Was It Murder Read Online

Ellington with a man whom he did not recognise.  She greeted him with a pleasant if rather wistful smile and hastened to introduce him to the stranger.  The latter, apparently, was none other than Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne, who had come to Oakington to attend to matters connected with his brother’s death.  Mrs. Ellington, after a few moments, left the two men together; she seemed glad enough to do so, and Revell could easily understand her motive.  The raking over of recent events must have been peculiarly distressing to her.

Geoffrey Lambourne, on further examination, appeared as a short, rather stout man, round-faced and spectacled, not much like his brother and seemingly many years his senior.  Revell was interested in his mere identity, and could feel considerable sympathy with him.  They took a stroll, at Revell’s suggestion, round the Ring, and Lambourne, in a delicate, rather over-sensitive voice, told Revell that he was the representative of an English firm in Vienna and had come to England especially to wind up his brother’s affairs, interview his solicitors, and so on.  “It’s all been a little curious, his death, don’t you think?” he said.  The faintly quizzical understatement, spoken in such a quiet tone under that blazing sky, made Revell suddenly shiver.

“Very curious,” he answered, guardedly.  “But then, I think your brother was in many ways a very curious man.”

“May I ask if you knew him well, Mr. Revell?”

“Oh, not very well.  But we liked each other’s company, I think.”

Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne nodded.  “He liked yours, at any rate.

Several of his letters to me contained mentions of you.”

“Really?  I had no idea he would ever think me worth writing about.  I certainly liked him—he had a wry sense of humour that rather appealed to me.”  (Certainly, Revell reflected, he HAD had a wry sense of humour.)  “I suppose you were very much attached to him?”

“I was.”  The simplicity of the admission held its own pathetic dignity.  “We were the sole survivors of our family—both bachelors too, and likely to remain so.”  He blinked gently as he entered a patch of open sunlight.  “Max was the only human being in the world I had to care about, and I—or so I had imagined—occupied a similar place in his affections.”

Revell was quick to notice the pluperfect tense of this last remark.  “So you HAD imagined?” he echoed.

The other nodded.  “Yes, exactly.  But I had better tell you, if you are interested, just what happened when I arrived in England.”

“Yes, please do.”

“I had been wired for, you understand, by the solicitor who acts for us both.  I was not in time for the inquest, but I was able in Paris to buy English newspapers that reported it.  I am glad, by the way, that the jury returned an open verdict, for I am perfectly certain that my brother was not the sort to take his life deliberately.  The veronal habit was a surprise to me, but I can hardly blame him, poor fellow—he was, as your Headmaster said, a most tragic victim of the War.  But I must tell you what happened at my visit to the solicitor.  I had naturally expected that my brother’s possessions, small though they might be both in quantity and value, would pass to me—in fact, we had both made wills in each other’s favour some dozen years ago.  Judge of my surprise when the solicitor informed me that my brother, greatly against his persuasions, had made a later will, dated only last year, leaving everything he had to a complete stranger.”

“Indeed?”

The other coughed deprecatingly.  “Please do not suppose that the bequest itself troubles me.  I am not badly off, and in any case, my brother left nothing but his books, a few pounds in the bank, and his term’s salary payable up to the date of his death.  What does—or perhaps I had better say, DID—perturb me a little was the discovery that he knew anyone whom he cared for sufficiently to put me in, so to speak, a second place.  Or rather,” he added, with a slight smile, “no place at all.  In this second will of his, I was not even so much as mentioned.”

Revell was itching to learn the name of this mysterious beneficiary, but he felt that Geoffrey Lambourne was the kind of man who told his tale better when left alone.  He therefore contented himself with a sympathetic murmur.

“Yes,” continued Lambourne, “I was a little hurt at first, I confess.  And when I further learned that it was a woman, I was perhaps even annoyed.”

“A woman?”

“Yes.  The woman who introduced us just now.  Mrs. Ellington.”

“Good Lord, you don’t say so?”

