Half-Mast Murder

by Milward Kennedy

  “Loyalty of a sort, I suppose, that she held her tongue and didn’t give her brother away ?” the Major suggested. His guest shrugged his shoulders.

  “Then that fellow Trent,” he continued. “Disliked him from the first. I was sure there was something shifty about him. He has a quarrel with his friend the Professor ; stumbles into the summer-house, more or less by chance, and finds him murdered, and the first thing he thinks of is how to stop that letter to the lawyers. And, secondly, how to keep himself clear of suspicion. And a poor sort of alibi he fakes, too.”

  Dillon smiled, though inwardly impatient to hear the true story of the murder itself.

  “What about the other fellow ? Yes, Shipman ?”

  “Oh, I suppose he meant well. But I can’t conceive why he jumped to the conclusion that the girl was a murderess. It’s true that he did fake the suicide pretty well, though in so doing he destroyed the most conclusive evidence against the real criminal. But if you accept it as decent of him to try to protect the girl (whatever you may say of his judgment of her), what are you to think of the way he threw his hand in as soon as I got him down here and threatened him with arrest ?”

  “Yes, not very consistent gallantry.”

  “And as for that American. A man who notices detail. But his business methods are distinctly peculiar, and by suppressing the fact that he was to receive, on the Q.T., a tidy sum of money, he threw me right off the high road.”

  “You mean, Guest, that it wasn’t till it came out that a thousand pounds ought to have been found in the safe that you saw where the truth lay ?”

  The Superintendent laughed.

  “No, sir. I don’t hold with using motive as your starting-point. I say you should use the evidence, and check it by motive. That’s why I wouldn’t pay too much attention to your politics. You would have it—now wouldn’t you, sir?—that it was a political crime, and wanted me to start by digging out the political motive and seeing where it led me.”

  “Still, your arrest of young Paley——”

  “No, sir : not on political grounds, but on direct evidence. You see, I worked back, stage by stage, through the evidence of the facts. First Shipman ; and then he was eliminated by the discovery that Trent was at the summer-house before him ; and then Miss Paley eliminated the two of them. So I came to Julian Paley—and, of course, his sister in the röle of accomplice. As I guessed, an unready accomplice in the murder, whatever part she’s played in the drugging and the theft. But though I arrested him—and it was that hustle over Scotland Yard that rather drove me to it, I’ll freely admit—I was still left with one unexplained fact.”

  He paused, and threw his cigar-end untidily into the fireplace. The Chief Constable pushed the box towards him, but he declined with a smile and shake of the head.

  “And what was your fact ?” asked Major Dillon.

  “The fact that according to the evidence there had been finger-prints on the handle of the knife. There was no reason why Shipman should have invented that. And equally there seemed no earthly reason why young Paley should suddenly have taken off the gloves to use the knife. If he had done it, obviously it had been done quickly, and that made it more than ever unlikely that he’d have wasted time in pulling them off. That was my awkward fact, and it seemed to leave me with a choice between Trent, Shipman, and Richards. But there was no pointer as to which of the three it was—though motive suggested Trent more than anyone. It struck me he might have been twice to the summer-house : the first time to do murder, the second to fake his alibi.”

  “Yes, I see,” said the Major. “But surely that means that it was the news of the money which put Richards top of your list—that is, by supplying a motive ?”

  “Oddly enough, it was something which the American said which put me on to it. He referred to Richards as the ‘ perfect butler,’ or words to that effect, and he also reminded me of his first visit to Cliff’s End at three o’clock. You see the point, sir ? Richards gave Quirk the impression that he was only pretending to have asked the Professor if he’d see him. But he really had done it. His manner was too perfect. A minute after three o’clock he went out on the terrace and straight down to the summer-house. He knew quite well that the Professor was there, and I expect he knew that the American was an expected and important visitor.”

  “Go on,” the Major demanded, as he paused.

  “Well, he saw no one. Mrs. Arkwright and Shipman were both upstairs. Trent was in the walled garden. Cynthia and Julian Paley were on the landing-stage. And in the summer-house the Professor was just coming to. The safe was open, and lying in it—half in, half out, I expect—were those banknotes. For a tragic second,· the Perfect Butler slipped back into the Petty Thief. He stooped and picked up the notes.”

