Was It Murder? (27 page)

He paused and then went on:  “Of course you can laugh if you like and say that it was a preposterously vast conclusion to draw from a preposterously minute premise.  I quite agree, and I was fully aware of it at the time.  No one knew better than I did that it wouldn’t stand for a minute before a judge and jury.  To begin with, there was no one to swear that she had said it—and there were a hundred other ways in which a clever counsel could have ridiculed it to pieces.  I simply had to pack up and go, although I was perfectly sure that she had committed murder and had managed to palm it off on a poor devil of a suicide.

“And even that wasn’t quite so hellish as the real truth, as it happened.  Here, again, I depend on nothing but her own statement, but she told this part of it so proudly that it may well be true.  It’s frightful enough, in all conscience, for, according to her, Lambourne’s death was neither suicide nor accident, but murder.  And it was she who murdered him!”

Revell stared speechlessly.

“Yes.  And the way she managed it was perhaps the most astonishing part of the whole business.  She’d got into a panic, you see, with all the inquiries being made, and she had the idea that if someone only confessed everything would be all over.  So, knowing that Lambourne was hopelessly in love with her, she went to him and told him nothing less than the whole truth.  Yes, it wasn’t HE who confessed to HER, but SHE who confessed to HIM.  And at the end of it all, working upon his hysteria, she suggested a suicide-pact between them—that they should both make their exit together from a horrible world.  She played on Lambourne’s shattered nerves like a virtuoso, and in the end, no doubt by making love to him pretty daringly, she had her way.  Roseveare, as it happened, came along just then—just a sudden idea to see if Lambourne was asleep, that was all—he listened a few minutes outside the door, heard a bit of the love-making, and walked away in disgust.  I gather he had suspected Mrs. Ellington of that sort of thing before.”

“Did he tell you all this?”

“Yes—explained it fully after the inquest on Lambourne.  His one idea, of course, was and had been all along to avoid any more scandal to the School.”

“Yet he lied to you about that second visit of his to Lambourne’s room.”

“No, he didn’t.  It was the fault of my too-precise question.  I asked him when he last saw Lambourne, and he answered—quite truthfully—nine o’clock.  He didn’t see him after that, though he heard him talking.”

“It was pretty cool of him, though, to say nothing about it at the inquest.”

“No doubt.  But, as he told me, he couldn’t see how the purely private scandal of an affair between Lambourne and Mrs. Ellington could affect the matter.  Anyhow, as he frankly admitted, it was his aim to let the inquest go as smoothly as possible.”

Revell nodded.  “He’s a cool customer, though.  The curious thing is that two boys happened to see him as he paid that second visit to Lambourne’s room—they were playing chess in the Common Room.  They told me about it, and I naturally wondered what on earth the Head had been up to. . . .  But please go on—don’t let me interrupt the exposition.”

“There’s not a very great deal to go on to, now.  Of course Mrs.  Ellington didn’t keep her share of the compact.  Lambourne took his overdose, but she only pretended to take hers, and the result we all know.  But I do hold that it was a rather magnificent improvisation on a theme suggested by mere panic.”

“She was a marvellous woman,” said Revell slowly.

“In many ways, yes.  But for that one tiny slip I might never have suspected her.  Even then, if she had kept her head, I could have proved nothing.  She had me on toast, if she had only known.  She had YOU, too, but in a rather different way, and that’s why I didn’t make much of a confidant of you in the matter.  In fact, I was very glad for you to think that I’d really been taken in by it all.”

“Oh, you were, were you?”

But Guthrie did not immediately reply to the rather disgruntled remark.  He stared for some moments at his fingernails and then resumed:  “Time’s getting on, Revell—I arranged to meet a friend here this afternoon.”  He put a steadying hand on Revell’s arm as the latter moved to get up.  “No, no—that wasn’t a hint for you to go—not at all.  As a matter of fact, I rather want you to meet my friend.  He should be here any minute now.”  He took out his watch, compared it with the clock on the far side of the room, and lit his pipe again.  “Yes,” he went on, reflectively, “that was a wonderful theory of yours about Lambourne confessing to save some other person.  The sort of thing, you know, that would never have occurred to a practical-minded fellow like myself.  But my friend’s different.  He’s more like you—a bit complicated in the attic.  Ah, here he comes, by Jove.”

