Death at Swaythling Court Read online

  “Why should I?”

  “True. Well, let’s get on with it. Now, here’s a queer thing!”

  The Colonel’s discovery was a flat plate of wax out of which protruded a fragment of wick, evidently the remains of a candle which had been burning on the desk-top until it finally guttered out. The three of them looked at it with astonishment. Cyril Norton was the first to break the silence.

  “Now, what the devil does a man want with a candle alight in a room where the electric light is burning? This thing leaves me standing! How do you account for it, Uncle Sherlock?”

  The Colonel was not over-pleased by the sarcastic tribute to his detective powers. He looked at the candle-stub with a frown for a full minute, revolving possible explanations in his mind.

  “He didn’t need it for light, that’s evident. But he might have been sealing a letter with sealing-wax and lighted the candle to heat the sealing-wax. That’s a possible explanation.”

  “Oh, it’s possible, all right,” Cyril admitted. His expression, however, indicated that it did not satisfy him. “But I see no letter. And I don’t see any sealing-wax, either.”

  “He may have dispatched the letter and put the sealing-wax back into a drawer. We’ll see later.”

  “It won’t wash, uncle. Point No. 1: Anyone would blow out a candle at once after using it. Point No. 2: Anyone who was in the habit of using a candle for sealing-wax would use one of the small kind, not an ordinary cheap thing like this. And Point No. 3: In a house of this kind there would be candlesticks, and no man in his senses would stick his candle to the surface of a polished desk like this.”

  The Colonel was rather vexed by this cavalier demolishing of his hypothesis.

  “Do you happen to have any better idea of your own, Cyril?”

  “No. The thing’s beyond me altogether.”

  “Well, let’s get on. Have you got the candle down in your notes, Bolam?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cyril Norton was still looking absent-mindedly at the pool of wax on the surface of the desk. Suddenly his eye wandered to the carpet.

  “Point No. 4: the clincher, I think. There’s a trail of grease across the floor from the desk to the door. You don’t suggest that Hubbard went wandering around with that candle in his hand all over the room?”

  The Colonel went down on hands and knees and made a ong inspection of the grease-spots on the carpet.

  “We’ll follow up that trail by and by,” he intimated, as he rose to his feet again. “In the meantime, we’d better finish with this room. We must be systematic.”

  He returned to the desk.

  “Not much else here, I think. Note this down, Bolam. A whisky decanter, stoppered, about half-full. A soda syphon; about a quarter of the soda left in it. And what’s this?”

  He held up a squat, wide-mouthed stoppered bottle containing some lumps of a crystalline material.

  “Sir, I believe that is the bottle that the . . . the deceased used for killing his insects.”

  “Oh, is that so, Bolam? I wondered what it was. Well, put it down on the list. Then there’s this tumbler; it’s got about a dessert-spoonful of whisky and soda left in it. Nothing else on the desk except a stationery cabinet with some blank notepaper and envelopes and a blotting-pad with a clean sheet on top. That finishes the desk; now for the rest of the room.”

  Cyril Norton appeared to pay no attention to his uncle’s enumeration of the articles on the desk. His eyes were still fixed on the remains of the guttered-out candle; and his expression suggested intense concentration upon a baffling problem.

  “Some of it fits,” he said, as if thinking aloud, “but the rest of it simply won’t. What the devil does a man want with a candle in a lighted room? I can make neither head nor tail of it.”

  He broke off in obvious irritation and transferred his attention to the Colonel, who was now extending the circle of his investigations.

  “Why, here are his keys sticking in the keyhole of his safe. It’s not even locked. Let’s look into this.”

  The Colonel swung the door of the big safe open and stared in surprise at the array of empty shelves which confronted him.

  “Not a solitary paper left in the thing. That’s funny.”

  He glanced round the room, and his eye was caught by a mass of fine ashes in the fire-place. Going across to the hearth he knelt down and examined the huge grate with interest. Then cautiously he touched some of the metalwork.

  “Still hot! There must have been a devil of a fire in this last night. And a lot of the ash here is obviously paper-ash. I can see fragments of writing on some of it. He must have been destroying documents on a big scale—compromising stuff that he couldn’t afford to leave about.”

