to meet Arkwright Jones, without arousing suspicion. We do know that
soon after he finally quarrelled with Janet Smith he walked over to
Kurtmoor; the two witnesses who spoke with him stated that they met
him whilst they themselves were walking to Broxmouth. It was then
past eight o'clock. Arkwright Jones had either dined at his hotel or
not; we do not know, for it never struck the police to inquire at
once how the popular General had spent his time on that fateful
evening. You know what those unconventional seaside places are:
people spend most of their time out of doors, and there would be
nothing strange, let alone suspicious, in any visitor going out for
an hour after dinner, even if it rained.
"Then surely you can in your mind see those two scoundrels putting
their villainous heads together, and as suspicion of any foul play
would of necessity at once fall on Marston, Jones decided to take the
hideous onus on himself. He went to the Dog's Tooth Cliff to meet
Janet Smith himself, and borrowed Marston's stick to aid him in his
abominable deed. He was clever enough, however, to throw it over the
edge of the cliff some distance away from the scene of his crime. We
do not know, of course, whether the poor girl recognised him, or
whether he just fell on her in the dark; she gave only one scream
before she fell.
"They were clever scoundrels, we must admit, but chance favoured
them, too, especially in one thing: she favoured them when she
prompted Arkwright Jones to put a muffler round his throat. This one
fact, as you know, saved Marston's neck from the gallows, but for the
strands of wool in the girl's hatpin, and Hoggs's brief view of a man
manipulating a muffler, nothing but Jones's own confession could have
saved his accomplice. Whether he would have confessed remains a
riddle which no one will ever solve. But as to the whole so-called
mystery, I saw daylight through it the moment I realised that
Marston's despair and humiliation during the inquest was a pretence.
If he feigned despair it was because he desired _temporarily_ to be
the victim of circumstantial evidence. From that point to the
unravelling of the tangled skein was but a step for a mind bent on
logic."
"But," I argued, for indeed I was bewildered, and really incredulous,
"what will be the end of it all? Surely three scoundrels like that
will not go scot free. There will be an enquiry into the affairs of
the Institute: the governors----"
"The governors have talked of an inquiry," the funny creature broke
in, with a chuckle, "but if you had any experience of these private
charities, you would know that the first thing their administrators
wish to avoid is publicity. The President of the Woodforde Institute
had sufficient influence on the committee you may be sure to stifle
any suggestion of creating public scandal by any sort of enquiry."
"But the question of the finances of the Institute is, anyhow, public
property now, and----"
"And it will be allowed to sink into oblivion. The executive has
resigned. Marston and Gubbins will leave the country, and everything
will be conveniently hushed up."
"But Arkwright Jones--" I protested.
"You see the papers regularly," he rejoined dryly; "watch them, and
you will see..."
I don't know when he went, but a moment or two later I found myself
sitting alone at the table in the blameless teashop. The matter
interested me more than I cared to admit, but, for once, I was not
altogether prepared to accept the funny creature's deductions.
Twenty-four hours later, however, I had to own that he had been
right, when the following piece of sensational news appeared in the
_Evening Post_.
"TRAGIC SEQUEL TO THE CLIFF MURDER
"An extraordinary sequel to the mysterious tragedy of the Dog's Tooth
Cliff near Broxmouth occurred last night, when on the self-same spot
where Miss Janet Smith met her death three months ago, General Sir
Arkwright Jones lost his footing and fell a distance of two hundred
feet on to the rocks below. It was a beautiful moonlight evening,
and the tide being low a number of visitors were down on the beach at
the time; but those who immediately hurried to the General's
assistance found life already extinct. The distinguished soldier,
who will be deeply mourned, must have been killed on the spot.
Indeed now general public opinion as well as every inhabitant of
Broxmouth will bring pressure to bear upon the Borough Council to see
that a suitable barrier is erected along the dangerous portions of
the beautiful Lovers' Walk. The double tragedy of this year's season
renders such an erection imperative."
I was probably the only reader of that paragraph who guessed that the
once distinguished soldier had not come accidentally by his death.
