Читать книгу Murder of the Ninth Baronet - J. S. Fletcher - Страница 7

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Chaney had come into my room half-dressed and was hurrying into more clothes as he spoke. I made haste to get out of bed and reach for the nearest garments. And I was so certain of my premonition about Sir John Maxtondale’s fate that I took his death for granted.

“How was it?” I asked.

“Same thing as the others,” answered Chaney. “Shot through the head! Same gun, same hand, most likely. There’s a very bloody and determined murderer somewhere about, Camberwell!”

“Where was the body found?” I inquired. “And who found it?”

“It was found within the last hour, at a place called Dutchman’s Cut, which, they tell me, is a sort of ditch, a canal, between the lake in Heronswood Park and a sheet of water at Marston’s place, Sedbury Manor. A couple of men from the colliery found him—they’d been searching that part of the district all night.”

“We’re going there, of course,” I said.

“Young Mr. Maxtondale is waiting for us with a car,” replied Chaney. “These men came here first—they told the butler, and he roused young Rupert. Queer chap, that; he seems in a devil of a temper about something or other—I can’t make him out.”

“Does Sir Stephen know?”

“Rupert Maxtondale’s gone to tell him and Ellerthorpe. We’ve phoned Mallwood and sent a man to the police sergeant at Sedbury. It’s a queer business, this, Camberwell—three deliberate murders within twenty-four hours! And what it all means is beyond me—at present. Yet there’s one thing that seems obvious; I’ve fixed it up in my own mind already.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“Let’s call the murderer, whoever he is, X. X comes across Sir John Maxtondale on his way from Mrs. Robbins’s house to Heronswood and for some reason or other murders him. Last night X discovers that the old woman, Mother Kitteridge, as they call her hereabouts, knows his secret, and he catches her splitting to Robson. So—he settles both of ’em! How’s that?”

“I dare say you’re not far wrong,” I replied. “Fear of discovery provides a motive for the murders of last night, but what about the murder of Sir John? We know now it wasn’t Robson. So—who?”

“That’s got to be found out,” he said. “But come on—that surly youngster’s in a nasty mood already.”

We hurried downstairs and to the front of the house; Rupert Maxtondale was already there, seated in a small car; he motioned us to get in.

“Sir Stephen—and Mr. Ellerthorpe?” asked Chaney.

“Coming on later,” replied Rupert, gruffly. “Not dressed yet.”

He went off along the drive at top speed as soon as we had taken our seats, and from thence onward took no more notice of us than if we had been a couple of suit-cases. The car sped along through the park as far as the group of cottages we had noticed the previous night; there it turned off into what was little better than a rough cart-track through the woods. This led to a bridle-path, over the turf of which we ran more smoothly; it opened at last on an irregular-shaped piece of water, fringed and overshadowed on all sides by the woods, then very thick. We skirted this for some little distance until it narrowed to a point whereat a narrow stream, with evidently artificial banks, ran into it; then Rupert Maxtondale pulled up his car.

“Have to walk the rest,” he said gruffly. “Straight ahead, under the trees.”

Chaney and I took no more notice of him; he was doing something at the car. There was a narrow path beneath the overhanging branches, close to the edge of the stream; we followed it. The stream itself, some eighteen feet wide, was just a ditch of deep, black water, thickly encrusted with weeds; here and there, however, a waterlily showed itself. Although it connected two sheets of water, it seemed to be sluggish almost to stagnation, and, what with its neglected condition and the thick woods around and above its very banks, it was dark and forbidding and gave one a chilly, eerie feeling.

“Suitable spot for a murder!” muttered Chaney. “Or for hiding a murderer’s work! Now, was he murdered here, or was his body brought here?—that’s got to be found out. There are the men!”

Some twenty yards ahead of us a little group of men stood on the path, at a point where the gloom was greatest; as we drew nearer, we saw that one of them was a gamekeeper, two farm-labourers, the other two, judging by their general appearance and cloth caps, colliers. And as we got still nearer, we saw that they were gathered about something that lay on the bank, covered by a man’s greatcoat.

Rupert Maxtondale came running up behind us; together we approached the group. The gamekeeper and the labourers touched their caps; the two colliers, without ceremony, drew aside the greatcoat. Sir John Maxtondale’s dead body lay before us. One glance sufficed to show that he had been shot from behind at close quarters, and after that glance Chaney motioned the men to cover up the shattered head and face. But there was something else—one of the colliers was already pointing to it. Attached to the body by stout pieces of clothes-line were two weights, of the sort used on farmsteads for weighing produce; weights of twenty-eight pounds each. Four stones!—quite sufficient to keep down, under water, a man whose own weight I set down at something about fourteen.