Guthrie rose to his feet with a welcoming smile, and Revell, turning round, was astonished to see the benign, spectacled face of Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne.

CHAPTER XIV

ENTER THIRD (AND LAST) DETECTIVE

For a moment Revell was too bewildered to speak.  Then at last, taking the stranger’s proffered hand, he managed to gasp:  “Mr.  Lambourne?  But—but—I thought you’d gone back to Vienna?”

Guthrie placed a chair for the stranger to sit between them.  “Of course, you’ve met before, you two—I can see that,” he remarked, pleasantly.  “I think perhaps we’d better blow our little gaff and have done with it.  This isn’t really Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne at all—in fact, so far as I know, there isn’t any such person in the world.  It’s my friend and colleague Detective Cannell, of the Yard.”

Revell found this rather more bewildering than ever.  “But surely I met you at Oakington—“ he stammered, staring blankly across the table at the round and absurdly cheerful face of the mystery man.

The latter nodded.  “Quite right, Mr. Revell,” he said, in that same quiet, soothing voice that Revell had liked instinctively on the occasion of their first meeting.  “I WAS Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne for the time being, it is true.  I gather that you haven’t explained things yet, Guthrie?” he added, turning to his friend.

“Not altogether,” Guthrie answered.  “The first part took longer than I had expected.  I’m terribly hoarse, by the way—I wish you’d do the rest.”

“Very well.”  And the other turned to Revell with a smile.  “We owe you a considerable apology, Mr. Revell, but we hope you’ll forgive us when you’ve heard all the details.  You may wonder why we trouble to tell you about it now, but the truth is that we both dislike deceiving innocent people, and even when it has to be done we prefer, if possible, to undeceive them afterwards.  Yes, that’s so—we have a conscience, though you mightn’t think so.  You see we rather liked you, Mr. Revell, as well, and that made us regret having to make use of you in the way we did.  So now, if we can, we shall make amends.  You’ll drink another brandy with me, I’m sure?”

Revell hardly acquiesced, but the other took his silence for acceptance and gave the order.  Then he went on:  “Let’s see, now, Guthrie, how much does our young friend know?”

“I got as far as Lambourne’s supposed confession and my own supposed retirement from the case,” replied Guthrie.

“Ah, yes.  I’m afraid the plain truth, Mr. Revell, whether Guthrie told it to you or not, is that he was pretty badly stumped by this Oakington case.  Here was a woman whose husband inherited a large sum of money by the deaths of two boys.  The first boy was killed accidentally—therefore she thought to herself—what a fine idea if I kill the other boy and my old man gets hanged for the murder!  Nothing left then but the money, which will just suit me . . . that was her idea, wasn’t it?  But Guthrie, try as he would, couldn’t find a shadow of evidence against her.  So he came to me, in the end—and not for the first time, let me say.  He talked—oh, how he did talk!--all one evening and nearly all one night about the case— we both examined it from every possible angle—we theorised and wrangled and argued—and what did we discover at the end of it all?”  He paused dramatically.  Then, in scarcely more than a whisper, he answered:  “Nothing.”

The waiter came with the brandies, and the little interruption gave Cannell time to raise steam, as it were.  “Nothing at all, Mr.  Revell, I do assure you.  That blessed woman had committed the almost perfect crime.  There wasn’t a ha’porth of legal evidence against her.  That little word ‘up’ that Guthrie has probably told you about—how a counsel would have sneered at it!  ‘It is the sort of clue you read about in detective stories’, he would have said.  Or else he would have denied that she’d ever used the word.  Or else he would have called as witnesses the doctors who performed the autopsy and asked them if from their examination of the body they believed that the shot had been fired in an upward direction.  And of course, since the head was so injured that the course of the bullet was quite untraceable, they would have had to reply that there was no evidence of direction at all.

“We also knew just a little bit of scandal about the lady’s past, but it wouldn’t have helped us in a court of law.  No, the fact is, there was simply NOTHING against her that could be proved.  And, if you want the truth, there isn’t much now.  But for that signed statement of hers, I don’t know what we could be sure of getting her on—even an attempted murderous assault upon you would want some pretty hard proving.  It may interest you to know, by the way, that the weapon that nearly killed you belonged to her husband.  He had bought it quite recently in preparation for his life in Kenya.”