No doubt the police had followed up the clue of the man with the
muffler, and were actually on the track of the miscreant, when the
latter, guessing that exposure was imminent, preferred to put an end
to his own miserable life.
I have since heard from friends at Broxmouth that Marston has gone to
the Malay States, and that Gubbins is doing something in Germany.
Curious creature Marston must have been! Imagine after Jones had
returned from his infamous errand and told him that the hideous deed
was done, imagine Marston walking back to Broxmouth along the Lovers'
Walk in the rain and the darkness, past the Dog's Tooth Cliff, at the
foot of which the body of the murdered girl lay! I wonder what would
be the views of the Old Man in the Corner on the psychology of a man
with nerve enough for such an ordeal.
VII
THE TYTHERTON CASE
§1
"What do you make of this?" the Old Man in the Corner said to me that
afternoon. "A curious case, is it not?"
And with his claw-like fingers he indicated the paragraph in the
_Evening Post_ which I had just been perusing with great interest.
"At best," I replied, "it is a very unpleasant business for the
Carysforts."
"And at the worst?" he retorted with a chuckle.
"Well...!" I remarked dryly.
"Do you think they are guilty?" he asked.
"I don't see who else..."
"Ah!" he broke in, with his usual lack of manners, "that is such a
stale argument. One doesn't see who else, therefore one makes up
one's mind that so-and-so must be guilty. I'll lay an even bet with
any one that out of a dozen cases of miscarriage of justice, I could
point to ten that were directly due to that fallacious reasoning.
"Now take as an example the Tytherton case, in which you are
apparently interested. It was an unprecedented outrage which stirred
the busy provincial town to its depths, the victim, Mr. Walter
Stonebridge, being one of its most noted solicitors. He had his
office in Tytherton High Street, and lived in a small, detached house
on the Great West Road. The house stood in the middle of a small
garden, and had only one story above the ground floor; the front door
opened straight on a long, narrow hall which ran along the full depth
of the house. On the left side of this hall there were two doors,
one leading to the drawing-room and the other to a small
morning-room. At the end of the hall was the staircase, and beyond
it, down a couple of steps, there was a tiny dining-room and the
usual offices. The back door opened straight on the kitchen, and on
the floor above there were four bedrooms and a bathroom. Mr. Walter
Stonebridge was a bachelor, and his domestic staff consisted of a
married couple--Henning by name--who did all that was necessary for
him in the house.
"It was on the last evening of February. The weather was fair and
bright. The Hennings had gone upstairs to their room as usual at ten
o'clock. Mr. Stonebridge was at the time sitting in the
morning-room. He was in the habit of sitting up late, reading and
writing. On this occasion he told the Hennings to close the shutters
and lock the back door as usual, but to leave the front door on the
latch as he was expecting a visitor. The Hennings thought nothing of
that, as one or two gentlemen--friends, or sometimes clients of Mr.
Stonebridge--would now and then drop in late to see him. Anyway,
they went contentedly to bed.
"A little while later--they could not exactly recollect at what hour,
because they had already settled down for the night--they heard the
front-door bell, and immediately afterwards Mr. Stonebridge's
footsteps along the hall. Then suddenly they heard a crash followed
by what sounded like a struggle, then a smothered cry, and finally
silence. Henning was out of bed and on the landing with a candle in
an instant, and he had just switched on the light there when he heard
Mr. Stonebridge's voice calling up to him from below:
"It's all right, Henning. I caught my foot in this confounded rug.
That's all.'
"Henning looked over the bannister, and seeing nothing he shouted
down:
"'Shall I give you a 'and, sir?'
"But Mr. Stonebridge at once replied, quite cheerily:
"'No, no! I'm all right. You go back to bed.'
"And Henning did as he was told, nor did he or his wife hear anything
more during the night. But in the early morning when Mrs. Henning
came downstairs she was horror-struck to find Mr. Stonebridge in the
dining-room, lying across the table, to which he was securely
pinioned with a rope; a serviette taken out of the sideboard drawer
had been tied tightly around his mouth and his eyes were blindfolded
with his own pocket handkerchief.
