The Dartmoor Enigma (3 page)

“You see, Mr. Carstairs, that the letters were written by the same hand and that the writer tried to disguise his handwriting by tilting the characters backward in the letter to the Commissioner. But the misspelling is the same in each.”

The Superintendent nodded.

“Then, if you look at the postmarks you can see that they were posted in places a good many miles apart. The writer, therefore, must have been in possession of a car or motor-lorry.”

Superintendent Carstairs acquiesced and handed back the photographs, glad to be rid of them. “Now, Mr. Richardson, you must be tired after your journey. I've found quarters for you and your sergeant at the local hotel—the Duchy Arms. If you will come round here at nine-thirty to-morrow morning I will introduce you to Mrs. Dearborn.”

O
CTOBER 11
was one of those rarely warm and beautiful days that seem to be sent to leave dwellers on the moor with a memory of the dead summer when the pall of mist and rain is due to descend upon them.

At half-past nine the Superintendent looked in to say that it was not too early to take Richardson over to Mrs. Dearborn. “I telephoned to her this morning, telling her to expect you, so you will find her prepared. Dr. Fraser will be at the house for the medical examination of the body at half-past eleven. Probably you will want to see him.”

“What about Sergeant Jago, Mr. Carstairs? Will the lady be prepared to receive two of us?”

“If you take my advice, Chief Inspector, you will see her alone. She isn't an excitable person, but I fancy that she will be more communicative if you are by yourself. While you are talking to her, Sergeant Jago might be looking over the car, which is in the private garage at The Firs.”

Mrs. Dearborn opened the door to them in person. She was a thin, worn woman, who looked older than her age; there was an air of faded gentility about her. She was dressed in black. “This is the gentleman of whom I spoke to you on the telephone,” said Carstairs. “Chief Inspector Richardson of Scotland Yard.”

Richardson shook hands with her and noticed that her fingers were rough like those of one accustomed to domestic work.

“Will you come into the sitting-room, Mr. Richardson?” she said; “we shall be quite quiet there. And you, Mr. Carstairs?”

“No, I've my work to do. But I hope you will tell Mr. Richardson everything you know and keep nothing back. While he is here I should like his assistant to have a look at the car in the garage. May I have the key please?”

She took a key from a hook in the hall and gave it to him. “No one has touched the car since it was brought in.”

After a sympathetic reference to her loss, Richardson began his questioning. “I think I ought to ask you first, how long you have been married to Mr. Dearborn?”

“We were married in Plymouth a year ago, but I had been keeping house for him for two years before that. You see, when my father died, his pension died with him and I was left very badly off. I saw an advertisement in a Plymouth newspaper, for a housekeeper, and I answered it. Mr. Dearborn invited me to an interview and that was how I first met him.”

“Until you answered that advertisement you knew nothing of your husband?”

“No; I had never heard of him in my life.”

“Had he been living long in Winterton?”

“No, he told me he had only just bought this house.”

“Did he say who the house agent was who sold it to him?”

“No.”

“Nor from what part of the country he came? Because I gather that he was not a Plymouth man.”

“No. It may seem strange to you, but he told me nothing of his past life and I asked him no questions, because I thought that he would tell me of his own accord if he wanted to.”

“So you never knew anything about his former profession?”

“No, nothing.”

“Nor about his friends and relations?”

“No; he told me he had no near relations, and apart from business letters from tradesmen, he received no correspondence by post.”

“What was his age?”

“There I can answer you. At the time of our marriage he gave it as thirty-eight.”

“He had a bank in Plymouth, I suppose?”

“Yes. It was the Union Bank—because when he showed me his will, I saw that the manager of the Union Bank was his sole executor and he explained that he had left everything he possessed to me.”

“What did he do with his time?”

“Well, he was a great newspaper reader, and that took up the greater part of his mornings. Lately he has had the quarry to visit, but before he bought that he used to take long walks.”

“By himself?”

“Yes, always by himself. When he first came people used to call on him, but he never returned their visits nor answered their invitations to tennis-parties and the like, so I suppose they grew tired of asking him.”

“And they haven't renewed their invitations since your marriage?”

“No, but I have always plenty to occupy me at home, looking after the house and garden.”

“You have a maidservant?”

“Yes, a Devonshire girl who has been with us ever since I came to the house.”

“Have you a gardener?”

She smiled. “You are talking to the gardener at this moment. Sometimes I have to get in a jobbing gardener to do the digging, but otherwise I look after the garden myself.”

“How long has your husband had a car?”

“He bought it about six months ago. It was like a new toy to him. Two or three times a week, except in very bad weather, he would go for long drives over the moor. I suppose he wasn't a very experienced driver and that that was the cause of the accident.”

“He was conscious between the time of his accident and his death a week later?”

“Oh, yes; certainly on the first two days after the accident.”

“And he never told you how it happened?”

“Yes; he said that his foot-brake didn't work, but my impression was that he had his foot on the wrong lever and mistook the accelerator for the brake.”

“Did he speak of having met anyone shortly before the mishap?”

“No. As I told you, he did not know any of his neighbours.”

“So it comes to this—that neither you nor he were on speaking terms with anyone in Winterton?”

“He was not, but I have one friend in the place—a young naval officer, Lieutenant Cosway, whose parents live in the second house from this, in that direction”—she pointed towards Plymouth. “You see, I have a Siamese kitten. One day Mr. Cosway was passing with his dog and it chased my kitten up a tree. He called off the dog and apologized, but the kitten was afraid to come down and so he took off his coat and climbed the tree. I got frightened because the higher he climbed the higher went the kitten, and I was afraid that the tree, which was bending with his weight, would break and both of them would be killed. However, he rescued the little beast and brought it down in his arms.

