The Clevedon Case by John Oakley and Nancy Oakley - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXVII
 WHO KILLED PHILIP CLEVEDON

IT has fallen to my lot to outline the solution of a good many mysteries, but never did I have a more appreciative or attentive or admiring audience than on this particular occasion. To them I was a wonder-worker, who had straightened out what looked like a hopeless tangle. I made no attempt to undeceive them. It wasn’t worth while, and it would have taken too long. But the reader who has followed my detailed recital will know how I really blundered through, how often I pursued false clues, the many side-issues that misled me, and the patient, methodical and, on the whole, not very exciting linking together of ascertained facts, which eventually conducted me to the goal I sought. That is how all detective work that is worth anything is done. The result may seen brilliant taken by itself, but in detail it is a curious mixture of luck and chance, with some amount of common sense, and a little of what is generally labelled intuition.

“And have you really discovered who killed Clevedon?” Thoyne asked.

“Yes,” I returned equably, “you did.”

“I expected that,” Thoyne rejoined, with a wry smile. “I think you have suspected me all along. I seem to have been the villain of the piece all through.”

“No,” I replied, “you do me an injustice. You were only one among half a dozen. Let me tell you the story. It is very simple, and a few words will encompass it. Grainger hated you because of his daughter, and when you ordered that sleeping mixture from him he filled the phial with prussic acid. His intention was to kill you. That Clevedon was his victim was only an accident. Clevedon called on you earlier on the night on which he died, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but I don’t know how you discovered it. I let Clevedon in myself, and not a soul saw us.”

“But it is a fact.”

“Oh yes, quite. He came to see me to tell me he had resigned any pretensions to marry”—he paused and glanced a little waveringly at Kitty Clevedon—“to the young lady we both wanted. We were friendly enough in a way.”

“You did not disclose this visit at the inquest?”

“No, the question was never asked, and I kept quiet, for fear I might say too much. I don’t regret it,” he added fiercely.

“It has worked out all right,” I replied, “though it gave me a lot of extra trouble and delayed my solution. However, you conducted your visitor to the door and stood for a few minutes in the porch, chatting to him. You were to be relatives by marriage, and had no particular desire to quarrel. You were willing to forget that he had been Calcott—”

“Calcott!” cried old Lady Clevedon, “who’s he?”

“A long story,” I returned smilingly. “Thoyne will tell you all about it some day. It has no bearing on this case. But in the course of conversation”—I had turned to Thoyne again—“he told you that he suffered from sleeplessness, to which you replied that you had occasionally done so since you had been wounded and shell-shocked in the war, but that you had found a very useful medicine, which you advised him to try. You had got a new bottle untouched, and you offered to make him a present of it.”

“Quite right.”

“Then there you have the story—that is how Sir Philip Clevedon died. He took the poison Grainger had intended for you.”

“What an escape!” Thoyne muttered, a little hoarsely.

“And the hatpin?” old Lady Clevedon queried sharply. “Was that an accident, also?”

“Hardly,” I replied, “but that is another story, and a very curious one, too.”

I had reached the most difficult part of my explanation. I had to render it intelligible, without betraying Nora Lepley’s secret, which I had surprised. To put it as briefly as possible, she had thrust the hatpin through the heart of the dead man in the hope of diverting suspicion from Ronald Thoyne, whom she believed to be responsible for Sir Philip Clevedon’s death.

“As I had passed through my aunt’s sitting-room,” she had told me, “I saw the hatpin lying there on the mantelpiece, and I picked it up, intending to return it to Miss Kitty. It was in my hand when I entered Sir Philip’s study and found him dead. I knew he had been poisoned, because there was prussic acid in the bottle on the table.”

She explained to me when I questioned her that she had spent much time with her friend, Mary Grainger, in the shop, and was familiar with all sorts of drugs.

“On the floor,” she went on, “was a white paper, and when I picked it up I found on it some pencil marks I had made myself. I had been into Midlington and had called on Mr. Grainger, who asked me if I would deliver a packet at Mr. Thoyne’s house, as he had no other means of sending it. Of course, I said I would. At the station I looked up some trains on the time-table, and having no other paper with me, I noted them in pencil on the back of the little packet Mr. Grainger had given me.”

So was explained the mysterious figures on the paper I had found in Nora Lepley’s curious hiding-place. I regarded her thoughtfully for a moment or two.

“You had delivered that packet at Mr. Thoyne’s house?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You thought Mr. Thoyne had passed it on to Sir Philip.”

“That’s what I thought—yes.”

“That he had procured some prussic acid from Mr. Grainger, so that he might murder Sir Philip?”

“Yes—and then it occurred to me—that if Sir Philip—that perhaps they might think he had been stabbed if—if the hatpin was found.”

“You did it to protect Thoyne?”

That she had been in love with Thoyne seemed evident; that she would never confess as much was equally obvious; and I had no desire to force her confidence. The fact was sufficient for me; the motive I was content to leave in doubt, or at least, unexpressed. That was the difficulty I had in telling my story to my little audience. I was determined they should not draw the inference I had found inevitable.

“The story of the hatpin,” I said, “is very curious, but quite simple. Nora Lepley, when she found Sir Philip dead, recognised the bottle as one she had found in Grainger’s shop. She had known Mr. Grainger for many years, and had been his daughter’s bosom friend. She jumped to the conclusion that Grainger had poisoned Sir Philip, and it was in the hope of diverting suspicion from him that she took away and hid the bottle and—er—used the hatpin. There is the whole story.”

“But suppose somebody had been involved—Kitty, for example, or Ronald—would she have spoken?” the younger Lady Clevedon demanded.

“Undoubtedly,” I replied.

But I spoke without knowledge, because that was a question I had carefully refrained from putting to Nora herself. My own impression was that she would cheerfully have seen the whole Clevedon family hanging in company if that would have secured Ronald Thoyne’s immunity. But I did not tell them that.

THE END