Death by the Gaff_Black Heath Classic Crime

by Vernon Loder

  It took a little time to fix the gaff in the model in such a position that it remained in Its place while allowing the shaft to be turned round. Then the experiment was repeated, and, by a little manipulation, the dummy was pulled up free of the hook.

  “There may be something in it,” said Rigby. “Got your shots, Williams? Very well. Now we’ll try the hook with its point fixed down the shaft. Now that we can turn the gaff round, that adjustment will be easy.”

  Joan’s spirits rose again. Evidently Rigby was impressed now, and her theory had not been destroyed by the first contretempts.

  “In any case, everything isn’t an exact representation,” she told Wint, as the helpers prepared for the second trial. “If Mr. Hayes had a faint, he may have recovered for a moment when he felt the wound and struggled a little.”

  “That is also possible,” remarked Rigby, who had overheard her. “Your theory envisages the idea of the man being alive at the moment when he fell in. A wound, of the nature received, together with the rush of water into the throat passages, would revive any man from a faint.”

  The second trial had as much success as the first. That is to say, it proved that, in certain conditions, it was possible for Hayes to have met his death without the intervention of a human hand. Whether the conditions of the experiments sufficiently represented the conditions present at the time of the actual tragedy, it was impossible to judge. The dummy was artificially manipulated in the model shaft, while it was presumed that the push of the current in the Cwyll had driven Hayes into contact with the point of the gaff jammed there.

  But, however partial, or incomplete, the experiments from an ideal point of view, they struck the Chief Constable as being good enough to destroy the body of slender circumstantial evidence against Mrs. Hayes. The prosecution would have to deal with a jury not versed in the niceties of scientific deduction and probably influenced in the prisoner’s favour by the evil character of the dead man. He did not believe they would get a verdict, and intended to make representations to the Crown Prosecutor’s office to that effect.

  “I must thank you for your assistance which was very public-spirited,” he told Joan and as the men began to dismantle the rough apparatus. “I cannot tell you yet how the authorities will regard this, but I can congratulate you on having done something to strengthen the case for the defence. And that is not the kind of congratulation I usually have to offer,” he added with a smile.

  Joan felt sure from his manner, and the tone in which he said this, that he had begun to believe in Mrs. Hayes’s innocence. Bow had the same idea. His face lit up, and he shook hands with the Chief Constable and the Inspector with the greatest goodwill, before hurrying after Joan and Harry Wint, who had set off for the place where the bus would start for Pengellert.

  “You ought to get a reward for this,” he said to them when he caught them up. “If either of you needed it, I would go a long way to see that you got it.”

  Joan smiled. “We felt that, too, but, as neither of us cared to go to the authorities for a reward, we decided to reward each other—and that was really your work too.”

  He smiled, but looked puzzled. “Mine? What do you mean?”

  Joan grinned. “I had to propose to Mr. Wint yesterday before I could get him to see that we were wasting our young lives in single cursedness, Mr. Bow.”

  “Oh, come!” Wint cried. “I made you take it back, didn’t I, and completed the job properly myself.”

  “I congratulate you both very heartily,” said Bow, holding out his hand, “but still I fail to see what I did.”

  “You were at once a good and bad example, Mr. Bow. Your devotion turned our young minds to thoughts of love, and your delay in securing your own happiness told us that we were losing time, too. Now, I have spoken like a book, haven’t I?”

  “A copy-book,” said Wint. “I like your rounded phrases, and feel that you have been at Jane Austin again.”

  “Abandoning sensibility for good sense,” said Joan. “Well, that’s the last chapter of our criminal history, I hope. We are going back to town to-morrow, to alarm our parents—at least, mine—with news of the move.”

  “I am sure they will be very pleased,” said Bow, laughing.

  “Dad won’t remember for fifteen minutes, and my mother is on so many committees that I should have to pose as a charity to get any attention,” said Joan.

  “Do you go back to town, too?”