“Just as we found him, mister,” said one of the colliers. “Them weights were there, just as you see ’em! And whoever did it took care to make them knots tight—of course, the water’s swelled ’em, but they’d made ’em secure, an’ all!”

“Where did you find him?” asked Chaney.

The two men turned and pointed to a black patch in the water from which the weed and scum had been cleared away.

“Right there, mister! Me and Jim here,” said the man who had spoken first; “we’d been searching through this wood all night, with lanterns. This morning, when it had come fairly light, we bethought us to take a careful look at this Dutchman’s Cut. We got a pole and began sounding. And—well, we found him, just there, as I said. Sunk in four feet of water, close under the bank. With these weights on him, just as you see ’em.”

One of the farm-labourers nodded his head.

“Them weights,” he said, “is our master’s.”

“Who’s your master?” demanded Chaney.

“Ay, well, mister, I should ha’ said him as was!” replied the man. “Mr. Robson. Them weights was with a weighing-machine in a shed just the other side of this wood. Saw ’em there myself only two days ago, let alone I was using ’em in that shed last week. They’ve been fetched from there, they have!”

“And that piece of clothes-line’s been cut off a line in one of our cottages, near the steward’s house,” observed the other labourer. “Lay anything I could soon find out! Some woman or other could tell if her line’s been cut.”

An interruption came at this stage. We heard hurried, running footsteps on the path behind us and turned—to see a young woman hastening towards us: a handsome, healthy, well-set-up young woman, probably twenty-six or seven years of age; bright of colour, flushed with running; eager-eyed. She was fully dressed, early as it was, in a smart riding-costume, boots, breeches, short coat, billycock hat, white choker; in one hand she carried a hunting-crop. She made a spot of life and colour in that gloomy, death-haunted place, but Rupert Maxtondale frowned as he saw her, and he strode forward, stifling some expletive.

“Go back, Ettie!” he snarled. “Go back! This is no place—”

The young woman paused, drawing herself up with a questioning look. Rupert Maxtondale went on to her; they exchanged a few words; it seemed to me that she resented his interference, but presently both turned back along the path towards the place where we had left the car, and disappeared.

“Who’s the young lady?” asked Chaney.

“Steward’s daughter—Miss Weekes,” replied the gamekeeper. “Good sport, she is!”

The collier who had given us most of our information suddenly pointed to his legs.

“Me and my mate’s about wet through, getting it out of that cut,” he said. “I think we’d best to go and change; we were nearly up to our middles in that water. And there’s naught we can do at present. The police’ll be here before long—we sent another chap to the sergeant at Sedbury as soon as we found it.”

“All right,” agreed Chaney. “You’ll be wanted for the inquest, you know.”

“We know that very well, mister,” said the collier. “And some nice things we expect to hear come out then! Three on ’em!” he added, as he and his companion turned away. “Never was anything o’ that sort in these parts before. You’ll be a detective, I reckon, mister?”

“Something of the sort,” admitted Chaney. “Why?”

“Nay, I was only thinking you’d got your work cut out,” said the collier. “You and the police. And here’s the police coming.”

Mallwood came in sight, accompanied by several of his men, and in their rear, from another car, appeared Sir Stephen Maxtondale and Mr. Ellerthorpe. The two colliers, at Chaney’s suggestion, waited a few minutes, to tell their story once again; then they went off, and the rest of us began in hushed voices to discuss the situation.

A very brief examination of our immediate surroundings convinced us of certain facts. First, Sir John Maxtondale had been shot dead. The shooting had taken place at a point some twenty yards away from that stretch of Dutchman’s Cut where the body was found; this was determined by traces of blood on the ground and on the bushes. This point was on the path through the woods followed by Sir John from Mrs. Robbins’s house and connecting the Sedbury lands with those of Heronswood. Second, the body had been dragged from this point to a hiding-place in the undergrowth, where, judging from what we saw there, it had been left to remain some little time. Third, it had eventually been drawn from that place to the stream, in which it had been sunk with the two twenty-eight-pound weights securely attached to it. Fourth, there was no doubt that the two weights had been fetched from a shed some forty or fifty yards away, on the side of the wood, or that the piece of clothes-line used to attach them to the body had been cut—clean-cut, as with a sharp knife—from a new line then in use in some cottage garden.

But there was a fifth fact—the dead man had been robbed. There was nothing left in the pockets of his clothing. At the place to which the body had first been dragged, there were two or three small matters lying about as if the murderer had tossed them carelessly aside—a handkerchief marked J. M., a box of safety-matches, a bit of lead pencil with a point-protector, a metal ring with two or three keys depending from it. But there was no purse, no watch and chain, no loose money, no pocket-book. Every pocket was empty in coat, waistcoat, trousers; one of the hip pockets in the trousers, the right-hand one, had been turned inside out. Robbery, then, as well as murder, had taken place. But had robbery been the murderer’s motive?

