Death at Swaythling Court Read online

  The Colonel was by no means a dull man; and he could see quite well how dangerous a case might be built up against Jimmy if everything came out. The trouble in a murder case was to establish a motive; and here was a motive ready-made. It might be that Jimmy’s peccadillo had been slight; but what really mattered was how Jimmy had looked at it. He might have thought it serious enough to make murder worth while if the blackmailer could be silenced. If only one knew what had happened!

  Cyril Norton, scrutinizing his uncle’s face, could gauge what was going on in the brain behind it; and he left the Colonel to think out his problem without interference. They took several turns up and down the road before Colonel Sanderstead broke the silence.

  “I never was a good hand at intricate moral problems,” he said, despondently. “I dare say there’s a lot to be said on all sides of the thing; and there’s no evidence to go on as far as I can see. One just has to make up one’s mind on general principles. Mind you I don’t admit that there’s a case against Jimmy Leigh—”

  “No more do I,” interjected Cyril, with emphasis.

  “But,” continued the Colonel, “even if there were a case, I think I’d settle the thing in my own mind on broad principles. I’m no refined moralist, able to split hairs. I’m just a plain practical man with a leaning towards honesty and the right.”

  Even this very vague expression of his moral ideas made the Colonel desperately uncomfortable. Principles, he felt, were things one acted on; one didn’t discuss them: in fact one could hardly formulate them on the spur of the moment. He switched off and began afresh.

  “The way I look at it, Cyril, is this. There’s no ‘case’ against Jimmy Leigh at present; I’ve seen no evidence whatever in that house which would suggest to anyone that he was mixed up in the business. You and I happen to know some facts which might, if one twisted them, bring his name into the affair. But even these facts could go no farther than the raising of unconfirmed suspicions. In themselves they prove nothing. Therefore unless something further comes to light, I agree with you that we aren’t bound to divulge what we know about his relations with Hubbard.”

  He paused for a moment or two, making a further attempt to find expression for his principles.

  “In a case like Hubbard’s, I’m not sure that Law and Justice come to the same thing. A man who eliminates a blackmailer, to my mind, is doing a public service, whatever the Law may say about it. Legally, of course, it’s murder; but if I were settling the case on first principles, unhampered by the Law, I think I’d be rather inclined to shake hands with the man who did it, if he had suffered by Hubbard’s doings.”

  Cyril Norton’s face betrayed his satisfaction at this rather confused account of the Colonel’s views.

  “That’s pretty nearly how I look at it myself.”

  Then a fresh thought seemed to strike him.

  “Why don’t you drop in at the Bungalow on your way home and tackle Jimmy himself? It’s quite possible that he may have facts that would clear him of any suspicion whatever—an alibi, say—and it would be just as well to get that straight. You’re in a better position than I am in the matter; you’re not so closely connected with him as I am, through Stella.”

  He appeared to meditate for a time before closing the subject:

  “There’s one thing I would take my oath on: Jimmy Leigh would never stab a man in the back.”

  The Colonel nodded his assent to this. From what he himself knew of Jimmy’s character he could hardly believe him capable of that action. He could imagine Jimmy wrought up to the pitch of murder; but it would not be that particular kind of murder.

  As they turned and walked back in silence towards the house, Colonel Sanderstead saw the vicar standing at the front door with the butler, evidently deep in conversation.

  “Picking up all he can,” was the Colonel’s reflection; and he made up his mind to cut short Flitterwick’s unofficial investigations. The less that chatterbox knew about it, the better. Anything he learned would be scattered over the whole village in a couple of days: a titbit here, another morsel for a second ear, and so on, until the affair was public property in its last detail.

  Ascending the steps, Colonel Sanderstead remembered that he ought to see Mickleby before leaving the house; and brushing past the vicar he went on into the study.

  “Well, doctor, what do you make of it?”

  Mickleby had assumed his most pompous air; and it was clear that he did not propose to be drawn.

