The Hampstead Mystery by John R. Watson (sneezy the snowman read aloud .txt) 📕

"You have found out who killed my father?" she asked quietly.

Crewe had sufficient personal pride to feel a little hurt when he saw the calm way in which she accepted the result of his investigations, instead of congratulating him on his success in a difficult task.

"I think so," he said. "Before I tell you who it is you must prepare yourself for a great shock."

"I know who it is" she said—"Mr. Holymead."

There was no pretence about his astonishment.

"How on earth did you find out?"

She smiled a little at such a revelation of his appreciation of his own cleverness in having probed the mystery.

"I did not find it out," she said. "I had to be told."

"And who told you, Miss Fewbanks?" he asked. "Has he confessed to you?
How long have you known it?"

"I have known it only a few minutes," she said. "Will you tell me how you got on the track and all you have done? I am greatly interested. You have been wonderfully clever to find out. I should never have guessed Mr. Holymead had anything to do with it—I should never have thought it possible. When you have finished I will tell you how I came to know. The story is extremely simple—and sordid."

The fact that the key of the mystery had been in her hands only a few minutes was a solace to Crewe, as it detracted but little from the story he had to tell of patient investigations extending over weeks.

He pieced together the story of the tragedy as he had unravelled it. Hill, he said, had conceived the idea of blackmailing her father after he had discovered the existence of some letters in a secret drawer of Sir Horace's desk. The fact that Sir Horace had kept these letters instead of destroying them as he had destroyed other letters of a somewhat similar kind showed that he was very much infatuated with the lady who wrote them. That lady, as doubtless Miss Fewbanks had guessed, was Mrs. Holymead—a lady with whom Sir Horace had been on very friendly terms before she married Mr. Holymead.

"What became of the letters?" asked Miss Fewbanks. "Have you got them?"

"I think they are destroyed," he said. "Mrs. Holymead removed them from the secret drawer the day after the discovery of the murder. She removed them when the police had charge of the house, and almost from under the eyes of Inspector Chippenfield. It was a daring plan and well carried out."

Miss Fewbanks heaved a sigh of relief on learning the fate of the letters. It had been her intention to endeavour to obtain them if they were in Crewe's possession, and destroy them.

Crewe explained that Hill was afraid to take the letters and then boldly blackmail Sir Horace. The butler conceived the plan of getting Birchill to break into the house. He did not take Birchill into his confidence with regard to the blackmailing scheme, but in order to induce Sir Horace to believe the burglar had stolen the letters he told Birchill to force open the desk, as he would probably find money or papers of value there. But in order to prevent Birchill getting the letters if he should happen to stumble across the secret drawer, Hill removed them the day before. His plan was to go to Riversbrook in the morning after the burglary, and after leaving open the secret drawer which had contained the letters, to report the burglary to the police. When Sir Horace came home unexpectedly Hill had just removed the letters and had them in his possession. Hill was greatly perturbed at his master's unexpected return, and had to get an opportunity to replace the letters in the secret drawer, but Sir Horace told him to go home, as he was not wanted till the morning. Hill went to that girl's flat in Westminster, and there saw Birchill. He told Birchill that Sir Horace had returned unexpectedly, but he urged Birchill to carry out the burglary as arranged, and assured him that as Sir Horace was a heavy sleeper there would be no risk if he waited until Sir Horace went to bed. Hill's position was that if the burglary was postponed Sir Horace might make the discovery that the letters had been stolen from the secret drawer. In that case Sir Horace would immediately suspect Hill, who, he knew, was an ex-convict. It was just possible that Sir Horace, before going to bed, would discover that the letters had been stolen—that is, if he went to bed before Birchill got into the place—but Hill had to take that risk.

It was the fact that the burglary Hill had arranged with Birchill took place on the night Sir Horace was killed that had given rise to the false clues which had misled the police. Crewe, as he himself modestly put it, was so fortunate as to get on the right track from the start. His suspicions were directed to Holymead when he saw the latter carrying away a walking-stick from Riversbrook after his visit of condolence to Miss Fewbanks. Crewe explained what tactics he had adopted to obtain a brief inspection of the stick in order to ascertain for his own satisfaction if it had belonged to Holymead. His suspicions against Holymead were strengthened when he discovered that the latter, when driving to his hotel on the night of the tragedy, had thrown away a glove which was the fellow of the one found by the police in Sir Horace's library.