  He nodded. “I think I shall. I had better see my lawyers again, and have the news of these experiments passed on to Tregaskin. He’ll be better able to assess the value of these experiments than I am.”

  Hoad was waiting anxiously outside the hotel when the party returned. Wint’s snubs had not inclined him to encourage others by a show of curiosity, but his eagerness was too great now to allow him to keep silent.

  “What happened, Mr. Wint?” he asked, as they got down from the country bus.

  Wint took pity on him at last. “We’ll tell you when we come down in a few minutes, Hoad,” he said. “If you can wait till then.”

  Hoad shrugged resentfully at the last dig. “Are they really going to try Mrs. Hayes before a judge?” he demanded. “I feel responsible for bringing her here. I do indeed! I wish you would tell me.”

  Joan touched him gently on the shoulder. “I shouldn’t worry any more, if I were you. We can’t tell for certain, of course, but we think the police will drop the case very soon.”

  “And not charge anyone else with the murder?”

  She nodded. “If they drop it, it is because there was no murder, Mr. Hoad,” she said, and ran indoors after Bow and Wint, who had slipped away.

  Hoad’s expression changed as he stood there, staring at the doorway through which Joan had vanished. His face cleared, the wrinkles of perplexity on his brows smoothed away, and the harassed look which had been in his eyes for many days gave place to a look of relief mingled with wonder.

  “No murder?” he said to himself. “I wonder what she meant?”

  But there was no answer to that till the three came down again, so he entered the hotel once more, and turning into the billiards-room, began to knock the balls about in a desultory way.

  It seemed to him that he had done no harm to anyone, after all. It was even a question if he could hold himself responsible for Blodwen Tysin’s suicide. For that had been the thing that worried Hoad all along. Just as a morbid character may commit a crime for the sake of notoriety, so young Hoad had suffered the most enjoyable agonies by his egotistical determination to believe himself at the bottom of half the trouble.

  He wondered now if he would get half the “kick” out of finding his character rehabiliated in the eyes of his fellow-guests.

  Chapter XXIX

  Happy Release

  THERE was some relief in the office of the Public Prosecutor when it was eventually decided that the case against Mrs. Hayes, on a charge of murdering her husband, was to be withdrawn, and she was released on bail, with the knowledge that it was only a matter of waiting for a few days before the prosecution formally freed her.

  The department had agreed that the case against her was sufficient to go to a jury in the first instance, but they had not been at all sure of obtaining a verdict, and the result of the experiments at Cwyll, submitted to them with a covering letter from the Chief Constable, destroyed any hopes there had been in that direction.

  A memory of one or two convictions, which had lately been quashed by higher courts and created some public uneasiness, added to their relief at abandoning the charge.

  Then Mrs. Hayes, appealed to by Bow, had stated that she was not aware that her husband had any tendency to faint or had noticed in him any suggestion of ill-health. He never had a day in bed, and appeared to be always extremely healthy and robust.

  “An unlikely thing for her to say, if she were guilty,” said a young lawyer in the department. “The value of this new evidence—the experiments, and so on—lies in the point that the man took il
l and fell in. It was to her interest as the murderess to say that he was subject to fits or faintness.”

  “It would have been, if she had no family doctor,” said the man to whom he spoke. “You forget that the local medico would have been asked by us for his opinion.”

  “As he never had a day’s illness, I assume that he never called in the doctor,” said the lawyer acidly. “In any case, many a man has a faint now and then without consulting his doctor about it.”

  “They might alarm him.”

  “Some men are least likely to go to the doctor when a symptom alarms them, my dear fellow. Ask any doctor you know. He’ll tell you that the fear of having something serious keeps lots of men from him until it is too late. No. Mrs. Hayes is either uncommonly subtle, or as innocent as you and I.”

  “I don’t believe for a moment that she did it.”

  Edward Bow, unhappily, was not so sure. When he met Mrs. Hayes on her release, he spoke of his doubts, with as much daring as trepidation.

