The Loudwater Mystery/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
IT would have been easy enough for Mr. Flexen to send for Hutchings to the Castle and question him there. But he did not. In the first place, he did not think it fair to a man who had already prejudiced himself so seriously by his threats against the murdered man. Besides, he would be at a disadvantage, under a greater strain at the Castle, and Mr. Flexen wanted him where he would be at his best, for he wished to be able to form an exact judgment of the likelihood of his being the murderer. Indeed, it must be a very careful and exact judgment, for he felt that he was moving in deep waters; that it was a case in which it was possible, even easy, to go hopelessly wrong. Also, he was fully alive to the fact that if threatened men live long, the men who threaten are to blame for it, and that threats such as Hutchings' are the commonest things in the world, and, as a rule, of very little importance. But there was always the chance that Hutchings was the unusual threatener; and, if he were, he had assuredly been in circumstances most favourable to the carrying out of his threats.
Accordingly he learnt from Inspector Perkins the way to the gamekeeper's cottage in the West Wood, where Hutchings was staying with his father, and drove the car to it himself. Hutchings was alone in the cottage, for his father was out on his rounds. He invited Mr. Flexen to come in. Mr. Flexen came in, sat down in an arm-chair, and examined Hutchings' face. He saw that the man was plainly very anxious and ill at ease. It was natural enough. He must perceive quite clearly how black against him things looked.
He was forced also to admit to himself that Hutchings had not a pleasant face. It was choleric and truculent, and in spite of the man's evident anxiety, there was a sullen fierceness on it which gave him no little of the air of a wild beast trapped.
Mr. Flexen wasted no time beating about the bush, but said to him: "When you visited Elizabeth Twitcher last night you entered and left the Castle by the library window."
"You got that from that young blighter Manley," said Hutchings bitterly.
"Not at all. I did not know that Mr. Manley knew it," said Mr. Flexen. "So you did?"
"Yes, sir, I did. I always went to the village that way in the summer-time. It's the shortest. Besides, his lordship was nearly always asleep; and if he wasn't and did 'ear me, there was always something I could be doing in the library, sir."
He spoke with eager, rather humble civility.
"Well, did you, as you went through the library, coming or going, hear Lord Loudwater snore?"
Hutchings knitted his brow, thinking; then he said: "I can't call to mind as I did, sir. But, then, I wasn't giving him any attention. I was thinking about other things altogether. Of course, I went out quietly enough. But that was habit."
"That sounds as if you had not heard him snore—as if you thought that he was awake," said Mr. Flexen.
"I don't think I thought about him at all, sir, at the moment. I was thinking about other things," said Hutchings.
"You say that Mr. Manley saw you go out?"
"Yes, sir. I passed him in the hall and went into the library. We had a few words, and I told him I had come to fetch some cigarettes as I'd left behind."
"Do you know what the time was?" said Mr. Flexen.
"No, sir—not exactly. But it must have been nearly half-past eleven, I should think."
"It is very important to fix the time at which Lord Loudwater died," said Mr. Flexen. "You can't tell me nearer than that?"
"No, sir. It was nearly ten to twelve when I got home, and I reckon it's about twenty minutes' walk from the Castle to the cottage here."
"And all you went to the Castle for was to speak to Elizabeth Twitcher?" said Mr. Flexen.
"That was all I went for—every single thing. And it was all I did there—every mortal thing I did there, sir," Hutchings asseverated, and he wiped his brow.
"H'm!" said Mr. Flexen. "As you passed through the library, did you happen to notice whether the knife was in its place in the big inkstand?"
Hutchings hesitated, and his lips twitched. Then he said: "Yes, I did, sir. It was in the big inkstand."
Mr. Flexen could not make up his mind whether he was telling the truth or not. He thought that he was not. But he did not attach much importance to the matter. People who knew themselves to be suspected of a crime had often told him quite stupid and unnecessary lies and been proved innocent after all.
