XVIII
The Truth of the Matter
Wendover brought out cigars and cigarettes, and endeavoured to make his guests as comfortable as possible without too much fuss. It was some days after the affair at the Maze which had ended in Ernest Shandon’s suicide; and Sir Clinton had asked his host to invite Stenness and Ardsley to dinner. The Squire had at first objected to the toxicologist, for his prejudices were quite unabated; but Sir Clinton had made it clear that Ardsley’s presence was essential from his point of view, and Wendover had given way without too much argument. Dinner had passed off without any friction, for the Squire was not the sort of person to abuse his position as a host.
Sir Clinton picked out a cigar and cut it with some care.
“I hear we may congratulate you on your engagement, Stenness,” he said. “I suppose it’s rather early to ask when you’re going to be married?”
Stenness looked across the room, rather as though he were in doubt about the intention behind the question.
“I’ll have to make some money first,” he answered. “One can’t live on somebody else’s income.”
Sir Clinton laughed.
“Some people don’t seem to find it so hard as all that. But if that’s your difficulty, perhaps I could do something for you. I’ve some small influence in South Africa, and it so happens that a man out there asked me to look round for someone to fill a post. The pay’s good enough to marry on. I’ll come across tomorrow to Whistlefield in the morning and talk to you about it. My impression is that it would suit you. And it has one big advantage. It would take you both out of your old surroundings and make a clean break with all this affair, which would hang round your neck if you stayed in this country. People will talk, no matter what happens; and Miss Hawkhurst couldn’t help knowing they were talking if she stayed on here.”
He paused to light his cigar before he continued.
“And that brings me to my reason for getting you people together tonight. None of you are likely to talk; but you’d be hardly human if you didn’t think about this Whistlefield affair. And it’s on the cards that you might fall into misapprehensions over it, which might lead to difficulties. I’ve come to the conclusion that it will be better if you know all that I know myself about it; and I think that will clear the whole thing up and let you get it out of your minds. Once a puzzle’s solved, no one troubles about it any more; but even a trace of mystery will keep one worrying spasmodically and so one can’t put the matter aside for good.”
He glanced round the group and he could see that his suggestion met with the approval of them all.
“Very well. You must bear in mind, first of all, that I’m going to give you a mixture of facts and theories. I can’t guarantee that every detail will be absolutely accurate, for some of it’s guesswork on my part.”
“Go ahead,” said Wendover. “We understand that well enough.”
“One thing that most people forget when they read about a police case in the papers,” continued Sir Clinton, “is the handicap of local knowledge. On the face of it, any one of you three had a better chance than I had of getting to the bottom of the Whistlefield affair. All of you had some knowledge of the characters of the people involved; each of you at any rate knew his own part in the business: but a detective coming in from the outside sees nothing before him but a group of strangers with totally unpredictable qualities. He has all that leeway to make up before he even starts level with you—and he hasn’t much time to pick up his information.”
“That’s true,” said Stenness, thoughtfully. “I’d never looked at it in that light. The police have a harder job than I thought.”
“There’s a countervailing advantage, of course,” Sir Clinton hastened to admit. “A detective comes to a case with no preconceived ideas about character. The actors are all strangers to him; and he has to depend on his wits and his judgment entirely. That was my position when I came into the Whistlefield case. I knew none of you personally, and I was quite free from prejudices about you.”
“Facts are more important than opinions in a case of this sort, so that really leaves a balance in your favour,” Ardsley suggested.
“Quite true—once you’ve got your facts,” Sir Clinton agreed. “Now let’s take the facts in the order that they presented themselves. The things I saw when I was called to the Maze were plain enough. An airgun had been used to fire poisoned darts. Roger Shandon had been hit in the shoulders and the neck; Neville Shandon had been struck rather lower down in the body. There had been no attempt at robbery, except for the tearing away of the sheet of notes in Neville’s hand. Loopholes had been cut in the hedge, evidently beforehand—for no one would start cutting loopholes with his victim a few yards away. A box of darts had been spilt at the loophole from which Roger Shandon was shot. The murderer had managed to dodge either Miss Forrest or young Torrance, or both of them, as he made his way out of the Maze. Finally, my dog proved that the murderer had followed a very roundabout track in leaving the Maze. He got out near the river bank. He went across to a clump of trees, on one of which there was a mark about three feet off the ground. Then he had gone across the grass to the road. And when he reached the road, his trail stopped short.”
“Yes,” Wendover interjected, “you talked a lot of rot about the murderer getting into his private aeroplane and flying away, I remember.”
Sir Clinton smiled slightly.
