Was It Murder Read Online

Ellington got into her second panic.  (Her first, you remember, was when you first arrived at Roseveare’s summons.)

“I had questioned Lambourne pretty stiffly, and had got out of him the story of what he really did on the night of the murder.  I don’t know that I actually disbelieved him, but he evidently thought I did, and was sufficiently upset by it all.  What happened after that was in a way superbly logical.  He had one of his periodic nerve attacks, Mrs. Ellington ministered to him as on former occasions, and the next day he was found dead of an overdose of veronal.  Whereupon Mrs. Ellington volunteered the information that on the previous evening he had made a full confession of murder to her, and had promised to make the same over again to me in the morning.  All perfectly feasible and not really improbable, when you come to think about it.  Her story and her way of telling it were both admirably convincing.  It wasn’t legal evidence, of course, but it was moral evidence of a rather unshakable character.  There was really nothing for me to do after listening to it but to shrug my shoulders and shake the dust of Oakington from my feet for ever.  Which I did.  Or rather, to be more accurate, appeared to do.”

Revell leaned forward excitedly.  “You mean that you didn’t believe her?” he exclaimed.

“Believe her?  Not only did I not believe her, but by the time she had got to the end of her yarn I knew for certain that she had murdered the boy herself.”

“Good God!”

“Yes, I was certain of it.  And it was a single word that told me— a single word of two letters and one syllable—a word that we all use perhaps a hundred times a day.  I don’t suppose you’ll remember it—the really significant things in life are often the least memorable.  It was when she was describing how Lambourne had confessed.  She did it all so perfectly—except for just that one word.  She told how Lambourne and the boy had walked along by the side of the bath as far as the diving-platform, how Lambourne had waited till the boy was standing on the edge facing the empty bath with the platform just above him, and how Lambourne then had sprung back and shot up at the boy from behind.  Revell, when I heard her say that, I had to use all the self-control I possess—for it told me, as clearly as a vision from Heaven, that the woman had done it!”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow the argument.”

“No?  I’m not surprised—it was a thing I might easily have missed myself if I hadn’t been lucky.  Repeated at second-hand, as I did it just now, I don’t suppose it did exactly leap out at you.  But I assure you, Revell, it was convincing enough to me.  The little word ‘up’ was the one morsel of truth that the woman couldn’t help letting escape.”

“The word ‘up’?  How?  I don’t remember—“

“Not even now?  I’ll say it again then.  In recounting Lambourne’s confession, she told us that he had ‘shot up at the boy from behind’.  Now d’you get it?  Why on earth should she have used that word ‘up’?  Lambourne’s rather a tall fellow—he wouldn’t have needed to shoot up at all, for the boy was only of medium height.  But Mrs. Ellington herself was exceptionally little—hardly five feet, I should say—and for her it would have had to be a distinctly upward shot.  Unconsciously, while describing Lambourne’s supposed movements, she had had her own in mind, and that one little word, to anyone who noticed it, was as eloquent as a signed confession.”

He paused and then went on:  “Of course you can laugh if you like and say that it was a preposterously vast conclusion to draw from a preposterously minute premise.  I quite agree, and I was fully aware of it at the time.  No one knew better than I did that it wouldn’t stand for a minute before a judge and jury.  To begin with, there was no one to swear that she had said it—and there were a hundred other ways in which a clever counsel could have ridiculed it to pieces.  I simply had to pack up and go, although I was perfectly sure that she had committed murder and had managed to palm it off on a poor devil of a suicide.

“And even that wasn’t quite so hellish as the real truth, as it happened.  Here, again, I depend on nothing but her own statement, but she told this part of it so proudly that it may well be true.  It’s frightful enough, in all conscience, for, according to her, Lambourne’s death was neither suicide nor accident, but murder.  And it was she who murdered him!”

Revell stared speechlessly.

