“Her ladyship seems much better, doesn’t she, miss? She might be twenty years younger going upstairs the way she is.” Then he looked at the picture:— “A tragic story, miss, but of course things like that don’t happen now. I believe her ladyship has always been interested because she has the same first names—Jane Elizabeth.”
Vaguely resenting the man’s words and attitude, Sophy did not answer but went on to the dining-room. Martin followed with his tray and cigars. Earl Wych was standing now. He frowned when he saw Martin enter.
“That will do, those aren’t wanted,” he said, and waved the man away. When the door had closed behind him, he said:—“They’re playing Bach somewhere—Vienna, I think. I want to hear it so I’ll leave you.”
He began to move towards the door, but now Ralph also was on his feet.
“Uncle,” he said quickly, “I told you before I wanted to have a talk with you to-night.”
The earl turned and the two men faced each other, age and youth, the contrast made the more effective by the strong family likeness between them, so that the earl might have been Ralph with fifty years added, and Ralph the earl half a century younger. Somewhat absurdly, Sophy found herself remembering the old puzzle about the meeting of the irresistible force and the immovable object. Earl Wych said:—
“Talk will do no good.”
Ralph answered:—
“All the same, I mean to have it.”
The old man looked more fierce, more angry than ever, more than ever like a hooded eagle on its eyrie.
“That is not the way to speak to me,” he said.
“I am sorry,” Ralph answered, but his tone too hard and resolute for much sorrow to find expression in it. “All the same we’ve got to have a talk—and to-night.”
More and more angry looked Earl Wych. Sophy wished devoutly she was anywhere but here, anywhere in all the whole wide world. The others sat silent and watchful and uncomfortable. The two protagonists seemed to have forgotten that they were not alone.
“Talking’s no good,” Earl Wych repeated, as if in a last appeal.
“You’ve got to talk before you act,” Ralph said.
Earl Wych turned towards the door. Already he had hold of the door knob when Ralph said:—
“Uncle, you’ve got to listen.”
“I have no wish to,” the old man answered. “It would do no good. There is nothing you can say that will make the least difference.”
“All the same I mean to say it,” Ralph insisted, his face flushed, his tone very angry indeed.
Earl Wych opened the door. He had recovered his self-possession that for the moment he had seemed on the point of losing. Haughty, upright and unperturbed, he stood in the doorway, his tall, thin old form there framed. He said nothing, but the gesture that he made was eloquent of decision and command. He passed through the door and vanished from sight. Ralph stood still for a moment, looking at the closed door. He glanced back at the table and at those still sitting there and he also said nothing.
“It’s no good, Ralph,” Anne’s cool voice said. “You’re only making a fuss—and uncle very cross.”
“Ralph, old man,” Arthur chimed in, helping himself to another glass of wine at the same time, “we all understand the way you feel, but what’s the good? Things are what they are.”
“So they are,” Ralph retorted, “and also they will be what they will be, and truth happens to be important.” He looked across at Bertram, who had managed to get hold of that very special bottle of port Countess Wych had told Martin to bring her. He was doing very well with it, too. Challengingly and not too pleasantly, Ralph said to him:— “Well, what’s the claimant got to say?”
“It isn’t me that’s the claimant, it’s you,” retorted Bertram.
It was a reply both effective and unexpected. Ralph flushed still more angrily, and from where he stood near the door turned sharply towards Bertram, who apparently took the quick movement for a threat of attack and at once jumped to his feet. He swung up the bottle which by now was empty. Possibly it was the heat of the wine in his veins that made him take up so aggressively the challenge he read into Ralph’s movement.
“You keep off,” he said. “For just nothing at all, I’d lay you cold.”
It all happened in an instant, a scene such as that dignified, patrician apartment had not witnessed since the early eighteenth century when a duel had been fought in it by candlelight. Ralph moved like a flash. Bertram struck with the bottle. Ralph caught his wrist. A short, brief struggle. A chair went flying, crashing against the wall. Bertram followed it, crashing, too, against the wall. Ralph very deliberately and carefully replaced upon the table the bottle he had taken from his opponent. Bertram sat up and looked dazed. He got out his handkerchief and put it to his mouth and cheek which were bleeding slightly. He said:—
“All right. All right. All right. If I had had a gun...”
He did not finish the sentence. The door opened and Martin appeared once more, his small, quick eyes more than ever alert and watchful. Sophy’s clear impression was that he had been hanging about outside, waiting to see if anything happened.
“I beg pardon,” he began, and got no further.
“Get out,” Ralph said, and there was that in his tone sent Martin flying.
Bertram began to pick himself up.
“If I had had a gun...’’ he kept muttering. “If I had had a gun...”
Anne said:—
“Ralph, you are only making things worse for yourself.”
“For—myself?” Ralph repeated; and Sophy wondered if she were right in thinking that he laid a slight emphasis on the word, as if he had noticed, as she had done, how Anne had said ‘for yourself’ and not ‘for us’.
“Anne’s right,” Arthur chimed in. “If you are going to law this sort of thing won’t help you. Put any jury against you at once, set any one against you for that matter.”
