CHAPTER IV
THE SILVER-HEADED HATPIN
THE Midlington evening papers reached Cartordale about seven o’clock. To accomplish that they had to be printed somewhere about 3.30 p.m., and accordingly were rather early editions. Nevertheless, the one I saw contained a very good account of the Clevedon tragedy, though, as I could well see, reading between the lines, one which the police had carefully supervised. The press and the police work in very much closer accord than most people realise. They help one another, and the wise newspaper man never gives away anything the police desire to keep secret. In return for that the press receives all sorts of information otherwise inaccessible to it. I have many thousands of newspaper cuttings, all carefully indexed, of which I make good use in the compilation of my books. Newspapers give the facts that are known with creditable accuracy, though really what remains unknown is frequently the more important. The whole story is not always told.
And the press may and often does materially assist the police. If the latter wish to publish some item broadcast, the description of some individual, particulars of a missing weapon, details that may bring further items and possibly produce an unsuspected clue, they go to the press, which very quickly and efficiently gives them all the publicity they want. They do not deliberately keep things from the press. Any such attempt defeats its own end. It is the reporter’s job to get news and he is an expert at it.
But if you tell the press all you know with a reservation as to what may not be published, the secret is safe enough. In a very long and varied experience I never knew a newspaper man to break a promise or violate a confidence. Some journals, of course, make a speciality of crime investigation on their own account, and clever enough they are at it. But even they will suppress an item of news if the police ask it, and frequently when they discover some fact unknown to the police will inquire before publishing whether it is desirable or safe. The ordinary man’s idea that the press thinks first and only of its news column is a delusion. Very often a newspaper knows a lot more than it says.
From the account in the Midlington evening paper I learnt that Sir Philip Clevedon had dined alone soon after seven o’clock. At the conclusion of dinner he retired to his study according to his usual custom. At a quarter past eight he received a visit from Miss Kitty Clevedon, who had motored over from Hapforth House, the residence of Lady Clevedon, with a message to Mrs. Halfleet, the housekeeper. Miss Clevedon left before nine o’clock, and at 11.30 Sir Philip rang for his man Tulmin and ordered a whisky-and-soda, giving also some instructions regarding a contemplated journey to London on the morrow. Tulmin went off to bed, and thereafter was a long blank from 11.30 or so until between six and seven o’clock in the morning, when Miss Nora Lepley found Sir Philip lying dead on the couch in his study with the hatpin driven through his heart. Those were the facts out of which the reporter had made several columns. But the summary is sufficient for my purpose.
There was, of course, a description of the hatpin, which was eight inches long, with a flat, circular head of silver about the size of a shilling and a three-sided or three-cornered blade of steel that tapered off to a very fine point—an unusual hatpin that more resembled a silver-headed skewer or stiletto. It had been driven into the body so that the head was close up to the white shirt-front—as far as it would go, in fact—but any bleeding had apparently been internal, since there was none discernible either on the exterior of the body or on the clothing.
I made a careful note of the times. Tulmin had last seen his master alive at about 11.30. It was 11.53 when the girl tapped at my window. When I had read the newspaper story I sent for Martha Helter, my housekeeper.
“Who is Lady Clevedon?” I asked her, “and what relation is Miss Kitty Clevedon to Sir Philip?”
“It is a little bit complicated, you see,” she said, seating herself on the extreme edge of a big arm-chair. “Lady Clevedon is the widow of the late baronet who died some years ago—before the war, anyway. She was Miss Ursula Hapforth before her marriage, and when her husband died she went back to Hapforth House, which had been left her by her father, whose only child she was. The Hapforths are older than the Clevedons in these parts.”
“But perhaps not so wealthy?”
“Oh, I don’t know for that. They have plenty of money.”
“And this Sir Philip—was he her son?”
But I recollected that her attitude had been anything but that of a bereaved mother when I saw her a short time before.
“No, she never had any children,” Martha told me.
“Oh, then—but go on, Martha.”
I had been about to remark that Miss Kitty was not, therefore, Lady Clevedon’s daughter, but had thought better of it. I should get more out of Martha, I reflected, by allowing her to tell her story in her own way.