“Yes.  And the way she managed it was perhaps the most astonishing part of the whole business.  She’d got into a panic, you see, with all the inquiries being made, and she had the idea that if someone only confessed everything would be all over.  So, knowing that Lambourne was hopelessly in love with her, she went to him and told him nothing less than the whole truth.  Yes, it wasn’t HE who confessed to HER, but SHE who confessed to HIM.  And at the end of it all, working upon his hysteria, she suggested a suicide-pact between them—that they should both make their exit together from a horrible world.  She played on Lambourne’s shattered nerves like a virtuoso, and in the end, no doubt by making love to him pretty daringly, she had her way.  Roseveare, as it happened, came along just then—just a sudden idea to see if Lambourne was asleep, that was all—he listened a few minutes outside the door, heard a bit of the love-making, and walked away in disgust.  I gather he had suspected Mrs. Ellington of that sort of thing before.”

“Did he tell you all this?”

“Yes—explained it fully after the inquest on Lambourne.  His one idea, of course, was and had been all along to avoid any more scandal to the School.”

“Yet he lied to you about that second visit of his to Lambourne’s room.”

“No, he didn’t.  It was the fault of my too-precise question.  I asked him when he last saw Lambourne, and he answered—quite truthfully—nine o’clock.  He didn’t see him after that, though he heard him talking.”

“It was pretty cool of him, though, to say nothing about it at the inquest.”

“No doubt.  But, as he told me, he couldn’t see how the purely private scandal of an affair between Lambourne and Mrs. Ellington could affect the matter.  Anyhow, as he frankly admitted, it was his aim to let the inquest go as smoothly as possible.”

Revell nodded.  “He’s a cool customer, though.  The curious thing is that two boys happened to see him as he paid that second visit to Lambourne’s room—they were playing chess in the Common Room.  They told me about it, and I naturally wondered what on earth the Head had been up to. . . .  But please go on—don’t let me interrupt the exposition.”

“There’s not a very great deal to go on to, now.  Of course Mrs.  Ellington didn’t keep her share of the compact.  Lambourne took his overdose, but she only pretended to take hers, and the result we all know.  But I do hold that it was a rather magnificent improvisation on a theme suggested by mere panic.”

“She was a marvellous woman,” said Revell slowly.

“In many ways, yes.  But for that one tiny slip I might never have suspected her.  Even then, if she had kept her head, I could have proved nothing.  She had me on toast, if she had only known.  She had YOU, too, but in a rather different way, and that’s why I didn’t make much of a confidant of you in the matter.  In fact, I was very glad for you to think that I’d really been taken in by it all.”

“Oh, you were, were you?”

But Guthrie did not immediately reply to the rather disgruntled remark.  He stared for some moments at his fingernails and then resumed:  “Time’s getting on, Revell—I arranged to meet a friend here this afternoon.”  He put a steadying hand on Revell’s arm as the latter moved to get up.  “No, no—that wasn’t a hint for you to go—not at all.  As a matter of fact, I rather want you to meet my friend.  He should be here any minute now.”  He took out his watch, compared it with the clock on the far side of the room, and lit his pipe again.  “Yes,” he went on, reflectively, “that was a wonderful theory of yours about Lambourne confessing to save some other person.  The sort of thing, you know, that would never have occurred to a practical-minded fellow like myself.  But my friend’s different.  He’s more like you—a bit complicated in the attic.  Ah, here he comes, by Jove.”

Guthrie rose to his feet with a welcoming smile, and Revell, turning round, was astonished to see the benign, spectacled face of Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne.

CHAPTER XIV

ENTER THIRD (AND LAST) DETECTIVE

For a moment Revell was too bewildered to speak.  Then at last, taking the stranger’s proffered hand, he managed to gasp:  “Mr.  Lambourne?  But—but—I thought you’d gone back to Vienna?”

Guthrie placed a chair for the stranger to sit between them.  “Of course, you’ve met before, you two—I can see that,” he remarked, pleasantly.  “I think perhaps we’d better blow our little gaff and have done with it.  This isn’t really Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne at all—in fact, so far as I know, there isn’t any such person in the world.  It’s my friend and colleague Detective Cannell, of the Yard.”

