MR. BATHURST REMINISCENT
I have been asked by Cunningham to write the concluding chapter to the
manuscript that has just reached me. Needless to say it has traveled by
a somewhat circuitous route from the institution wherein he has been
detained for so many years. My presence there in the latter part of last
year awakened, no doubt, his egotistical interest in the crime, and
caused him to put his own account of it to paper. His accompanying note
to me contains the remark that after all I am preëminently the right
person to finish the affair. Perhaps I am. At any rate, I've decided to
do what he requests, if only to stifle certain ill-founded and
prejudiced statements that were current for some time after Cunningham's
arrest, trial, sentence and subsequent detention "during His Majesty's
pleasure." Now for the facts. The great difficulty for us who attempted
to investigate the Considine Manor tragedy lay in the separation of the
"faked" clues from the true ones. That, of course, to a certain extent,
would apply with equal force to a number of other crimes, but in this
instance we were arrayed against a criminal--proved afterwards to be a
homicidal maniac who had deliberately set out to lead us astray. That
was, as I have foreshadowed, our main trouble. Our second difficulty was
the apparent absence of motive. But after a time this second matter
became less obscure to me. I have read Cunningham's account of the
tragedy very carefully, and I will say this: he has been very fair to
his readers. Only three clues have been kept from them, and in two of
these three cases he himself is unaware of them to this day. The third
omission he can be forgiven, for to have given it in its full
significance at the time when it came under my notice would have
destroyed some of the interest in the narrative from the pure
mystery-story point of view. I will now attempt to show how I arrived at
my conclusions. When I was called to the billiard room that morning I
was very much at sea--the whole thing seemed untrue, but when I pulled
my wits together I eventually found that I had to find satisfactory
answers to four questions.
(a) Why was Prescott wearing brown shoes?
(b) Why had the dagger been used as well as the lace?
(c) Had Prescott dressed _himself--because his handkerchief was up his
right-hand sleeve--and his one laced shoe had been tied in a most
peculiar manner_--I only discovered this by actually handling it.
(d) Why was he there--what had brought him?
The question of the handkerchief was unobserved by Cunningham--yet it
was the first slip he had made! The lace business he realized, for he
spotted me looking at it closely. I will try to describe its
peculiarity. The lace of the shoe had been tied in a bow over a
reef-knot. I had never seen a lace tied quite like that before, and it
was only by an accident I noticed it, for it wasn't exactly obvious to a
casual observer. Well, these two facts suggested a train of thought in
my mind--had Prescott been murdered--_then_ dressed or partially
dressed--and _brought_ to the billiard room? Had he been brought there
from the garden? For there was mud on his shoes but _no mud_ on the
billiard room floor--despite glaringly obvious signs of a struggle and
disturbance! With that idea I paid a visit to Prescott's bedroom. I
observed there were nine stairs to be negotiated--not an impossible
distance to carry a dead body--for a very powerful man. My idea you see
was beginning to take shape. Prescott's bedroom told me something else.
While there, I was able to make a deduction of which I am secretly
rather proud! It will be remembered that the dressing space of the room
was between the entrance-door and the bed, that is to say on the right
of a person lying in the bed on his back. Now when a person gets out of
bed he invariably turns the bedclothes _away_ from the side where he
gets out. For example, a person leaving this bed, to dress the side of
the entrance-door would undoubtedly fling the clothes away to his
_left_--_yet these clothes were all lying and trailing on the side by
the door_. Baddeley took this as evidence that the bed had been slept
in--to me it was conclusive evidence in the other direction. I was not
concerned for the moment with the missing money. I was reconstructing
the crime. The next stage was the garden--the footprints under the
billiard room window. For a long time these disconcerted me. There were
the four sets and the two kinds. Who had been Prescott's companion? Did
Prescott come from the billiard room into the garden? Had he climbed up
into the billiard room from the garden? Had the footprints any relation
at all to the billiard room? Then the amazing truth hit me. There was no
sign of a descent from the billiard room--the earth below was clear. The
shoes didn't show a trace of scraping--yet why on earth had Prescott put
them on, and not his ordinary dress-shoes? They were on Prescott's feet
because the _murderer wished us to see them there_--the footprints were
faked--Prescott had not been outside at all--_the murderer had worn them
himself_. It was at this stage that Lady Considine's pearls made their
appearance or rather their disappearance, and once again the job of
unraveling the two skeins presented itself. Just as I had convinced
myself they were dissociated from each other, came that startling
discovery of the shoe-lace in Webb's pocket. To my mind this was
Cunningham's second slip--he managed to get it into the pocket during
the struggle that preceded Webb's arrest--but it can be argued that it
might very easily have served to hang Webb. I tried hard to persuade
myself that Webb must and should be the murderer, but my instinct was
always in conflict and I felt that the robbery was just a coincidence.