  “I shall have to carry out a post-mortem before I can say anything definite, Colonel.”

  “Ah, of course. You want to trace the character of the wound, and so forth. See where the blade went inside, I suppose.”

  Mickleby nodded without adding anything further.

  “There’ll have to be an inquest,” the Colonel reminded him.

  “I’ll notify the coroner.”

  “Good. Nothing more I can do, is there? Any help I can give you?”

  Mickleby again nodded, this time in dissent.

  “Very good. I needn’t stay here and get in your way. Good morning, doctor.”

  For the third time, Mickleby nodded, this time in dismissal; and he turned at once to continue his examination of the body.

  On his way out, the Colonel annexed the vicar in passing.

  “Oh, Flitterwick, I’d like to hear your views on this affair. I’ll send my car home; and you and I can walk down the avenue together, if you don’t mind leading your bicycle. I want to drop into the Bungalow and ask young Leigh to play a round with me.”

  Flitterwick reluctantly parted from the butler and joined Colonel Sanderstead.

  “Well, what do you think about it?” inquired the Colonel after they had walked out of earshot of the house. Cyril Norton had already departed on his motor-cycle; and the Colonel’s chauffeur had just passed them in the car.

  “Adhuc sub judice lis est, as we learned in our Horace at school: the case is still in progress, and it seems to me a difficult one. Life, Colonel, is full of mysteries and coincidences. Here this morning, I set out in answer to poor Hubbard’s invitation, and as I pedalled up the avenue my thoughts were full of butterflies, of this wonderful collection in which the poor fellow took such a pride. I thought of that American specimen which he regarded, justly I believe, as the star of his museum. And, suddenly, I was plunged into this terrible tragedy, in which that very butterfly, that infinitely fragile thing of beauty, forms the central feature.”

  “What’s that you say?” demanded the Colonel, startled out of good manners by this unexpected suggestion.

  Flitterwick appeared to be gratified by having produced such a marked impression.

  “Surely this case is simple in the extreme, Colonel. I penetrated to the heart of it almost immediately from the few words I had with Hubbard’s butler. A most intelligent man, most intelligent.”

  “Well, what’s your theory?”

  “As one who has had in the course of his vocation to study the depths of the human soul, I can affirm, Colonel, that of all the passions, that of envy is the most widely disseminated. Now in the case of collectors, that passion reaches its maximum. It becomes in some cases a positive fury. Now we have poor Hubbard foully done to death last night; and when we examine the very room in which he was slain, we find missing from his cabinet, the gem of his collection, the great American butterfly. Is it stretching our imagination too much if we see a connection, a very intimate connection, between those two facts? I think not. To my mind, it seems clear that the unfortunate Hubbard had aroused the envy of some rival collector who, carried away by his envy and covetousness, had decided to secure that marvellous specimen for his own, cost what it might. In some collectors the passion attains almost to the pitch of monomania; and it seems quite possible that some crazed enthusiast may have crept in, meaning to steal away that particular wonder. Grant that, and all the rest falls into place. There is a clear motive for the tragedy.”

  The Colonel turned a pair of exp
ressionless eyes upon the vicar’s face:

  “That’s an idea, certainly,” he admitted.

  He refrained from adding that it was an idiotic idea, though the adjective completed his thought on the subject. He was quite content to find Flitterwick following up that particular trail; for so long as the vicar was on a wild-goose chase he was unlikely to do much harm by his gossiping. They walked on in silence until they reached the lodge.

  “Excuse me for a moment, Flitterwick; I have a message to leave here.”

  The Colonel stepped up to the door, while Flitterwick walked slowly out of the gates on to the road. The lodge-keeper appeared in answer to the Colonel’s knock; and very briefly Colonel Sanderstead gave him as much of the news as seemed necessary.

  “By the way,” he added, as though struck by an afterthought of no great importance, “did anybody visit Mr. Hubbard yesterday? Did you notice anyone passing the lodge?”

  The lodge-keeper considered the question for a time.