Revell found this rather more bewildering than ever.  “But surely I met you at Oakington—“ he stammered, staring blankly across the table at the round and absurdly cheerful face of the mystery man.

The latter nodded.  “Quite right, Mr. Revell,” he said, in that same quiet, soothing voice that Revell had liked instinctively on the occasion of their first meeting.  “I WAS Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne for the time being, it is true.  I gather that you haven’t explained things yet, Guthrie?” he added, turning to his friend.

“Not altogether,” Guthrie answered.  “The first part took longer than I had expected.  I’m terribly hoarse, by the way—I wish you’d do the rest.”

“Very well.”  And the other turned to Revell with a smile.  “We owe you a considerable apology, Mr. Revell, but we hope you’ll forgive us when you’ve heard all the details.  You may wonder why we trouble to tell you about it now, but the truth is that we both dislike deceiving innocent people, and even when it has to be done we prefer, if possible, to undeceive them afterwards.  Yes, that’s so—we have a conscience, though you mightn’t think so.  You see we rather liked you, Mr. Revell, as well, and that made us regret having to make use of you in the way we did.  So now, if we can, we shall make amends.  You’ll drink another brandy with me, I’m sure?”

Revell hardly acquiesced, but the other took his silence for acceptance and gave the order.  Then he went on:  “Let’s see, now, Guthrie, how much does our young friend know?”

“I got as far as Lambourne’s supposed confession and my own supposed retirement from the case,” replied Guthrie.

“Ah, yes.  I’m afraid the plain truth, Mr. Revell, whether Guthrie told it to you or not, is that he was pretty badly stumped by this Oakington case.  Here was a woman whose husband inherited a large sum of money by the deaths of two boys.  The first boy was killed accidentally—therefore she thought to herself—what a fine idea if I kill the other boy and my old man gets hanged for the murder!  Nothing left then but the money, which will just suit me . . . that was her idea, wasn’t it?  But Guthrie, try as he would, couldn’t find a shadow of evidence against her.  So he came to me, in the end—and not for the first time, let me say.  He talked—oh, how he did talk!--all one evening and nearly all one night about the case— we both examined it from every possible angle—we theorised and wrangled and argued—and what did we discover at the end of it all?”  He paused dramatically.  Then, in scarcely more than a whisper, he answered:  “Nothing.”

The waiter came with the brandies, and the little interruption gave Cannell time to raise steam, as it were.  “Nothing at all, Mr.  Revell, I do assure you.  That blessed woman had committed the almost perfect crime.  There wasn’t a ha’porth of legal evidence against her.  That little word ‘up’ that Guthrie has probably told you about—how a counsel would have sneered at it!  ‘It is the sort of clue you read about in detective stories’, he would have said.  Or else he would have denied that she’d ever used the word.  Or else he would have called as witnesses the doctors who performed the autopsy and asked them if from their examination of the body they believed that the shot had been fired in an upward direction.  And of course, since the head was so injured that the course of the bullet was quite untraceable, they would have had to reply that there was no evidence of direction at all.

“We also knew just a little bit of scandal about the lady’s past, but it wouldn’t have helped us in a court of law.  No, the fact is, there was simply NOTHING against her that could be proved.  And, if you want the truth, there isn’t much now.  But for that signed statement of hers, I don’t know what we could be sure of getting her on—even an attempted murderous assault upon you would want some pretty hard proving.  It may interest you to know, by the way, that the weapon that nearly killed you belonged to her husband.  He had bought it quite recently in preparation for his life in Kenya.”

“And if you HAD been killed,” put in Guthrie, “it seems quite possible that Ellington might have been hanged for it.  There was method even in that woman’s madness.”

The other detective resumed:  “Ah yes—she had an extraordinary talent for improvisation.  If only her nerve had equalled it—if only she had sat tight—laughed at you, Mr. Revell—put out her tongue at you—shrugged her pretty little shoulders and told you, metaphorically, of course, to go to hell!  A man might have done it, if ever a man had had her type of genius to begin with.  But her nerve was only a woman’s.  We broke down that nerve—you, me, and Guthrie between us—and that’s about all we did do.”