“This Sir Philip was a cousin of the other baronet,” my housekeeper went on, “and next to him comes Mr. Billy Clevedon, who is Miss Kitty’s brother. He is in the army. They say that he and Sir Philip quarrelled, and there are all sorts of rumours about. Miss Kitty lives with Lady Clevedon. I believe she has some money of her own, though I don’t know how much. Her father was a rector down in Cornwall, but he’s been dead a long time now.”
“And this Sir Philip—where did he come from?”
“From somewhere abroad, I think. He was not very young, perhaps forty-five, and he wasn’t married. We didn’t see a lot of him in Cartordale—he lived mostly in London. He was not friends, they say, with Lady Clevedon, though I should not think they had really quarrelled. He was a stiff, solemn sort of man, and not very popular.”
In point of fact the Clevedon title was one of the oldest surviving baronetcies, though there had been Clevedons in the Dale long before James I invented baronets as a new means of raising revenue. The Clevedons had all been politicians of varying degrees of importance, frequently unimportant. A minor Minister or two, a Colonial governor or so, a small Embassy, all urbane, honest, honourable, but occasionally unintelligent personages, belonging to what one might describe as the great Official class, which has ruled England since the days of the Tudors, doing most things badly but generally with clean hands.
But the late Sir Philip Clevedon was something of a mystery. No one had heard of him until the death of his cousin had given him the title. He had never been in Cartordale before that, and way entirely unknown even to his relatives. They had no idea even where he lived. Rumour was almost equally divided between America and Australia, but without any real foundation, since he himself vouchsafed no information on the point. Among the people of the Dale, as Martha indeed had told me, he had not been popular. He was too chilly and unemotional in his manner and, being frequently absent for lengthy periods, took no real part in the life of the Dale and, apparently, little interest in its concerns. To many of the inhabitants he was not even known by sight.
All this is a summary not only of what Martha told me, but of what I subsequently gathered.
When I had finished with Martha I went out and met Detective Pepster strolling in casual fashion through the village. I should have missed him in the darkness but that we stepped at the same time into the light cast across the roadway by the “Waggon and Horses,” Tim Dallott’s roadside inn, famed far and wide among visitors to the Dale.
“You haven’t been to arrest me yet,” I said, as Pepster returned my salute.
“No,” he replied, with a placid grin, “we are giving you a little more rope.”
“You have taken a load off my mind,” I returned cheerfully. “But are you quite sure? Sudden temptation, you know, and—and so on.”
“Ah, you are pulling my leg, Mr. Holt,” Pepster replied affably.
“But you did suspect me,” I urged, wondering how far the detective might be amenable to pumping.
Some of them are, but not those who know their job.
“Well, suspect—that’s rather a big word,” Pepster said thoughtfully. “You see, the law says a man is innocent until he is proved guilty, but a detective who knows his business proceeds the other way about. Everybody is guilty in his eyes until the facts prove their innocence. There is only one man I am absolutely sure did not commit this murder, and that is myself, but nobody save me has any call to be sure even of that. Now you, for example—could you prove an alibi for that night if I took it into my head to charge you?”
“We will suppose I could not—for the sake of argument.”
“Just so, but then, you see, something else is required. Society is based on a notion that ordinary, normal men act in an ordinary, normal manner and don’t go about murdering each other for the mere fun of the thing. It is like people walking along a city pavement while motor-cars are dashing to and fro in the roadway. The three or four inches by which the pavement is raised are no protection at all should a motor-car take a sudden swerve, but pedestrians go ambling quietly on in the knowledge that the normal thing is for motor-cars to keep their own place, and that when they go wrong it is because something has happened. Yes, Society is based on the prevalence of the normal. When you hear, for instance, that one man has killed another, you take it for granted there was a reason—what we call a motive. And the motive is vital. Sometimes the why of a murder reveals the who, and sometimes the who explains the why. But the two must go together.”
“Your philosophy is both interesting and accurate,” I said. “And what of the hatpin?”
“Ah, the hatpin,” Pepster replied thoughtfully. “But that may have been an accident and not the woman in the case.”
“The woman?” I said inquiringly, my thought going instantly to my midnight visitor. “Yes, of course, a hatpin does suggest a woman, doesn’t it?”
