CREWE steered to the stone landing-place and tied the little motor-boat
to a rusty iron ring which dangled from a stout wooden stake, wedged
between two of the seaweed covered stones. The tide was out, and the
top of the landing-place stood well out of the water, but it was an
easy matter for a young and vigorous man to spring up to the top,
though three rough and slippery steps had been cut near the ring,
perhaps for the original builder in his old and infirm days.
Looking down, he noticed that while his little boat floated easily
enough alongside, a boat of slightly deeper draught would have scraped
on the rocky bottom, which was visible through the clear water. The
surface of the landing-place was moist, and the intersections between
the rough stones were filled with seaweed and shells, indicating that
the place was covered at high tide.
Crewe had come from Staveley by boat instead of motoring across, his
object being to make a complete investigation of Cliff Farm without
attracting chance attention or rural curiosity about his motor-car,
which was too big to go into the stables. He wanted to be undisturbed
and uninterrupted in his investigation of the house. As he entered
the boat-house, he looked back to where he had left his boat, and saw
that the landing-place was high enough out of the water to prevent
passers-by on the cliff road seeing the boat before high tide. By that
time he hoped to have completed his investigations and be on his way
back to Staveley.
The boat-house was a small and rickety structure perched on a rough
foundation of stones, which had been stacked to the same height as
the landing-place. The inside was dismal and damp, and the woodwork
was decaying. Part of the roof had fallen in, and the action of wind
and sea and storm had partly destroyed the boarded sides. Many of the
boards had parted from the joists, and hung loosely, or had fallen
on the stones. An old boat lay on the oozing stones, with its name,
_Polly_, barely decipherable on the stern, and a kedge anchor and
rotting coil of rope inside it. Crewe had no doubt that it was the
boat James Lumsden used to go fishing in many years ago. A few decayed
boards in front of the boat-house indicated the remains of a wooden
causeway for launching the boat. In a corner of the shed was a rusty
iron windlass, which suggested the means whereby the eccentric old man
had been able to house his boat without assistance when he returned
with his catch.
Having finished his scrutiny of the boatshed and its contents, Crewe
made his way up the cliff path, and walked across the strip of downs to
the farm.
Cliff Farm looked the picture of desolation and loneliness in the
chill, grey autumn afternoon. Its gaunt, closely-shuttered ugliness
confronted Crewe uncompromisingly, as though defying him to wrest from
it the secret of the tragic death of its owner. It already had that air
of neglect and desertion which speedily overtakes the house which has
lost its habitants. There was no sign of any kind of life; the meadows
were empty of live-stock. Somewhere in the outbuildings at the side of
the house an unfastened door flapped and banged drearily in the wind.
Even the front door required main strength to force it open after
it had been unlocked, as though it shared with the remainder of the
house the determination to keep the secret of the place, and resented
intrusion. The interior of the house was dark, close and musty. Through
the closed and shuttered windows not a ray of light or a breath of air
had been able to find an entrance.
Crewe's first act was to open the shutters and the windows on the
ground floor; his next to fling open the front and back doors, and the
doors of the rooms. He wanted all the light he could get for the task
before him, and some fresh air to breathe. He soon had both: wholesale,
pure strong air from the downs, blowing in through doors and windows,
stirring up the accumulated dust on the floors, causing it to float and
dance in the sunbeams that streamed in the front windows from the rays
of an evening sun, which had succeeded in freeing himself in his last
moments above the horizon from the mass of grey clouds that had made
the day so chill and cheerless.
Crewe commenced to examine each room and its contents with the
object of trying to discover something which would assist him in
his investigation of the Cliff Farm murder. He worked carefully and
minutely, but with the swiftness and method of a practised observer.
The front room that he first entered detained him only a few minutes.
Originally designed for the sitting-room, it had been dismantled and
contained very little furniture, and had evidently not been used for a
considerable time. A slight fissure in the outside wall explained the
reason: the fissure had made the room uninhabitable by admitting wind
and weather, causing damp to appear on the walls, and loosening the
wall-paper till it hung in festoons.