"The woman's screams brought her husband upon the scene; together
they set to work to rescue their master from his horrible plight. At
first they thought that he was dead, and Henning was for fetching the
police immediately, but his wife declared that Mr. Stonebridge was
just unconscious and she started to apply certain household
restoratives and made Henning force some brandy through Mr.
Stonebridge's lips.
"Presently, the poor man opened his eyes, and gave one or two other
signs of returning consciousness, but he was still very queer and
shaky. The Hennings then carried him upstairs, undressed him and put
him to bed; and then Henning ran for the doctor.
"Well, it was days, or in fact weeks before Mr. Stonebridge had
sufficiently recovered to give a coherent statement of what happened
to him on that fateful night, and--which was just as much to the
point--what had happened the previous day. The doctor had prescribed
complete rest in the interim. The patient had suffered from
concussion and I know not what, and those events had got so mixed up
in his brain that to try and disentangle them was such an effort that
every time he attempted it it nearly sent him into a brain fever.
But in the meanwhile his friends had been busy--notably, Mr.
Stonebridge's head clerk, Mr. Medburn, who was giving the police no
rest. There was, even without the evidence of the principal witness
concerned, plenty of facts to go on, to make out a case against the
perpetrator of such a dastardly outrage.
"That robbery had been the main motive of the assault, was easily
enough established--a small fire- and burglar-proof safe which stood
in a corner of the morning-room had been opened and ransacked. When
examined it was found to contain only a few trinkets which had
probably a sentimental value, but were otherwise worthless. The key
of the safe--one of a bunch--was still in the lock, which went to
prove either that Mr. Stonebridge had the safe open when he was
attacked, or what was more likely--considering the solicitor's
well-known careful habits--that the assailant had ransacked his
victim's pockets after he had knocked him down. A pocket-book, torn,
and containing only a few unimportant papers, lay on the ground;
there had been a fire in the room at the time of the outrage, and
careful analysis of the ashes found in the hearth revealed the
presence of a quantity of burnt paper.
"But robbery being established as the motive of the outrage did not
greatly help matters, because, while Mr. Stonebridge remained in such
a helpless condition, it was impossible to ascertain what booty his
assailant had carried away. Soon, however, the first ray of light
was thrown upon what had seemed until this hour an impenetrable
mystery.
"It appears that Mr. Medburn was looking after the business in High
Street during his employer's absence, and one morning--it was on the
Monday following the night of the outrage--he had a visit from a
client, who sent in his name as Felix Shap. The head clerk knew
something about this client, who had recently come over to England
from somewhere abroad, in order to make good his claim to certain
royalties on what is known as the Shap Fuelettes--a kind of cheap
fuel which was launched some time before the War by Sir Alfred
Carysfort, Bart., of Tytherton Grange, and out of which that
gentleman made an immense fortune, and incidentally got his title
thereby.
"This man, Shap--a Dutchman by birth--was, it appears, the original
inventor and patentee of these fuelettes, and Mr. Carysfort, as he
was then, had met him out in the Dutch East Indies, and had bought
the invention from him for a certain sum down, and then exploited it
in England first and afterwards all over the world at immense profit.
Sir Alfred Carysfort died about a year ago, leaving a fortune of over
a million sterling, and was succeeded in the title and in the
managing-directorship of the business by his eldest son David, a
married man with a large family. The business had long since been
turned into a private limited liability company, the bulk of the
shares being held by the managing-director.
"The fact that the patent rights in the Shap Fuelettes had been sold
by the inventor to the late Alfred Carysfort had never been in
dispute. It further appeared that Felix Shap had at one time been a
very promising mining engineer, but that in consequence of incurable,
intemperate habits he had gradually drifted down the social scale; he
lost one good appointment after another until he was just an
underpaid clerk in the office of an engineer in Batavia, whose
representative in England was Mr. Alfred Carysfort. The latter was
on a visit to the head office in Batavia some twelve years ago when
he met Shap, who was then on his beam-ends. He had recently been
sacked by his employers for intemperance, and was on the fair way to
becoming one of those hopeless human derelicts who usually end their
days either on the gallows or in a convict prison.