“There may be a woman in it,” Pepster went on, gently garrulous, “but I don’t know that the hatpin brings her in. Some woman owns the hatpin, no doubt, but that isn’t to say that she used it. Though it does help things wonderfully to get a woman into a case, even though it may complicate it. No doubt there would be a man in it too. There generally is. Women seldom play a lone hand. But they have always been a fruitful source of crime in men ever since Adam had to declare that the woman tempted him and he did eat. I have always thought ill of Adam for that—for telling, I mean. It’s not the sort of thing a real man would have blurted out. But for all that it was true—it was true then and it has been true ever since. Women—”
“And as you say,” I interrupted gently, “it would be a woman’s hatpin.”
“Oh, yes, it would be a woman’s hatpin. Sir Philip Clevedon didn’t wear them—not that I ever heard. And we have identified it, you know. It belongs to Lady Clevedon and, as far as I can make out, Miss Kitty Clevedon borrowed it when she went to see the housekeeper earlier that evening. It will be in all the papers to-morrow. There seemed no particular reason to keep it secret.”
“According to the newspapers, Miss Clevedon went to see the housekeeper, Mrs. Halfleet,” I observed. “Did she take her hat off? Where did she leave the pin?”
“Those questions have been asked and answered,” Pepster replied. “She was caught in a shower of rain on her way to White Towers and took off her hat to dry it. She does not recollect where she laid the pin down, but it must have been somewhere in the housekeeper’s room. She did not see Sir Philip Clevedon and did not enter the study where later the body was found.”
“The housekeeper—?”
“Knows nothing of the hatpin—does not remember Miss Clevedon laying it down, and in fact never saw it until she was brought to her dead master. It was Lady Clevedon herself who identified the hatpin and told me all about it.”
“So that instead of one woman you have three,” I murmured.
“Yes, three women but not the woman. Hullo! there’s Dr. Crawford, and I want to speak to him.”
He nodded a quick farewell and went off with long strides after the doctor. Considering his bulk and his apparently leisurely methods of thought and speech, Pepster was curiously quick and active in his movements.
“Do you know Mrs. Halfleet?” I asked my own housekeeper when I again reached home.
“Oh, yes, quite well,” she replied. “I have known her for years. A little stand-offish in her manner, but quite pleasant face to face.”
“About how old would she be?” I queried.
“Oh, well, let me see. I am—yes, she must be quite sixty, perhaps a year or two older.”
“Not a young woman, anyway.”
“Oh, dear no, not a young woman. She is the widow of a minister, a Methodist, I think, who was at a church in Midlington when he died. That must be a good sixteen years ago. Lady Clevedon, who was living at White Towers then, her husband being alive, brought her in as housekeeper, and the present—I mean the late—Sir Philip kept her on. She is sister to Mrs. Lepley, but far more of a lady—”
I switched the conversation on to other lines, leaving Mrs. Halfleet for later investigation.
The case, you will note, has advanced another stage. The weapon has been identified. The queer hatpin, with the three-cornered blade and the silver knob, was the property of Lady Clevedon, who lived at Hapforth House. Miss Kitty Clevedon borrowed it and so conveyed it to White Towers where, apparently, she left it. That was all very interesting and quite simple, but probably irrelevant. The question was not who had owned the hatpin or who had worn it, but who had used it.
The question of time becomes interesting here. Tulmin, the valet, had seen his master alive at 11.30, and the girl had visited me at 11.53. She certainly had committed no murder at White Towers in that interval. It was a physical impossibility. I had carefully assured myself regarding that. It would have required at the very minimum another fifteen or twenty minutes. But I had lost her in the darkness somewhere before 2 a.m. As I have already said, it was seven minutes past two when I reached Stone Hollow again on that night (or rather early morning), and allowing for the time I stood after she had evaded me, and for the walk homewards, I judged that it would be about 1.15 when she disappeared into the darkness. What had her movements been after that?
It must not be supposed that I suspected the girl of having had any hand in the tragedy, though I by no means ruled her out. Her beauty and youth did not weigh with me at all. I had found both in even greater measure in proven criminals. Besides which, a murder is not invariably a crime.
But I had two ascertained facts—that Kitty Clevedon had worn the hatpin to White Towers, and that she had been abroad in the Dale during the early hours of that tragic morning.