The Castleford Conundrum Read online

  “Laughing at you behind your back”! She had laughed at Winnie; Winnie had laughed at her; and Dickie, most likely, had been laughing in his sleeve at both of them, all the while. He had played the same game with each, evidently. When he and Winnie were together, it was Connie who was to be deceived; when he and Connie met, then Winnie was the person to be kept in the dark. Miss Lindfield knew how that had heightened the zest in her own case. She could guess that Winnie was in the same boat. And Winnie had a double thrill. Castleford had to be kept in ignorance as well, in her case.

  But was he likely to be hoodwinked much longer? Suddenly Constance Lindfield remembered that he had received a letter by that morning’s post. She had not seen the address on it; but she recalled now that from a distance it looked very much like the one in her hand. The yellowish cheap envelope, slightly crumpled, might have been the twin of her own. That anonymous writer, bursting with malice as he obviously was, would hardly have attacked her and left Philip Castleford untouched.

  But Philip Castleford’s troubles were no concern of hers, just then. She had her own affairs to brood over. Dickie she meant to have for herself. She was not shocked by the situation which the anonymous letter had unveiled; it took a good deal to shock Miss Lindfield. But her cool mind perceived quite clearly the main factors in the affair. The strength of Winnie’s position lay in the Glencaple money. That made her entirely independent of all the rest of them. At the worst, she could well afford to let Castleford divorce her and then—well Dickie was not the sort of person who would refuse to marry for money if he got the chance. Constance Lindfield had no illusions about that side of his character. And if things did not get to that pitch, the money would enable Winnie to keep her present husband under her thumb up to a point, perhaps. Up to a point? Yes, but what point? Just how much would Castleford stand?

  Her ear caught the faint sound of voices. Evidently Castleford and his daughter were coming out of the study and going upstairs to bed. Miss Lindfield’s mind went back to an earlier matter. She picked up the box of pistols and ammunition, switched out the lights, and went out into the hall in time to intercept Castleford.

  “Oh, wait a moment,” she began, as she came up to the two in the hall. “Frankie’s unearthed these things, Phil. Do you think they’re safe?”

  She put down the box on the hall-table, picked out the two pistols, and passed them to Castleford.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Castleford said, as he examined them.

  He could not make out, from Constance’s tone, exactly what her position in the matter was; and he preferred to be non-committal until she showed her hand.

  Hilary took one of the weapons from her father and looked at it curiously.

  “I hope he won’t get his hands on these things,” she said, briefly. “A rook-rifle’s dangerous enough.”

  Quite obviously she was not yet ready to forgive Miss Lindfield in the matter of the golf-match.

  Miss Lindfield took the weapon out of Castleford’s hands.

  “I think you’re right,” she admitted pleasantly. “At least, so far as these pistols go. The bother is, I don’t know where to put them, so that he won’t find them. Would you mind if I hid them in the study—in that cupboard where you keep some of your things? He’s not likely to look for them there.”

  Castleford nodded assent, though with signs of doubt.

  “That cupboard has no key,” he pointed out.

  “That doesn’t matter. He’s not likely to look into it,” Miss Lindfield assured him, with a smile. “Hillie, would you mind putting them in there, now? I want to get to bed.”

  She handed the pistols to Hilary, wished them goodnight, and went up the stair, leaving them in the hall. Philip Castleford was ruffled by the incident. It was like that woman to use Hilary to save herself trouble; and it was just that attitude which he hated. It seemed to put his daughter into the position of an underling who had to fetch and carry for everyone in the house.

  “Put them in the box with the ammunition, Hilary,” he said. “I’ll stow them in the cupboard myself. Off you go to bed, dear. It’s later than I thought it was.”

  Hilary kissed him goodnight with more than her usual affection. He watched her go up the stairs; then, with the box in his hand, he made his way back to his study. The envenomed phrases of that anonymous letter recurred to his mind and he put his hand into his pocket in search of it; but he had left it in the pocket of his other jacket when he changed for dinner. He hardly needed it. Those malignant sentences were burned into his memory. Hilary thought she had heard the worst of the story; but this was far beyond anything that had gone before.