“Including you?” Ralph asked, his tone anything but amiable. “Perhaps you aren’t sorry to think I’m out. Well, I’m not out yet.”
“Aren’t you?” Arthur snarled. “Looks like it,” he said viciously.
Anne got up and walked over to Bertram, now somewhat unsteadily upon his legs again.
“I am so sorry this has happened,” she said in her rather high, deliberate voice.
Bertram muttered something inaudible. Anne helped him to a chair. She did it in a quiet, abstracted way, as if her mind were occupied with many thoughts. Sophy thought her expression strange. Enigmatical was the word that came into her mind. She found herself thinking:—
“There’s something in Anne’s mind... I wonder what.”
Bertram was looking weakly from Anne to Ralph and back; and one might have thought from his startled eyes and odd expression that he was not sure which of the two to be the more afraid of. Ralph’s expression was of mingled hostility and contempt, but he made no further movement, just stood there with his hands in the pockets of his dinner jacket. Anne’s air as she stood by Bertram began to be protective, as if she were shielding him; possessive, too. Sophy found herself thinking now:—
“She’s going over to his side. She must think he is really the heir. She didn’t before. What’s made her change?”
In spite of Sophy’s recent resolution never to look at Ralph again, she did so now. It seemed awful to her if he were really going to lose Anne as well as everything else. To her utter bewilderment his expression changed as their eyes met. The hard, fierce, fighting look vanished, he looked no longer formidable, but friendly, he gave the idea, somehow, that by his side there was safety, there was even the beginning of a smile apparent in his eyes and at the corners of that stern, set mouth. Incredible, impossible, absurd, of course, but it really was as if he had caught a glimpse of the sympathy and the faith that almost without her knowledge flooded all Sophy’s being.
“Well, I’ll go on the terrace for a smoke,” Ralph said abruptly.
He vanished. He had not looked again a
t Sophy, but why should he? She heard Arthur saying:—
“He’s behaving like a fool. He can’t go to law, there’s nothing he can take action on. He hasn’t a leg to stand on. So long as both the old folk back Bertram up, that is.”
“He got me when I wasn’t ready,” Bertram said. “Tough guy, isn’t he? Mighty tough. If I had had my gun...”
“Good thing you hadn’t,” Anne told him sharply. “Just remember, we don’t use guns in this country.”
“Oh, yeah,” retorted Bertram, looking at her sideways. “Thought I saw you with one last week.”
CHAPTER VII
INQUIRY BEGINS—MARTIN
Since Colonel Glynne, chief constable of the Wychshire County Police, chanced to be spending a day or two in London at the time when there occurred the Castle Wych murder, the preliminary investigations had to be conducted on his own responsibility by Inspector Bobby Owen, who acted both as head of the somewhat sketchy Wychshire C.I.D., and also as private secretary to the colonel; a position which it was generally understood meant that some day on the colonel’s retirement, Bobby was likely to succeed him.
From London the colonel arrived in haste and now was listening to what Bobby had to tell him, which indeed at present was not much more than already every newspaper reader in the country knew. For though the news had been too late for the morning papers, the evening papers had given it a prominence that for the time had driven into the background all the accounts of the war preparations that were daily occupying more and more space.
Naturally Colonel Glynne was already well acquainted with the tale of the unexpected return of the long missing heir, and of Ralph’s open threats to prove the newcomer an impostor. Now, as he listened to Bobby’s report, he shook his head gravely.
“Worse than I thought,” he said. “What a situation—a powder magazine and people walking about striking matches at random. Countess Wych muttering that ill would come of it. Ralph Hoyle threatening legal action. Anne Hoyle engaged to Ralph and flirting with Bertram, and what’s her idea? Arthur Hoyle making one think that he’s waiting to see if he can edge in his own claim. The Sophy Longden girl dropping vague hints. The butler, Martin, almost certainly up to something on his own. Clinton Wells, a hard-headed lawyer I always thought thoroughly ambitious and self-seeking, throwing up his partnership to support a quixotic forlorn hope. The claimant’s odd behaviour. The still more odd behaviour of Earl Wych himself, who proceeds more or less to shut himself up on his heir’s return instead of wanting to make a fuss of it as you would expect. And now this incomprehensible, this bewildering thing—the poor old man found shot dead on the terrace outside the library windows. And who can have done that and why?”
“One of those you’ve mentioned I think, sir,” Bobby said slowly; “though it might be someone we’ve never even heard of. But I don’t think so. As for the motive, that’s difficult. The obvious explanation is a sudden quarrel. But it may go deeper.”
“Hard to see that any one benefits by the old man’s death,” the colonel remarked.
Bobby said nothing. He felt that motives would be best discussed as each possible figure in the tragedy came up for consideration. The colonel said abruptly:—
“It couldn’t be suicide? or accident?”
“There are three bullet wounds,” Bobby explained. “A man does not shoot himself three times by accident. No weapon was found near the body, so it can hardly have been suicide, unless of course the weapon was removed. There seems nothing to suggest that. Nor for that matter do suicides often shoot three times over.”
“No,” agreed the colonel. “That establishes murder.”