  “Mr. Hilton came in the afternoon, sir. I couldn’t say exactly what time it was. I didn’t see him go out again; but I was working round at the back, part of the time; and I may have missed him.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “No, sir, not so far as I can remember.”

  “When do you go to bed at night?”

  “We’re always in bed by half-past ten, sir. We’re very regular people.”

  “So last night, I suppose, you would be asleep before, say, eleven o’clock?”

  “Oh, yes. I doze off almost as soon as my head touches the pillow, sir; and when I fall asleep, I sleep sound.”

  “Ah! By the way, do you close the gates at night?”

  “No, sir. Mr. Hubbard sometimes comes back late; and he likes to have the gates open always.”

  “H’m! Well, I don’t think he’ll worry about that in future. The police will probably want to interview you before long about his comings and goings. Nothing more you can remember?”

  But the lodge-keeper had nothing further to add to the Colonel’s stock of information.

  As Colonel Sanderstead turned away to follow Flitterwick, he admitted to himself a considerable satisfaction with the progress of his investigation. A motor had been there on the previous night—the tracks proved it. Now, by his inquiry at the lodge, he had established that its visit must have occurred not earlier than, say, 10.45 p.m. That was a factor in the case which he alone knew. Cyril, for all his ironical superiority, had missed this point—the presence of an extra man on the scene.

  At the gate of the Bungalow, Colonel Sanderstead left the vicar in order to pay his call on Jimmy Leigh.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Pickering. Is Mr. Leigh in?”

  The housekeeper’s reply took him aback.

  “No, sir. Mr. Leigh went off first thing this morning quite unexpectedly. It took me by surprise, sir, when he waked me up and said that he had to catch the first train. I got up and got him some breakfast; but he did not take much. He seemed very worried, sir, as if he’d had bad news.”

  The housekeeper knew that the Colonel was an old friend of the family and was more communicative with him than she would have been to a casual caller.

  “Did he say when he was coming back, Mrs. Pickering?”

  “No, sir. He just went off without a word.”

  “Not even his address?”

  “No, sir, nothing.”

  “Well, I suppose that means he’ll be back very shortly, perhaps this evening.”

  “He took his suit-case with him, sir.”

  “Indeed. Possibly he is spending the night in London; going to the theatre, perhaps.”

  But in his own mind the Colonel had very different ideas. The blackmail case, Jimmy Leigh’s abnormal mood, Cyril’s evidence with regard to Jimmy’s nerves, the meeting with Hubbard, and now this sudden departure: there seemed to be a sinister thread running through the whole thing, a thread which, try as he would, the Colonel could not ignore. One might call it a “departure”; but the real word that suggested itself to the Colonel was “flight.”

  “He’s bolted. That looks bad. That looks very bad,” he said to himself. Then aloud he continued:

  “I’ll just step into the laboratory and leave a note for him, Mrs. Pickering. Please see that he gets it as soon as he comes in.”

  At any cost, thought the Colonel, this sudden decamping must not be bruited abroad at that precise moment. Until he knew more of the mystery, he did not propose to let a connection be drawn between the murder and this apparently unforeseen departure. If the village supposed that Jimmy was returning almost immediately, no one would think of linking up his flight with the tragedy.

  He went into the laboratory, scribbled a note asking Jimmy to play golf with him two days later, sealed it in an envelope and left it on the desk. Then, for some reason which he himself could hardly have explained, he began to look round the room.

  Some changes in the arrangement had been made since his previous visit. The big iron tube of the “shooting gallery” had been dismantled; and the sections stood piled beside the french-window. The apparatus generating the Lethal Ray had been dragged into the centre of the room, where it now stood with its power-cables stretching across the floor to plugs in the wall. Beside it was a small table on which a sheet of paper was spread; and Colonel Sanderstead, half incuriously, stepped over to inspect this.

  “Queer thing for Jimmy to be using,” he murmured to himself as he examined it. “A six-inch-to-the-mile local section of the Ordnance map.”

