“Care to walk down the avenue a little to meet my car? The fresh air and all that. I rather like the dawn, myself, when it happens to come my way without too much exertion.”
Cecil saw that the Chief Constable was giving him an opening if he cared to take it.
“I’ll come along with you till you meet the car.”
Sir Clinton took leave of Michael Clifton, who obviously intended to go to bed immediately. As soon as he was well clear of the house, Cecil turned to the Chief Constable.
“You skated over thin ice several times in that yarn of yours. Especially the bits about Maurice. Toothache! Neuralgia! That infernal Inspector of yours swallowed it all down like cat-lap. From his face, you’d have thought he picked up an absolute cert. that no one else could see. I almost laughed, at that point.”
He changed suddenly to a serious tone.
“How did you spot what was really wrong with Maurice?”
“One thing led to another,” Sir Clinton confessed. “I didn’t hit on it all at once. The Fairy Houses set me thinking at the start. One doesn’t keep toys like that in good repair merely on account of some old legend. They were quite evidently meant for use. And then, Cecil, you seemed to have some private joke of your own—not a particularly nice joke either—about them. That set me thinking. And after that, you dropped some remark about Maurice having specialized in family curses.”
“You seem to have a devil of a memory for trifles,” Cecil commented, in some surprise.
“Trifles sometimes count for a good deal in my line,” Sir Clinton pointed out. “One gets into the habit of docketing them, almost without thinking about it. I must have pigeon-holed your talk about the Fairy Houses quite mechanically. Then later on I remembered that these things were dotted all over your estate and nowhere else. On their own ground, the Chacewaters were always within easy distance of one or other of these affairs. Ancient family curse; curious little buildings very handy; one brother grinning—yes, you did grin, and nastily too—at them, when you know he hates another brother like poison. It was quite a pretty little problem. And so . . .”
“And so?” demanded Cecil, as Sir Clinton stopped short.
“And so I put it out of my mind. It wasn’t the sort of thing I cared to think much about in connection with Ravensthorpe,” Sir Clinton said, bluntly. “Besides, it was no affair of mine.”
“And then?”
“Then came Michael Clifton’s story of finding Maurice in one of these Fairy Houses. And the details about the queer state Maurice was in when he was found. That came up in connection with a crime; and crimes are my business. Why does a fellow crawl away into a place like that? Why does he resent being dragged out of it. Why won’t he even take the trouble to get up? These were the kind of questions that absolutely bristled over the whole affair. One couldn’t help getting an inkling. But that inkling threw no light on the crime in hand, so it was no affair of mine. I dropped it. But . . .”
“Yes?”
“Maurice wasn’t an attractive character, I’ll admit that. I loathed the way he was going on. But I like to look on the best side of people if I can. In my line, one sees plenty of the other side—more than enough. And by and by I began to see that perhaps all Maurice’s doings could be explained, if they couldn’t be excused. He was off his balance.”
“He was, poor devil,” Cecil concurred, with some contrition in his tone.
“Then came the time I forced you to open the secret passage. Your methods were the very worst you could have chosen, Cecil. I knew perfectly well that you hadn’t done anything to Maurice. You’re not the fratricidal type. But you very evidently had something that you wanted to conceal behind that door. You were afraid of my spotting something. The Inspector jumped to the conclusion that it was murder you were hushing up. By that time I had a pretty good notion that it was the Ravensthorpe family secret. Once I saw that passage of yours, dwindling away to almost nothing, the thing was clear enough. With the Fairy House clue as well, the thing was almost certain. And finally, you gave the show away completely by what you said beside Maurice’s body.”
“Chuchundra, you mean?”
“Yes. I remembered—another of these docketed trifles—just what Chuchundra was. He was the musk-rat that tried to make up his mind to run into the middle of the room, but he never got there. Then I asked you if the trouble began with A. Of course it did. Agoraphobia. I suppose when Maurice was a kid he had slight attacks of it—hated to move about in an open room and preferred to sidle along by the walls if possible. That was the start of the nickname, wasn’t it?”
Cecil assented with a nod.
“It evidently cropped up in your family now and again. Hence the Fairy Houses—harbours of refuge when attacks came on. And that underground cell, where a man could shut himself up tight and escape the horror of open spaces.”
“I’d really no notion how bad it was with Maurice,” Cecil hastened to say. “It must have been deadly when it drove him to shoot himself.”
“Something beyond description, I should say,” Sir Clinton said, gravely.
He glanced over the wide prospects of the park and then raised his eyes to where great luminous clouds were sailing in stately procession across the blue.
“Looks peaceful, Cecil, doesn’t it? Makes one rather glad to be alive, when one gets into a scene like this. And yet, to poor Maurice it was a mere torture-chamber of nausea and torment, a horror that drove him to burrowing into holes and crannies, anywhere to escape from the terrors of the open sky. I don’t suppose that we normal people can even come near the thing in our imaginations. It’s too rum for our minds—outside everything we know. Poor devil! No wonder he went off the rails a bit in the end.”
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By J. J. Connington
Sir Clinton Driffield Mysteries
Murder in the Maze
Tragedy at Ravensthorpe
The Case with Nine Solutions
Mystery at Lynden Sands
Nemesis at Raynham Parva
The Boathouse Riddle
The Sweepstake Murders
The Castleford Conundrum
The Ha-Ha Case
In Whose Dim Shadow
A Minor Operation
For Murder Will Speak
Truth Comes Limping
The Twenty-One Clues
No Past is Dead
Jack-in-the-Box
Common Sense is All You Need
Supt Ross Mysteries
The Eye in the Museum
The Two Tickets Puzzle
Novels
Death at Swaythling Court
The Dangerfield Talisman
Tom Tiddler’s Island
Murder Will Speak
The Counsellor
The Four Defences
J. J. Connington (1880–1947)
Alfred Walter Stewart, who wrote under the pen name J. J. Connington, was born in Glasgow, the youngest of three sons of Reverend Dr Stewart. He graduated from Glasgow University and pursued an academic career as a chemistry professor, working for the Admiralty during the First World War. Known for his ingenious and carefully worked-out puzzles and in-depth character development, he was admired by a host of his better-known contemporaries, including Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr, who both paid tribute to his influence on their work. He married Jessie Lily Courts in 1916 and they had one daughter.
An Orion ebook
Copyright © The Professor A. W. Stewart Deceased Trust 1927, 2012
The right of J. J. Connington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook first published in Great Britain in 2012
by Orion
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4719 0594 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Tragedy at Ravensthorpe (A Clinton Driffield Mystery) Page 23