Crewe next examined the opposite front room in which Sergeant Westaway
conducted his preliminary inquiries into the murder. This room was
simply furnished with furniture of an antique pattern. Apparently it
had been used at a more or less recent date as the sitting-room, for a
few old books and a couple of modern cheaply bound novels were lying
about; a needle with a piece of darning cotton which was stuck in the
wall suggested a woman's occupation, or perhaps the murdered man or his
grandson had done bachelor darning there in the winter evenings. The
latter hypothesis seemed most probable to Crewe: only a very untidy
member of the other sex would have left a darning needle sticking in
the sitting-room wall.
Crewe then examined the room behind the front room in which Marsland
and Miss Maynard had sat before discovering the murdered man. It was
the front room of an English farm-house of a bygone age, kept for show
and state occasions but not for use, crowded with big horse-hair chairs
and a horse-hair sofa. There were two tables--a large round one with a
mahogany top and a smaller one used as a stand for the lamp Marsland
had lit--a glass case of stuffed birds; an old clock in a black case
on the mantelpiece, which had been stopped so long that its works
were festooned with spiders' webs; a few dingy oil-paintings on the
walls, alternately representing scenes from the Scriptures and the
English chase, and a moth-eaten carpet on the floor. There was also
a small glass bookcase in a corner containing some bound volumes of
the _Leisure Hour_ of the sixties, _Peter Parley's Annual, Johnson's
Dictionary,_ an ancient _Every Day Book_, and an old family Bible with
brass clasps.
It was in the room next to the sitting-room that Crewe found the first
article which suggested possibilities of a clue. It was a small room,
which had evidently been used by a former occupant as an office, for it
contained an oak case holding account books, some files of yellowing
bills hanging from nails on the wall, and an old-fashioned writing
bureau. It was this last article that attracted Crewe's attention. It
was unlocked, and he examined closely the papers it contained. But they
threw no light on the mystery of Cliff Farm, being for the most part
business letters, receipted bills, and household accounts.
There was a bundle of faded letters in one of the pigeon-holes tied
with black ribbon, which had been written to Mrs. James Lumsden from
somebody who signed himself "Yours to command, Geoffrey La Touche."
These letters were forty years old, and had been sent during a period
of three years from "Her Majesty's sloop _Hyacinth_" at different
foreign ports. They were stiff and formal, though withal courteous
in tone, and various passages in them suggested that the writer had
been an officer in the Royal Navy and a relative of Mrs. Lumsden. They
ceased with a letter written to "James Lumsden, Esq.," expressing the
writer's "deep regret and sincere sorrow" on learning of his "dear
niece's sad and premature end."
There was another room opposite this office which had doubtless been
intended for a breakfast-room, but was now stored with odds and ends:
superfluous articles of furniture, some trunks, a pile of bound volumes
of the _Illustrated London News_, and a few boxes full of miscellaneous
rubbish. The passage on which these rooms opened terminated in two
stone steps leading into the kitchen, which was the full width of the
house. A notable piece of furniture in this room was an oaken dresser
with shelves reaching to the ceiling. There were also a deal table,
some kitchen chairs, and an arm-chair.
From the blackened beams of its low sloping ceiling some hams and
strings of onions hung, and an open tea-caddy stood on the table, with
a leaden spoon in it, as though somebody had recently been making
tea. An old brown earthenware teapot stood by the fire-place with
tea-leaves still in the pot, and Crewe noticed on the mantelpiece a
churchwarden pipe, with a spill of paper alongside. He found a pair of
horn spectacles and an old newspaper on the top of the press beside the
old-fashioned fire-place. Evidently the kitchen had been the favourite
room of Frank Lumsden's grandfather--the eccentric old man who had
built the landing-place.
