Was It Murder? (26 page)

Revell made no comment, and Guthrie proceeded:  “Well, now we pass to the actual murder, and I expect you’re thinking it’s about time we did.  Mrs. Ellington, after you’d gone back, soon regained her lost courage and began to plan her ‘murder by accident’.  She must have made her detailed plans very quickly and almost at the last minute.  She knew that Wilbraham was a swimmer and very often went to the baths on the warm evenings.  On the particular day decided upon she contrived, by an apparently casual suggestion to her husband, to have the bath suddenly emptied.  (She frankly admitted her responsibility for this, which was a distinctly clever touch.) Then, soon after ten in the evening, when the boy came down to the baths all ready for a swim, she met him, seemingly by accident, and entered with him on some pretext or other.  That wouldn’t be difficult—they were cousins, remember, and on fairly intimate terms.  It wasn’t more than half-dark, and when they got into the main building a surprise awaited them—the bath was empty.  And I’ll warrant you she acted that surprise jolly well.”

Guthrie’s voice had become a little husky; he poured himself out the remains of the now cold coffee and drank it.  Then he went on:

“Most of this I’m glad to say I deduced.  Afterwards, however, I wasn’t so lucky.  My notion was that she’d suddenly shot the boy while the two of them were standing on the edge of the bath, and had then bashed his head about to disguise the bullet-wound.  A pretty awful thing for a woman to do, when you come to think about it, and I’m not really surprised that Mrs. Ellington decided on something much more artistic.  She wanted the boy’s head to be bashed in completely, and she came to the really brilliant conclusion that the best way to achieve this would be to make him actually fall from that top diving-platform.  She did it (I’ve only her word for it, of course, but it sounds quite credible) by larking about with him for a time and then challenging him for a race up to the top.  There are two ladders, you know, approaching the platform from either side, so conditions were quite good for a race.  The two reached the top, and there, in the gathering twilight, she whipped out her revolver and shot him so that he fell head foremost on to the tiled floor sixty feet below.  There was no need to bash his head in.”

Revell shuddered involuntarily.  “She had nerve,” he muttered.

“Up to a point, yes, but beyond that—however, I shall come to that later on.  She had nerve enough to go to the fuse-box and cut the fuses, and to unstrap the boy’s wrist-watch (it hadn’t been injured in the fall) and climb back with it to the top diving-platform.  Oh, and you remember the note you wrote me about the dressing-gown?  You thought it might have led to a clue, but I’m afraid I’d given it my fullest attention long before, and there was no clue in it at all.  The dressing-gown and slippers found by the side of the bath next morning were simply the boy’s ordinary dressing-gown and slippers, and no amount of perseverance could deduce anything else from ‘em.  The beauty of it was, you see, that before going up the ladder to the platform, the boy took off his dressing-gown—it’s an awkward garment to be wearing in a climbing-race.  And, of course, that suited the lady admirably, though I wouldn’t say she absolutely foresaw it.  Probably she had some alternative plan if circumstances had arisen differently.  Anyhow, as it was, there were only the boy’s slippers to be removed after the murder, and they hadn’t any blood on them.

“I’d better clear up one other small point while I’m about it.  I daresay it may have struck you as rather remarkable that nobody heard the shot.  One reason, of course, was the fact that the swimming-baths are a fair distance away from the other School buildings.  But the chief reason, I think, was that everyone assumed that the affair had happened so much later than it did.  You, for instance, went about asking people, if they had heard anything during the night—they hadn’t, of course.  But when I asked them what they had heard during the evening I got quite a lot of interesting answers.  Several people, for example, thought they had heard something between ten and eleven o’clock, but there’d been so many noises of all kinds during the day that they hadn’t taken much notice.  Mrs. Ellington had chosen her time well.  Even at Oakington most people are awake at ten-thirty on a midsummer evening, and, though it may seem a paradox, there is always less chance of a noise being noticed when most people are awake than when they are asleep.  That night, also, as it happened, workmen had been busy until dusk knocking platforms and grandstands together in readiness for the Oakington Jubilee celebrations, so there was an additional reason for a noise passing unnoticed.  I’m not denying that she took a risk, of course.  But then, all murderers must do that.