"But at the back of Shap's fuddled mind there had lingered throughout
his downward career the remembrance of a certain invention which he
had once patented, and which he had always declared would one day
bring him an immense fortune; but though he had spent quite a good
deal of money in keeping up his patent rights, he had never had the
pluck and perseverance to exploit or even to perfect his invention.
"Alfred Carysfort on the other hand, was brilliantly clever, he was
ambitious, probably none too scrupulous, and at once he saw the
immense possibilities, if properly worked, of Shap's rough invention,
and he set to work to obtain the man's confidence, and, presumably,
by exercising certain persuasion and pressure he got the wastrel to
make over to him in exchange for a few hundred pounds the entire
patent rights in the Fuelettes.
"The transaction was, as far as that goes, perfectly straightforward
and above board; it was embodied in a contract drawn up by an English
solicitor, who was the British Consul in Batavia at the time; nor was
it--taking everything into consideration--an unfair one. Shap would
never have done anything with his invention, and a clean, wholesome
and entirely practical fuel would probably have been thus lost to the
world; but there remains the fact that Alfred Carysfort died a dozen
years later worth more than a million sterling, every penny of which
he had made out of an invention for which he had originally paid less
than five hundred.
"Mr. Medburn had been put in possession of these facts some few weeks
previously when Mr. Felix Shap had first presented himself at the
private house of Mr. Stonebridge; he came armed with a letter of
introduction from a relative of Mr. Stonebridge's whom he had met out
in Java, and he was accompanied by a friend--an American named Julian
Lloyd--who was piloting him about the place, and acting as his
interpreter and secretary, as he himself had never been in England
and spoke English very indifferently. His passport and papers of
identification were perfectly in order; he appeared before Mr.
Stonebridge as a man still on the right side of sixty, who certainly
bore traces on his prematurely wrinkled face and in his tired,
lustreless eyes of a life spent in dissipation rather than in work,
but otherwise he bore himself well, was well-dressed and appeared
plentifully supplied with money.
"The story that he told Mr. Stonebridge through the intermediary of
his friend, Julian Lloyd, was a very curious one. According to his
version of various transactions which took place between himself and
the late Sir Alfred Carysfort, the latter had, some time after the
signing of the original contract, made him a definite promise in
writing, that should the proceeds in the business of the Shap
Fuelettes exceed £10,000 in any one year, he, Sir Alfred, would pay
the original inventor, out of his own pocket, a sum equivalent to
twenty per cent. of all such profits over and above the £10,000, with
a minimum of £200.
"Mr. Shap had brought over with him all the correspondence relating
to this promise, and, moreover, he adduced as proof positive that Sir
Alfred had looked on that promise as binding, and had at first
loyally abided by it, the fact that until 1916 he had paid to Mr.
Felix Shap the sum of £200 every year. These sums had been paid
half-yearly through Sir Alfred's bankers, and acknowledgments were
duly sent by Shap direct to the bank, all of which could of course be
easily verified. But in the year 1916 these payments suddenly
ceased. Mr. Shap wrote repeatedly to Sir Alfred, but never received
any reply. At first he thought that there were certain difficulties
in the way owing to the European War, so after a while he ceased
writing. But presently there came the Armistice. Mr. Shap wrote
again and again, but was again met by the same obstinate silence.
"In the meanwhile he had come to the end of his resources; he had
spent all that he had ever saved, but, nevertheless, he was
determined that as soon as he could scrape up a sufficiency of money
he would go to England in order to establish his rights. Then in
1922 he heard of Sir Alfred Carysfort's death. It was now or never
if he did not mean to acquiesce silently in the terrible wrong which
was being put upon him. Fortunately he had a good friend in Mr.
Julian Lloyd, who had helped him with money and advice, and at last
he had arrived in England. It was for Mr. Stonebridge to say whether
the papers and correspondence which he had brought with him were
sufficient to establish his claim in law. Mr. Medburn remembered Mr.
Stonebridge telling him all about these matters and emphasising the
fact that Felix Shap had undoubtedly a very strong case and that he
could not understand a man of the position of Sir Alfred Carysfort
thus wilfully repudiating his own signature.