“I was near enough for all practical purposes, as you’ll see, Squire. Now we come to what I thought it reasonable to infer from the facts. First of all, an airgun can be fired by either a man or a woman, so the weapon didn’t even suggest the sex of the criminal. The poison was obviously going to be a good clue; for it made the crime abnormal, so to speak; and the more uncommon the method is in a murder, the more you limit the possibilities in the identity of the murderer. Next, it was clear enough that Roger had been shot while he was sitting in his chair with his back to the murderer. In that position, only his shoulders and neck would be exposed as targets and it was there that he was hit. Neville, on the other hand, had been shot from the front or slightly to the side. That suggested the possibility that Roger might have been killed in mistake for Neville, whereas Neville could not have been mistaken for Roger, since the murderer, shooting from the front or side, could see his face as he fired.”
“Did you lay much stress on that in your mind?” Stenness asked.
“Not much at the time. It suggested that Roger might have been killed first of all, by mistake, and that Neville was the man the murderer was really after. But alone, it amounted to very little. Then comes the fact that nothing seemed to have been removed from either body, except the notes torn out of Neville’s hand. Of course, I’d been following the Hackleton case; and it was clear enough that Neville Shandon might have been put out of the way to keep him from examining Hackleton. That’s been done before—remember how Maître Labori was shot in the back as he was going into Court to examine General Mercier during the Dreyfus case. I merely docketed that in my memory and kept an open mind on the point. I hadn’t enough data to make it worth while doing more.
“The next point was the discovery of the loopholes. That established premeditation—the crime had been thought out and prepared for beforehand. And that meant, further, that the murderer was someone who knew that one or other of the Shandons was likely to be in the Maze that afternoon or at least at some time thereabouts. That looked like a local criminal at first sight. But one has to be judicial; and it was clear enough that a premeditated crime might have been preceded by a good deal of quiet spying; and thus an outsider might have got to know the Shandons’ habits. One couldn’t lay much stress on that.”
“So at that point you didn’t know whether the Hackleton case came in or not?” Stenness asked.
“No. I simply kept an open mind on the point. Now the next thing was the box of darts which Skene found scattered about. That was easy enough to read. The murderer must have fumbled while he was shooting Roger—because the box was at Roger’s loophole. He was in a deadly hurry, or he’d have picked them up then. Evidently he’d something else to do in a hurry and he meant to come back for the darts. Isn’t it clear enough that when he’d shot Roger, he saw the face after he’d fired; and he realised he’d hit the wrong man. Neville had still to be reckoned with—and it looks to me as if the murderer had counted on Neville being in the Maze just then. I expect he had private information. So he grabbed three darts from the ground and rushed off to finish Neville, which he did. Neville may have been alarmed by something, which would account for his standing up when he was shot at. Then the murderer proposes to go back for his lost darts. But now he finds someone else in the Maze. He hears voices. Probably he finds his road back to Helen’s Bower blocked by these strangers. So he runs as hard as he can to get rid of his airgun, which is the deadly evidence against him. But he gets into difficulties in avoiding these unknown people in the Maze and it takes him some time to get out.”
“Did you suspect anyone in particular at that point?” Wendover interrupted.
“It might have been young Torrance, of course,” Sir Clinton admitted. “He might have doubled his own part with that of the murderer. I kept an open mind.”
“I suppose it might have been Miss Forrest, if you take everyone into account,” Ardsley commented.
“I didn’t speculate much at the time,” Sir Clinton answered. “What really started me thinking definitely was the clue that my dog gave us. He led us, you remember, by a very winding track through the Maze—evidently the turnings and windings were due to the murderer dodging someone in the alleys. Then we came near the river—that suggested that he flung away his airgun into the water as he passed. Then the dog led us to a tree in a small clump near by. Wendover noticed a mark on the trunk of the tree, about three feet off the ground, and he suggested that it had been made by the boot of the murderer while he was trying to climb the tree. But after that the trail went on and reached the road—and there it stopped dead. The dog simply baulked there; it found nothing further.”
Sir Clinton paused for a moment to let this point sink in.
“A trail can only stop dead in that way for either of two reasons. First, a man may stand still and wait. But since the man wasn’t there he obviously hadn’t waited. The only other way in which a thing like that could happen is by the man getting into the air off the road at that point.”
“Ha! The private aeroplane, I suppose,” said Wendover sarcastically.
Sir Clinton’s retort crushed the Squire slightly.
“Or the private motor—or even the humble push-bike. If you step into a car or get on to a bicycle your trail will stop so far as footsteps are concerned.”
Wendover admitted the hit.