  “You were lucky, Caroline,” he said to her, when they had driven to a little country town and ordered lunch in the empty coffee-room of a small hotel. “I don’t blame you, of course, but I trembled all the time for fear you would make some mistake.”

  Caroline Hayes stared at him. “You never thought I did it, Ned?”

  He surveyed her steadily. “What other conclusion could I come to?”

  She met his eyes as steadily. “But you told me all along that you were sure I never killed him.”

  He nodded. “My dear, what was I to say? Your safety depended all along on your not getting rattled. I knew very well that, if I seemed to doubt your innocence, you could hardly have kept it up. The mere recollection that you would have to play a part before me, knowing that I knew, would have broken you down. That’s elementary psychology, I think.”

  She bit her lip. “Ned, don’t make me lose faith in you, will you? And don’t lose faith in me. What would my love be if I let you marry me, when I murdered my husband? And what kind of man should I think you if you were willing to marry me, believing that I murdered him?”

  He stared now. “Murder him? I never suggested that, my dear.”

  “Then it’s a joke, Ned,” she replied. “I don’t know that I like that, either. And it’s not like you.”

  “Joke? Why, Caroline, I thought you had killed him, not murdered him. There’s all the difference in the world.”

  Her expression changed again. “I knew you couldn’t say, or mean, such a cruel thing, Ned,” she returned earnestly. “But did you really think I killed him?”

  Her sincerity convinced him at last that she was speaking the truth.

  “Did I? Of course. That was what gave me the greatest fear. If I could have felt convinced that you had not gone down to that pool when he was there, I shouldn’t have worried to the same extent. Naturally, I thought you had come on him with that girl, and followed him down to the bank when she went home.”

  “And struck him with the gaff?”

  “Yes. I could not explain exactly what had happened, and I dare not ask you, for the reasons I have already given. But I took it that you had either found a gaff, or that Hayes had picked up one on the bank—Wint’s, very likely, in spite of what the police said. I took it that your blow must have been in self-defence, and forgetting the hook at the end of the handle. A man of Hayes’s type, caught as I assumed he was, would be furious at the exposure, and lose his temper and his head at once.”

  Caroline smiled at last. “My dear Ned, I forgive you for saying what you did. But it’s too absurd that you should have even thought it. In my last statement to the Inspector I told him the exact truth about my movements that night. But surely you must have realised that when you heard Miss Powis’s theory, and saw the experiments?”

  “No, I am afraid they did not convince me; partly, no doubt, because I felt sure you had accidentally killed Hayes. I took it that human flesh is a great deal tougher than straw wrapped up in muslin. And I saw that the policeman turned the dummy figures about several times before the gaff came unstuck. Now that I know the truth, of course, there is no longer any doubt in my mind. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to know that Hayes actually died by accident.”

  “If it hadn’t been for Miss Powis, you would have gone on believing it.”

  “Don’t be too hard on me, Carrie,” he said. “I believed nothing ill against you. If I killed a man with a blow I did not intend should kill him, I would not think of myself as a murderer. And I was determined that nothing I did or said should hamper you, and lead to our being charged with murder.”

  She held out her hand. “Don’t think any more of it, Ned. Life’s too short to spare some of it for unnecessary arguments. You believed in me, and now there is no one between us any longer—except Father Time, old boy.”

  “He’s with us both, so that squares out, Carrie,” he returned. “Can you make it three months hence instead of six?”

  Chapter XXX

  Parfitt Moves

  INSPECTOR IVOR PARFITT was a methodical and conscientious man. He had joined, to the best of his ability, in making the experiments in the quarry at Cwyll; he had given his official, if unasked, approval to the release of Mrs. Hayes; and convinced himself that the lady was innocent of the crime.

  But for several weeks he had been making some experiments on his own account—experiments which required time for their completion, and were utterly useless if rushed.

  Once a day he repaired to an attic in his house, and inspected the contents of a large zinc bath, into which he had been careful to pour some gallons of water from the river Cwyll, and each successive visit filled his mind with triumph, though it appeared to make him melancholy as well.