“As I reconstruct the crime,” Bobby went on, “Earl Wych was sitting in his armchair, apparently listening to the wireless and presumably smoking a cigar, since a half-smoked cigar and an overturned ash-tray were found near the chair, between it and the fireplace. There are bloodstains on the chair and it has been pushed violently out of position. My suggestion is that the first shot was fired from the terrace outside, the french windows having been pushed open and the curtains drawn aside. Earl Wych was hit in the body, but not fatally. He jumped up and ran towards the window, perhaps with some idea of tackling his assailant.”
“Plucky of him,” the colonel said. “The Hoyles always showed pluck though—traditional.”
“The murderer then fired two more shots. Earl Wych fell just outside the window and must have died almost immediately. The terrace is of stone and the steps lead down to a gravelled path. I have had a search made but there are no footprints. There is nothing to show the murderer either came or went that way. He may have but there’s no proof of it. He—or she—” Bobby corrected himself deliberately—“may have left the house earlier, waited for an opportunity, and afterwards re-entered the house by the library, through the open french windows. The medical evidence puts the time at about half-past eleven. Of course, that allows a margin of error each way. No shots were heard, but the wireless was going, and as the earl was a trifle deaf he generally had it on in full volume. That might account for the shots not being heard. Also the library door is heavy and fits closely. Martin is sure he heard the wireless going at eleven when he was locking up as usual. Bertram Hoyle and Miss Anne Hoyle were in the drawing-room till shortly after eleven when they went up to bed. Neither of them heard anything, and neither of them can be sure whether the wireless was going then. If it was, they didn’t notice it. It seems highly significant that the wireless was turned off. If I am right in thinking that at the moment of the murder, Earl Wych was listening and that the wireless prevented the shots from being heard, then it must have been turned off either by the murderer or by someone who was in the room after the murder. If the last, why wasn’t an alarm given? Of course, there is the possibility that the earl himself turned off the wireless before being attacked, and that it just happened that no one heard the shots. That is possible. No one sleeps apparently on this side of the house. Walls are thick and doors and windows strong and well-fitting. Also shots are common in the country, and if any one did hear anything, the sounds may not have been noticed or remembered.”
“Any finger-prints?” Colonel Glynne asked.
“I thought it important enough to call in Wakefield,” Bobby said. “I wired asking them to send one of their most experienced men along as quickly as possible. They sent him in a fast car. I haven’t his report yet.”
“Criminals never leave finger-prints, they know better,’ the colonel remarked pessimistically.
Bobby was inclined to agree, but then in detective work you never know your luck. A crime may be committed in the heat of passion and not a hint or a clue left behind. A crime may be committed after the most careful preparation and the scene simply shriek the name of the perpetrator. Bobby turned to the pile of reports and statements through which the colonel had been glancing.
“Up to and including dinner last night,” he said, “the statements made are clear and detailed and all agree. There were more at dinner than usual, I understand, because several came on after the evacuation meeting held earlier. During the afternoon the vicar, Mr. Longden, called at the Wych estate office. Ralph Hoyle was there. He acts as his great-uncle’s agent though I suppose he may get the sack now Bertram Hoyle has turned up again. Mr. Clinton Wells, who it seems is going to act for Ralph if the succession case comes into court, was there, too.”
“Well,” commented the colonel, “I don’t see what Ralph can do if both grandparents accept Bertram as genuine—pretty conclusive. Not our business, though. Our job is to find out who shot the old earl. A blackguardly crime. Not logical, I suppose, but somehow it seems worse to cut off an old man’s few remaining days. However, that’s not the point. What matters is the evidence you’ve got together. A bit confusing so far.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Bobby. “There are two or three points I want to draw your attention to. First, there seems no doubt about Ralph Hoyle and his great-uncle having had a violent quarrel last night. But R
alph left about half-past ten, an hour or so before the murder. So if he is responsible he must have come back.”
“No difficulty about that, I suppose?” asked the colonel.
“Oh, no, none. Secondly the butler, Martin, says that Lady Wych was using language earlier in the evening which could be taken either as a threat or as knowledge of a threat from another quarter. Thirdly, one of the gardeners found an umbrella in the castle grounds on a path that is often used as a short cut. It’s a private path, but there seems to be a sort of tacit permission for people in the neighbourhood to use it. The umbrella has been recognized as Mr. Longden’s. I’m told he has a trick of leaving things about. The gardener who found it had another look round and came across cigarette ends and other signs that someone had been sitting under rhododendron bushes near. So both the vicar and some other person were in the castle grounds last night, apparently about the time of the murder. The fourth point seems important. During the vicar’s call at the Wych estate office Ralph Hoyle was handling a Colt point three-two automatic. The bullets that killed the earl were fired from a pistol of that make and calibre. It doesn’t follow it was Ralph’s pistol, but it was one similar. Ralph says he locked his pistol up in the estate office safe, and that it must be there still because the safe has not been opened. But it appears that the vicar absentmindedly went off with Ralph’s keys, including the key of the safe. Ralph says he has no other key by him. The spare ones are kept in the bank, and it seems clear the key was in the vicar’s possession before, during and after the time of the murder.”
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