"I should have thought that your mind was too full of other things to notice a thing like that," he said in a somewhat incredulous tone.
Then there came an outburst. Mr. Flexen had thought that Hutchings was worked up to a high degree of nervous tension, and he was. He cried out that he knew that every one believed that he had done it; but he hadn't. He'd never thought of it. He was damned if he didn't wish he had done it. He might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, anyhow. He broke off to curse Lord Loudwater at length. He had been a curse to every one who came into contact with him while he was alive, and now he was getting people into trouble when he was dead. Yes: he wished it had occurred to him to stick that knife into him. He'd have done it like a shot, and he'd have done the right thing. The world was well rid of a swine like that!
His face was contorted, and his eyes kept gleaming red as he talked, and he came to the end of his outburst, trembling and panting.
Mr. Flexen was unmoved and unenlightened. It was merely the outburst of a badly-frightened man lacking in self-control, and told him nothing. It left it equally likely that Hutchings had, or had not, committed the crime.
"There's nothing to get so frantic about," he said quietly to the panting man. "It doesn't do any good."
"It's all very well to talk like that, sir," said Hutchings in a shaky voice. "But I know what people are saying. It's enough to make any one lose their temper."
"I should think that yours was pretty easy to lose," said Mr. Flexen dryly.
"I know it. It is very short, sir. It always was; and I can't help it," said Hutchings in an apologetic voice.
"Then you'd better set about learning to help it, my man," said Mr. Flexen.
He took out his pipe and filled it slowly. The flush faded a little from Hutchings' face. Mr. Flexen lighted his pipe and rose.
Then as he went to the door he said: "I should advise you to get that stupid temper well in hand. It makes a bad impression. Good afternoon."
Mr. Flexen drove back to the Castle, considering Hutchings carefully. There was no doubt that he was, indeed, badly frightened; but he had reason to be. Mr. Flexen could not decide whether he had worn the air of a guilty man or an innocent. He could not decide whether the butler had been too deeply absorbed in his own affairs to hear the snoring of Lord Loudwater as he went through the library. It was possible that Lord Loudwater was alive, asleep, and yet not snoring at the time. Snoring is often intermittent.
He considered Hutchings' violent outburst. Certainly such an outburst showed the man uncommonly unbalanced; it might, indeed, on occasion take the form of uncontrollable murderous fury. But it seemed to him that an actual meeting with Lord Loudwater would have been necessary to provoke that. But Lord Loudwater had been sitting in his chair when he died; and if he had not killed himself, he had been killed in his sleep. At any rate, there was probably sufficient evidence, seeing what juries are, to convict Hutchings. If he had been one of those not uncommon ministers of the law, whose only desire is to secure a conviction, he would doubtless arrest him at once. But it was not his only desire to secure a conviction; it was his very keen desire to find the right solution of the problem. He could not see where any more evidence against Hutchings was to come from. What Mr. Manley had told him about the knife, that it had been in general use, and that he had seen Hutchings cut string with it the day before the murder, greatly lessened its value as evidence, even if Hutchings' finger-prints were thick on it. He decided to dismiss Hutchings from his mind for the time being, and devote all his energies to discovering the mysterious woman with whom Lord Loudwater had had the furious quarrel between eleven and a quarter-past.
With this end in view, on his return to the Castle, he went straight to the library, where Mr. Carrington was engaged, along with Mr. Manley, in an examination of the murdered man's papers. They were uncommonly few, and Mr. Manley had already set them in order. Lord Loudwater seemed to have kept but few letters, and the papers consisted chiefly of receipted and unreceipted bills.
When he found that Mr. Flexen had come to confer with the lawyer, Mr. Manley assumed an air of extraordinary discretion and softly withdrew.
"I want to know—it is most important—whether there was any entanglement between Lord Loudwater and a woman," said Mr. Flexen.