It was hard to place accurately the evidence of the noises in the
night--hard, that is, at this stage of the inquiry. I will attempt to
explain them later. But so far, I had gone a long way towards sorting
out the conditions of the crime, but had found no direct evidence
against anybody in particular. But the finding of this shoe-lace opened
my eyes a bit, and began to narrow down my field of suspicion. The next
point was the discovery of the I.O.U., given to Prescott by Barker. How
had that got into the billiard-table pocket? For a long time I was
uncertain--then once again the solution came to me. By reason and by
memory. It had been put there with deliberation! Nobody had used that
room--we _knew_--till Cunningham and I went there--by "used" I
mean--played billiards there. The servants gave it a wide berth for
transparent reasons. I cast my mind back to the morning Prescott had
been discovered--I visualized the entire scene--what had struck me about
the "_billiards_" part of it? I had it! The three balls were lying in
the pocket near the murdered man's hand--_and the red ball was on top_.
The splash of color it had made against Prescott's white hand had been
vivid to me. Yet _when I knocked the balls from the same pocket to
commence our game--the spot ball was on top_--they had been
moved--surely for the secretion of the Barker I.O.U.--_since the
murder_. This caused me to eliminate Barker from my list of "suspects"
and I began to grow uneasy. I decided upon that second visit to
Prescott's bedroom for I realized I had made a mistake. I hadn't
examined the inner apartment. Here I ran across the "stub" of the
cigar--my idea had almost become a certainty! Then I began to appreciate
the horror of the affair to me--what had come to Bill Cunningham? Yet I
clung to the hope that my trail would lead to somebody else at the end,
and I dared not let him know what I suspected! Here came Cunningham's
third slip! The letter fragments he found were his own. He was getting
desperate now and out to involve as many people as he possibly
could--why not confuse matters more? He had an old letter from Mary
Considine in his letter-case--probably retained for sentimental
reasons--written years before and quite innocent. "She would meet him
somewhere--the station probably--in the 'Bean'--the car they had at the
time." He suddenly realized the significance of the time she mentioned
in the letter--"faked" it to appear relevant to the murder and
"discovered" it under Prescott's bed. I saw through this very
quickly--strangely, Mary can't remember ever having written it. Still, I
determined to be certain so I popped up to see Mrs. Prescott. Alas! my
terrible theory received no shaking. Her son was not ambidextrous and
therefore not likely to wear his handkerchief in his wrong sleeve. Also
as far as she knew, he was no fancy knot-tier. Running into Baddeley
there, was remarkable, and of course he was on a wild-goose chase;
Barker and Hornby were merely visiting Mrs. Prescott in the hope that
she would accept payment of Lieutenant Barker's debt of honor. He told
me this next morning. I made some more investigations that day that
revealed the fact to me that Cunningham's grandfather had committed
suicide after making a ferocious and entirely uncalled-for attack upon a
Roman Catholic priest residing in his neighborhood. This decided me. Any
thought that to arrest Cunningham might savor of treachery towards a
friend--was dispelled. I owed it to the community to put him away where
he could wreak no more harm and I arrived home that night only to hear
of his attack upon Jack. The rest is known. Now this is the matter of
the murder! Cunningham's jealousy of Prescott, born of the loss of his
Cricket "blue" had been fanned into a blazing flame by the invitation of
Prescott for the Considine "week" and his strenuous attentions to Mary.