  Two pencil lines ruled on the map caught his attention.

  “H’m! The map’s oriented as it stands. North and south line through the Bungalow. Second line ruled from the Bungalow to—Hullo! To Swaythling Court! That’s funny. And here’s a protractor. He’s been reading off the bearing of the Court on the map. Now what interest could that have for him?”

  The Colonel’s eye wandered to the adjacent stand of the Lethal Ray machine and his glance caught something which made him start. A compass was lying on the top of the fine brass pointer of the machine. Colonel Sanderstead stepped round the table and read the bearing of the pointer. Then, with the protractor, he measured the angle made by the two lines on the map.

  “Whew! He’s got that pointer bracketed on Swaythling Court. And he told us that the Court was well within the range of the machine! There’s more here than meets the eye, it seems to me. That’s a nasty state of affairs.”

  He pondered over this new evidence for a time without being able to bring it into relation with the data already in his possession.

  “Well, no matter what one thinks of this,” he concluded, “no Lethal Ray was ever able to put a knife into a man’s back. That’s clear enough. Jimmy may have had murderous intentions; but that’s not quite the same thing as being a murderer. I expect he rigged this infernal thing up during a hot fit; then thought the better of it; and did nothing further. But then, why has he bolted? For it is a bolt—undoubtedly. It looks fishy.”

  Then a possible interpretation struck him.

  “Suppose Hubbard threatened immediate exposure; and Jimmy’s bolt was on that account? He may have fitted this beastly contrivance up; then had a cold fit; felt unable to see the thing through; and simply decamped before Hubbard could publish the business, whatever it was. That would fit the facts all right. And then it would be a mere coincidence that Hubbard was murdered that very night. Just a mere coincidence.”

  But though the Colonel, in his anxiety to keep Jimmy Leigh’s name out of the affair, repeated to himself again and again that “it was just a coincidence,” he did not feel altogether reassured. Some coincidences are too pat to be purely accidental. And there, before him, was the damning evidence of the Lethal Ray machine, which proved beyond a doubt that at one moment Jimmy Leigh had at least begun to consider the elimination of Hubbard.

  For a while longer the Colonel remained plunged in thought. Then, coming at last to a resolution, he picked up the map and compass and t
ransferred them to his own pocket. After that, he slightly shifted the position of the Lethal Ray generator so that the brass needle no longer pointed towards Swaythling Court.

  “I suppose this makes me an accessory after the fact,” he reflected, rather ruefully. “But I can’t help it. It wouldn’t be justice to hang Jimmy Leigh on account of a blackmailing beast like Hubbard.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Opening of the Inquest

  THE coroner seated himself in a chair at the end of the long table in the dining-room of Swaythling Court and, after opening his book, glanced over the faces of the jury. His expression seemed to indicate that he had a poor opinion of their intelligence.

  Formal evidence of Hubbard’s identity was given and then the coroner, before calling further witnesses, addressed a few words to the jury.

  “It will perhaps make matters easier for you, gentlemen, if I explain to you the purpose for which you are here this morning. You have inspected the body of a dead man in the room upstairs; and you have also been shown the apartment in which he was first discovered after his death. Formal evidence of his identity has been submitted to you—not that there is any dispute on that point, for I believe he was well known to some of you by sight. The question before us, which you have to settle for yourselves in your own minds, after hearing the evidence which we shall bring before you, is: “In what way did this man come to die?”

  The coroner paused for a few moments, evidently to let his words sink into the minds of his hearers. Colonel Sanderstead took the opportunity to inspect the group of people before him. The jurymen, all looking slightly self-conscious, were familiar to him: the village butcher, Corley; old Swaffham, the Fernhurst grocer; Simon the motor-man; and some farmers of the neighbourhood. Much to his disgust, the Colonel discovered that Simon had been chosen foreman of the jury.

  The reporter of the Micheldean Gazette was sharpening his pencil at the foot of the table; and one or two spectators seemed to have been admitted.