by Cyril Hare
“He reserved the case of Davitt for himself,” Mr. Dedman put in. “And invented a purely imaginary interview with an equally imaginary landlady to account for him.”
“That is just what I expected. The attempt to find a scapegoat for his own crime was a forlorn hope, of course, but it came perilously near to success twice. The first time, was in the case of Parsons.”
“I told him that properly handled, the Parsons affair might have produced a favorable settlement from the Insurance Company,” said Mr. Dedman in vexation. “It was really pitiful to see how he and young Johnson bungled that business! I beg your pardon, Inspector, I was forgetting. Please go on.”
“The second time,” said Mallett, his moustache points twitching as he tried to suppress a smile, “the result was very nearly more serious than it had been in Parsons’ case. I think he was prepared to throw up the sponge after you had pointed out to him that he had failed to prove Parsons’ guilt; but the news that his last speculation had ruined him drove him to make one last despairing effort. And I am afraid I was really responsible. As a last resort, he tried to put the guilt upon Martin Johnson. You see, Johnson really had something to hide. He was no murderer, but he did happen to be in the hotel on the night of the murder, and he was almost recognized there by Mr. Dickinson. Incidentally, Mr. Dickinson was talking to me at the time, and I remember noticing that immediately afterwards he suddenly switched the conversation to his daughter, who had not been mentioned before. I saw the significance of that only when I had learned that Johnson was his daughter’s fiancé.”
“I knew it!” exclaimed Mr. Dedman. “Jones!”
“Exactly. The suitcase point over again.”
“But not that point only. I knew it as soon as I saw Miss Dickinson’s face when the name of Jones was mentioned in my office.”
“She knew that he had been there, gallivanting with another young lady of his choice?”
“Undoubtedly. And I am very much afraid she knows a good deal more than that.”
“I am sorry to hear it. So far as Stephen Dickinson is concerned, he does not seem to have guessed it until at our last meeting I put it into his head. I did it to test his reactions, but I confess that I did not think they would be as violent as they proved to be.”
“That is a question that is puzzling me,” said Mr. Dedman. “How did young Dickinson hope to be able to represent that Johnson was guilty, in the face of the violent denials he would be sure to make, and what was his object in getting him to drive down to Pendlebury?”
“We can only guess at that,” the inspector replied. “But I have not the smallest doubt what the true answer is. He intended to kill Johnson.”
“But this is terrible!” said Mr. Dedman.
“Why not? One murder often leads to another, and a pistol was found on him when he was picked up. I think that his design was to kill him, and represent it as suicide brought on by remorse acting on a guilty conscience. The point of taking him to Pendlebury, no doubt, was to give colour to the theory. He would be able to say afterwards that he charged him with the crime and that he had then confessed. It would have been very difficult to disprove. Possibly he did actually go so far as to accuse him. That would account for the erratic driving of the car. Johnson will be able to tell you that when he is better. How is he, by the way?”
“Almost recovered. But he has no recollection of anything that happened for half an hour before the accident. On the whole, I think it is just as well.”
“As you say. He seems to have got off very lightly. I never saw a more completely smashed car in my life. But of course the passenger’s side took the brunt of the collision.”
“And how did you come to be on the spot so very opportunely, Inspector?”
“I was going to the Old Hall myself, to see whether the people there could identify Stephen Dickinson from the photograph which I had had taken of him the afternoon before. As it turned out, I was able to get the identification from his body instead, which was much more satisfactory.”
The two men sat in silence for a few moments, and then the solicitor rose to his feet.
“Thank you,” he said. “I shall be making my claim on the Insurance Company for the full amount of the policy moneys today. So far as Stephen Dickinson’s share is concerned, I don’t think there will be any difficulty. It will naturally fall into the rest of the estate and be divided between his mother and sister. The one thing that concerns me now is to see that Mrs. Dickinson never learns the truth. Goodbye.”
The inspector turned to his writing. For an hour there was no sound in the quiet room except the gentle scratching of his pen on the paper. At last, even that ceased. The record was complete. The file of “Re Dickinson” returned for the last time to its drawer in the inspector’s desk.
* * *
At his mother’s insistence, Stephen was buried in Pendlebury churchyard next to his father. There was a full attendance of the family at the funeral. It was observed by all that Uncle George was in far better humour than usual. The reason, as Aunt Lucy could have told them, was that since the settlement with the Insurance Company there was no longer any ground for fearing that he would be called upon to contribute anything to the support of his brother’s family.
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.
Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.
The line Stephen handed it across the desk into Mr. Dedman’s which occurs as the first line of a paragraph on original page 174 appears to be correct; but when it appears again as the first line of a paragraph on the following page it is clearly wrong. As we do not have the correct line, it is left unchanged.