“You are surprised, Mr. Revell?”

“Well, yes, I must admit I am.  Though really not so much, perhaps, on second thoughts.  At least, I can think of a reason for it.”

“So can I—a very obvious one.”

“You mean that your brother was in love with her?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me, having seen her.”

Revell smiled.  “Yes, she’s an exceedingly attractive woman, I admit.  Your brother certainly admired her, but I don’t imagine there was ever anything like a real affair between them.  Mrs.  Ellington sympathised with him a great deal—they had many tastes in common—far more, no doubt, than she had with her husband, who isn’t the most suitable man for her to have married.  Whenever your brother struck his bad patches she was able to help him in many ways—she had been a nurse, you know.  I really think that’s all it came to.”

“You like her, then?”

“Yes, I do.  Very much.”

“Thank you, Mr. Revell.  You have told me just what I wanted to know.  Mrs. Ellington, whom I liked, I must say, as soon as I met her, was far too modest to explain things as you have done.  I can see now exactly why my brother made his will as he did, and I’m no longer troubled about it in the least.  Mrs. Ellington I certainly don’t blame at all—she says that the bequest came as a complete surprise to her, which I can well believe.  Perhaps as an embarrassment as well, for by the look of him, Mr. Ellington is not a man to deduce a good motive when one not so good is equally handy.  I note, by the way, that YOU don’t care for him, either?”

“We’re rather different types, I’m afraid.”

They had completed the first round of the Ring, and it was Lambourne this time who suggested a second circuit.  Revell agreed, offering the other a cigarette.  “It’s very decent of you to tell me all this,” he said, lighting one for himself.  “I haven’t been here long enough to have become really intimate with your brother, but perhaps I knew him as well as any of the others did.”

“Better, I am sure.  You knew, of course, about his War experiences?”

“You mean about his—er—his court-martial and all that?”

Lambourne, however, showed by a sudden clouding over his normally benignant countenance that he had not meant any such thing.  When he replied there was even a mild ring of indignation in his tones.  “Good heavens, Mr. Revell, am I to understand that the story of his one single lapse followed him here?  I am sorry to hear it—I had no idea of it all.  I still do not believe that he committed suicide, but if ever there could have been a reason for his doing so, it would have been the raking up of that sad affair.”

“It didn’t follow him here,” Revell answered, with a feeling of having badly put his foot in it.  “So far as I know, not a soul at Oakington knew about it except me.  I’ll be frank with you and tell you how I got to know.  You’ve heard, of course, of the two boys whose deaths here during the past year have caused such a sensation in the papers?”  The other nodded.  “Well, a detective from Scotland Yard was here recently looking up all our pasts and so on.  He took me into his confidence a bit and told me of the affair.”

“He had no business to,” was the quick response.  “It was a thing that ought to have been forgotten long ago.  And in any case, after all these years, I don’t feel that the slightest real disgrace attaches to my brother.  He was, behind that attitude of cynicism that so many people misunderstood, one of the bravest and sincerest men who ever lived.  He was among the first to enlist when the War broke out, and for two years he waged a constant battle, not so much against the Germans, as against a far more terrible foe—his own nerves.  You may think this is high-flown language—but I assure you I’m only telling the simple truth.  My brother fought a long and terrible battle, till at last his nerve gave way.  He was court-martialled.  He would doubtless have been shot but for the pleading of an officer who understood him a little.  And afterwards he went back to the trenches and never gave way again till a particularly bad head-smash caused him to be sent home.  In all, he fought for nearly three years, was wounded four times, and also badly gassed.  I defy anyone to call that the record of a coward!”

And Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne looked, for the moment, as if he really were capable of defiance.

“I should say not!” Revell answered.  “I think it’s one of the pluckiest records I ever heard of.”

