“It depends on what you mean by all right.” The doctor turned to watch the passage of his stretcher-borne patient across the lawn. “I think she’ll live but it’s going to be a fight. She’s had an extremely severe shock and her hand is one of the nastiest cases of burning in my experience. All the burns are severe, but the hand––” He made a grimace that blended sympathy with distaste. “In a way, of course, she was lucky; the area of the burns is limited. She must have been half in and half out of the door when the thing went up–a pressure-stove, I understand? I shouldn’t have thought it possible to make a mistake like that, though using petrol in ’em wasn’t entirely unknown in the army when paraffin was hard to come by. Some people got away with it. I gather from the police activity that you think this wasn’t a mistake.”
“It seems unlikely–from what I know of Miss Walton.”
“Impossible, I should say.” The doctor stood for a moment looking after the ambulance as it made its way slowly along the narrow lane, then he got in behind the steering-wheel of his own car. “Fortunately Miss Walton’s as strong as a horse–poor thing,” he said. “I’ll let you have a report.” With a parting wave of his hand he followed the ambulance’s dust.
The members of the technical squad were already at work, looking for fingerprints, taking photographs and collecting fragments of the pressure-stove. In order to see if he could find any trace of the intruder who earlier in the day had ransacked Cynthia Walton’s desk and box-room, and presumably stolen her pistol, the fingerprint man had begun his operations in the study; there Duffy found him. It seemed to the superintendent that nothing had been further disarranged in the room since his previous visit to it. He assured himself that the cheque for Miss Walton’s annuity was still in its place in the pigeon-hole over the desk, then he passed the envelope in which it had come to his colleague.
“Try that for dabs,” he suggested. “It was posted in New York, and I have an idea about it–probably a bit far-fetched though.”
He waited while the man dusted powder over the envelope, examined it through a magnifying-glass and finally put it away for closer study at the County H.Q.
“Plenty of prints there certainly,” was the verdict, “too many of ’em and all on top of each other. Looks as if a couple of sweaty people had been playing hot-hands with it. We’ll be lucky if it tells us anything.”
“Well, at least it tells us that no one tried to remove any prints,” Duffy observed. “See what you can make of it all the same.”
“Even amateur burglars wear gloves nowadays,” said the fingerprint man comfortingly to Duffy’s retreating back.
After she had passed the care of her patient over to professional hands Mrs. Scully had returned to her own cottage belatedly to prepare her family’s evening meal. She was hard at work cooking and answering questions when Duffy and Sergeant O’Callaghan called to see her on their way back towards Newtown Moore. Mr. Scully, it appeared, had not yet returned from a distant cattle fair, but Annie, who worked thrice weekly for Miss Walton, and Tomeen, the shotgun expert, were listening to their mother’s tale and punctuating it with exclamations of awe and incredulity. They seemed to be an intelligent pair and were able to confirm what the detective had already been told and had observed for himself of Miss Walton’s habitual care in handling combustibles.
“Oh, she’d never make a mistake the like of that,” Annie pronounced. “She smoked very little and had a nose like a blood-hound. Indeed you’d expect her to smell the petrol in the stove before she lighted it.”
“What I really came to inquire about,” Duffy said, “is alternative ways of getting here. Is there, for instance, any way of getting from the main road to Miss Walton’s without passing under your windows, Mrs. Scully?”
“Not for cars–but there’s a short-cut you could take a bicycle on when the ground’s hard like it is now.” It was the red-haired and red-visaged Tomeen who had taken it upon himself to answer the question. “You know where the bohereen forks above near Mr. Peregrine’s house?”
“I do.” It was between the house and the boat-house, Duffy remembered.
“There’s a straight path runs from there to the pier near Miss Cynthia’s place. ’Tis the way anyone on foot would go because ’tis only half the distance of following the bohereen around the bends of the water–though nobody uses it much except on Sundays.”
“I take it you didn’t come home that way yourself this evening.” Duffy had observed a high-powered motor-cycle in the yard. “What about you, Miss Scully?”