Before examining the upper portion of the house Crewe closed the doors
and windows he had opened, restoring things to the condition in which
he had found them. Then he went upstairs, and, after opening the
windows and blinds as he had opened them downstairs, entered the room
in which the murdered man had been discovered.
It was while Crewe was thus engaged that his quick ears detected a
slight crunch of footsteps on the ground outside, as though somebody
was approaching the house. The room he was searching looked out on
pasture land, but he was aware that there was a gravel path on the
other side, running from the outbuildings at the side to the rear of
the house. He crossed over to the corresponding room on that side of
the house, and looked out of the open window, but could see no one.
He ran quietly downstairs and into the kitchen. His idea was to watch
the intruder by looking through one of the kitchen windows, without
revealing his own presence, but he found to his annoyance that the
little diamond shaped kitchen window which looked out on the back was
so placed as to command a view of only a small portion of the bricked
yard at the back of the house.
He waited for a moment in the hope that the visitor would enter the
house through the unlocked kitchen door, but as he heard no further
sound he decided to go in search of the person whose footsteps he had
heard. He opened the door and looked over the empty yard. Suddenly
a woman's figure appeared in the doorway of the barn on the left.
Immediately she saw Crewe she retreated into the shed in the hope that
she had not been seen. In order to undeceive her on this point, Crewe
walked down the yard to the barn, but before he reached it she came out
to meet him. She was young and pretty and well dressed.
"You are Mr. Crewe," she said with composure.
"And you are Miss Maynard. We have not met before, but I have heard a
great deal about you."
She read suspicion in his use of the conventional phrase and she
decided to meet it.
"I came out to look at the old place--at the scene of this dreadful
tragedy--before finally deciding what I ought to do."
He realized that having said so much she had more to say, and he gave
her no assistance.
"Perhaps Mr. Marsland has not told you, Mr. Crewe, that I was with him
in the house when he discovered the body."
"He has not," replied Crewe.
"That makes it all the more difficult for me. I do not mind telling
you, for you are his friend, and you are such a clever man that I feel
I will be right in taking your advice."
Crewe's mental reservation to be slow in offering her advice was an
indication that his suspicions of her were not allayed.
"I also sought shelter here from the storm on that fateful night," she
continued. "But because I was afraid of the gossip of Ashlingsea I
asked Mr. Marsland if he would mind keeping my name out of it. And he
very generously promised to do so."
"A grave error on both sides," said Crewe.
She was quick in seizing the first opening he gave her.
"That is the conclusion I have come to; that is why I think I ought
to go to the police and tell them that I was here. They may be able
to make something out of my story--they may be able to see more in it
than I can. My simple statement of facts might fit in with some other
information in their possession of which I know nothing, and in that
way might lead to the detection of the man who killed Frank Lumsden.
But how can I go to them and tell them I was here after I begged Mr.
Marsland to say nothing about me? He would never forgive me for placing
him in such an embarrassing position. It would not be right."
"And it is not right to keep from the police any information to which
they are entitled."
"That is my difficulty," she said, with a smile of gratitude to him for
stating it so clearly.
"I have no hesitation in advising you to tell the police the whole
truth," said Crewe.
"And Mr. Marsland?"
"He must extricate himself from the position in which his promise to
you has placed him. He knows that the promise should never have been
made, and doubtless in the end he will be glad to have been released
from it."
"I hope he will understand my motives," she said.
"Perhaps not. But he will begin to realize, what all young men have to
learn, that it is sometimes difficult to understand the motives which
actuate young ladies."
That reply seemed to indicate to her that their conversation had
reached the level of polite banter.
"Will you plead for me?" she asked.
"That is outside my province," was the disappointing reply. "I
understood you to say, Miss Maynard, that you came here that night for
shelter from the storm. Did you arrive at the house before Marsland or
after him?"
There was a moment of hesitation before her reply was given.
"A few minutes before him."
"No doubt you will materially assist the police by giving them a full
account of what you know," said Crewe.