with a superior smile.

  “Contributory proof,” said Crewe. “If you went along the cliff road, as I did on leaving the farm after meeting you there, you would have noticed that the danger post nearest the farm was out of the perpendicular. That was not the case previous to the night of the storm. This motor-car without lights bumped into it. The mark of the wheels where the car had left the road was quite plain when I looked—it had not been obliterated by the rain. Four miles away the car was run into the ditch and overturned. I saw it as Sir George Granville and I drove along to Cliff Farm on Saturday morning. If you want information concerning it and the person who drove it you can obtain it at Gosford’s garage at Staveley. The car was hired from Gosford.”

  “By whom?” asked Gillett.

  “By a man named Arnold Brett, who was a very close friend of the dead man.”

  “I know all about Brett from Inspector Murchison,” said Gillett. “He rang me up about him and promised to let me know when he came back to his lodgings at Staveley. He said that Brett was a close friend of Lumsden’s, and would probably be able to give us some useful information when he returns.”

  “When will he return?” asked Crewe.

  “You think he has cleared out?” suggested Gillett.

  “I’m sure of it,” was the reply.

  “Murchison gave the impression that he was sure to come back—that he had left Staveley the day before the murder. I understood from Murchison that Brett is doing some secret service work for the Government, and that it was quite a regular thing for him to disappear suddenly.”

  “No doubt it was,” said Crewe. “But this time he is not coming back.”

  “I’ll ring up Murchison,” said Gillett.

  “Don’t waste your time,” was Crewe’s reply. “Murchison is an excellent fellow—an ideal police official for a quiet seaside place where nothing happens, but too genial and unsuspecting for an emergency of this kind. Go and see Brett’s apartments at Staveley—No. 41 Whitethorn Gardens—and the landlady, Mrs. Penfield, will tell you as she told Murchison, and as she tol
d me also, that Brett left Staveley on secret service work on Thursday morning, 15th October, and that she expects him back at any moment. But go to Gosford and he will show you the car that Brett hired on Friday.

  “He will tell you that on Saturday about midday Brett rang him up—from Lewes, Gosford says, but it was more probably from Marlingsea, on his way to London—and told him that he had met with an accident with the car, and that it was lying in the ditch on the side of the road about six miles out from Staveley on the road to this place. It was there that Gosford’s foreman found the car when he went for it. If Brett hired a car at Staveley on Friday he couldn’t have left Staveley on Thursday, as his landlady says. She doesn’t know what to think in regard to this murder, but she is ready to shield Brett all she can because she is in love with him.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  “I must say that I feel very grateful to you, Mr. Crewe,” said Detective Gillett after a pause. “You have certainly got hold of some facts of which I was not aware. And your deductions are most interesting. What do you say, Westaway?”

  “Most interesting,” said the sergeant. “I had heard a lot of Mr. Crewe before I met him, but I’d like to say that it’s a great privilege to listen to his deductions.”

  “Oh, I don’t go so far as to accept his theory and abandon my own,” interposed Gillett hurriedly. “To my mind there is truth in both of them, and the whole truth will probably be found in a judicious combination of both.”

  Crewe could scarcely hide his impatience at Gillett’s obstinacy, and his determination to claim at least an equal share in solving the mystery.

  “My dear Gillett,” he said, “let us abandon theories and keep to facts. The great danger in our work is in fitting facts to theories instead of letting the facts speak for themselves. If you still think you have a case against Marsland, let us go into it. It is no part of my work to prove Marsland innocent if he is guilty; I have no object in proving Brett guilty if he is innocent. But as the guest of Sir George Granville, I want to save him and his nephew unnecessary distress and anxiety. By a full and frank discussion we can decide as man to man whether there is any real case for Marsland to answer. I admit that you have justification for some suspicions in regard to him, but let us see if the fog of suspicion cannot be cleared away by a discussion of the facts.”

  “It will take a great deal to convince me that he doesn’t know more about this tragedy than he has told us,” said Gillett doggedly.

  “But are we to find him guilty merely because he chooses to keep silence on certain points?”

  “What is his object in keeping silence? What was his object in making a false statement? What is his object in putting obstacles in our way? Is that the conduct of an innocent man?”

  “It is not the conduct of a man anxious to help the police to the utmost of his power without regard to consequences,” said Crewe. “But there is a wide gulf between being guilty of keeping something back and being guilty of murder.”

  “When the thing kept back suggests a motive for getting the man who was murdered out of the way, it is natural to see a connection between the two,” returned Gillett.

  “And what was the thing that Marsland kept back?”

  “He kept back that he was an officer in the army—Captain in the London Rifle Brigade. He kept back that this man Lumsden was a private in his company.”

  “But the discovery of these things did not present any great difficulty to a police official of your resources, Gillett.”

  “No, they did not,” the detective admitted. “But we should have been told of them in the first place.”