“What an ass I was not to see that at once. And of course the road was bone-hard and had no dust on it, so he left no track of his tyres?”
“None that I could swear to. Now that bicycle settled a good deal. It cleared at once Torrance, Miss Forrest, and most probably Costock as well. I may say at once that I never took Costock seriously. He’s a miserable creature who couldn’t screw himself up to murder if he tried. I had him watched; but I never really suspected him of anything beyond a futile attempt at blackmailing Roger Shandon. He hadn’t even the nerve for that. His pistol was really for self-defence against Shandon, I’m sure, just as he said it was.”
Wendover harked back to the problem of the track.
“You seem very sure it was a bicycle and not a motor car.”
“Isn’t it fairly certain?” Sir Clinton asked. “If the murderer had used a car, he’d have been seen by the lodge-keepers if he left the grounds—at least he’d have run that risk. But a bicycle can be carried off the road by hand and taken through a gap in a hedge quite easily. Since the murderer evidently would not want to be seen, the bicycle is the obvious thing. Call it a bicycle, anyway, for convenience just now. My trouble was that I couldn’t prove which way the bicycle went: whether it went towards the house or towards the East Gate. I left the matter alone for the time, hoping for something else to turn up. Of course, I set my men at work to hunt for any bicycle that had been concealed in the grounds; but they failed to find it.”
“Why didn’t you make inquiries about bicycles at Whistlefield?” Wendover demanded.
“Because I wanted to keep my thumb on the bicycle question. I didn’t want to get the name of being too clever—so far as the murderer was concerned. It was far better to let him think his method was undetected.”
“So at that point,” Stenness put in, “you didn’t know whether the murderer had gone back to the house or had gone outside the grounds?”
“No,” Sir Clinton admitted. “I didn’t. The next thing, if you remember, was my visit to the house and my interviews with various people, yourself included. Bear in mind that at that time, I didn’t know whether the murderer was one of the house group or had come in like a bolt from the blue from outside. I had to get that point cleared up as soon as possible; and it offered a good deal of difficulty.
“When I came to interview the various people at the house, it was simply a case of meeting a number of strangers for the first time. I had to pick up what I could, and at the same time take care not to be prejudiced by initial impressions. That’s more difficult than you’d think. Torrance and Miss Forrest were cleared already, so I did not need to pay much attention to them, apart from their evidence. You, Stenness, gave me a bit of trouble, I admit. I couldn’t quite make you out at that time.”
Stenness acknowledged this with a faint smile. Sir Clinton hastened on with his narrative without giving either of the others a chance of interrupting.
“Arthur Hawkhurst caused me some thought, though. Stenness gave me a hint about his attack of sleepy sickness. He came in with an airgun in his hand. He seemed an irresponsible sort of boy. But that was all. There’s a big chasm between that and homicidal mania. I simply docketed him in my memory and left the matter there.”
At this point Sir Clinton seemed to find his narrative growing more interesting to himself. He pulled himself up in his chair and glanced round his audience before taking up the next part of his subject.
“Ernest Shandon was the final figure—for, of course, I dismissed Miss Hawkhurst at once. Now at first sight, friend Ernest was an unattractive fellow. First, he was obviously callous in the extreme. He didn’t seem sorry about his brothers’ deaths; his sore toe bulked far more prominently in his conversation. That seemed a bit grotesque to me at the time. It stuck in my memory on that account alone. Then, second, he seemed absolutely selfish. His ego seemed to be the only thing that really interested him. He wanted his tea; and he meant to have it, too. That seemed a bit abnormal, though one can’t hang a man for wanting his tea, of course. Third, he gave me the impression of being one of the dullest and stupidest men that one could wish to meet. Altogether, one would say, there wasn’t much to be got out of a person of that type: dull, selfish, callous, and stupid. And yet, if you look back now, you’ll see that the whole basis of the Shandon tragedies lies in just those qualities. It’ll be quite clear when we come to it.
“I’ve pointed out that my difficulty was to fix as soon as possible whether this was ‘an inside job’ or one carried through by an outsider. Also, quite possibly there might be more trouble at Whistlefield. Now I’d taken particular care to note that the murderer knew the Maze thoroughly. So as a wild shot I dropped the hint about Ariadne’s clue—the thread which would guide a man through the Maze if he didn’t know it very well. I flung that down casually. I hadn’t really much hope of doing much with it; for I hardly believed in further trouble then. But it would do no harm, so I dropped the suggestion in presence of some of the possible criminals.”
“H’m! Now I begin to see some light,” Wendover commented.