  He opened the cupboard, picked up the box of weapons, and stood looking at them absentmindedly for a few moments before he put them away. If it were France, now, with the unwritten law in force . . .

  A faint sound made him turn hastily. Miss Lindfield had come downstairs again and now stood confronting him with an expression which puzzled him.

  “I didn’t want to speak in front of Hillie,” she said, hurriedly. “I think you ought to know, though. You won’t tell anyone I said anything? Very well. Winnie’s cancelled her will. She’s going to make a fresh one, cutting you out.”

  “Cutting me out?” Castleford echoed, dully, as if he had not quite understood.

  The blow, though he had long expected it, stunned him. Hilary would get nothing. These years of petty martyrdom were to go unpaid-for. And, as a final thrust, he learned it from this woman who, he well knew, hated him and his daughter. Winnie hadn’t even had the decency to tell him outright herself.

  “I’m sorry,” Miss Lindfield said, though her tone showed plainly enough that the phrase was merely formal.

  “She hasn’t actually made this new will yet?” Castleford asked, as though to fill an awkward pause with a commonplace query.

  “Not yet.”

  “H’m! Well, I can do nothing, obviously.”

  “No, I suppose you can’t.”

  Somehow Miss Lindfield’s voice suggested that something might be done, even at that stage. But Castleford had a shrewd suspicion that her motive was a mere desire to see him wince.

  “Thanks for letting me know,” he said, in as formal a tone as he could command. “She’s written to Wadhurst about it, has she?”

  “Yes.” Miss Lindfield added a nod of confirmation. “She wrote to Wadhurst saying she’d changed her mind; and she asked for the will they had, because she wanted to destroy it. She told them she’d send them fresh instructions, by-and-by, so that they could draw up a new will in proper form. She hadn’t quite decided, then, what she was going to do.”

  “I suppose she’s destroyed it. Not that it matters much, now.”

  Miss Lindfield’s gesture disclaimed any knowledge.

  “It was in the drawer of the escritoire when I saw it last,” she volunteered. “It should be there now, if she hasn’t burned it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Castleford said heavily. “Goodnight.”

  Miss Lindfield showed no surprise at this cavalier dismissal. She wished him goodnight in her turn and left the room. She had shot her bolt and saw no reason for lingering.

  Castleford, as the door closed behind her, seated himself in his armchair and turned the affair over in his mind. The will—the actual document—was of no importance now. Wadhurst would testify that she had revoked it, even if she had not fulfilled all the legal niceties. And, in a day or two, she would give fresh instructions on the lines laid down for her by the Glencaples. He and Hilary were out of it.

  He found he could not occupy his mind with the will. His thoughts went back to the anonymous letter, and at the remembrance of one phrase in it, he flushed and something seemed to swell in his throat till he could hardly draw breath. In his mind’s eye he saw a picture of his wife, asleep upstairs, quite indifferent to the shame and disaster which she spread around her, untroubled by the faintest compunction for her doings. Fresh from Dick Stevenage, she had come in all ca
relessness to give her husband the final stroke in the matter of her will. Common decency might have saved her from that, he reflected, bitterly.

  Castleford leaned back in his chair and indulged himself in the weak man’s luxury of imaginary revenge. Suppose he loaded one of these pistols now and went up to her room? How would she look, and what would she say, when he showed her that anonymous letter? A faint sadistic smile twisted his lips as he pictured the scene to himself. That would make her pay something in exchange for what she had made him suffer. He could see her startled eyes and terrified face when she woke up to find him beside her, weapon in hand. It would almost be worth it!

  Then, a fresh thought shot through his mind. If his wife died now, she was intestate. Where would her money go?

  To satisfy a somewhat morbid curiosity, he got up and walked across to where an Encyclopaedia stood on the bookshelves. Intestacy. Inheritance. He consulted the articles, listlessly at first, then with a keener interest. So far as he could make out, if Winnie died before she had time to make a fresh will, he himself would be the person to inherit all her property. The Glencaples would be out of it completely. If anything happened to her, all his difficulties would be solved.