“Now,” he continued, after a short pause, “we can turn to what happened immediately after the murder.  Mrs. Ellington, of course, went home and to bed.  And here comes another factor in the situation.  Ellington was a very jealous man, and suspected his wife with Lambourne.  That night—the night of the murder, that is— he fancied she had been to visit him.  He didn’t tax her with it— that wasn’t his way—but he brooded and went out to walk his feelings off a little.  Meanwhile Lambourne, thinking to have a swim, had gone down to the baths and had found the body there.  I don’t doubt that it was a fearful shock to him and that he really did do exactly what he said he did.  His story, improbable enough in itself, has a certain ring of possibility in it when you think of the man who told it.  He suspected murder instantly, but whereas other men would have raised an alarm and declared their suspicions, Lambourne’s less-straightforward brain accepted the challenge, as it were, and set about to trump the other fellow’s card.  Believing that Ellington had bashed the boy’s head in and taken away the weapon, he fabricated, just as he confessed, the evidence of the cricket-bat.  Then he took his stroll and met Ellington.  It must have been a dashed queer meeting—Lambourne thinking Ellington had just committed murder, and Ellington thinking Lambourne had just been carrying on with his wife. . . .”

He smiled slightly and continued:  “I think you know how
I
came into it all.  Somebody sent Colonel Graham, the boy’s guardian, an anonymous letter, which he brought to us along with newspaper cuttings of the two inquests.  He had suspicions, rather naturally, and I went off to Oakington by the next train to see what I could find out at firsthand.

“You mustn’t imagine that Graham’s misgivings were taken at their face value.  Coincidences do happen, often enough—in fact, they’re far less unusual than the murder of two boys by a schoolmaster.  Until I found independent evidence of some kind, there was really no case against anybody.  To begin with, I spent a few days scouting round the place as a perfect stranger.  The first thing to do, if possible, was to interview the writer of the anonymous letter, but it had been typewritten and had a London postmark, so THAT wasn’t a very promising line of investigation.  I don’t know now who wrote it, but I strongly suspect Lambourne. . . .  You see, then, my difficulty when I arrived at Oakington.  I had nothing at all to go on but the coincidence of the two apparent accidents and an anonymous letter that might or might not be some malicious hoax.  All the usual clues that one looks for after a murder had been cleared away beyond hope of discovery.  It was really enough to make any detective hold up his hands in despair.  Then, just in the nick of time, came the finding of the cricket-bat.

“By then, as you know, there were all sorts of rumours about the place, and it was pretty generally known that Scotland Yard was on the job.  Two of my men, plain-clothes chaps, of course, found the bat during a casual stroll about the grounds.  They weren’t looking for anything—they just tumbled across it.  It struck me at the time that the thing must have been very badly hidden, and why, after all, should it have been hidden at all and not destroyed?  Still, it was evidence, and it enabled us to get a Home Office order for the exhumation of the body, and that, of course, led to the discovery of something that was a complete surprise to us—the bullet in the boy’s brain.

“All this must have startled Mrs. Ellington pretty considerably, for her detailed plans to have her husband suspected had been on rather different lines.  You see now, perhaps, why I was so secretive about what it was that my men had discovered?  Mrs.  Ellington knew it couldn’t have been the revolver, for she had hidden that carefully.  She didn’t know, of course, anything about Lambourne’s faked cricket-bat clue.  All she did know was that SOMETHING had been discovered, SOMEWHERE, and SOMEHOW, and she must have spent awful moments wondering whether she had dropped a handkerchief or a spot of face-powder or some other incriminating trace in the swimming-bath.  It’s not a bad plan to give people these awful moments, and it certainly worked with Mrs. Ellington.  You said just now that she had nerve, and I agreed that she had, but only up to a point.  That’s the whole truth of the matter, and I’m rather proud that, having noticed it, I made use of it all along.

“Not, of course, that I suspected her at first.  On the contrary, there was a fairly strong case against Ellington himself—the cricket-bat clue, the missing revolver clue, his obvious motive—oh yes, I daresay we might have got a conviction.  Only, to me, at any rate, the case seemed too strong—as well as in some ways too weak.  We had found the cricket-bat a little too easily.  The missing revolver had been confessed to by Ellington himself.  The motive— well, it was obvious enough, but wasn’t it, in a sort of way, TOO obvious?  All this may sound rather vague, but then it WAS only a vague feeling, at the time.  I’m quite certain that if Mrs.  Ellington’s plans hadn’t gone astray we should have been provided with some much more convincing clues to implicate her husband— clues that were neither too far-fetched nor too obvious.  She was clever enough to get inside the skin of a detective, as it were, and see things with just his critical mind.  She was much cleverer than Lambourne—she would never have left such a schoolboyish signpost as a blood-stained cricket-bat lying under a bush.  As for what she WOULD have left us, if she had had a chance, I can’t tell you.  But I’ll wager it would have pointed to her husband in some subtle and rather indirect way.

“For days, as a matter of fact, I felt like arresting Ellington—on suspicion, at any rate.  And yet, in a way, I never felt any enthusiasm about it—subconsciously, even then, I must have known he wasn’t guilty.”

Guthrie smiled.  “We detectives deal in evidence, of course, not in subconscious intuitions.  Anyhow, before long, the case against Ellington was decidedly weakened by Brownley’s statement that on the fatal night he had seen Lambourne walking towards the Ring with a cricket-bat.  I had already, in a way, been rather favourably impressed by Ellington.  I didn’t like him, and I don’t like him, but I didn’t think he was the ‘killer’ type, and I certainly doubted his ability to plan anything very astute.  So, you see, my suspicions veered a little towards Lambourne.  It wasn’t easy to think of a motive in his case, but then he was such a queer person that he might well have had a queer enough reason.  I did, I admit, think for a time that he might have killed the boy to throw suspicion on Ellington.  And it was then that Mrs. Ellington got into her second panic.  (Her first, you remember, was when you first arrived at Roseveare’s summons.)

“I had questioned Lambourne pretty stiffly, and had got out of him the story of what he really did on the night of the murder.  I don’t know that I actually disbelieved him, but he evidently thought I did, and was sufficiently upset by it all.  What happened after that was in a way superbly logical.  He had one of his periodic nerve attacks, Mrs. Ellington ministered to him as on former occasions, and the next day he was found dead of an overdose of veronal.  Whereupon Mrs. Ellington volunteered the information that on the previous evening he had made a full confession of murder to her, and had promised to make the same over again to me in the morning.  All perfectly feasible and not really improbable, when you come to think about it.  Her story and her way of telling it were both admirably convincing.  It wasn’t legal evidence, of course, but it was moral evidence of a rather unshakable character.  There was really nothing for me to do after listening to it but to shrug my shoulders and shake the dust of Oakington from my feet for ever.  Which I did.  Or rather, to be more accurate, appeared to do.”

Revell leaned forward excitedly.  “You mean that you didn’t believe her?” he exclaimed.

“Believe her?  Not only did I not believe her, but by the time she had got to the end of her yarn I knew for certain that she had murdered the boy herself.”

“Good God!”

“Yes, I was certain of it.  And it was a single word that told me— a single word of two letters and one syllable—a word that we all use perhaps a hundred times a day.  I don’t suppose you’ll remember it—the really significant things in life are often the least memorable.  It was when she was describing how Lambourne had confessed.  She did it all so perfectly—except for just that one word.  She told how Lambourne and the boy had walked along by the side of the bath as far as the diving-platform, how Lambourne had waited till the boy was standing on the edge facing the empty bath with the platform just above him, and how Lambourne then had sprung back and shot up at the boy from behind.  Revell, when I heard her say that, I had to use all the self-control I possess—for it told me, as clearly as a vision from Heaven, that the woman had done it!”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow the argument.”

“No?  I’m not surprised—it was a thing I might easily have missed myself if I hadn’t been lucky.  Repeated at second-hand, as I did it just now, I don’t suppose it did exactly leap out at you.  But I assure you, Revell, it was convincing enough to me.  The little word ‘up’ was the one morsel of truth that the woman couldn’t help letting escape.”

“The word ‘up’?  How?  I don’t remember—“

“Not even now?  I’ll say it again then.  In recounting Lambourne’s confession, she told us that he had ‘shot up at the boy from behind’.  Now d’you get it?  Why on earth should she have used that word ‘up’?  Lambourne’s rather a tall fellow—he wouldn’t have needed to shoot up at all, for the boy was only of medium height.  But Mrs. Ellington herself was exceptionally little—hardly five feet, I should say—and for her it would have had to be a distinctly upward shot.  Unconsciously, while describing Lambourne’s supposed movements, she had had her own in mind, and that one little word, to anyone who noticed it, was as eloquent as a signed confession.”