Annie shook her head violently and her face flushed to an approximation to her brother’s ruddy complexion. “Is it that lonely place? I declare to goodness, I wouldn’t walk along that dark path by myself for gold–not for all the gold in The States. I might meet a tramp–or worse.” The indignation went out of her voice as suddenly as it had come. “Anyway Tomeen always lifts me out from town on his pillion.”
Duffy did not see how the path could well be lonelier than what passed for a road but he supposed that familiarity gave an illusion of safety. He gave thanks for the information that he had received and was about to take his leave when Mrs. Scully held up one hand dramatically.
“Whisht,” she hissed. “Is it him?”
From the direction of the main road there could be heard in the sudden silence the sound of a car approaching at high speed, bucketing over the uneven surface and leaving behind it a trail of dust clouds. Abandoning her cooking, Mrs. Scully rushed to the window.
“What is it, Mammy?” demanded her children simultaneously.
“Hold your whisht, you, now and let me listen.” Mrs. Scully’s ample bulk almost filled the kitchen window as she craned out through it, the better to hear and to see the road. Although she had enjoined silence on her companions, she continued, when she was not actually speaking, to emit a sort of keen of excitement that rather resembled the sound of bagpipes played on a single note. “Will you hark to the unholy speed of the scoundrel?” she implored. “Oh, the saints preserve us! ’Tis him. ’Tis the murderer. The black-hearted divil. I’d know the sound of that engine in my sleep. Tomeen–get your gun and scatther him. We have him now.”
Seconds before the roof of a small black car came in sight over the top of the hedge Sergeant O’Callaghan had run down to the road, though with less aggressive intent than had been urged upon Tomeen. By tile time that Duffy, with the Scully family in echelon behind him, had reached the gate a Hillman Minx saloon had been jerked to a halt beside it, and a round red and agitated face had been thrust from the window beside the driving-seat. Mrs. Scully brandished a minatory frying pan.
“Let you hit him a good skelp now, Sergeant, or he’ll escape you,” she roared. “Tomeen, why didn’t you bring the gun like I told you? Is it mad entirely you are, or what ails you?”
The driver, too, wanted his doubts set at rest. “What in the name of God’s going on out here?” he demanded in no less stentorian tones.
“Plenty,” said Duffy, “and I think I’m just beginning to get the hang of it. Were you out this way earlier in the day?”
“I was not.” The round face lengthened in disapproval. “I’ve other things to do beside spending the day at the seaside. Anyway I haven’t been out this road in years. What of it?”
“Sure of course he’d deny it.” Mrs. Scully’s voice was heavy with scorn. “Oh! Look at the fat wicked face of him; guilt is written on it plain for all to see. Let you give yourself up now, you ruffian, you’re known and you’re outnumbered. Or is it a taste of your own medicine you’re looking for? Take your hand off me, Tomeen.” With a swift push she put an end to an attempt by her son to restrain her. “If I want to clatter the villain, you’ll not stop me.”
As the old woman surged forward, provoked rather than mollified by Tomeen’s interference, Duffy gently took the frying pan from her grasp. “It’s all right, Mrs. Scully,” he said. “I thought you’d know this gentleman by sight. He’s the County Chief Superintendent of the Ci
vic Guard. You can take it he’s not the criminal we’re after.”
“Though God knows I might be driven to it yet,” muttered the man in the car.
“The saints preserve us!” Mrs. Scully guffawed heartily. “Amn’t I the right eedjut. ’Twas the reckless speed the man was driving at that deceived me. He has a fine open face now that I come to look at it–just that bit of hardness in it that comes from summonsing people for a living. Isn’t it well I didn’t spoil it for him.” Her laughter rang out again as she polished her hand on her apron and then took the chief superintendent’s in the grip of friendship. “No hard feelings now–but I have a dinner to cook against my man getting home from the fair. Let ye find the murderer without my help.”