  His mind began to range over the possibilities. A gun-accident, for instance: these things happened often enough, to judge by the newspapers. Some fool or other seemed to crop up who “didn’t know it was loaded.” That little brute Frankie, for instance, might easily shoot somebody—why not Winnie? Or she might come by a motor-accident; there were plenty of them, nowadays. Or there might be a mishap on the links; people had been killed by golf-balls hitting them on the head, though that rarely happened. Or, again, there might be a bungle with the hypodermic syringe, the kind of thing he’d read about somewhere . . . in Dorothy Sayers’s Unnatural Death, that was it, of course. And who could swear that she hadn’t tried to give herself an insulin injection and made a fatal botch of the business?

  He became gruesomely entranced in following up some of these suggestions. The more he thought over them, the more they fascinated him. He pulled his pipe from his pocket, filled it, and settled down to think. Suppose one tried to “contrive an accident,” how would one set about it? A gun-accident, for instance. Would it be better to have witnesses and chance deceiving them, or no witnesses and an unmistakable “accident,” or a complete alibi?

  He grew more and more engrossed in these problems, and time passed unnoticed as he smoked pipe after pipe. It was like a cricket-match, with questions for the bowling, the criminal batting, and the police organisation in place of the field, alert to pounce on any careless answer. The first ball would be the announcement of the discovery of the death. How should a murderer take that? Should he be cool, or should he pretend to lose his nerve, or should he be apparently deeply affected by the news? A slip there might lead suspicion straight upon him. And if he becomes obviously suspect, what should his pose be? Indignation? Refusal to take the thing seriously? An attitude of frank admission that the facts might be construed in that manner?

  At last, in the early hours of the morning, he knocked out his pipe and got to his feet. As he switched out the lights he made a movement towards the room containing the house safe. His bearer bonds were stored in the safe, and he had decided to leave them no longer mixed up with his wife’s property. If anything happened, it would be better that no mistakes could arise. He felt too sleepy to trouble about the matter, just then, however. After all, he could get the bonds any time he wanted them. And, as he reminded himself with a grim smile, if she died before changing her will, he would get the lot, so that no dispute could arise about the ownership of the scrip. Any time within the next day or two would be soon enough. He yawned sleepily and went up to his room.

  Chapter Five

  The Tragedy at the Chalet

  Mrs. Haddon glanced from the paper jam-pot cover in her hand to the splintered pane of her cottage window and reflected once again that life was a worrying business. When Jack came home in the evening, he’d see that broken pane, and most likely he’d be angry about it. If he was in one of his bad moods, he might take it into his head to go up to Carron Hill and make a row; and if he did that, then she would probably lose her little job as caretaker to the Chalet.

  Jack had been a changed man when he came back from the West Front, she ruminated dejectedly. He’d got among a bad set in the Army and picked up all sorts of notions about Bolshevism and the class-war. Nowadays he spent most of his time in grousing against anyone better off than himself, sneering at the local bigwigs in the taproom of the Pheasant Inn until the landlord—a staunch Conservative—grew restive. He was getting himself disliked by everybody; and steady work was hard enough to find, nowadays, without setting employers against you with that sort of talk.

  She licked the gum of the jam-pot cover thoroughly, and then pasted the disc neatly over the starred glass. Next time Jack spotted a winner, they could get a new pane put in. The sooner the better, she reflected, as she inspected the ugly repair. She had still some pride left; and she felt that this makeshift advertised their poverty to anyone who passed the cottage. Wondering how it looked from the outside, she went to the door to examine it.