  Cyril stepped over to the hearth-rug and looked at the mass of ash and cinders which choked the grate and lay piled high up in the fire-place.

  “Hubbard didn’t necessarily do that himself. It may have been the murderer. Most likely it was the murderer. Anyway, the work’s been done thoroughly. There doesn’t seem to be anything but fragments; he must have stirred the stuff up while it was burning and then heaped any amount of coals on top. What a furnace! It’s no wonder the place was like an oven when we came into it. Pure luck that a blaze of that size didn’t set fire to the whole house.”

  The Colonel looked gloomily at the mass of embers which probably represented all that remained of a clue to the mystery. All at once he bent forward, looked keenly down amongst the interstices of the pile; then, very delicately he introduced his hand and extracted something which had caught his eye.

  “There’s a find, anyway,” he said, with a certain pride, as he drew from among the ashes a long slender metallic object. “Here’s the weapon.”

  Under his directions, Bolam spread some sheets of clean paper on a small table which stood near the window. The Colonel blew the ash carefully from his find and then deposited the thing on the paper.

  “I’ll describe it, Bolam. Take this down, word for word.”

  The Colonel was recovering his detective enthusiasm. He felt that the discovery of this object re-established his credit, which had been slightly shaken by Cyril’s dismissal of the sealing-wax theory of the candle.

  “Length of object over all, about twelve or fourteen inches. Made up of two parts. A steel blade, about nine inches long by three-quarters of an inch broad at its base and tapering to a sharp point. The blade’s almost flat—not more than a quarter of an inch thick where it enters the handle. Steel handle, with slight ornamentation, about four inches long—just a comfortable size for a hand-grip. No finger-marks, of course, and no blood-stains. One couldn’t expect anything of that sort after it had been lying in that fire. Now, just to make sure, we’ll compare its size with the cut in Hubbard’s coat.”

  Tearing a strip from a stiff sheet of notepaper, the Colonel wrapped it round the blade where it entered the handle and pinched it until it took the shape of the steel, after which he slipped it off, still retaining the mould.

  “I don’t want to bring the dagger near the wound itself. Much better to be able to say that they were never in contact. Now we’ll fit the paper to the cut in the cloth.”

  Going across to Hubbard’s body, he brought the paper ring down on the top of the slit in the coat and adjusted it until they were exactly in register.

  “They fit precisely,” he announced in mild triumph; and took a step aside so that the others might see clearly. “Now that clears up part of the business. We know what he was killed with, anyway; there can be no dispute about that. Let’s have another look at the weapon and see what it has to tell us.”

  He went back to the table again and pondered for a while over the wicked-looking steel fang.

  “Don’t take this down, Bolam. I’m just thinking the matter out; and it isn’t evidence. Now I was sure when I saw the wound that it was made with a stiletto; and here’s the very instrument I predicted. One naturally asks: ‘What sort of person would use a weapon of that sor
t?’ It isn’t the sort of thing the ordinary person carries in the pocket. It won’t fold up; it’s a clumsy length. Then again, you can’t buy a stiletto at the first cutlery-shop. They aren’t used in this country. What does that point to? I think I can tell you. It means one of two things. Either this murder was committed by a foreigner who could buy a stiletto in his own country; or else the murderer had access to some collection of old arms and picked out the stiletto as being the thing he needed for this affair. Now that narrows down our search very considerably. See that, Bolam?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bolam was evidently deeply impressed by the rapidity and sureness of the Colonel’s reasoning. Cyril, however, had listened to his uncle’s exposition with a faintly sardonic expression; and he now broke in.

  “You’ll have to extend your search to another class—the people who use paper-knives. That’s just an ordinary steel paper-cutter. You can buy them anywhere. I shouldn’t wonder if it belonged to Hubbard himself and was lying on the table.”

  The Colonel looked crestfallen.

  “Perhaps you’re right, Cyril. I hadn’t thought of that. We can easily test it by questioning the servants. But where are the servants?”