The other warmed to his sympathy.  “I knew you would think so.  My brother wrote to me that he felt you as a kindred spirit.  The trouble with him was always that he was too imaginative, too sensitive to things that other people hardly felt at all.  He often worried over other people’s troubles far more than they did themselves.  They never knew it, of course.  He hid everything behind that mask of cynicism.  But Mrs. Ellington saw beneath it, apparently.  Perhaps you did, also.  Was he comfortable here—in his work, I mean?”

“I think so.  Oh yes, I’m pretty sure he was.”  For a moment Revell had a wild idea that he would tell Geoffrey Lambourne the whole amazing story of his confession.  Nothing but vague caution prevented him; it would be safer, he felt, on second thoughts, to let the whole unpleasant business remain as it was.  There was no knowing what Geoffrey would do if he were told, and whatever he might choose to do could hardly lead to anything but further trouble.

Lambourne, still with quietly smouldering indignation, was continuing.  “You know I rather wonder if this other business—the deaths of the two boys—was worrying him at all.  I see one of the jurymen at the inquest suggested it, too.  It was just the sort of thing that WOULD have worried Max.  Since the War he had always been deeply interested in crime—often, in fact, I’ve told him frankly that he was getting morbid about it.  He once told me that there wasn’t a crime I could think of in which he couldn’t to some extent sympathise with the criminal.  I remember inventing the most horrible and ruffianly affair, more out of amusement than anything else, but when I had finished he replied quite seriously:  ‘Yes, I can quite conceive circumstances in which a good man might be driven to do a thing like that.’  Over-imaginativeness again, of course.”

Revell was finding all this extraordinarily interesting.

“Yes, he even told ME once, apropos of some murder case, that after being in the War he could never manage to be very indignant over a little private and unofficial slaughter.”

Lambourne nodded.  “That was just the sort of thing he WOULD say.  But really, of course, it was a grotesque perversion of the real state of affairs.  My brother was deeply indignant over murder; but he felt that the State, after organising murder on a wholesale scale for four years, had no right to be.  And he hated what he called the legal torture of criminals.  He not only hated it—it upset him whenever he thought about it, which was very often.  I recollect at the time of the Thompson-Bywaters case, he was positively ill through worrying over it.  I was with him on the night before Mrs. Thompson was executed—we were sharing a room at a hotel—he couldn’t sleep a wink, and was in such a state of collapse by the morning that I had to send for a doctor.  ‘If I could save that woman with my own life, I would,’ he told me, and I quite believed him.  Whenever he conceived a sympathy for anyone, even though he might never let them know it, he was ready to sacrifice himself in almost incredible ways.  And it was the irony of ironies that most people thought him sarcastic and unfriendly and perhaps even callous!”

They had reached the end of the second circuit and were now once again within sight of the entrance of Ellington’s house.  Mrs.  Ellington, as it chanced, came cycling along the drive towards them, and as she approached she dismounted and smiled at Revell.  “I hope you’ve been giving me a good character,” she began.  “Mr.  Lambourne came here hating me pretty badly, so I hope you haven’t let me down.”

Geoffrey Lambourne made haste to reply.  “Not at all, not at all.  On the contrary, Mr. Revell has told me how you have on so many occasions helped my brother.  I am deeply grateful to you, and I think he did quite right to put you before me in his thought and feelings, I, after all, was a thousand miles away, but you were on the spot.”

“Oh no,” she answered, embarrassedly.  “I did very little.  I really don’t deserve all your praise.  But I’m glad you don’t hate me now, anyway.”

She smiled again and left them, whereupon Lambourne turned once more to Revell.  “A charming woman,” he remarked, when she was well out of earshot.  “I can guess how my brother felt towards her—it wasn’t his way to feel things by halves.  And there had never been any woman in his life before.”  The School bell began to clang, and he hurriedly consulted his watch.  “Good heavens, we’ve been talking for nearly an hour—I mustn’t keep you any longer.  I have to return to London this evening—this is really a very hurried visit.  But perhaps we may meet again some day.  Good-bye.”

When Revell sank into an easy-chair in the Head’s deserted drawing-room, his mind began at first to function with curious slowness, as if it were recovering after the numbness of a blow.