  The cottage looked northward over some rolling pasture-land dotted with feeding sheep. Farther in the distance, the grounds of Carron Hill began, but they were hidden by the nearer undulations of grassland. Immediately behind the cottage rose a belt of plantation netted with intricate foot-paths threading its undergrowth; and on the south face of this strip of woodland the Chalet had been built. Beyond that again, at some distance, ran the nearest road fit for wheeled traffic. Mrs. Haddon had no neighbours; and the only passers-by, in the ordinary course, were lovers seeking the seclusion of the plantation glades. Mrs. Haddon used to watch them pass her gate in the summer evenings with feelings which were half-envious and half-pitying. Sometimes one of them would ask for a drink from the well in the garden and give her a chance of talking for a minute or two. Apart from that, she had to depend for conversation on Jack and the people she met when she went out with her basket to buy supplies from time to time.

  As she inspected the patch on her window, the tail of her eye caught a spruce figure in a brown golfing-skirt emerging from one of the paths which led into the labyrinth of the plantation; and, turning to face it, she recognised Miss Lindfield. Probably on her way home from the Chalet, Mrs. Haddon guessed, since there was a short cut to Carron Hill across the pastures. A thought crossed her mind, and she hurried down the little nasturtium-bordered path to the gate. If she could get the damaged window paid for now, it would lessen the risk of Jack making trouble when he came to hear of it.

  She was glad that it was Miss Lindfield who had chanced to pass and not Mrs. Castleford. Mrs. Castleford either ignored her completely or else found fault with her over the cleaning of the Chalet; but Miss Lindfield was more approachable and would sometimes do her a favour in an offhand sort of way. By Mrs. Haddon’s humble standard, Miss Lindfield was “a real lady” who knew her own place and your proper place, too; whereas Mrs. Castleford “thought a bit too much of herself and treated you as if you were just dirt.” Besides, if the cottage needed a bit of repairs done, Miss Lindfield was the one to go to. You couldn’t impose on her; but she’d listen to you; and if she said she’d mention the matter to Mrs. Castleford, then you knew the thing was as good as done. If you went to Mrs. Castleford direct, nothing ever came of it. She forgot all about the business at once, and got cross if you ventured to remind her.

  Miss Lindfield had seen Mrs. Haddon’s dash to the gate. She turned away from the short cut and came towards the cottage, an alert brown figure, bare-headed, and carrying a light cardigan over one arm.

  “Good afternoon, miss,” began Mrs. Haddon, who was a stickler for the minor ceremonies of social intercourse.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Haddon.”

  Mrs. Haddon was not quite sure, from the tone, whether she had caught Miss Lindfield in one of her best moods. Howe
ver, it was too late to draw back now.

  “I just wanted to show you this, miss,” she explained, retreating up the path towards the cottage. “If you’ll be so good as to step this way for a moment, miss, you’ll see it for yourself.”

  Miss Lindfield, brought up to the window, showed no desire to be helpful. She merely waited in silence for enlightenment.

  “It was Master Frankie did that, miss,” Mrs. Haddon explained hopefully. “He’s shooting with that new gun of his over in the wood and I think one of his shots must have got through the trees somehow.”

  She pointed to where the plantation pushed out a narrow belt of trees to the west of the cottage.

  “Anyhow, it was one of his shots did it, miss, for I’ve found the bullet in the room. Very dangerous, really, miss. It might have hit me when it came through the window. I don’t really think he ought to be shooting off his gun so near here, without taking more care, miss. It might have put my eye out quite easily if it had hit me there. It makes me a bit nervous, miss, for . . . there! he’s at it still, you hear?”

  Miss Lindfield heard the snap of the report.

  “I didn’t pay much attention at first,” Mrs. Haddon went on. “I never thought a shot would get this length, miss. And then he was quiet for a while and I thought he’d gone away. Then it began again, miss, and the first thing I knew was the window going smash and something hitting the wall at the back of the room. It gave me such a start, miss.”

  “So I can well understand,” said Miss Lindfield with a touch of unwonted grimness in her tone. “You see, you’re not the only sufferer.”

  She spread out part of her cardigan, and Mrs. Haddon perceived a small hole in the fabric.

  “What! Did he hit you, miss?” Mrs. Haddon demanded in a horrified tone.

  Miss Lindfield shook her head.

  “No, I was carrying it over my arm, as you saw. But a shot went through it, as I was coming along.”