“The next point was the nature of the poison,” Sir Clinton went on. “The local doctor suggested you, Ardsley, as an expert; so I went over at once to get your views. Once I knew it was curare, I felt I’d got something definite enough to go on. That isn’t common stuff. Of course you probably had a stock yourself; and I didn’t feel inclined to interfere with you. I thought it fairly clear that if you had gone on the murder tack you’d have avoided a stuff which could be traced to you directly. So I asked about any other local source, and you put me on to the pot in the Whistlefield museum.
“That put a different complexion on the whole case. It was evidently essential to get hold of that supply immediately. If the murderer had drawn a private stock from the pot, we couldn’t help that. If he had just used enough to poison his darts, then we could stop further supplies by confiscating the pot. So I packed you and Wendover off to secure it.”
“Wendover being to watch me, I suppose?” Ardsley put in with a grim smile.
“I won’t deny it. You’d have done the same in my place,” Sir Clinton pointed out.
“Why didn’t you come yourself?” Wendover inquired.
“Because I’d something else on hand that had to be done in a hurry. I must confess frankly that I’d nothing definite to go on. It was mere intuition, if you like; or you can call it a case of taking precautions against eventualities which one doesn’t expect to occur. It was rather like the business of Ariadne’s clue—a long shot which might come off. And I thought it had more chance of bearing fruit. These poisoned darts were clues of a sort. They were also weapons. So if the murderer got a chance of grabbing them, I thought he might be tempted. But I wasn’t going to let him have the real things, not likely. I gave him a substitute, quite similar in appearance, but really quite harmless. Then if he tried any more of his games, the chances were that he’d use the darts I gave him; and do no great harm with them. Even if he had one or two deadly darts left, he’d be sure to mix the lot together, and that reduced the risk of poison in a dart chosen at random from the mixture of deadly and harmless ones.
“So, when we were passing through the village, I got you to drop me, Wendover; and I bought some darts, drilled them like the deadly ones, faked them to match with Condy’s fluid, put some litmus in so as to make my lot easily recognisable by a simple test, and then I was ready. Incidentally, I think I got the reputation of being quite mad. I needed a tin to keep the deadly darts in—I wasn’t going to have them loose in my pocket—and I had to leave the real tin for the murderer to pick up if he wanted. So I sent out for some Navy Cut, used the tins for the lethal darts, and staggered the sergeant down there by presenting him with the tobacco. He’s still puzzling over it, I guess.
“You know what happened next. I left the sham darts on the mantelpiece of the museum purposely; and the murderer lifted them. Now as Ardsley didn’t touch them—he went out of the room in front of me and they were still lying there—and as Wendover wasn’t the murderer, that left only you, Stenness, and Miss Hawkhurst, young Hawkhurst and Ernest Shandon, as possible thieves. If the tin vanished, then I had got down to pretty narrow limits.”
“I see you’d ruled me out by that time,” Ardsley said.
“Oh, practically,” Sir Clinton agreed. “Of course my convictions were quite fluid still. I was quite prepared to reconsider things at any time. The next point was to go over the alibis as well as I could. Wendover gave me a hand with that. Once one got into that matter, it was clear enough that the only possible suspects were yourself, Stenness, young Hawkhurst, you, Ardsley—because I knew nothing about your doings that day—and finally, somebody with a bicycle. But once you bring in the bicycle, Ernest Shandon’s alibi falls to bits. I’ll show you how.
“This is my reconstruction of the murders in the Maze: I don’t say it’s correct in every detail—only the main outlines are really important. Ernest Shandon went off with Miss Hawkhurst in the car. I suspect that he knew his brothers were going to the Maze that afternoon. He’d already taken his bicycle along and concealed it in a little plantation near the East Gate; and he’d hidden the airgun there as well.
“He got off the car at the East Gate, walked along the road quickly, and got through the hedge into the plantation. He took out his bicycle and the airgun and pedalled as hard as he could go for the Maze. His one risk was meeting someone on the road. If he’d done that, he’d have had to postpone his affair until another day. He met no one—it’s a road hardly anyone walks on, I believe. He got to the Maze, went in to his loophole commanding Helen’s Bower. There he saw someone whom he took to be Neville Shandon. I suspect that he had the Hackleton case at the back of his mind during the planning; and he meant to make it appear that Neville had been killed on that account. You know yourselves what a troublesome false trail it turned out to be at the start.
“My belief is that he was sweating like a pig owing to his sprint up to the Maze—you must remember that his whole alibi depended on the time factor and he hadn’t a moment to waste. Very likely his nose was greasy and he had trouble with his glasses. You remember they were always going askew or falling off? However it happened, he didn’t recognise Roger from behind, and he shot him first of all. He shot him in the neck; and I am led to suppose that Roger didn’t cry out, because the heavy dose of curare paralysed his vocal muscles almost immediately.