When the three policemen were left to themselves it did not take long for Duffy to bring his temporary chief abreast of the latest developments in the situation; it was a more involved business, however, to draw inferences from what had happened and to plan appropriate action. The murderer’s identification and arrest had become more than ever a matter of urgency. There must be no other victim.
“So you think we have the same miscreant to thank for everything.” With a far-away look in his eyes the chief superintendent kept stuffing tobacco into the bowl of a pipe that was already full. “Is it a maniac the fellow is, or what?”
“No more so than any other deliberate murderer, I think. He’s certainly a very clever man–or woman. Let’s take the case of Peregrine Walton’s disappearance. There are two possibilities: either Walton has done a bunk of his own free will or he has been put out of the way by someone else. I think we can rule out accident. If that estate agent chap, Flynn, has told us the whole truth, the likelihood is that Walton staged a drowning accident when he was sure that he had a witness, swam under water to the nearest little island, hid there till he could get to the mainland without being seen by Flynn, then scrambled ashore and was picked up by a car by prior arrangement. The tracks I found were very recent, you know, and there was no trace of anyone having slid down the mud-bank into the water. Incidentally the car that picked up somebody who had climbed out of the water was similar to yours.”
“A black Hillman,” muttered the chief superintendent unnecessarily. “How can you be sure of that?”
“Only on the assumption that Flynn is telling the truth. He says that a black Hillman, going in the direction of the main road, passed him just this side of the boat-house and that no other car went by, or was to be seen on the road, from then to the time that we all went down to search for Peregrine Walton. If that Hillman had been stopped where I saw the tracks, it would have been well out of Flynn’s sight and, provided that the engine had been left running and there was no need to use the self-starter, it could have been driven away after picking up Walton without Flynn’s being likely to hear it. There were two motor-boats on the bay, remember, and Flynn must have been pretty het-up, but he wouldn’t have missed anything actually passing the open stretch by the boat-house because he’d naturally have been on the lookout for anyone who could fetch help. Since there’s no place wide enough to turn a car on that part of the road, only the black Hillman will fit in both with Flynn’s story and with what I observed. If the car’s presence had been merely coincidental, Walton would have been taken straight to his own house, to a doctor, or to the hospital, and we should have heard by now that he’s safe. It’s odds-on that he planned to disappear.”
“That seems reasonable enough, Duffy–if Flynn told you the truth.”
“If he lied, an obvious explanation would be that he was himself responsible for Walton’s disappearance, or death, which in turn suggests that it was he who murdered Joan Allison–unless, of course, he was exacting a private vengeance because he thought that Walton had killed the girl. But all that leaves unexplained the person who climbed out of the water without leaving any traces of having got into it and was then apparently driven off in a car that couldn’t have been Flynn’s. I’m suspicious of coincidence but I find the idea of murderous collusion in a community of this sort even harder to swallow.” Duffy helped himself to a cigarette and handed a box of matches to the chief superintendent whose unlit pipe had begun to irritate him. “Then there’s the sabotaging of Miss Walton’s stove,” he pursued, “and the stealing of her pistol. I think there’s one thing in common between what happened to her and what happened to her brother: in neither case would much suspicion have been aroused if the murder at Moore Court hadn’t already put people on the qui vive. To Mrs. Scully, for instance, every strange car now contains a murderer, and I’m afraid that a set of unaccounted-for footprints have had rather the same effect on me. In other circumstances foul play might not have been thought of at all. Accidents do happen–quite often.”
“Meaning what?” the chief superintendent inquired.
“Meaning that the murderer–supposing him, or her, to be responsible for the latest developments–has not lost his touch. For a rushed job these meant-to-be-accidents were not unclever; and if they became necessary as a result of the murder their planning must have been rushed. Of course there is another possibility.”
At last the chief superintendent had got his pipe going; billowing clouds of smoke filled tire small car. “You mean that what happened to Dr. Walton–whatever it was–was originally planned,” he suggested, “and that the killing of the girl was an improvisation that became necessary only because Walton had to be disposed of later. Not a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc but the other way round.”
