TULMIN’S QUEER STORY
DURING my journey to London I devoted careful and prolonged thought to
the difficult problem of Mr. Ronald Thoyne, whose exact place in the
story I had by no means satisfactorily determined. He had played a very
curious game all through, and though there was an explanation in his
anxiety to help Kitty Clevedon and relieve her anxiety regarding her
brother, the facts as I knew them would equally have fitted a desire to
throw pursuers off his own scent.
I did not attach undue importance to the series of anonymous letters
received by Pepster, and yet, in the light of Thoyne’s queer and
frequently mysterious actions, I did not feel inclined entirely to ignore
them. I was fully aware that so far I had not found the key to the
mystery. Did Thoyne hold that or was it Nora Lepley? Thoyne was an
American and, as far as I had been able to gather, came of a wealthy and
highly respectable family in Chicago. There was absolutely nothing of
any sort against him and yet it seemed queer that he had settled down in
England and had apparently no intention of returning to America. Even
Kitty Clevedon was not sufficient to account for that. She would
certainly have gone with him had he asked her. Even if he had not
actually encompassed Clevedon’s death, was he privy to it? Then I
remembered suddenly—the first time it had occurred to me—what the Vicar’s
wife had told me. Thoyne, when he first went to Cartordale, had lodged
at Lepley’s farm and gossip had coupled his name with Nora’s. What was
there in that? Little, probably; perhaps nothing.
And so I maundered on, my thought flitting from one thing to another and
back again, but with no tangible or coherent result. I could not fit
Thoyne into the picture anyhow. If he had set out to fool me he had
succeeded, for all I had tripped him up so many times. That again was
curious. Practically everything he had told me had been dragged out of
him. Very little had come from him voluntarily. He became confidential
enough when he knew that I knew, but he offered nothing.
I walked to the address in Bloomsbury Stillman had given me. He met me
on the doorstep, and taking me into his room made a few minor alterations
in my appearance, not sufficient to merit the word disguise, but enough
to prevent Tulmin from recognising me. I had never spoken to him, but I
had been on the jury when he was a witness and he might know me again.
And then I gave Stillman another mission—Grainger, Mary Grainger, Nora
Lepley.
“Anything particular?” Stillman asked.
“No,” I said. “Everything. I don’t know what it will lead to. It is
absolutely new ground.”
I told him all I knew and left him to it.
When Tulmin came in Stillman introduced me as a friend of his named
Spencer and for a time we talked on all sorts of topics until Stillman
mentioned quite casually that Tulmin had come from Cartordale.
“Did you know Sir Philip Clevedon?” I asked, “the man who was poisoned?
A cousin of mine was housekeeper there, name of Halfleet.”
“Mrs. Halfleet, yes, she is the housekeeper,” Tulmin said.
“She thinks he committed suicide,” I observed.
“Nay, she’s wrong there,” Tulmin replied, “he wasn’t the suicide sort.”
“Tulmin,” I said suddenly, “why, I remember that name. You were his
secretary, weren’t you, or something of the sort.”
“Yes, that’s right, something of the sort,” Tulmin responded, with a
grin.
I was a little taken aback at his almost good-humoured frankness. His
was certainly not the attitude of a man who stood in fear of pursuit.
“But surely,” I said, “it’s you the police are looking for.”
“Me? What should they want with me?” he growled, sitting suddenly
upright.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m not very well up in the case. It was my
cousin that told me. ‘I believe, myself, it was suicide,’ she said, ‘but
the police think differently, and they’re looking for Tulmin, who ran
away.’”
He rose from his seat and thumped the table angrily, though his face grew
a little white. Stillman, who had been watching him carefully, poured
out a glass of whisky and handed it to him. Tulmin gulped it down at a
draught and seemed to recover his nerve.
“But didn’t you run away?” I asked.
“No, I didn’t, damn you! Who said I ran away?”
“But you disappeared.”
“Mr. Thoyne knew where I was.”
“Who is Mr. Thoyne?” I asked. “My cousin said nothing about him. Is he
suspected also?”
“Why,” he responded, with a queer laugh, “you might guess again and get
farther off.”
“Do you mean he did it?” I asked.
“I don’t mean anything,” he replied cautiously, and then he added, “It
was Mr. Thoyne who sent me here.”
“But why did he do that?” I demanded. “So that the police would—think
things?”
“If you didn’t do it you were a fool to quit,” Stillman said.
“Yes, I was a fool, that’s plain enough,” Tulmin muttered, with an
unpleasant sort of laugh. “Thoyne’s had me for a fool.”
He reached out his hand for some more whisky, which Stillman supplied.
“I see now,” Tulmin went on, almost as if talking to himself, “that was
why Thoyne offered me a job and was so anxious to get me away. Yes, and
then he almost pushed me off that blasted yacht of his, and told me to
come to London and wait for him. I see his game. He wanted me out of
the way, so they’d think—but I didn’t do it, though I know who did.”
I did not allow so much as an eyelid to quiver. If Tulmin stopped
talking now I might never get him again.
“It was Thoyne himself—the swine,” he went on. “I saw him give Clevedon
the dope that killed him—in a white packet. ‘You’ll sleep all right
after that,’ he said, and laughed. He wasn’t far out. He put Clevedon
to sleep sound enough.”
“Did you tell Thoyne what you saw?” I asked. “When did he give it to
him?”
“Why, Clevedon called on him that night. They’d quarrelled over a girl,
and Clevedon went to—I don’t know what he went for.”
“Went where?”
“To see Thoyne—at Thoyne’s house. I followed him. I couldn’t hear all
they said, but I could see everything.”
“And you didn’t tell Thoyne what you saw?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But, why?”