“Then, as Roger fell, Ernest recognised that he’d blundered. He’d killed the wrong man; and the Hackleton business wouldn’t serve to complicate this case. I expect he got flustered—and no great wonder. I suppose he dropped the darts, his glasses fell off, and altogether he was in a pretty state of confusion. And there was still Neville to finish off.
“At that moment, he’d no idea that the Maze wasn’t empty except for Neville in the other centre. So he abandoned his darts after grabbing three from the ground; and he went off to kill his other brother before anything more happened. Bear in mind that speed was everything to him, and you’ll get some idea of the flurry he must have been in. I expect he meant to come back for the spilt darts and the tin as soon as he’d finished Neville.
“We know from the evidence of Torrance and Miss Forrest that the first murder passed unnoticed so far as they were concerned. They didn’t even pay any attention to the reports of the airgun in Roger’s case. Considering the queer acoustics of the Maze, there’s nothing wonderful in that. But I think it’s likely enough that Neville Shandon had heard something; and Ernest just got him as he was standing up and wondering if he shouldn’t hunt about for the cause of the funny noise he had heard.
“Whatever the details were, Ernest got him all right; but he shot him in the body and Neville was able to give a yell or two before he collapsed. That accounts for the cries that Miss Forrest heard and also for the airgun noises. And with that, friend Ernest’s little troubles suddenly increased; for he heard voices in the Maze as these two called to each other, and he must have known he was up against it.”
Sir Clinton’s voice became grave.
“It was a bit of sheer luck that he came across neither of those two on his way out. He’d have shot them without any hesitation if he could. My reading of it is that he was hindered in two ways. First, he’d used up all his darts and daren’t waste time and risk detection by going back for those that he’d spilt. Secondly, he was losing time—and time was the essence of his alibi. So he dodged about, no doubt suffering agonies of terror, and at last he got out of the Maze safely, undetected. He pitched his gun into the water at once and went for his bicycle. In lifting it, he scraped the tree with the brake-handle, I think. He wouldn’t be in a state to do things cautiously. That was the mark Wendover noticed. He carried his bicycle across the grass so as not to leave the track of crushed stems that he’d have made if he’d wheeled it. And then, once on the road, he mounted—and his trail stopped, so far as the dog was concerned.
“He sprinted down the road to near the East Gate, carried his machine into the plantation, and concealed it. I set my men to hunt for it; but they didn’t find it. It’s pure theory; but I think it’s quite likely he had some tackle ready and hoisted the thing up into a tree. No ordinary country constable would ever think of looking up into the air for a bicycle, and it would be well hidden among the leaves. But that’s mere conjecture.
“Once clear of the bicycle, he got through the hedge again on to the public road, hurried along it as far as he could and then sat down by the wayside to wait for the postman’s cart, which he knew was due to pass along at a fixed time. When the postman came, he had his yarn ready about his sore toe and all the rest of it.”
“That’s remarkably neat,” said Ardsley. “But if I’d been in your shoes I wouldn’t have given Ernest Shandon credit for as much brains as all that.”
“You must remember that I knew nothing about his brains,” Sir Clinton pointed out. “I’d only seen him in circumstances where one doesn’t expect brains to come out very strong in most cases. I kept an open mind about him. All I admitted to myself was that Ernest Shandon hadn’t a cast-iron alibi after all.”
“Very sound,” Ardsley commended. “You ought to be in the scientific line, Driffield. Some of us aren’t so cautious.”
“Then came the burglary,” Sir Clinton went on. “On the face of it, it was possibly genuine, possibly a fake. It might have been a real attempt to get at something connected with the Hackleton case; or it might have been the usual blunder of a murderer trying to strengthen the case against someone else. I didn’t know at the moment. But when Miss Hawkhurst gave me back the tin of darts that morning and when I’d found by testing them that they weren’t my faked darts, then I had a pretty fair notion how things stood. The murderer had been careful not to steal the tin of darts outright. He’d given me back some darts right enough; they had been faked like mine, only they hadn’t my litmus in them.
“That told me two things straight away. The murderer was one of the people in the museum that night and—much more important than that—he had work still to do, for he wanted those darts at any price. That gave me some worry, I can tell you; for I couldn’t be absolutely certain that his teeth were drawn. He might have had a deadly dart or two in reserve for all I knew. It was a stiff business to be up against; and really I didn’t feel comfortable.”