  The policeman has to do many things that conflict with his innate, if unofficial, sense of justice, and this was one of them. He had always felt since the tragedy that Hayes’s death was one of those events which should slip into oblivion; unwept, unsung, and unpunished. The dead man had been a terrible blackguard, and his death was richly deserved. It should have been allowed to rest there, but Parfitt’s official conscience had the best of it, and he was doing his utmost at the moment to outrage his private feelings in the cause of abstract justice.

  At the end of three weeks he had a conference with the Chief Constable, Mr. Rigby, which lasted for many hours, but ended in a warrant being issued.

  “Now it’s up to you, Parfitt,” said his superior, when the conferences had ended. “I think I must get you this warrant, but I warn you that your name is mud if you don’t pull it off. You’re a clever fellow and a good officer, but I doubt if you will convince the Public Prosecutor that you can prove your case.”

  Parfitt was stubborn. “I’ll do it, sir! It’s no fun to me, but it’s my job to clear the murder up, and I am obliged to you for permission to go on.”

  Davis was sitting in his cottage, gloomily fitting a new ring to his salmon-rod, when the shadow of Inspector Parfitt fell across his threshold. He rose, forced a smile, and spoke.

  “When are you going to let me have my new gaff back, Inspector?” he asked. “Haven’t got it with you, I see.”

  Parfitt came in and shut the door behind him. “Got your winter fuel in yet, Davis?” he asked.

  Davis looked at him. “I’m glad you’ve come, Inspector,” he said slowly and surprisingly. “I had almost made up my mind to come to you, one of these days.”

  “Ah, you had?” said Parfitt, sitting down and taking the warrant from his pocket. “Then I’m going to warn you, Davis, before you get any further. It’s not a nice job, but, if there is anything takes the sting out of it, it is that you let that lady be taken for it. Now I warn you that anything you say may be used against you in evidence hereafter, and I propose to read this warrant, charging you with the murder of Mr. Hayes——”

  And he went on to read the warrant, while Davis looked at him with weary but steady eyes.

  “I’m glad you came,” he repeated
when the officer had made an end. “I thought I could stick it, but I couldn’t. Indeed, I thought I could live on without her, but I can’t. Not that she ever gave me anything. But it was something to know she was up there, though she never gave much of a thought to me down here.”

  “They mayn’t hang you,” said Parfitt. “There’s manslaughter as well as murder, Davis. And you’d better see a lawyer. He’ll probably advise you to plead not guilty—that’s between you and me.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Davis. “But I would rather be hanged. The days are too long here. They’d be hell in gaol. I——”

  “Don’t incriminate yourself Davis,” said Parfitt. “Any statement will and must be purely voluntary, and of course I may take it if you insist. But I am bound to tell you what are your rights in this case.”

  Davis nodded, and appeared to reflect for a few minutes.

  “You’re a fair man, Inspector. I will say that. Do you mind if I just say what I felt about the lady? Look you, sir, I would not like her to think I would have stood by and seen anything happen to her. I knew she was innocent, and I never believed they would do anything to her. But I was wrong whatever I did, and if I’d known the hell it was to be, I’d have stood up before and said the truth. Only it did seem hard that I should be hanged for killing a vermin like that. There’s keepers with doors nailed all over with less vermin than Hayes, and no one to blame them.”

  Parfitt in his heart subscribed to every word of that, but he was an officer carrying out a law that admits of no private vengeance, and he said nothing.

  Davis got up and took his hat from a peg. “How did you come on it, may I ask?” he demanded.

  “That beats me—unless it was the bit of pine.”

  Parfitt nodded. “You couldn’t think of everything in a hurry, Davis, and that was it, mostly. You remember that you spoke of the log that you got fouled in your old gaff? Well, you said it sank. It was sodden and heavy. It wouldn’t dry much in the tunnel under the water.”