“It could have happened like that,” Duffy agreed. “The method would have the advantage, from the murderer’s point of view, of starting the investigation off on the wrong foot. But there’s one thing we must have before going any further; if Walton’s really dead, I want his body.”
The older man did not appear to have been listening; he was still enveloped in clouds of his own making. “I got a report in this afternoon that I didn’t tell you about yet,” he said. “God help me! I don’t like it–and this is one of the times that I don’t like my job. Still an’ all––” He let the sentence tail off into a grunt that might have expressed either hope or resignation. “You remember the O’Brien Moores’ car broke down in the Midlands when they were on the way to Dublin on Tuesday? Well, the garage that did the repair job for them hired a car out to Mr. Dominick till his own was ready, There was plenty of time for the family to have gone on to the airport in it to meet their cousin’s plane, but they didn’t do that. There was plenty of time for them to have come back here too, if they felt like it, and be at Moore Court when that girl was killed.” He looked imploringly at Duffy, as if asking for assurance that what he had envisaged could not have happened. “Queer they didn’t mention the hired car.”
“They said they spent the time at the local hotel, didn’t they?” Duffy was trying to recall details of the original interrogation that had been completed before his arrival in the district. “If they knew at the start how long the job on their own car was going to take, it seems odd that they should just sit about for so many hours. Did they lust sit about?”
“The hotel people say that the old lady and the little boy, Michael, were there for lunch and tea, but went off somewhere during the afternoon. They couldn’t give anything like accurate timing. The only time anyone remembers seeing Mr. Dominick there was when he and his daughter called to pick up the others in the evening. That leaves the two of ’em with the best part of the day unaccounted for, but–but surely to goodness, man, you wouldn’t suspect anyone from a family like that of committing a deliberate murder when he had his young child along with him.”
“God forbid,” said Sergeant O’Callaghan fervently before Duffy could reply. “’Tis unthinkable.”
“Anyhow you said a while back that you were beginning to get the hang of what’s been happening,” the chief superintendent pursued. “That must mean that you’ve already got a pretty definite suspect in mind.”
“It does, and I have,” said Duffy slowly. “The pict
ure’s by no means complete; I can’t fit the attack on Miss Walton into it yet and I can’t find a satisfactory motive but I feel very strongly that only one person seems to have all the attributes of our murderer. It isn’t just a question of not having proof that would stand up in court; here and now I haven’t got enough facts even to back up a decent argument. Perhaps I shall have them by to-night; if so, I’ll tell you then who I’ve got in mind. I’m not going to bore you with a theory based mainly on instinct.”
“It wouldn’t bore me, you know, Duffy.”
“No? But it would waste your time–mine, too; I’ve got to go out after evidence. Will you lay on boats in the meantime to search for Walton’s body?”
“I will surely. If it’s drowned the poor man is, they’ll get him in the narrow neck of the bay between the pier below here and the jetty at Moore Court when the tide turns. It’s fairly shallow there, they say, shallow enough for a tall man to walk it almost at low water–all except for a deep channel in the middle. Anything else?”
“One other thing–I think I mentioned it last night.” Duffy threw away his cigarette and prepared to return to his own car. “I’d like you to find out for me, as soon as you can, the financial position and the testamentary dispositions of the two Waltons.”
“Right,” said the chief superintendent, pursing his lips as he selected a marked page in his notebook. “I can tell you a bit about that now. Old Colonel Walton left the house to Peregrine and split what money there was evenly between him and the sister, the difference being that Cynthia only gets the interest up to such time as she might marry–which she won’t now poor woman–with the consent of the trustees when the capital was to become hers absolutely. If she married without consent the money was to go to Peregrine, though it was only three or four hundred a year anyhow. It seems there was some undesirable fella after her when she was young. I think she has some annuity as well, so that she’s comfortably enough off but wouldn’t have much to leave. Her brother, now, has made quite a bit out of his books and his lecturing.”
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