Geoffrey Lambourne’s story only, of course, added to the already long enough list of things that people had SAID.  Yet, on reflecting carefully, Revell was amazed to find how strangely it fitted in.  Guthrie’s character study of Max Lambourne had been based on only half a story; Geoffrey Lambourne had now supplied the other half, which would have made the character study entirely different.  Guthrie, for example, had mentioned the court-martial episode, but it was Geoffrey Lambourne who, by explaining it, had made it appear in a totally different light.  Nothing that Geoffrey had said really contradicted Guthrie’s evidence, yet somehow, after hearing Geoffrey, Guthrie’s whole idea of Max Lambourne seemed fundamentally absurd.

The confession was, of course, the snag.  After all, if a man behaved suspiciously, as Lambourne had done, and if afterwards he confessed to the crime of which he had been suspected, there was usually no reason to disbelieve him.  Guthrie, by accepting Lambourne’s confession as bona fide, had only acted as most reasonable persons would have done.  That suspicion should wrongly point to a man, and that his confession, when made, should be false, was really too much to credit.

And yet . . . and yet . . . could it be that . . . ?  Once again Revell found himself theorising wildly without evidence.  It was no use trying not to; he could not help it.  And the mainspring of his theorising was nothing less than a conviction, strong enough to be proof against all logic, that Max Lambourne had not and could not have committed the murders at all.

Then why on earth had he confessed to them?  And suddenly, like a bubble born and swelling on the surface of troubled water, a theory vividly complete darted across Revell’s mental vision.  Supposing Lambourne had confessed to save someone else . . . ?

Even as the idea came to him, the cautious and critical second self that watched over his actions bade him pause and think where he was going.  How scornfully, in his more normal mood of cynicism, would he have rejected such a motive!  How he would have laughed at it if he had met with it in a play or a novel!  Fantastic self-sacrifice had never appealed to him even ethically, and he had always regarded Sidney Carton’s last moments as those of a bore who must also have been a bit of a prig.  Yet now, in perfect seriousness, he was casting Max Lambourne for the same unlikely role!  Was it possible?

Ten minutes of profound thinking convinced him that it was.  The theory gained on him; he saw details rising up at every step, like fragments of a new scene when one approaches it on a misty day.  The murders, he argued, had been committed by someone else.  Lambourne, with a shrewdness quite in consonance with his abilities and with his study of crime, had guessed from the beginning the identity of the culprit.  His story about laying the false clue of the cricket-bat was true; in his own queer, tortuous way he had done his best to unmask the murderer.  Later, however, he had got into a mess; he had imagined that Guthrie suspected him (and perhaps the detective did), and he had been greatly upset by the severity of Guthrie’s cross-examination.  Even though he might have known that Guthrie could prove nothing, he would have worried desperately over the matter; in fact, as Geoffrey Lambourne had said, it was just the sort of thing he could not endure.

Then suddenly (so Revell’s theory continued), he had realised how the whole terrible business might react on Mrs. Ellington.  The detective, in course of time, might subject HER to the same savage questioning.  Even if he did eventually arrive at the right conclusion and arrest Ellington, there could be nothing but unhappiness in store for Mrs. Ellington.  For though she might not care for her husband a great deal, to see him tried and convicted for murder would be a frightful ordeal.  And an ordeal, too, from which he (Lambourne) would save her if he could.  Most likely he had not reached his final decision until that last evening when she had visited him.  Her kindness then, her solicitude for his health, and his own deep love for her, might all have combined to give him a vision of that simple, ultimate sacrifice which would ensure her peace of mind.  After all, what did it matter?  He had no family to disgrace; his health was bad; he would probably not live long in any case.  He had no future to which he or any other human being could look forward hopefully; he was doomed, in some sense, as much as any convicted criminal.  Why not, indeed, cut the Gordian knot that entangled his own miserable affairs, and those of Oakington itself?  If he had said of Mrs.