  “True. But listen to the explanation why you were not told. Marsland has been an invalid for some months. He was invalided out of the army because of wounds and nervous shock. He broke down as many others have broken down, under a long experience of the awful horrors of the front. In order to assist in his recovery the doctors ordered that as far as possible his mind should be kept from dwelling on the war. For this reason the war is never mentioned in his presence by those who know of his nervous condition. He is never addressed by them as an army officer, but as a civilian.”

  “All that is very interesting, Mr. Crewe, but it does not dispose of the information in our possession. You see, the circumstances in which Captain Marsland came into this affair were so very extraordinary, that he might well have told Westaway the truth about the military connection between himself and Lumsden. It was an occasion when the whole truth should have been told. We could not have been long in learning from his relatives that he was suffering from nervous shock, and we would have shown him every consideration.”

  “That is an excellent piece of special pleading,” said Crewe. “But you do not take into consideration the fact that the evasion of everything that dealt with the Army, and particularly with his old regiment, has become a habit with Marsland.”

  “Our information,” said Gillett slowly and impressively, “is that he believed Lumsden was dead—that he had been killed in France. That in his capacity as an officer he sent Lumsden and another man to their death. He had a grudge against this other man. Lumsden’s companion was killed but Lumsden was taken prisoner and subsequently escaped. If that is correct, it supplies a strong motive for getting Lumsden out of the way when he discovered that Lumsden was alive and in England.”

  “When did Marsland make this discovery?”

  “That I don’t know. But he could easily have made it and obtained Lumsden’s address from the headquarters of the London Rifle Brigade.”

  “Did he make such inquiries there?”

  “I have not obtained positive proof that he did. But as a retired officer of the Brigade, who knows his way about their headquarters, he could do it for himself in a way that would leave no proof.”

  “Who was the man that Marsland sent out on a mission of death with Lumsden?”

  “I haven’t got the name.”

  “Can’t you get it?”

  “I am afraid not. It is not a thing one could get from the regimental records.”

  “But cannot you get it from your informant—from the person who is your authority for the story?”

  “Not very well.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Our informant is anonymous. He sent me a letter.”

  “And since when have you begun to place implicit faith in anonymous letters, my dear Gillett?”

  The detective flushed under this gentle irony. “I don’t place implicit faith in it. But it fits in with other information in our possession. And you ought to know better than to despise anonymous information, Mr. Crewe. It is not difficult to conceive circumstances in which a man is willing to give the police very valuable information, but will not come into the open to do it.”

  “But it is even less difficult,” replied Crewe, “to conceive circumstances in which a man tries to divert suspicion from himself by directing the attentions of the police to some one else by means of an anonymous letter.”

  “I haven’t overlooked that,” said Gillett confidently.

  “And this anonymous communication fits in with other information in your possession—other information that you have received from Miss Maynard?” Crewe looked steadily at Gillett, and then turned his gaze on Westaway.

  “So, you know about her?” was Gillett’s comment.

  “She did me the honour of asking my advice when I met her two days ago at Cliff Farm.”

  “What was she doing there?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “She did not.”

  “I understood from her that it was her firm determination to tell you everything—to take you fully into her confidence, and throw all the light she could on the tragedy.”

  “She told us that she was at the farm the night Captain Marsland was there,” said Gillett. “She sought shelter there from the storm and went upstairs with Captain Marsland when the body was discovered. He said nothing whatever about this in his statement to Westaway.”r />
  “Nothing whatever,” said Westaway. “He led me to believe he was entirely and absolutely alone.”

  “But why didn’t she come to the police station that night and make her own statement?” asked Crewe. “Why all this delay?”

  “Her first impulse was to keep her name out of it because of the way people would talk,” said Sergeant Westaway, who, as an old resident of Ashlingsea, felt better qualified than Detective Gillett to interpret the mental process of one of the inhabitants of the little town.

  “And so she asked Marsland to say nothing about her presence at the farm?” asked Crewe.

  “She admits that,” was Westaway’s reply.

  “Of course she had to admit it in order to clear the way for a statement implicating Marsland in the crime,” said Crewe.

  “That was not her motive. After thinking over all that happened, she decided that by shielding herself from idle gossip she might be helping unconsciously to shield the murderer.”

  “And she told you everything,” said Crewe.

  “Everything,” said Sergeant Westaway emphatically.

  “She told you why she was waiting at the farm on the night that Lumsden’s dead body was brought there?”

  “She went there for shelter from the storm,” explained the confident sergeant. “That would be after the body was brought there—if your theory is correct, Mr. Crewe; and after he was shot in the house—if our theory is correct. Our theory is that Captain Marsland, after committing the crime, went outside the house to hide the traces of it—probably to get rid of these boots and revolver, which he threw down the well.”

  “It hasn’t occurred to you, sergeant, that these things may have been placed in the well within the last few days in order that you might find them there?” said Crewe.

  “Who would place them there?” asked Gillett coming to the rescue of the sergeant with a poser.

  “I think you asked me just now what Miss Maynard was doing at the farm two days ago,” said Crewe.

  “And you think that there may be some connection between her visit there and these things?”