“Was that the time you were so perplexed?” Wendover asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t wonder at it now.”
Sir Clinton brushed this aside.
“Now I’m coming to Ernest Shandon’s first big mistake. In telling me the story of the burglary, he dragged in a tale about the transactions relating to his late brother.”
Stenness showed no outward sign of perturbation, but Sir Clinton could see he was uneasy as to the next stage of the narrative. With a glance, the Chief Constable reassured him. Stenness, realising that his affairs would not be brought in, leaned back again in his chair.
“I needn’t go into details about the thing,” Sir Clinton continued. “All I need say is that it would take a pretty smart man to spot what Ernest had spotted. And so, naturally, I reconsidered my ideas about friend Ernest. He wasn’t an ass after all—not by any means. That set me thinking hard. And what made me think harder was his evident desire to throw suspicion on you, Stenness. He tried to persuade me—indirectly—that he was in fear of his life from you.”
“From me?” Stenness asked in amazement.
“I’m telling you the facts,” Sir Clinton contented himself with pointing out. “Well, the next business was the news that Ernest himself had been attacked in the Maze. And at that point I began to feel pretty sure of my ground. It was the most obvious line he could have taken to divert suspicion from himself. And, what made me more uneasy, it was a possible preliminary to an attack on someone else. He’d killed his two brothers. If a third attack was made, he might come under suspicion—and a breath of suspicion might be enough. So he boldly faked up an attack on himself next. Then, if still another attempt was made, who would suspect the poor victim who had nearly lost his life just a few days earlier?”
“One has to admit he showed some acuteness,” Ardsley said, drily.
“At that point the case began to clear up a little in my mind. Assuming Ernest to be the murderer, what was he after? The more I thought about it the clearer it seemed that cash must be at the bottom of the affair. He wanted money. He’d never worked in his life. How could he lay his hands on cash? And of course it was as plain as anything then. If he could kill off his brothers he’d inherit part of their money—I learned that pretty easily from the fact that there were no near relations except himself, Arthur and Miss Hawkhurst. But the craving for money isn’t easily satisfied. Obviously, if he could eliminate his nephew and niece, he’d be left with not only the whole of his two brothers’ fortunes, but the Hawkhurst money as well.
“If you look into criminology, you’ll find that the murderer for money reasons is a fairly definite type. He’s usually clever enough to devise a fresh method of murder, or of disposing of the body. Apart from that, he’s not a very brainy type. And he has a terrible knack of repeating the same method in successive crimes. Suppose you have to cross a boiling torrent by stepping from stone to stone. You get across the first time in safety. If you have to cross again, you’ll choose the same stones as before. You’ve proved them to be safe. Any other stones may be insecure and may bring you down. Now that’s the state of mind of the mass-murderer when he goes in for his work. He carries out his first crime by a novel method. He isn’t detected. So when he tries his hand again he follows his first procedure slavishly in all its mean details. These are the safe stepping-stones for him. Look at the case of Smith, how he repeated all the minutiæ of his bath-business time after time. Deeming used to put down a fresh cement floor in a room to cover the bodies of his victims. He did that more than once. He’d found it safe the first time, you see. If you read up Burke and Hare’s doings, you’ll find them a steady repetition of the same method applied without variation. It’s the mark of the mass-murderer.
“So naturally, I expected the poisoned darts and the airgun to come into play again, if Ernest carried his work to a further stage. And I made up my mind that I’d choose his next victim for him. He made two deadly slips in that interview he had with us, Wendover. Perhaps you noticed them?”
Wendover shook his head.
“You told me after our talk with him that I ought to know who the murderer was; but I didn’t guess it. What slips did he make?”
“The first slip was when he volunteered that he had a bicycle and had used it to get down to the Maze. Once I had information that he owned a bicycle, his alibi with the sore toe disappeared instanter from my mind. His second slip was a worse one. He said to us that he hadn’t been down to the Maze since the murders. And then he let out that he knew the position of the loophole through which Roger Shandon was shot. Speaking of his mythical assailant he said: ‘He was at the same loophole as he’d used when he killed Roger.’ If he’d never been near the Maze, how could he have known where that loophole was? Perhaps you think he might have picked up the information from those who were there. But if he had, I doubt if he’d have phrased the thing as he did. He seemed to me to pitch on that description of its position simply because it was the easiest that came to hand—which meant that it conveyed something definite to his own mind.
“That finished him, so far as I was concerned. But I took the trouble to go down to the Maze, just for my own satisfaction. I’d been there that morning; and I’d noticed gossamer all over the hedge at the loophole—some of it actually stretching across the hole in the hedge. When I went down, after interviewing friend Ernest, those gossamer threads were still there. No gun could possibly have been shoved into the hole without snapping them. I put my hand in, just to see; and of course I got it covered with spider’s web.”