  He stepped across to the bell and rang a prolonged peal which they could hear thrilling through the silent house. There was no response.

  “There’s nobody on the premises, it seems,” the Colonel said tentatively, as if he almost expected that Cyril would find a flaw in the statement. “I wonder what’s happened to them. It looks a bit fishy finding a murdered man in an empty house; and Hubbard must have kept a staff of sorts.”

  “Sir,” volunteered the constable, “he had one man—a sort of butler—and another man—the chauffeur—and two maid-servants.”

  “Four servants? Surely they can’t all be in it. This is a rum affair, very rum. What are you looking at, Cyril?”

  Cyril Norton pointed to an open typewriter which stood on the table beside the paper-knife.

  “There’s his typewriter, evidently. A Hammond. Hadn’t we better compare its type with the typing of these letters I showed you? Nothing like making sure of one’s ground.”

  The Colonel seemed less interested in this point than he had been in the other discoveries. The blackmail case had been overlaid in his mind by the excitement of the murder; and he saw little advantage in recurring to it. However, he consented to satisfy Cyril; and bent over the machine.

  “Hulloa! There’s the beginning of a letter on this sheet. It reads: ‘My dear Sir, If you don’t pay the money down to-morrow . . .”

  Cyril unbuttoned his overall and drew out the packet of letters which he had shown to his uncle at Fernhurst Manor. Unfolding one of them, he scrutinized alternately the paper in his hand and the sheet clamped in the machine. At last he turned to the Colonel again.

  “That’s clear enough. Look at the ‘d’ in ‘don’t’ and this other ‘d’ in ‘down.’ In both cases there’s a defect in the type: the ring of the ‘d’ is clear enough, but the upright stroke and the tenon at the top are both defective. The shuttle’s been chipped slightly. Now compare that with the ‘Well-wisher’ letter. Look at the two ‘d’s’ in ‘demand,’ and the other ‘d’s’ in ‘during’ and ‘considerations.’ Same defect running right through. Both letters were written with the same shuttle. What a damned idiot Hubbard must have been to use a traceable thing like that when he could have bought a split-new shuttle for a quid. They’re interchangeable on the Hammond machine. Anyway, I think that’s clinched the matter. We could have brought the blackmail home to him easily enough merely on the strength of his typing.”

  “I don’t see that it matters much now,” commented the Colonel, who had been slightly rasped by Cyril’s dismissal of his own discoveries.

  “True enough,” his nephew admitted. “But I like to be thorough.”

  To change the subject, the Colonel suggested that they might resume the examination of the room. His eye, ranging round the walls, was suddenly caught by something which he had missed in his earlier investigations.

  “Here’s another funny thing. Look at that glass case on the wall alongside the parrot-cage in the recess. Somebody’s smashed the glass front.”

  They went over to where the object hung, a large wooden case suspended from the wall. The lower edge was about three feet from the ground; and the case itself was about a yard high. The thing was simply an exhibition case such as is found in museums; and it contained a number of brilliantly tinted butterflies pinned down in rows.

  The Colonel inspected it carefully, looked at the fragments of glass scattered on the carpet below it, and then hesitated before speaking. He had been proved wrong several times, and he was afraid to risk another mistake.

  “That glass might have been broken, in a struggle, by someone’s elbow,” he suggested. Then, seeing something in Cyril’s expression, he added hurriedly, “But there doesn’t seem to have been any struggle.”

  He inspected the case again, and detected a fresh point.

  “Look here. At least one specimen has been removed from its place—the centre-piece of the whole collection. What do you make of that?”

  Cyril Norton looked up sharply and again his face took on the expression of bafflement which the Colonel had noticed before.

  “This dime novel’s far beyond me, uncle. I simply can’t make head or tail of it. One could fake up half a dozen explanations that will fit fifty per cent. of the facts; but what I can’t see is any reasonable theory that will fit the whole of the evidence. There’s no logic in the thing.”

  “It seems to me hard enough to find one hypothesis that will fit even a part of the facts,” the Colonel confessed. “I’d like to hear one of your half-dozen.”

  Cyril Norton took up the challenge without hesitation.