“Oh, well, I was keeping that,” he said, with a maudlin grin. “I thought
it might come in useful—later on. But Thoyne did it right enough.”
“Do you know what was in the packet?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t possibly say—”
“They both wanted the same girl—I know that—and Thoyne took his chance.
He came to the door with Clevedon. I was hid in the bushes. ‘Take a
dose of that stuff, and it’ll put you to sleep,’ Thoyne said. And, by
God, it did! Suicide, no. He didn’t commit suicide. Thoyne killed
him.”
And then he flung his arms over the table and fell into a stupid, drunken
sleep.
I glanced at Stillman, who shook his head.
“No jury would take his evidence,” he remarked.
I wondered for a moment or two if Tulmin had written the anonymous
letters. But then I remembered that they had borne the Midlington
postmark.
“Has he been away from London at all?” I asked.
“No.”
“Not even for a day?”
“No.”
Of course, he might have got somebody in Midlington to post them for him,
but I doubted it. I did not think he had written them. His accusation
merely came in queer corroboration of their statements. But anonymous
letters and a drunken gutter-thief from Chicago. I should have to get a
better case against Thoyne than that!
I stayed three or four days in London, having a good deal of business
with publishers to transact, and for that period I left Cartordale and
its concerns entirely alone. It was a visit from Stillman that plunged
me once again into the thick of the mystery.
“It’s only a preliminary report,” he said, “but as far as it goes it is
simple enough. Miss Grainger died at Long Burminster, a small village in
the Midlands, about sixty miles from London. That was some months ago,
and she left behind her a little baby girl, who has been adopted by the
people—themselves childless—with whom Miss Grainger herself had been
lodging. She wrote to her father, it seems, but he refused to visit her
or to have anything to do with her child—said they could send it to the
workhouse, which, however, they refused to do.”
I remarked that this seemed a very good and generous action on their
part, to which Stillman replied with his characteristic, unbelieving
grin, that they were being well paid for it.
“By whom—Grainger?” I asked.
“No,” Stillman replied. “Not by Grainger, but by Mr. Ronald Thoyne.”
“Thoyne!” I exclaimed. “Thoyne again! It seems to be always Thoyne.
But what had he to do with Mary Grainger?”
Stillman went on with his story. He reminded me, in the first place,
that Mary Grainger and Nora Lepley had been close friends, and that
Thoyne had lodged at Lepley’s farm when he first went to Cartordale. He
might have met her there; though he believed—he had not yet actually
verified this—that Thoyne had been a patient in the hospital at Bristol
where Mary Grainger and Nora Lepley had both served, the former as nurse,
the latter as V.A.D.
“And is the suggestion, then, that Thoyne is the father of this baby?” I
demanded.
But Stillman knew nothing as to that; it might be so, or it might not,
but it was quite certain that Thoyne was paying for the child now. And
there was another interesting point he had forgotten to mention. When
Mary Grainger went to Long Burminster she called herself Mrs. Blewshaw,
and wore a wedding ring, which, in fact, was buried with her.
It was when she was ill and knew she could not recover, that Mary had
written to her father, who had replied with a violent refusal either to
see her or to forgive her. Happily, Mary herself had never seen that
letter. She died peacefully and painlessly before it came.
Mrs. Greentree had shown it to Ronald Thoyne, who bade her sit down and
write a letter from his dictation, in which she informed the Midlington
chemist that his daughter was dead, and asked what wishes he had to
express regarding the child. The old man replied in person, but had
proved a rather grim, forbidding and unpleasant visitor. He had refused
to attend the funeral, or to pay for it, and would not even see the
little girl; whereupon Thoyne had come to the rescue, settling all the
bills, and arranging that Mrs. Greentree should take charge of the child
for the ridiculously generous payment of two pounds a week.
I whistled when I heard that, and Stillman nodded his head.
“It seems a lot, doesn’t it?” he murmured. “If she wasn’t his daughter,
I mean.”
The first lesson I learnt when I began my studies in crime and
criminology—because crime is not merely the commission of an unlawful
deed, but is of itself a complicated psychological problem—was to
distrust the obvious. Crime itself is sub-normal, super-normal,
extra-normal, anything but normal; and the obvious is always likely to be
untrue because there are always people interested in arranging it.
For my part, I never believe what I see or hear until I have also proved
it; and, accordingly, though it would seem to one’s ordinary intelligence
a certainty that Ronald Thoyne was the father of Mary Grainger’s
baby—possibly Mary Grainger’s husband, possibly not; but certainly in
some intimate relationship with the dead girl and the living child—I did
not take anything for granted. I had yet to learn the other side of the
story. Not that I had any reason to suppose that Thoyne was better than
his fellows, or that such an entanglement was impossible to him. He
certainly had never occurred to me as a saint.
The story seemed fairly clear, though, of course, I lacked many details.
Thoyne had met Mary Grainger either at the hospital in Bristol, or while
he was lodging at Lepley’s farm, and then, after an interval regarding
which we had no information, the girl was found to be living at his
expense, and when she died he paid for the maintenance of her child.
Added to all this was the other ascertained fact that Nora Lepley, in
whose possession I had discovered the phial of prussic acid, was Mary
Grainger’s dearest and most intimate friend.
But, then, what had all that to do with the death of Sir Philip Clevedon?
Was there any connection at all between the two stories? Certainly I
could discern none of even the most shadowy character, and yet I somehow
felt that Thoyne was the pivot on which the whole business swung, though
so far the key which would open the door of the mystery remained out of
reach. It was interesting, too, to recollect that Thoyne’s serious
courtship of Kitty Clevedon had not begun until Mary Grainger was safely
out of the way—interesting, but whether or not it had any significance, I
could not say.
I told Stillman to continue his inquiries, and myself returned to
Cartordale.