“Since then he has been in to look at my garden once or twice. You see, he has a dockyard appointment at Devonport and often comes up to Winterton to see his family.”

“Did he never make your husband's acquaintance?”

“No, my husband always happened to be out when he came.”

“Then if your husband had no friends in Winterton, at any rate he had no enemies?”

She appeared startled. “Enemies? Why do you ask that?”

Up to this point her manner had been so colourless and her replies so composed that Richardson had scarcely realized that he was dealing with a woman of flesh and blood. She left him in no doubt on that point now.

“The questions you have been asking me are surely very unusual. Do you always cross-examine people on their private lives like this in the case of an accident? I think that I am entitled to some explanation.”

“You are quite right, Mrs. Dearborn. I ought to have explained sooner why I have been asking these questions. Someone has been writing anonymous letters to the police, suggesting that your husband's death was due, not to the motor accident alone, but to an attack made upon him by someone on the road, and in order to clear this up there is to be another medical examination this morning.”

“But this is ridiculous. My husband was fully conscious after his accident, and I am sure he would have told me if he had been attacked.”

“Well, we can only wait for the result of the medical examination, and until that is made there is nothing for you to worry about. You see, Mrs. Dearborn, anonymous letters in most cases turn out to be malicious and ill-informed, but it is unwise entirely to ignore them as I think you will agree.”

“I quite see that, and now that I know the reason for your questions I will answer them all to the best of my ability. The only point on which I can give you but little help is on my husband's affairs, because he never took me into his confidence.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Dearborn. I won't worry you with any more questions now.”

Richardson went round to the garage where he found Sergeant Jago with evidence on his clothes and hands of having made an exhaustive survey of the car. Before joining the Metropolitan Police Jago had worked in a Tavistock garage and the experience had been useful to him; indeed there had been a time when the Public Carriage Department at Scotland Yard had competed with the C.I.D. for his services.

“Well, young man,” said Richardson, “what discoveries have you made?”

“The engine's all right, but the steering-gear is badly messed up. There's nothing whatever wrong with the brakes; they couldn't have contributed to the accident, but there's one funny thing. These cars are always furnished with a starting-handle in case the batteries run down, and there's not one in the car or anywhere in the garage. The speedometer marks a run of sixteen miles, which would mean that the car had been about as far as Moorstead on the day of the accident.”

“I should like to take advantage of this fine day by running out to the scene of the accident. You had better come with me and we'll get the Superintendent to give us the man who found that broken walking-stick. Come along with me to the police station.”

They found Superintendent Carstairs in his little office. “Certainly you can have the car, and as it happens the man who will drive you is the very man who found the broken stick.” He rang a bell and the car was brought round.

“My God! What a road!” exclaimed Richardson, as they negotiated the hill leading up from Sandiland. “It's like the side of a house.” But the car took the hill on her second speed, and before they came to the top she pulled up well to the side of the track. The driver jumped down.

“This is where we found the car, sir. It had turned nearly over. You can see the wheel marks there in that broken heather.”

“And where did you find the broken stick?”

“If you'll come up the hill a little way, sir, I'll show you. It was me that found it.”

He led the way up in the direction of Duketon and stopped at a point where the hill was a little less steep. The heather was particularly tall and dense at this point.

“I marked the place with three little stones, sir. Here they are, and there's the place where the broken stick was lying.”

Richardson cast an eye round. The surface of the road was rough at this point; the traffic to and from Duketon and the downpours of rain had washed gutters in the surface.

“It's almost useless to attempt to keep a tarred road in good order with all the summer traffic of char-à-bancs and lorries. The rain comes down here like a water-course.”

“What I want to look for,” said Richardson, “is the other half of the broken stick and the starting-handle of the Austin Seven. They must both be somewhere about.”

The three men began to quarter the ground systematically, beginning on the near side of the road. Richardson was the first to exclaim. He stooped and held up a starting-handle already coated with rust but not pitted with it. Sergeant Jago came over to him and identified his find as belonging to an Austin Seven. It was now the turn of the driver. “Here we are,” he cried, “if this isn't the other half of the stick I'm a Dutchman.”

“It certainly looks like the same wood,” said Richardson; “but we'll have to fit the two pieces together before we can be sure. What's your theory about what happened?” he asked the driver, with the ghost of a smile playing about his mouth.

“The way I figure it out is this, sir. Mr. Dearborn wasn't an experienced driver. He let his engine stop, and then, not liking to go down the hill without it, he got out with the starting-handle to swing the engine. While he was stooping to fit it in a man came up behind him and whacked him over the head with that stick.”

“What was the motive?”

“Highway robbery, sir. There's quite a lot of quarrymen out of work in the autumn, and it was a temptation to one of them to knock the gentleman down and go through his pockets. Then he threw away the broken stick and starting-handle into the heather and got away with his find. You see, it's a very lonely road.” “But why did Dearborn not tell the police as soon as the doctor had driven him down to Winterton?”

“Loss of memory, sir. After a whack on the head like that, a man remembers nothing of what's just happened to him. It's true that he managed to start the car again and to drive on, but a man in that state in a car was asking for trouble. And then all he would remember afterwards would be the accident.”

“I see,” said Richardson dryly. “What's your theory, Sergeant Jago?”

Jago knew his chief in this mood and was not disposed to commit himself. “I would rather wait until we've gone further into the case before expressing an opinion,” he said.

“Wise man; you'll go far in your profession,” observed Richardson. He did not commit himself, either, to any theory of his own. He turned to the driver. “You'll have a job to turn your car in this narrow road. What's wrong with running on into Duketon and letting me have a look at the village?”