Revell shook his head despairingly.  “I still don’t quite see how you come into this affair, Mr. Cannell.  What made you appear at Oakington as Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne?”

“Ah, quite right—that’s what I must explain to you.  You see, when Guthrie and I found ourselves completely at a deadlock in this case, we decided to use a little guile.  We knew there was no hope of a frontal attack, so we planned what the military tacticians call an enveloping movement.  And with your unconscious assistance we succeeded.”

“I still don’t quite follow.”

“You will in a moment.  The details of the plan were my own, but the conception—the broad outline—was agreed to by both Guthrie and myself.  Briefly, our idea was to stand by, unknown to the lady, and watch what happened in a particular set of circumstances.  To that end I composed the unique and original character of Geoffrey Lambourne, visited Oakington, saw our heroine, and found her particularly charming.  But it was you whom I wanted to see most of all.  I wanted to tell you all about my poor, imaginary brother.  I must say I was rather proud of the way I carried it through, especially afterwards, when I noted its effect upon you.”

“You mean that it was all a pack of lies that you told me?”

“By no means.  It was an impersonation founded to a large extent upon the truth.  Lambourne really had left a will in Mrs.  Ellington’s favour, and I’m pretty certain it was for the obvious reason.  In fact, though I never met the fellow, I wouldn’t mind betting that my own interpretation of him was a good deal more accurate than Guthrie’s.”

Guthrie interposed:  “Quite probably.  I never pretend to do that sort of thing.  Psychological jerry-building doesn’t appeal to me temperamentally, though I admit it has its uses.”

Cannell went on:  “You see, Mr. Revell, the chief reason for not believing Lambourne guilty was the obvious fact that he wasn’t at all the sort of man to do such a thing.  Not much of a reason for a chap like Guthrie, but you and I, perhaps, are human enough to let it weigh.  At any rate, by telling you the sort of man Lambourne was, I very successfully convinced you that he couldn’t have been the criminal, didn’t I?”

“You mean that you wanted me to reach that conclusion?”

“Oh, much more than that.  I wanted you to begin an entirely new attempt to solve the Oakington riddle on your own.  You did so.  And all the time I wanted you to become more and more friendly with the pretty lady.  You did that, too.  I wouldn’t have minded if you’d even begun to suspect her a little—in fact, part of my Geoffrey Lambourne impersonation was aimed to lead you gently in that direction.  But it didn’t work—and, anyhow, everything else went according to plan, so that one little point hardly mattered.  The great thing was that sooner or later she should get to know that you were investigating the case on your own, and that the whole thing wasn’t finished with, as she had supposed.  I guessed she’d play Delilah to your Samson, and a particularly fascinating Delilah, too.  Guthrie’s not so sure—her style of looks doesn’t appeal to him.  He and I, of course, were watching all the time.  We had our eye on her as she became more and more worried lest her earnest young lover should stumble accidentally on the truth.  Rather refined torture for her, when you come to think of it, but not more than she thoroughly deserved.  Night after night she knew that you were sitting up in your room, pondering over the problem to which she alone was the answer.  You saw her looking pale and worried, and you thought in your innocence that her husband was the cause of it.  But he wasn’t—it was you yourself.”

“Which was what you had intended?”

“Precisely.  We knew her weak spot, and when you know that about your enemy, the battle’s half won.  Her weak spot was FEAR.  Even when she was in an absolutely secure position, she couldn’t put away from her the terror of being discovered.  Twice, under the stress of this fear, she had given way to panic, and Guthrie and I were quite certain she would do it a third time.  We were watching and waiting for it, and in the end—though not in the way we had foreseen—it came.”

Revell gulped down what was left of his brandy.  “But I don’t like it,” he cried, thickly.  “I’m beginning to see your game, and I don’t like it a bit.  It seems to me like damned, dirty work.  Why couldn’t you have stayed on at Oakington and watched her openly?  If she was so terrified of me, surely she’d have been still more terrified of you?”