He felt that Prescott intended a proposal and how he hated him for what
he called his cursed presumption! Prescott's success during the week and
his own failures brought matters to a climax. He'd kill him and he'd
also set Anthony Bathurst a nice little problem. He borrowed the shoes
from Prescott's bedroom immediately after dinner, and when the others
first adjourned to the drawing-room he constructed the "footprints,"
returned the shoes and kept one of the laces. He intended to hide in the
inner bedroom before Prescott came to bed and then strangle him from
behind by taking him unawares. Things went well for him--he saw Barker's
I.O.U. passed over and noted it. Also he noticed Hornby fingering the
Venetian dagger, so he removed that--wearing gloves--when he went up to
bed--it had Hornby's finger-prints--and also might be useful if it came
to a "rough house" with Prescott. Against this, however, Dennis had seen
him in the garden--without, of course, recognizing him, and Mary had
been conscious of the "espionage" that was connected with the "smell of
a cigar." As a matter of fact his jealousy had caused him to follow
Prescott and Mary several times before--as she told us. Arrived in
Prescott's bedroom he sought a hiding-place in the bathroom, and was
there when Barker went along to bed. When the latter was being
questioned by Baddeley as to the people that were upstairs when he went
to bed, Cunningham stated that he answered Barker's "good-night." He did
_not_, because _he was in Prescott's bedroom and not in his own_. When
Prescott came to bed he naturally began to undress--probably sitting on
the bed with his back towards Cunningham. Waiting for a favorable
opportunity the latter sprang on his victim and strangled him with the
lace--leaving a cigar stub in the inner room. His fourth mistake!
Prescott, no doubt, had previously removed his coat, vest, tie, collar
and shoes. In the struggle the bed-clothes were disarranged, and
subsequently pushed on to the floor by Cunningham.
He then abstracted Barker's I.O.U. and collected all Prescott's spare
cash. All he had to do now was to dress Prescott again--which he did,
making the two mistakes alluded to--wait till the whole house was
quiet--and then carry him downstairs to the billiard room--the brown
shoes of course being used for the purpose that I have shown to give the
affair an "outside" connection. Everybody was asleep, and he probably
went in his stockinged feet--it was a thousand to one nobody would hear
him. But Jack Considine heard him shut his own bedroom door upon his
return. Whitney, the motorist, saw the light go up in the billiard room
when Cunningham entered with his ghastly burden--but that was all he
could see. Cunningham probably wore gloves all the time--there were no
finger-marks. But he knew that Major Hornby's finger-marks would show on
the dagger which he had had no occasion to use. So he used it--driving
it into Prescott's dead body. It would cause the police much
mystification, and throw suspicion on Hornby.
The noises that Arkwright and his wife heard were consequent upon the
visit of the "Spider"--about an hour after the actual murder and say an
hour or so before the descent to the billiard room. The attack on Jack
Considine I can only attempt to explain. But my conjecture is that
Cunningham's jealousy had reached such extreme limits that he was
infuriated by Jack's praise of Prescott at breakfast that morning. He
used the lumber shed to fire from--that was how I told Jack the exact
spot of the outrage. He had used the shed before to hide behind when
following Mary and Prescott. Even then I made him convict himself--I
felt that I must remove all shred of doubt before telling Sir Charles
and getting Baddeley to act. I arranged with Mary to play Cunningham the
eighteen holes of golf--fearing the possible consequences of a refusal
on her part as he was by that time in a dangerous state. I arranged for
her shoe-lace to come undone--and that she should get Cunningham to tie
it for her. He was excited--he forgot himself--_he tied it exactly as he
had tied Prescott's shoe_! I had arranged with Baddeley to give him the
signal if my worst fears were confirmed. I did so. When the time came we
acted quickly.
I try to forget it all--and now, having written this account of it, am
going to try all the harder. For then I can think of him as he was
before that dreadful madness turned his brain, and after all--
"There--but for the Grace of God--goes--any one of us!"
THE END
FOOTNOTES
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at the Price You Like to Pay_"
_There Are Two Sides to Everything_--
--including the wrapper which covers every Grosset & Dunlap book. When
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You will find more than five hundred titles to choose from--books for
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_Don't forget the other side, but in case the wrapper is lost, write to
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_There is a Grosset & Dunlap Book
for every mood and for every taste_
Transcriber's Notes
--Copyright notice provided as in the original--this e-text is public
domain in the country of publication.
--In the text versions, delimited italics text in _underscores_ (the
HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)
--Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and
dialect unchanged.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Billiard Room Mystery, by Brian Flynn