“So that was why you cleaned your hand on the hedge and made such a fuss about spiders!” Wendover exclaimed. “I thought you were simply fooling—”
“I was certainly in high spirits,” Sir Clinton confessed blandly. “I think I’d every right to be. I’d got complete confirmation of my suspicion—though really I didn’t need the confirmatory evidence. Let’s get on with the story. We picked up friend Ernest’s cigar-case there; and I kept it. I had a notion that he hadn’t left it there without some ulterior purpose. And besides, I thought his fingerprints might come in useful some time. We didn’t need them, as it turned out. It was merely a precaution on my part. You see, there was very little to be done with fingerprints on these airguns. It seems friend Ernest had carefully organised a grand airgun shooting competition on the morning of the day he killed his brothers. He’d had the guns passed from hand to hand, so that the fingermarks of nearly everyone were printed on them in addition to his own. Of course, I had the tin box containing the spurious darts. He’d handled that. But I hardly troubled to examine it for fingermarks. I was sure he’d use gloves in touching it.
“Then I found another thing which I half-expected. I’d dropped the hint about Ariadne’s clue and the possibility of an outsider having to resort to something of the kind. Well, Wendover and I found some yards of black thread carefully placed where we couldn’t help seeing it. No black thread was found when the Shandons were murdered. But after I’d dropped that hint in Ernest Shandon’s presence, behold! we get the clue which is meant to suggest an outside murderer. Wasn’t that evidence, on the whole, quite enough to raise some suspicions about him?
“Wendover, I may tell you, thought I treated our friend Ernest rather brutally in our interview after the mythical attack on him. I certainly told Wendover afterwards that I thought Ernest had had a bad half-hour. What I meant, Squire, was the bad half-hour he had when he was laying off his tale to us and wasn’t sure what I thought about it. That was a stiff time for him. As a matter of fact, I took no pains to conceal from friend Ernest that I thought his yarn was a mere pack of lies. I wanted him to feel afraid of me, afraid of what I was getting at in the Whistlefield case. Then, I felt sure, he’d have a shy at knocking me out before I became really dangerous.
“To help on that good work, I arranged to play bridge one night at Whistlefield, so as to let him operate on his own ground. In case of accidents, I had arranged that Ardsley should come over and take charge of the casualty. I’d taken most things into account—I had to—and in case friend Ernest hit anyone else in his flurry, I arranged with Ardsley that the injured person was to ‘die’ nominally; so that friend Ernest might be convinced of the efficacy of the faked darts I’d put into his hands, and might go on to further crimes.
“I needn’t go into that affair. I’m not proud of it. I never intended to risk Miss Hawkhurst in that way. Of course, I knew at once she hadn’t been poisoned with curare. But though I’d done my best to sterilise the faked darts, I was afraid of blood-poisoning setting in. I spent a bad time over it, I can tell you. One can never be sure in a case like that.
“Well, there we were. He’d managed to nip back into the winter-garden before Wendover got after him. He believed Miss Hawkhurst was dead and only Arthur’s life stood between him and the whole of the Shandon-Hawkhurst money. By this time, like all successful mass-murderers, he’d begun to feel a complete contempt for the risk of detection. See Burke and Hare.
“So young Hawkhurst was marked down. And this time, friend Ernest meant to have a perfect alibi. He must have guessed that I suspected his other one; and he’d made up his mind to avert even a shadow of suspicion. He’d stay under my eye at the very time that murder was being done in the Maze; nearly a mile away. That was a masterstroke, I admit.
“He used his cigar-case to bait the trap—got Arthur’s back up very skilfully on the point of cowardice. And beforehand he’d set a booby-trap. He’d fixed the airgun in position to shoot at the right level; and he’d arranged a thread to the trigger. When young Hawkhurst came to the entrance to the Maze he stepped against the thread stretched across the opening; the gun went off; and the dart hit him near the heart. So simple! And then Ernest came down with us; stumbled ‘accidentally’ over the airgun; tore away the thread from the trigger before handing the gun to us. And then he ‘found’ Ariadne’s clue for us—the thread he’d laid down as a blind, to make us think it was a stranger at work, someone operating from the river.”
“He was cleverer than I gave him credit for,” Stenness confessed, rather grudgingly. “I always thought him a dull brute.”