“And if you HAD been killed,” put in Guthrie, “it seems quite possible that Ellington might have been hanged for it.  There was method even in that woman’s madness.”

The other detective resumed:  “Ah yes—she had an extraordinary talent for improvisation.  If only her nerve had equalled it—if only she had sat tight—laughed at you, Mr. Revell—put out her tongue at you—shrugged her pretty little shoulders and told you, metaphorically, of course, to go to hell!  A man might have done it, if ever a man had had her type of genius to begin with.  But her nerve was only a woman’s.  We broke down that nerve—you, me, and Guthrie between us—and that’s about all we did do.”

Revell shook his head despairingly.  “I still don’t quite see how you come into this affair, Mr. Cannell.  What made you appear at Oakington as Mr. Geoffrey Lambourne?”

“Ah, quite right—that’s what I must explain to you.  You see, when Guthrie and I found ourselves completely at a deadlock in this case, we decided to use a little guile.  We knew there was no hope of a frontal attack, so we planned what the military tacticians call an enveloping movement.  And with your unconscious assistance we succeeded.”

“I still don’t quite follow.”

“You will in a moment.  The details of the plan were my own, but the conception—the broad outline—was agreed to by both Guthrie and myself.  Briefly, our idea was to stand by, unknown to the lady, and watch what happened in a particular set of circumstances.  To that end I composed the unique and original character of Geoffrey Lambourne, visited Oakington, saw our heroine, and found her particularly charming.  But it was you whom I wanted to see most of all.  I wanted to tell you all about my poor, imaginary brother.  I must say I was rather proud of the way I carried it through, especially afterwards, when I noted its effect upon you.”

“You mean that it was all a pack of lies that you told me?”

“By no means.  It was an impersonation founded to a large extent upon the truth.  Lambourne really had left a will in Mrs.  Ellington’s favour, and I’m pretty certain it was for the obvious reason.  In fact, though I never met the fellow, I wouldn’t mind betting that my own interpretation of him was a good deal more accurate than Guthrie’s.”

Guthrie interposed:  “Quite probably.  I never pretend to do that sort of thing.  Psychological jerry-building doesn’t appeal to me temperamentally, though I admit it has its uses.”

Cannell went on:  “You see, Mr. Revell, the chief reason for not believing Lambourne guilty was the obvious fact that he wasn’t at all the sort of man to do such a thing.  Not much of a reason for a chap like Guthrie, but you and I, perhaps, are human enough to let it weigh.  At any rate, by telling you the sort of man Lambourne was, I very successfully convinced you that he couldn’t have been the criminal, didn’t I?”

“You mean that you wanted me to reach that conclusion?”

“Oh, much more than that.  I wanted you to begin an entirely new attempt to solve the Oakington riddle on your own.  You did so.  And all the time I wanted you to become more and more friendly with the pretty lady.  You did that, too.  I wouldn’t have minded if you’d even begun to suspect her a little—in fact, part of my Geoffrey Lambourne impersonation was aimed to lead you gently in that direction.  But it didn’t work—and, anyhow, everything else went according to plan, so that one little point hardly mattered.  The great thing was that sooner or later she should get to know that you were investigating the case on your own, and that the whole thing wasn’t finished with, as she had supposed.  I guessed she’d play Delilah to your Samson, and a particularly fascinating Delilah, too.  Guthrie’s not so sure—her style of looks doesn’t appeal to him.  He and I, of course, were watching all the time.  We had our eye on her as she became more and more worried lest her earnest young lover should stumble accidentally on the truth.  Rather refined torture for her, when you come to think of it, but not more than she thoroughly deserved.  Night after night she knew that you were sitting up in your room, pondering over the problem to which she alone was the answer.  You saw her looking pale and worried, and you thought in your innocence that her husband was the cause of it.  But he wasn’t—it was you yourself.”

“Which was what you had intended?”

“Precisely.  We knew her weak spot, and when you know that about your enemy, the battle’s half won.  Her weak spot was FEAR.  Even when she was in an absolutely secure position, she couldn’t put away from her the terror of being discovered.  Twice, under the stress of this fear, she had given way to panic, and Guthrie and I were quite certain she would do it a third time.  We were watching and waiting for it, and in the end—though not in the way we had foreseen—it came.”