Cannell shook his head.  “Think—we were detectives,” he said quietly.  “We had absolutely no locus standi at Oakington except as servants of the law.  If we had stayed, we should have had to arrest somebody—we should have had to make out a case—and there WAS no case.  Don’t forget that.  How could two detectives foist themselves indefinitely on a public school merely to terrify someone against whom there wasn’t a shadow of legal evidence?  Impossible, my dear boy, and I’m sure you can see it was.  It was a clear case for private enterprise—for the gifted amateur—and particularly for the amateur who was an Old Boy of the School and whom the Headmaster could appoint as a temporary secretary without attracting undue attention.”

“Good heavens—you mean that Roseveare was in the game, too?”

“He helped us, yes.  It was necessary.”

Revell glared at his two companions with eyes that grew more angry with every second.  “I see,” he exclaimed, not too coherently, for he had drunk quite enough.  “I was a decoy, eh?  You couldn’t get any evidence yourself, so you used me to pull the irons out of the fire for you!”  His face was flushed; the drink he had taken gave his rage a certain dream-like quality of which he was curiously aware as he continued.  “I suppose, since you couldn’t prove the other murder, you rather hoped she’d murder me to give you a chance of proving that?”

Cannell shook his head sadly.  “My dear Revell, that is unjust to us.  We had no idea you were in personal danger—we had no idea that her third moment of panic would take the form it did.”

“It was your letter to me that sent things off with a bang,” interposed Guthrie.  “Fortunately I was keeping an eye on your room that night—I’d seen her in it with you a bit before the thing happened.  Then when I saw some vague person leaning out of the dormitory window towards yours I guessed something was wrong and I raced up as quick as I could.  You owe your life to that bit of spying, Revell.”

“And after all,” said Cannell, “you weren’t hurt—though it was

only by the greatest of good fortune, I know—“

A slow, dull pain was tearing through Revell’s head.  “Not hurt, eh?  NOT HURT?  To be fooled all the time—to—to have you two prying and spying—oh, damnation—it’s more than I can stand—I’m going—I’m going—“  He lurched up from his chair, spilling the remains of the coffee and upsetting the brandy glasses.  His head throbbed; there was a monstrous dark blur before his eyes; he had been a fool, he reflected, to have that second brandy.

The two detectives were helping him, one on either side.  There was a halt in the restaurant, where Guthrie paid the bill, even for the cocktail that Revell was supposed to have stood him, for Revell was far beyond remembrance of such a detail.  He was, in fact, barely sober enough to walk the dozen yards or so across the restaurant to the street-door.

Out on the pavement, while a uniformed porter went for a taxi, he heard Guthrie saying:  “By the way, Revell, this Oakington affair’s going to make the devil of a stir when it comes on at the Assizes, you know.  A Fleet Street friend of mine asked me this morning if I’d do a few articles about it after the trial, but of course I had to refuse—not professional, you know.  But I mentioned you— cracked you up no end—said you were absolutely in the thick of it and knew the dame from A to Z.  So I wouldn’t be surprised if you hear something pretty soon.  ‘Mrs. Ellington as I Knew Her’—that sort of thing, you know.  And if you take my advice, you won’t accept a penny under a hundred quid for the job—they’ll give it you if you stand out firm enough.”

And he heard Cannell saying:  “Don’t think too hardly of us.  We did the only thing that was to be done, and in the only way it could be done.  You helped us tremendously—it all, in the end, depended on you.”

He felt them shaking his hand and hoisting him into a taxi; he heard the door bang to; then, with a sideways lurch as the cab started, his head and face lolled on to the unpleasantly-tasting cushions.

He was in a drowsy coma when the cab pulled in at the Islington kerbside.  The driver left his perch, opened the door, and with cheerful good humour wakened him and helped him out.  “It’s all right, sir,” he said, as Revell began to fumble in his pockets.  “You don’t owe me nothin’.  The other gentlemen made that all right.  Shall I ring the bell, sir, or do you think you can manage? . . .  Very good, sir, thank you.  Mind the step. . . .”

Two minutes later Revell was safely sprawled in his favourite arm-chair.  Mrs.