"'There is not only the original letter,' Mr. Stonebridge had
concluded, 'making a definite promise to pay certain sums out of his
own pocket if the profits of the company exceeded ten thousand pounds
in any one year, but there are all the covering letters from Sir
Alfred's bankers whenever they sent cheques on his behalf to
Shap--usually twice a year for sums that varied between one hundred
and one hundred and fifty pounds. I cannot understand it!' he had
reiterated more than once, and Mr. Medburn, who also had a great deal
of respect for the Carysforts, who were among the wealthiest people
in the county, was equally at a loss to understand the position.
"However Mr. Stonebridge, after he had seen the late Sir Alfred's
bankers about the payments to Shap, and consulted an expert on the
subject of the all-important letter signed by Alfred Carysfort,
sought an interview with Sir David. From the first there seemed to
be an extraordinary amount of acrimony brought into the dispute by
both sides; this was understandable enough on the part of Felix Shap,
who felt he was being defrauded of his just dues by men who were
literally coining money out of the product of his brain; but the
greatest bitterness really appeared to come from the other side.
"At first Sir David Carysfort refused even to discuss the question;
he was quite sure that if his father had made promises of payments to
any one, he was the last man in the world to repudiate such
obligations. Sir David had not yet had time to go through all his
father's papers, but he was quite convinced that correspondence, or
documents, would presently be found, which would set at nought the
original letter produced by Mr. Shap. But, of course, the payments
to Shap up to and including the year 1916 could not be denied; there
was the testimony of Sir Alfred's bankers that sums in accordance
with Sir Alfred's instructions, varying between one hundred and one
hundred and fifty pounds, were paid by cheque every half year to the
order of Felix Shap in Batavia. In 1916 these payments automatically
ceased, Sir Alfred giving no further orders for these to be made.
Mr. Stonebridge naturally desired to know what explanation Sir David
would give about those payments.
"At first Sir David denied all knowledge as to the reason or object
of the payments, but after a while he must have realised that public
opinion was beginning to raise its voice on the subject, and that it
was not exactly singing the praises of Sir David Carysfort, Bart.
"Although Mr. Stonebridge had, of course, been discretion itself, Mr.
Shap had admittedly not the same incentive to silence, and what's
more his friend, Mr. Lloyd, made it his business to get as much
publicity for the whole affair as he could. Paragraphs in the local
papers had begun to appear with unabated regularity, and though there
were no actual comments on the case as a whole, no prejudging of
respective merits, there were unmistakable hints that it would be in
Sir David's interest to put dignity on one side and come out frankly
into the open with explanations and suggestions. Soon the London
papers got hold of the story, and you know what that means. The
Radical Press simply battened on a story which placed a poor,
down-at-heel inventor in the light of a victim to the insatiable
greed and frank dishonesty of a high-born profiteer.
"Whether it was pressure from outside, or from his own family, that
suddenly induced Sir David to 'come out into the open' is not
generally known; certain it is that presently he condescended to give
an explanation of the mysterious half-yearly payments made by his
father to Felix Shap, and the explanation was so romantic and frankly
so far-fetched that most people, especially men, refused to accept
it--notably Mr. Stonebridge. It was not the business of a lawyer to
listen to sentimental stories, least of all was it the business of
the lawyer acting on the other side.
"The story told by Sir David, namely, was this:
"The late Sir Alfred, when quite a young man, had gone out as clerk
to that same engineering firm in Batavia, whom he represented later
on; it was then that he first met Felix Shap, who had not yet begun
to go downhill. An intimacy sprang up between Alfred Carysfort and
Shap's sister, Berta, and the two were secretly married in Batavia.
A year later Berta had a son whose birth she only survived by a few
hours. The marriage had been an unhappy one from the first, and
Carysfort was only too thankful when his firm called him back to
England and he was able to shake off the dust of Batavia from his
feet, as he hoped for ever. He never spoke of his marriage, nor did
he ever recognise or have anything to do with his son. By some
pecuniary arrangement entered into with Felix Shap the latter
undertook to provide for and look after the boy, to give him his own
name, and never to trouble his brother-in-law about him again. A
deed-poll was, Sir David believed, duly executed, and the boy assumed
the name of Alfred Shap.