“The contents of Roger Shandon’s will took away my last doubts,” Sir Clinton went on. “Besides that, I’d tested the dart he’d used against Miss Hawkhurst and found it was one of the faked lot stolen from the museum that night. So by then the only question was: ‘What should be done with friend Ernest?’ ”
Sir Clinton paused and lit a fresh cigar before going on to the end of his narrative. When he spoke once more his audience was rather surprised by this theme.
“There’s always a good deal of talk in the newspapers from time to time about ‘unexplained mysteries,’ ‘unsolved crimes,’ ‘police inefficiency,’ and so forth. Now I’ll put a case to you. Suppose you were a detective engaged on some beastly case like the Jack-the-Ripper business. And suppose you discovered in the end that the criminal was a lunatic—as Jack-the-Ripper obviously was. And, finally, suppose that his insanity has been discovered and that he’s been put into an asylum since his latest crime. What would you do? Would you publish your results? Even if he weren’t already in an asylum, what could you do? Try him, and get him sent to Broadmoor? For you couldn’t hang him, since he’s insane. Would you do that? If you did, the net result would be that you’d spatter all his innocent relations with the mud of his crime; and you’d do no good at all. There are some sleeping dogs that are best left lying. Mind, I’m giving you merely my own private view. I don’t mean that you can take that to represent police procedure. I’m simply telling you how I feel about the business.”
Ardsley nodded in agreement.
“So long as a brute gets his deserts, it doesn’t seem to me to matter how he gets them. And I agree with you about making an innocent family suffer through no fault of their own.”
Sir Clinton acknowledged Ardsley’s support.
“That’s how I looked at the Shandon case,” he said. “I could have arrested the brute. Then we’d have had a trial. And the Hawkhursts would have been branded as relatives of a murderer. I thought things could be done just as efficiently by making Ernest Shandon his own executioner. In fact, my method was a stiffer one than mere hanging, as you know. And if it failed—well, the law would take its normal course.
“I’d found a suitcase packed ready in the Maze on the night that young Hawkhurst was attacked. I expected something of the sort and went specially to look for it. I’d a notion that he wouldn’t care to sneak out of the house with a suitcase in his hand at the last moment, if he bolted. He’d have it cached somewhere, so that he could leave with empty hands, quite unsuspicious, you know. I knew he’d need a complete change of clothes so as to be able to alter his appearance and put the hue and cry off his track. He’d shown a penchant for the Maze all along. He’d even dragged it into his story of the attack on himself; so it was clear he had it very much in mind. I banked on that when I looked there for his suitcase. It was a good enough choice. He could sneak out of the house, pick up the suitcase, go across to the boathouse, and row himself down to the village without having to be seen carrying the bag on the public road at all—quite a good plan, if you ask me.”
“I hadn’t seen why he went to the Maze, I admit,” said Stenness. “It seemed rather like a bit of magic on your part to have foreseen that.”
“Once I’d found the suitcase,” Sir Clinton went on, “all that remained was to arrange the moment for his bolt, so that I could grip him. There was no use waiting on his good pleasure to fix the time. I gave him a plain hint that I’d be glad to see him go—let him think I wanted to avoid the scandal of a trial. There was no lying in that. I certainly did want to avoid putting him in the dock.
“Now as it happened, Stenness had been realising some capital at that time; so I got him to put his cash into the study safe that night. And I told friend Ernest that the money was there—a good round sum. That gave him the sinews of war for his bolt, free of charge, you see? He’d only to grab it in passing. And as soon as I felt he was nibbling, I telephoned a code-message to the police-station: some rot about Navy Cut tobacco. From that prearranged message, they knew they’d only to open an envelope and carry out their sealed orders which I’d left with them. They came up to the Maze during the night; watched Ernest into it about 6 a.m.—I’d been keeping an eye on his room during the night, so he couldn’t have given us the slip anyhow. Then, as soon as he went into the Maze my men closed the gates behind him—and the game was up!
“You know the rest. We had to hold an inquest, of course; but you must have seen that we gave the bare legal minimum of evidence; just enough to prove suicide. Of course there’s sure to be some talk. One can’t help that. But we’ve stifled it as far as we possibly could; and the reporters got so little that the thing was hardly talked about in the papers.”
Sir Clinton smiled with a tingle of sardonic amusement.
“I wonder what they’d have made of it if they’d known all about our methods! Perhaps I wasn’t quite orthodox. Perhaps I ought to have got him nicely hanged—and incidentally run the public in for a big bill for his prosecution. I can only say that my conscience is quite clear; it doesn’t give me a twinge. Consciences are weird things.”
He glanced across at Stenness with a glint of humour in his eye which the rest failed to see.
“And now, what about some bridge?”