"The next point to settle was whether Holymead had had anything to do with your father's sudden return from Scotland," said Crewe, continuing his story. "If that proved to be the case, and if evidence could be obtained on which to justify the conclusion that these two old friends had had a deadly quarrel, the circumstantial evidence against Holymead as the man who killed your father was very strong. I may say that before I went to Scotland I came across evidence of the estrangement of Holymead and his wife. Do you remember when you and Mrs. Holymead were leaving the court after the inquest that Mr. Holymead came up and spoke to you? He shook hands with you and was on the point of shaking hands with his wife as if she were a lady he had met casually. Then, on the night of the murder, the taxi-cab driver at Hyde Park Corner drove him to his house at Princes Gate, but was ordered to drive back and take him to Verney's Hotel. All this was interesting to me—doubly interesting in the light of the fact that Sir Horace had known Mrs. Holymead before her second marriage, and had paid her every attention.

"I went to Scotland and made inquiries at Craigleith Hall, where Sir Horace had been shooting. My object was to endeavour to obtain a clue to the reason for his sudden journey to London. The local police had made inquiries on this point on behalf of Scotland Yard, and had been unable to obtain any clue. No telegram had been received by Sir Horace, and he had sent none. Of course he had received some letters. He had told none of the other members of the shooting party the object of his departure for London, but he had declared his intention of being back with them in less than a week. It had occurred to me when the crime was discovered that his missing pocket-book might not have been stolen by his murderer, but might have been lost in Scotland. I made inquiries in that direction and eventually found that the man who had attended to Sir Horace on the moors had the pocket-book. His story was that Sir Horace had lost it the day before his departure for London. He had taken off his coat owing to the heat on the moor, and the pocket-book had dropped out. He ascertained his loss before he left for London, and told this man Sanders where he thought the pocket-book had dropped out. Sanders was to look for it, and if he found it was to keep it until Sir Horace came back. He did find it, and after learning of your father's death was tempted to keep it, as it contained four five-pound notes. Sanders is an ignorant man, and can scarcely read. He professed to know nothing of the pocket-book when I questioned him, but I became suspicious of him, and laid a trap which he fell into. Then he handed me the pocket-book, which he had hidden on the moor, under a stone. In the pocket-book I found a letter from Holymead asking your father to come to London at once as there were to be two new appointments to the Court of Appeal, and that Sir Horace had an excellent chance of obtaining one if he came to London and used his influence with the Chancellor and the Chief Justice, who were still in town. The writer indicated that he was doing all that was possible in Sir Horace's interests, and that he would meet Sir Horace at Riversbrook at 9.30 on Wednesday night and let him know the exact position. There is nothing suspicious in such a letter, but my inquiries concerning new appointments to the Court of Appeal suggest that the statements in the letter are false.

"Now let us consider the conduct of Holymead and his wife since the night of the murder. His course of action has not been that of a man anxious to assist the police in the discovery of the murderer of his old friend. We have first of all his secrecy regarding his visit to Riversbrook that night; the fact of the visit being established by the stick, and the glove he left behind. We have the estrangement of husband and wife. We have Mrs. Holymead's visit to Riversbrook on the morning that the first details of the crime appeared in the newspapers. Ostensibly she came to see you and pay her condolences, but as she knew that you had been away in the country she ought to have telephoned to learn if you had come up to London. Instead of telephoning, she went to Riversbrook direct, and when she found you were not there she was admitted to the presence of my old friend, Inspector Chippenfield. He is an excellent police officer, but I do not think he is a match for a clever woman. And Mrs. Holymead is such a fine-looking woman that I feel sure Chippenfield was so impressed by her appearance that he forgot he was a police officer and remembered only that he was a man. She managed to get him out of the room long enough to enable her to open the secret drawer in Sir Horace's desk and remove the letters. No doubt Sir Horace had shown her where he kept them, as their neat little hiding place was an indication of the value he placed upon them. She was under the impression that no one knew about the letters, and her object in removing them was to prevent the police stumbling across them and so getting on the track of her husband. But as I have already told you, Hill knew about the letters, and on the night of the murder had them in his possession. On the night after the murder, while Inspector Chippenfield was making investigations at Riversbrook, Hill had managed to obtain the opportunity to put the letters back. He naturally thought that if the police discovered some of Sir Horace's private papers in his possession they would conclude that he had had something to do with the murder.

"The next point of any consequence is Holymead's defence of Birchill and the deliberate way in which he blackened your father's name while cross-examining Hill. If we regard Holymead's conduct solely from the standpoint of a barrister doing his best for his client his defence of Birchill is not so remarkable. But we have to remember that your father and Holymead had been life-long friends. His acceptance of the brief for the defence was in itself remarkable. The fee, as I took the trouble to find out, was not large; indeed, for a man of Holymead's commanding eminence at the bar it might be called a small one, and he should have returned the brief because the fee was inadequate. We have, therefore, two things to consider—his defence of the man charged with the murder of your father, and his readiness to do the work without regard to the monetary side of it. Much was said at the time in some of the papers about a barrister being a servant of the court and compelled by the etiquette of the bar