Jean Stine - Legendary Women Detectives

“Yes. Poor Captain! Did he yelp or groan?”

“Why, he gave one loud, long, hideous yelp, just as if he had been a common cur. I might just as well have let him alone; it only set that other brute opening his window and spying out on me, and saying in his cracked old voice: ”Master, what are you doing out here at this time of night?“”

Again he sank back in his chair, muttering incoherently with half-closed eyes.

Loveday let him alone for a minute or so; then she had another question to ask.

“And that other brute – did he yelp or groan when you dealt him his blow?”

“What, old Sandy – the brute? He fell back – Ah, I remember, you said you would like to see the hammer that stopped his babbling old tongue – now, didn’t you?”

He rose a little unsteadily from his chair, and seemed to drag his long limbs with an effort across the room to a cabinet at the farther end. Opening a drawer in this cabinet, he produced, from amidst some specimens of strata and fossils, a large-sized geological hammer.

He brandished it for a moment over his head, then paused with his finger on his lip.

“Hush!” he said, “we shall have the fools creeping in to peep at us if we don’t take care.” And to Loveday’s horror he suddenly made for the door, turned the key in the lock, withdrew it and put it into his pocket.

She looked at the clock; the hands pointed to half-past seven. Had Griffiths received her note at the proper time, and were the men now in the grounds? She could only pray that they were.

“The light is too strong for my eyes,” she said, and rising from her chair, she lifted the green-shaded lamp and placed it on a table that stood at the window.

“No, no, that won’t do,” said Mr. Craven; “that would show everyone outside what we’re doing in here.” He crossed to the window as he spoke and removed the lamp thence to the mantelpiece.

Loveday could only hope that in the few seconds it had remained in the window it had caught the eye of the outside watchers.

The old man beckoned to Loveday to come near and examine his deadly weapon. “Give it a good swing round,” he said, suiting the action to the word, “and down it comes with a splendid crash.” He brought the hammer round within an inch of Loveday’s forehead.

She started back.

“Ha, ha,” he laughed harshly and unnaturally, with the light of madness dancing in his eyes now; “did I frighten you? I wonder what sort of sound you would make if I were to give you a little tap just there.” Here he lightly touched her forehead with the hammer. “Elemental, of course, it would be, and–”

Loveday steadied her nerves with difficulty. Locked in with this lunatic, her only chance lay in gaining time for the detectives to reach the house and enter through the window.

“Wait a minute,” she said, striving to divert his attention; “you have not yet told me what sort of an elemental sound old Sandy made when he fell. If you’ll give me pen and ink, I’ll write down a full account of it all, and you can incorporate it afterwards in your treatise.”

For a moment a look of real pleasure flitted across the old man’s face, then it faded. “The brute fell dead without a sound,” he answered; “it was all for nothing, that night’s work; yet not altogether for nothing. No, I don’t mind owning I would do it all over again to get the wild thrill of joy at my heart that I had when I looked down into that old man’s dead face and felt myself free at last! Free at last!” his voice rang out excitedly – once more he brought his hammer round with an ugly swing.

“For a moment I was a young man again; I leaped into his room – the moon was shining full in through the window – I thought of my old college days, and the fun we used to have at Pembroke – topsy-turvy I turned everything–” He broke off abruptly, and drew a step nearer to Loveday. “The pity of it all was,” he said, suddenly dropping from his high, excited tone to a low, pathetic one, “that he fell without a sound of any sort.” Here he drew another step nearer. “I wonder–” he said, then broke off again, and came close to Loveday’s side. “It has only this moment occurred to me,” he said, now with his lips close to Loveday’s ear, “that a woman, in her death agony, would be much more likely to give utterance to an elemental sound than a man.”

He raised his hammer, and Loveday fled to the window, and was lifted from the outside by three strong pairs of arms.

* * *

“I thought I was conducting my very last case – I never had such a narrow escape before!” said Loveday, as she stood talking with Mr. Griffiths on the Grenfell platform, awaiting the train to carry her back to London. “It seems strange that no one before suspected the old gentleman’s sanity – I suppose, however, people were so used to his eccentricities that they did not notice how they had deepened into positive lunacy. His cunning evidently stood him in good stead at the inquest.”

“It is possible,” said Griffiths thoughtfully, “that he did not absolutely cross the very slender line that divides eccentricity from madness until after the murder. The excitement consequent upon the discovery of the crime may just have pushed him over the border. Now, Miss Brooke, we have exactly ten minutes before your train comes in. I should feel greatly obliged to you if you would explain one or two things that have a professional interest for me.”

“With pleasure,” said Loveday. “Put your questions in categorical order and I will answer them.”

“Well, then, in the first place, what suggested to your mind the old man’s guilt?”

“The relations that subsisted between him and Sandy seemed to me to savour too much of fear on the one side and power on the other. Also the income paid to Sandy during Mr. Craven’s absence in Natal bore, to my mind, an unpleasant resemblance to hush-money.”

“Poor wretched being! And I hear that, after all, the woman he married in his wild young days died soon afterwards of drink. I have no doubt, however, that Sandy sedulously kept up the fiction of her existence, even after his master’s second marriage. Now for another question: how was it you knew that Miss Craven had taken her brother’s place in the sick-room?”

“On the evening of my arrival I discovered a rather long lock of fair hair in the unswept fireplace of my room, which, as it happened, was usually occupied by Miss Craven. It at once occurred to me that the young lady had been cutting off her hair and that there must be some powerful motive to induce such a sacrifice. The suspicious circumstances attending her brother’s illness soon supplied me with such a motive.”

“Ah! that typhoid fever business was very cleverly done. Not a servant in the house, I verily believe, but who thought Master Harry was upstairs, ill in bed, and Miss Craven away at her friends’ in Newcastle. The young fellow must have got a clear start off within an hour of the murder. His sister, sent away the next day to Newcastle, dismissed her maid there, I hear, on the plea of no accommodation at her friends’ house – sent the girl to her own home for a holiday and herself returned to Troyte’s Hill in the middle of the night, having walked the five miles from Grenfell. No doubt her mother admitted her through one of those easily-opened front windows, cut her hair and put her to bed to personate her brother without delay. With Miss Craven’s strong likeness to Master Harry, and in a darkened room, it is easy to understand that the eyes of a doctor, personally unacquainted with the family, might easily be deceived. Now, Miss Brooke, you must admit that with all this elaborate chicanery and double dealing going on, it was only natural that my suspicions should set in strongly in that quarter.”