  “And then ? Go on.” The Chief Constable sounded quite impatient.

  “I think his own story is the true one. Poor devil, he almost thanked me for arresting him. Couldn’t bear to think of it, he said.”

  “But why didn’t he give himself up ? Funny way to show devotion to the family, to let Julian Paley be arrested.”

  “Of course he’d only heard of that an hour or two before. And I suppose it’s carrying devotion a long way, to give yourself up for murder. However, his account of it is that, as he stood there, trying to resist the temptation to pocket those notes—the Professor stirred and opened his eyes. Richards doesn’t seem to know whether he spoke ; but, if he didn’t, his eyes expressed his meaning. He accused Richards of turning thief again. And Richards half lost his head and half determined to blot out that accusation. I think he really was devoted to his master. There’s nothing worse than to be caught out badly by someone whose good opinion you value above anything else. It makes you resentful against that someone. So Richards stabbed him with the knife that he’d caught up. The Professor had partly swung round in the chair ; that’s why Julian Paley gave a different account of his uncle’s position from the others.”

  The Superintendent paused again and produced a pipe. He glanced enquiringly at his host, asking permission to light it.

  “Of course, man. But, still, I don’t see where the perfect butler comes in.”

  “Ah, he was only absent for that flash of time. The second the blow was struck, the perfect butler was back again.”

  “Replacing the perfect murderer ?”

  “That’s just what he never was. He never thought of those finger-prints on the knife. He just stuffed the notes in his pocket and—looked round. And he saw one thing out of place in the summer-house. Yes, the coffeecup.”

  “You mean to say, that at such a time it occurred to him to——”

  “I reckon that partly it was second nature to the man to remove that cup. But also, I daresay, he felt it was a kind of reason to be coming back from the summer-house. So he carried it back to the house. And he hurried back too. He wanted to be back by the time the alarm was given. And, as Quirk said, he knew his business. He told him, quite truly, that he had seen the Professor and that the Professor wouldn’t see Quirk. And Quirk had no shadow of doubt that the man was lying.”

  The Chief Constable considered.

  “Even so, your evidence wasn’t very strong, was it ?”

  “No, sir. I’d found that he had the opportunity, though, and that he was out on the terrace at just about the critical time, and I’d found that there was, after all, a strong motive. And that coffee-cup : who but a butler, or a servant, would have taken pains to remove it from the summer-house ? And, as our inventory showed, it wasn’t there when the door was broken down. But for my conclusive evidence—well, I reckoned that these notes would come to light when we’d arrested Richards. As they have done. Though his confession, of course, clinches things.”

  “Well, I think you’ve done devilish well, Guest,” was the Chief Constable’s verdict. “And I’ll see that that opinion goes forward to the proper quarters.”

  The Superintendent pretended to hide his gratification under a matter-of-fact modesty.
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br />   “Not a bit of it, sir. A straightforward case. My chief trouble, if I may say so, was the suggestion that it was a matter of politics, when really it was just a matter of collecting all the facts, keeping them in mind, and fitting them together.”

  The Chief Constable would have none of it. He expressed his warm admiration for the way in which the Superintendent had conducted the enquiry.

  “Above all, I must say I think it was a big job even to keep all the facts handy in your mind,” he observed.

  And Superintendent Guest, anxious not to go too far in modesty, omitted to confess that he had been told at a very early stage of his inventory that the Professor had taken the coffee-cup out into the garden with him, and that he had neither remembered nor attached significance to the fact until Mrs. Arkwright happened casually to repeat it in the police station.

  “Of course,” said Major Dillon, helping himself to another cigar, “we don’t get many cases of this sort down here. Come on, have another cigar instead of that pipe. That’s right. Where was I ? Oh, yes, I was just saying that, luckily, murders are rare in this part of the world. But, by Jove, you know, this business has reminded me of a case I ran into years ago. Out in India. Did I ever tell you about it ?”

  Guest lit the cigar. He recognised the symptoms, and saw that he was now cast for the röle of audience.

  THE END.