"I should think it very unlikely," said Mr. Carrington without hesitation. "At least, I have never heard of anything of the kind, and so far I have come across no trace of anything of the kind among his papers."
Mr. Flexen frowned, considering; then he said: "Do you happen to know whether he employed any one besides your firm to do legal work for him?"
"As to that I can't say. But I should not think it likely. It was always a business to get him to attend to anything that wanted doing, and he always made a fuss about it. I can't see him employing another firm too. But he may have done. The only thing is that I ought to have found either their bills or the receipts for them among those papers—except that my late client does not appear to have taken the trouble to keep many receipts."
"The thing is that I've learnt that Lord Loudwater had a furious quarrel with some unknown woman between eleven and a quarter-past on the night of his death, and I want to find her. You can see how important it is. It may be that she stabbed him, or it may be that she provided him with the motive to commit suicide—not that that seems likely. But you can't tell: she might have been able to threaten him with some exposure. Those people without any self-control are always doing the most senseless things—bigamy, for instance, is often one of their weaknesses."
"Loudwater was certainly without self-control; but I hardly think that he was the man to commit bigamy," said the lawyer.
"It would very much simplify matters if he had," said Mr. Flexen in a dissatisfied tone. "I wonder whether Manley would know anything about it?"
"He might," said Mr. Carrington.
Mr. Flexen went through the library window to find Mr. Manley strolling up and down the lawn with every appearance of enjoying his pipe and the respite from perusing papers.
"Mr. Carrington tells me that you were in Lord Loudwater's confidence," said Mr. Flexen.
"Wholly," said Mr. Manley, with more promptness than his actual knowledge of the facts warranted.
It seemed to him fitting that a secretary of his intelligence and discretion should have been wholly in the confidence of any nobleman who employed him. Therefore he himself must have been.
"Then perhaps you can tell me whether he was entangled with a woman," said Mr. Flexen.
"Entangled? In what way?" said Mr. Manley in a tone of surprise.
"In the usual way, I suppose. Was he engaged in a love-affair with any woman, or had he been?"
"He certainly did not tell me anything about it if he was," said Mr. Manley. "But that is the kind of thing he might very well not confide to his secretary."
"You don't happen to know if he was making any payments to a woman—an allowance, for example?" said Mr. Flexen.
Mr. Manley was well on his guard by now. These questions must surely refer to Helena.
"He never told me anything about it," he said with perfect readiness. "Not, of course, that I would tell you if he had," he added, in his most amiable voice. "I've told you that I thought that he made enough trouble while he was alive. I won't help him to make trouble now that he's dead."
Mr. Flexen thought that the asseveration was unnecessary, since Mr. Manley had not the knowledge which would make the trouble. He returned to the lawyer and told him that Mr. Manley had no information to give.
"It seems a very important point in the affair," said the lawyer.
"It is," said Mr. Flexen, frowning. "I wonder if there was an intrigue with a country girl or woman, some one in the neighbourhood?"
"There might have been. Lord Loudwater rode a great deal. He was hours in the saddle every day. He had time and opportunity for that kind of thing.
"On the other hand, there's no need for it to have been any one in the neighbourhood at all. To say nothing of the train, it's a short enough motor drive from London; and it was a moonlight night," said Mr. Flexen.
"Then you may be able to find traces of the car. The woman must have left it somewhere while she had the interview with Lord Loudwater," said Mr. Carrington.
"I'll try," said Mr. Flexen, not very hopefully, "But there are so few people about at night nowadays. Five out of the eight gamekeepers are still abroad. In ordinary times there would have been four at least of them about the roads and woods. On that night there was only one."
"There's the further difficulty that Lord Loudwater had so few friends. That will make it harder to find out anything about an affair of this kind—if he had one," said Mr. Carrington.
"It will, indeed," said Mr. Flexen, and paused, frowning. Then he added gravely: "I'm sure that there was such an affair, and I've got to find the woman."