The Shrieking Pit by Arthur J. Rees (chrysanthemum read aloud TXT) 📕

Naturally, she was very much perturbed at his unexpected appearance. She waited for an opportunity to speak to him after hearing his voice, but was compelled to attend on her mad grandmother until it was very late.

"Before going to bed she went down the passage to see if by any chance he had not retired. There was a light in Mr. Glenthorpe's room, and, acting on a sudden girlish impulse, she ran along the passage to Mr. Glenthorpe's door, intending to confide her troubles in one who had always been very good and kind to her. The door was partly open, and as she got no reply to her knock, she entered. Mr. Glenthorpe was lying on his bed, murdered, and on the floor—at the side of the bed—she found the knife and this silver and enamel match-box. She hid the knife behind a picture on the wall. She did a very plucky thing the following night by going into the dead man's room and removing the knife in order to prevent the police finding it, for by that time she was aware that the knife formed an important piece of evidence in the case against her lover. It was the knife she threw into the sea, but she kept the match-box, which she recognised as Penreath's. When she came to me she did not intend to tell me anything about the match-box if she could help it. She was frank enough up to a point, but beyond that point she did not want to go.

[Pg 303]

"After Penreath's conviction she began, womanlike, to wonder if she had not been too hasty in assuming his guilt, and as the time slipped by and brought the day of[Pg 302] his doom nearer she grew desperate, and as a last resource she came to me. It was a good thing she did so. For her story, though apparently making the case against Penreath blacker still, incidentally brought to light a clue which threw a new light on the case and decided me to return to Flegne. That clue is contained in the match-box."

CHAPTER XXV

Colwyn opened the silver and enamel box, and emptied the matches on the table.

"I showed this match-box to Charles on my return to the inn, and he told me that Penreath used it in the upstairs sitting-room the night he dined there with Mr. Glenthorpe. Therefore, it is a reasonable deduction to assume that he had no other matches in his possession the night of the murder.

"This fact is highly significant, because the matches in Penreath's silver box are, as you see, blue-headed wax matches, whereas the matches struck in Mr. Glenthorpe's room on the night of the murder were of an entirely different description—wooden matches with pink heads, of British manufacture—so-called war matches, with cork pine sticks. The sticks of these matches break rather easily unless they are held near the head. Two broken fragments of this description of match, with unlighted heads, were found in Mr. Glenthorpe's room the morning after the murder. Superintendent Galloway picked up one by the foot of the bed, and I picked up the other under the broken gas-globe. The recovery of Penreath's match-box in the murdered man's room suggested several things. In the first place, if he had no other matches in his possession except those in his silver and enamel box, he was neither the murderer nor the second person who visited the room that night. But if my deduction about the matches was correct, how was it that his match-box was found in the murdered man's room? The inference[Pg 304] is that Penreath left his match-box in the dining room after lighting his candle before going to bed, and the murderer found it and took it into Mr. Glenthorpe's bedroom to point suspicion towards Penreath.

"This fact opened up a new possibility about the crime—the possibility that Penreath was the victim of a conspiracy. When we were examining the footprints which led to the pit, the possibility of somebody else having worn Penreath's boots occurred to me, because I have seen that trick worked before, but the servant's story suggested that Penreath did not put his boots outside his door to be cleaned, but came to the door with them in his hand in the morning. But Penreath told me this morning that he put out his boots overnight to be cleaned, but had taken them back into his room before Ann brought up his tea. The murderer, therefore, had ample opportunity to use them for his purpose of carrying the body to the pit and to put them back afterwards outside Penreath's door.

"But Peggy's belated admissions did more than suggest that Penreath was the victim of a sinister plot—they narrowed down the range of persons by whom it could have been contrived. The plotter was not only an inmate of the inn, but somebody who had seen the match box and knew that it belonged to Penreath.

"I returned to Flegne to resume the investigations I had broken off nearly three weeks before, and from that point my discoveries were very rapid, all tending to throw suspicion on Benson. The first indication was the outcome of a remark of mine about his height, and the broken gas light in Mr. Glenthorpe's bedroom. It was purely a chance shot, but it threw him into a pitiable state of excitement. I let him think, however, that it was nothing more than a chance remark. That night[Pg 305] I was put to sleep in Penreath's room, and there I made two discoveries. The first was the existence of a small door, behind the wardrobe, opening on a corresponding door on the other side, which in its turn opens into Mr. Glenthorpe's room. Thus it would be possible for a person in the room Penreath occupied, discovering these doors as I did, to see into the next bedroom—under certain conditions. My second discovery was the outcome of my first discovery—I picked up underneath the wardrobe a fragment of an appealing letter which Penreath had commenced to write to his fiancée, and had subsequently torn up. It was a long time before I grasped the full significance of these two discoveries. Why should a man, after writing a letter of appeal to his fiancée, decide not to send it and destroy it? The most probable reason was that something had happened to cause him to change his mind. What could have happened to change the conditions so quickly? The hidden doors in the wall, which looked into the next room, supplied an answer to the question. Penreath had looked through, and seen—what? My first thought was that he had seen the murder committed, but that theory did not account for the destruction of the letter, and his silence when arrested, unless, indeed, the girl had committed the murder. The girl—Peggy! It came to me like a flash, the solution of the strangest aspect of this puzzling case—the reason why Penreath maintained his dogged silence under an accusation of murder.

"It came to me, the clue for which I had been groping, with the recollection of a phrase in the girl's story to me—her second story—in which she not only told me of her efforts to shield Penreath, but revealed frankly to me her relations with Penreath, innocent enough, but commenced in chance fashion, and continued by clandestine[Pg 306] meetings in lonely spots. I remembered when she told me about it all that I was impressed by Penreath's absolute straightforwardness in his dealings with this girl. He was open and sincere with her throughout, gave her his real name, and told her much about himself: his family, his prospects, and even his financial embarrassment. He went further than that: he told her that he was engaged to be married, and that if he could get free he would marry her. A young man who talks in this strain is very much in love. The artless story of Peggy revealed that Penreath was as much in love with the girl as she was with him. 'If he could get free!' That was the phrase that gave me the key to the mystery. He had set out to get free by writing to Miss Willoughby, breaking off his engagement. Later he had torn up the letter because through the door in the wall he had seen Peggy standing by the bedside of the murdered man, and had come to the conclusion that she had murdered him.

"If you think it a little strange that Penreath should have jumped to this conclusion about the woman he loved, you must remember the circumstances were unusual. Peggy had surrounded herself with mystery; she refused to tell her lover where she lived, she would not even tell him her name. When he looked into the room he did not even know she was in the house, because she had kept out of his way during the previous evening, waiting for an opportunity to see him alone. Consequently he experienced a great shock at the sight of her, and the mystery with which she had always veiled her identity and movements recurred to him with a terrible and sinister significance as he saw her again under such damning conditions, standing by the bedside of the dead man with a knife in her hand.

"Penreath's subsequent actions—his destruction of the[Pg 307] letter he had written to Miss Willoughby, his hurried departure from the inn, and his silence in the face of accusation—are all explained by the fact that he saw the girl Peggy in the next