  “Well, I’ll have a dash at it. How would this fit the facts? Suppose Hubbard, being a trifle overwrought after getting my letter, primed himself with Dutch courage from the decanter there. Then, while he is destroying compromising documents preparatory to a bolt, the main fuse of the house gets blown, and the light goes out. He fishes out a candle from somewhere or other and sets about replacing the fuse. Then he wanders up here again; and, being rather canned, he sticks the candle on the table and forgets all about it. He sits down, a bit muzzy, and drops asleep.

  “A burglar then arrives; finds Hubbard has carelessly left his latch-key in the door—a thing that might happen to any of us; comes into the house that way; finds Hubbard here asleep with the safe-door open. The burglar helps himself to a few valuables from the safe—we haven’t an inventory, and for all we know there may have been something in it besides documents. Just as the burglar has got his claws on the loot, Hubbard wakes up—still muzzy. The burglar, on the spur of the moment, snatches the paper-knife from the table and does Hubbard in. Then he decamps via the front door, jolting out the Yale key as he slams it behind him.

  “That covers everything except the 0·22 automatic on the mat and the broken show-case. And there’s nothing against that theory if you assume that Hubbard was drunk enough to stick the candle down and forget about it. Oh, it’s easy enough to fake up a yarn to fit parts of the evidence. It’s when one tries to make the whole hundred per cent, fit that one falls down.”

  “We can test your hypothesis, anyway.” The Colonel was not sorry to take the opportunity of playing critic in his turn. “All we need do is to follow up the grease-trail and see if it leads to the fuse-box.”

  “It won’t,” Cyril Norton admitted amiably. “The fuse-box is about the last place in the world I’d expect that trail to lead to. But we needn’t waste time in talk. Suppose we get on the track now and see where it does lead?”

  The Colonel nodded; and they moved towards the open door. As they did so, the sputter of a motor-cycle engine sounded under the window, passed on, and ceased abruptly. Someone ascended the perron; a latch-key clicked in the Yale lock; and as they stepped out into the hall, the front door opened to ad
mit a man in motor-cycle overalls.

  Chapter Five

  The Butler

  “CURIOUSER and curiouser!” quoted Cyril Norton, as he saw the incoming figure. “Is this the First Murderer, or a master-sleuth sprung from nowhere with a solution in his hip-pocket, or a friend of the family, or a mere casual caller? It seems to be Visiting Day at Swaythling Court.”

  “Sir, it’s the butler,” whispered Bolam, after a glance at the approaching figure, “I didn’t recognize him at first, in his overalls.”

  The Colonel caught the whispered identification and looked keenly at the man who was coming rather hesitatingly towards them. What he saw did not impress him favourably.

  “Rat-faced creature,” he murmured to himself

  There was a certain justification for the unkindly comment. The butler’s sharp nose jutted out over a long, thin-lipped mouth and receding chin, giving the whole countenance a pronounced rodent-like character. The Colonel got the impression of a personality stamped with a combination of weakness, predaceousness and cowardice in almost equal proportions; and even at the first glance he disliked the man before him.

  “Who are you?” demanded the butler, looking uneasily from one to the other. The tone of his voice expressed only a natural surprise; but the Colonel, watching closely, saw that the newcomer’s lower lip quivered as though the butler’s nerves were slightly out of control. Still keeping his attention fixed on the butler’s face, the Colonel broke his news:

  “Your master was murdered during the night. Do you know anything about it?”

  What the Colonel had expected to see, he could hardly have defined. Of course, when a servant learns abruptly that his master has come by a violent end, it is natural to count upon some change in his facial expression; but what precise shade of emotion one could anticipate was not very clear in the Colonel’s mind. He had shot out his statement sharply with a half-defined hope that from its effect on the butler he might learn something of value; but in practice he found that he had gained nothing. Surprise, he seemed to see, and something that might almost have been called relief; but he had to admit to himself that for all practical purposes the face of the butler had shown nothing which gave a clue to the mystery. Colonel Sanderstead could not even make up his mind whether the man was acting or not. He contented himself with a mental comment: