Case with No Conclusion (10 page)

“So you didn't know till next morning that he hadn't been in all night?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I didn't know until the police rang up and told me. We haven't shared a room for ages,” she added.

“Oh, I see. Has your husband ever had anything to do with the police before?” he asked in tones of some suspicion.

“Only when we had a burglary a couple of years ago,” said Sheila Benson in a rather bored voice.
“That was a silly affair which came through his not locking the surgery window properly. They didn't get into the house, though, so there was nothing to claim from the insurance. But…”

Beef interrupted her. “You know I meant anything on the
wrong
side of the police,” he put in tersely.

“Oh, I see what you mean. Well, nothing that I know of—though I'd never be surprised with my late husband.”

Beef nodded. “No more shouldn't I,” he agreed. “Well, I think that's all the information I'll ask you for at present,” and he stood up.

“Would you like to see my garden before you go?” asked Sheila Benson sweetly.

“I think that's a pleasure I'll postpone,” said Beef grandly. “In the circumstances I must return to my duties,” and he picked up his hat to leave the house.

T
HAT
evening, when I had driven Beef back to Lilac Crescent, I dined alone and decided to spend an hour in my own study working on the case. After all, I argued to myself, if Beef could find a solution, there was no reason why I shouldn't. I had as much experience as he had of murder mysteries, and, I flattered myself, rather more intelligence.

I decided to make a list of the points first, and then of people, and see what sort of sense emerged from them. We had discovered a great deal in our investigations which, so far as we knew, the police knew nothing about. And it was out of this material that a solution must come if Stewart were not guilty. So I wrote:

1.
Omar Khayyám,

Beef had taken tremendous interest in this book, and he at least felt, I guessed, that it had some bearing on the case. It was surely not a coincidence that it had been given to Stewart on the night of the murder. While a reading from it as entertainment for bachelor guests at the dinner was sufficiently extraordinary to make one wonder if it had not been used as some form of communication. Could it be possible, as Beef had suggested, that
the “surly Tapster” referred to Wilkinson, the ex-gardener publican? The verse had gone on to talk of his visage being smeared by the smoke of Hell. Did this mean that somebody had suggested that he was a villain? And when in the last line, the poem said “He's a Good Fellow, and 'twill all be well,” did this mean that the supposition was mistaken, or that he had been bribed or persuaded into something which would save somebody's plans from interference by him? It was a little fantastic perhaps, but not altogether impossible.

2.
Bloodstains.

Once before, I remembered, Beef had solved a murder mystery purely by noting the nature and position of bloodstains. He had kept very quiet this time about that mysterious extra bloodstain on the cushion. The knife, as it lay on the library table, was stained with blood, yet it had apparently been wiped on the cushion cover. What could this mean? Had the murderer plunged it into Benson's neck, withdrawn it, wiped it, and then inserted it again? It was a gruesome thought and seemed to lead nowhere. Yet, as Beef had often remarked, everything means something, and you couldn't ignore a point like that.

3.
Poison.

What had Beef meant by sniffing at the whisky and then suggesting that there had been arsenic in it? It seemed ludicrous to me that when a man had been stabbed to death, one should begin to talk about poison. Yet if that whisky had been doped there must be some explanation for it.

4.
Sheila-Stewart rumour.

This was everywhere, yet so far we had found no confirmation of it. Everyone had bracketed the names of Sheila Benson and Stewart Ferrers, but no one whom
we had questioned had actually seen them together. And when the murder had been mentioned to Sheila, she had calmly said it was Peter she loved, not Stewart. Was she lying now, or had the rumour lied? She had struck me as a flagrant and vulgar person, but not, I somehow felt, a liar. Could a rumour like this have gone through the whole district without some real foundation?

5.
The receipt.

This was a most extraordinary document. Stute's explanation of it as a piece of nonsense so worded that it might be signed by a tipsy or a careless man in the belief that it was a receipt for £500 whereas it really represented the last words written by a man about to commit suicide, was a feasible one. But the wording was extremely odd. I looked along my reference shelf for some book which would tell me about the Saint mentioned in it, and finding the thick volume of Lippincott's
Dictionary of Biography,
I turned up “Ferrer” and found this entry:

“Ferrer (Vincenzo), in Latin, Vicentius Ferrerius, known as St. Vincent Ferrer, a Spanish Dominican, born at Valencia, January 23, 1357. He published a
Tractatus de Moderno Ecclesiae Schismate,
and was famous throughout Christendom for his miracles, his preaching, and his success in converting Jews and Saracens. Died at Vannes, in France, April 5, 1419.”

Was I not reasonable in supposing that the name of a fourteenth-century Spanish Dominican, who had afterwards been canonized, had only been dragged into this because of its similarity to that of the two brothers? Or could the Saint have some actual influence in the matter? At all events there was a flimsy aspect of the police's explanation. If Stewart meant to stab the doctor, it was very hard to see how he was going to make anyone
think that Benson had committed suicide. A doctor of all people would be the last to kill himself by that difficult and chancy means.

6. Pre-selection gears.

Was Stute right in attaching quite the importance he did to these simple inquiries from Stewart to Ed Wilson? It is true that the doctor's car had them, and that anybody who intended to drive such a car for the first time might well make a few inquiries about their working. But then so had hundreds of other cars pre-selection gears, and for all we knew Stewart might have thought of buying one. It was only as the words of a guilty man that his inquiries had any significance at all.

7.
The quarrel.

The truth about this we should never know since Duncan had committed suicide, but it remained a significant, and a very important matter. Duncan had gathered that their quarrel was to do with Sheila, and yet Sheila herself had blandly stated that this was impossible as Benson was indifferent to her infidelities except as a possible means of freeing himself from the ties of married life. In any case, if she was to be believed, there had been no grounds for such a ruarrel since her love-affair had been with Peter and not with Stewart. Over what then had they quarrelled that evening? Was it true that Benson was blackmailing Stewart? If so, on what grounds? What could he know about this quiet, church-going man, who seemed to be respected, if not particularly liked, in the district? Perhaps we should know something of that when we came to interview Stewart, but at present that quarrel seemed a misfit. As for the other sentence Duncan had heard, “It's in my surgery now,” this might mean anything or nothing. It might be a casual reference to something Benson had borrowed
from Stewart, it might be one of a hundred trivial details. On the other hand it might possibly refer to some evidence of something through which he was obtaining money from the elder brother.

8.
Money.

I always looked for money considerations in such crimes as these, and there were several here. First of all there were the four sums of £500 each which had been drawn by Stewart in £1 notes from his bank since he had inherited his fortune. Large sums in small notes always suggested blackmail. And one of these had been found in a brown-paper parcel in Stewart's dressing-table upstairs. It was, of course, possible to admit the police theory that these had been drawn for, and possibly paid to, Benson, and recovered from his body after the murder. But apart from the inadvisability of admitting any police theories, I had serious doubt on this score. Then also on the subject of money there had been the visitor to Stewart in his father's time; Mr. Orpen, alias Oppenstein, who had turned out to be a money-lender. How, if at all, did he come into the case? Could there be any connection between him and St. Vincent Ferrer, who was famous for his conversion of Jews?

9.
The dagger.

This was, perhaps, the most puzzling clue of all. Why had it been returned to the table when it might well have been left in Benson's throat? Was one to admit Stute's suggestion that it had been placed there by force of habit by Stewart, who was its chief user? It had his finger-prints on it, and yet it had been cleaned by Rose after Stewart had left the house that day, and he had not returned to the library till he had gone there with his guests after dinner. It was, of course, the most damning piece of evidence that Stute had.

10.
Figures in the drive.

The girl Freda's evidence of having seen these two men was the most sensational, and probably the most significant, clue on which we had stumbled. Her story tallied with that of the young mechanic, and it was fairly safe to assume that the first man, the one with the bicycle, the one who had twice rung the front-door bell, was the mechanic himself. But what about that second man whose presence had so startled the first, and who had waited until the cyclist's disappearance before he had quietly crept away? Was he the murderer? That seemed a most important point on which we had still to decide.

11.
Front-door keys.

So far as our information went, the only people with keys were Stewart, Duncan, Mrs. Duncan, Ed Wilson, Rose, and Freda. Now, since the house had been carefully locked up and no one had broken in, the murderer had to be one of the three following: (a) one of those with a key, mentioned above, (b) someone who secretly had a key and had not ever used it to the knowledge of those we had cross-examined, and (c) someone who had remained hidden in the house while Duncan had locked up. I noted down this point, but I realized that it still left the net a wide one.

12.
The “Passing Moment.
”

Peter and Wakefield had badly wanted money for this, and Wakefield at least had seemed to me a man who would stop at nothing in attaining his means. Had they done more than ask Stewart for the money and resign themselves to his emphatic refusal?

This was all the evidence that I knew of which
had come to light, and I proceeded to consider the people so far involved in the case.

When I began to consider these I was faced by one very obvious difficulty. It was to divide them into those who might possibly have committed the murder, and those who couldn't have done so. In all the cases with which I had been connected this had been the first measure in finding suspects. What made it difficult now is that really only one of these people seemed to have any motive at all—and that was Stewart. With an absence of motive to guide one, one could go on listing possible murderers among people known and unknown,
ad infinitum.
One could start with the probables, those in and out of the house, and continue down to the individuals like the policeman who had been on duty that night, and further, to that half of the people in London who could not account for their movements at the time of Benson's murder.

So, instead of attempting to make a list of suspects, I decided to put down on paper the names of those who seemed to have some direct connection with the matter, and consider what we knew of them. This was my list:

1.
Stewart Ferrers.
We had not yet interviewed him, of course, though I understood that Peter was arranging with his solicitor for Beef to see him. (There seemed to me, by the way, something almost superstitious in Peter's faith in Beef. Only superstition could account for the trouble he was taking to give Beef every facility.)
But in the meantime, the personality of Stewart, so far as it had been revealed, was not very attractive. We had been taught to imagine him as a stern, uncharitable, religious man, keeping his own counsel, and his own bank balance. He had certainly been drawing these curious sums of money, and there seemed a good chance of his having been blackmailed. The actual circumstances of the crime as the police knew them were strongly against him, and it would need some startling work on Beefs part to exonerate him.

2.
Peter Ferrers.
He was a strong possibility, I had felt from the beginning, as a murderer. We hadn't yet investigated his alibi, but so far as we knew there was no reason why he shouldn't have kept a key of the house, dropped Wakefield that evening, gone to his flat and established his presence there, crept out by some back way, murdered Benson, returned in the small hours, and received Duncan's telephone call as if nothing had happened. On the other hand I liked Peter and found in him that rare quality in any modern—sincerity. Beef liked him too, and Beefs instincts were apt to lead him well.

3.
Wakefield.
In character, the nearest thing I could recognize as a potential murderer, at any rate among those I had met in the case, but again with no known motive.

4.
Duncan.
Duncan had hanged himself, but I was induced to take the police view that he had done this rather than reveal all he knew, and not because he was ashamed of some act of his. I couldn't see Duncan jabbing at Benson with that knife in any case. And if he had committed the murder, how was it that Stewart had, apparently, shown Benson out of the front door himself?

5.
Mrs. Duncan.
Well, if ever a woman were capable physically of committing a murder, this one looked as though she were. But what conceivable motive could she
have? And why should she be suspected rather than anyone who had passed the Cypresses at any time on foot? It was true she was one of those in the house, and the only one of them (except Stewart of course) who looked powerful enough to have done it. But that was all that one could say.