Mr. Henry Marston joined us; he came with Mr. and Mrs. Weekes. All three apparently had hurried out of their beds and tumbled into any clothing that was handy; Mrs. Weekes had buttoned herself up in what looked like an old ulster of her husband’s. Mallwood at once put a direct question to Mr. Marston.

“Can you remember, sir, if this dead gentleman was wearing a watch and chain when he was with you at Sedbury Manor?” he asked. “It’s a matter of importance, if you can.”

“Watch and chain?” exclaimed Mr. Marston. “I remember well enough! He was wearing the same watch and chain that he wore when I knew him as a young man—it was one that had belonged to his grandfather. That was one of the things that convinced me that he was John Maxtondale.”

“You can’t say, Mr. Marston, what money he had in his pockets, of course?” continued Mallwood. “Or—valuables?”

“I’ll tell you what he had on him!” replied Mr. Marston, with sudden alacrity. “He’d a fistful of old gold coins—Spanish doubloons, he called ’em—he pulled ’em out of his hip pocket to show me—curiosities, you know.”

“Which side hip pocket?” asked Mallwood. “Can you remember?”

Mr. Marston made an effort.

“Left!” he said. “Left—I remember that.”

Muttering something to me and Chaney about wondering what was in the right-hand pocket, Mallwood turned to Sir Stephen Maxtondale.

“There’s no doubt the body was robbed, Sir Stephen,” he said. “It looks as if robbery had been the motive. The question is—who’s the murderer?”

Rupert Maxtondale had come up to the group and was listening intently to all this. Miss Weekes had not come back with him—unless she was hovering somewhere, unseen by us, amongst the bushes.

“There’s a man you might suspect!” he said suddenly. “Good reason, too, as far as I’m aware. That chap Batty!” He looked significantly at Weekes. Weekes nodded, but hesitatingly. “What do you say, Weekes?”

“Might be, Mr. Rupert,” answered the steward. “There’s the possibility. Of course, one doesn’t like to name—names! But—”

“Who’s Batty?” demanded Mallwood. “Don’t keep anything back, Mr. Weekes. This is murder! And triple murder!”

“Batty’s a man I had to discharge two or three weeks since,” replied Weekes. “Workman on the estate—bad lot! I suspected him of poaching, too—I know he’d a gun. I meant him to clear out when I got rid of him, Sir Stephen,” he went on, turning to his employer, “but I hear he’s been hanging about the neighbourhood—”

“He’s been lodging at Mrs. Kitteridge’s,” interrupted Mrs. Weekes. “I found that out only yesterday.”

“Well, he’s off now,” remarked Rupert. “I’ve just been round there—it isn’t a hundred yards away—to see if I could hear of him, and he’s not there. You’d better be after his tracks, Mallwood.”

At that point the doctors whom we had seen at Robson’s farmstead, the night before, arrived, and they, Ellerthorpe, and Sir Stephen went over to the place where Sir John Maxtondale’s dead body lay, still covered by the collier’s greatcoat. The rest of us turned aside, talking.

“You see it’s robbery?” said Mallwood, turning to Chaney. “This is how I fix it. Supposing it was this man Batty—he’d be down on his luck, of course, Mr. Weekes? Short of money, eh?”

“I should say so,” replied the steward. “He’d nothing to draw when he was disengaged, at any rate.”

“Well, we’ll suppose it was Batty,” continued Mallwood. “We’ll take it he was out here with that gun Mr. Weekes says he knows he had. He shoots Sir John and robs him. Mrs. Kitteridge finds it out. Batty finds out she’s found out. He tracks her to Robson’s last night and, getting the idea, or perhaps overhearing their conversation and finding that she’s given him away to Robson, shoots both of ’em. How’s that for a theory, now?”

“A very likely one!” said Mrs. Weekes.

“What do you say?” asked Mallwood, turning to Chaney. “How does it strike you—as a theory?”

“Granted the premisses, it seems a fairly sound one,” replied Chaney. “But I think there’s a lot of spade-work to be done before you can adopt it. I, for instance, should like to hear what Batty’s got to say about it. Better ask him!”

Rupert Maxtondale indulged himself with an open sneer.

“Better find him, you mean!” he said. “He’s got a good many hours’ start!”

Chaney turned and gave Rupert a steady stare that brought a hot flush to his cheeks, and a resentful glare to his eyes.

“I’ve caught a good many criminals in my time, young man, who had as many days’, ay, and weeks’ start as you have years on your back!” he said quietly. “I shall catch this one—if I’m asked to!”

A policeman came through the undergrowth, carrying something in his hand, which he held out to Mallwood.

“Picked this up over there, sir, near where you thought the gentleman was shot,” he said. “Spent cartridge, sir. One of Wheeley and Chesson’s manufacture.”