Unravelled Knots Read online

  “But though we all knew that the inquest would not be dull, yet we were not prepared for the surprises which were in store for us, and which will render that inquest a memorable one in the annals of criminal investigation. To begin with we already knew that Arthur Clarke had now the assistance of Mr. Markham, one of the leading solicitors of Barchester, in his difficult position. Acting on that gentleman’s advice Clarke had amplified the statement which he had originally made as to his movements on the fatal afternoon. This amplified statement he now reiterated on oath, and though frankly no one believed him, we were bound to admit that if he could substantiate it, an extraordinary complication would arise, which though it might not eventually clear him altogether, in the minds of thinking people, would at any rate give him the benefit of the doubt. What he now stated was in substance this:

  “‘The servants at Meere Court,’ he said, ‘are quite right when they say that I left the party soon after five o’clock. I was rather tired, and after a last dance with Miss St. Jude I went upstairs to pay my respects to Lady Foremeere. Her ladyship, however, kept me talking for some considerable time on one subject and then another, until, to my astonishment, I saw that it was close on seven o’clock, when I hastily took my leave. While I was looking for my coat in the hall I remember that Lord Foremeere came out of the smoking-room and asked me if I knew whether the party downstairs had broken up. “These things are such a bore,” he said, “but I will see if I can get one of them to come up and show you out.” I told his lordship not to trouble; however, he rang the bell, and presently the butler, Spinks, came through from the servants’ quarters, and his lordship then went upstairs I think. A minute or two later Miss St. Jude came, also from the servants’ quarters; she sent Spinks away telling him that she would look after me; we then talked together for a few moments and then I said good night and went straight back to the hotel.’

  “Now we had already learned from both the hall-porter and the head-waiter at the Deanery that Mr. Clarke was back at the hotel soon after seven o’clock, that he had his dinner in the restaurant at half-past, and that after spending an hour or so in the lounge after dinner he went up to his room and did not go out again until the following morning. Therefore all that was needed now was a confirmatory statement from Lady Foremeere to prove Arthur Clarke’s innocence, because in that case every hour of his time would be accounted for, from half-past three onwards, whilst Miss Clarke was actually seen alive by two neighbours when she introduced a visitor into her house at half-past five.

  “The question would then resolve itself into, Who was that visitor? leaving the more important one of the khaki tunic a baffling mystery, rather than a damning evidence.

  “The entire court room was on the tiptoe of expectation when Lady Foremeere was formally called. I can assure you that the ubiquitous pin could have been heard to drop during the brief moment’s silence when the elegant society woman stood up and disposed her exquisite sable cape about her shoulders and then swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  “She answered the coroner’s questions in a dear, audible voice, and never wavered in her assertions. She said that her stepdaughter had come up to her boudoir and asked her if she would see Mr. Arthur Clarke for a few moments; he had something very important to say to her.

  “‘I was rather surprised at the strange request,’ Lady Foremeere continued with utmost composure, ‘and suggested that Mr. Clarke should make his important communication to Lord Foremeere, but my stepdaughter insisted and to please her I agreed. I thought that I would get my husband to be present at this mysterious interview, but his lordship was having a short rest in the smoking-room, so on second consideration I decided not to disturb him. A minute or two later Mr.—er—Clarke presented himself and at once I realised that he had had too much to drink. He talked wildly about his desire to marry Miss St. Jude and very excitedly about some compromising letters which he alleged were in his possession and which he threatened to show to Lord Foremeere, if I did not at once give him so many thousand pounds. Naturally I ordered him out of the place, but he wouldn’t go for a long time; he got more and more incoherent and excited and it was not until I threatened to fetch Lord Foremeere immediately that he sobered down and finally I went away. He had been in my room about half an hour.’

  “‘About half an hour?’ was the coroner’s earnest comment on this amazing piece of evidence, ‘but Mr. Clarke said that when he left your ladyship it was close on seven.’

  “‘Mr.—er—Clarke is in error,’ her ladyship asserted firmly. ‘The clock had just struck half-past five when I succeeded in ridding myself of him.’

  “You can easily imagine how great was the excitement at this moment and how intensified it became when Lord Foremeere gave evidence in his turn and further confused the issues. He began by corroborating Arthur Clarke’s statement about his having spoken to him in the hall at seven o’clock. It was almost unbelievable! Everybody gasped and the coroner almost gave a jump:

  “‘But her ladyship has just told us,’ he said, ‘that Clarke left her at half-past five!’

  “‘That, no doubt, is accurate,’ Lord Foremeere rejoined in his stiff, prim manner, ‘since her ladyship said so. All I know is that I was asleep in front of the fire in the smoking-room when I heard a loud bang issuing from the hall. I went to see what it was and there I certainly saw Clarke. He was just coming through the glass door which divides the outside vestibule from the hall, and he appeared to me to have come straight out of the wet and to have left his hat and coat in the outer vestibule.’

  “‘But,’ the coroner insisted, ‘what made your lordship think that he had come from outside?’

  “‘Well, for one thing his face and hands were quite wet and he was wiping them with his handkerchief when I first caught sight of him. His boots too were wet and so were the edges of his trousers, and then, as I said, he was coming into the hall from the outer vestibule, and it was the banging of the front door which had roused me.’

  “‘And the hour then was?’

  “‘The clock had not long since struck seven. But my butler will be able to confirm this.’

  “And Spinks the butler did confirm this portion of his lordship’s statement, though he could say nothing about Mr. Clarke’s boots being wet; nor did he help Mr. Clarke on with his coat and hat, or open the door for him. Miss St. Jude had practically followed Spinks into the hall, and had at once dismissed him, saying she would look after Mr. Clarke. His lordship in the meanwhile had gone upstairs and Spinks went back into the servants’ hall.

  “Of course Miss St. Jude was called. You remember that she had previously stated that Clarke had only left the party at about seven o’clock, that she herself had danced with him most of the time until then, and finally said goodbye to him in the hall. But as this statement was not even corroborated by Clarke’s own assertions and entirely contradicted by both Lord and Lady Foremeere’s evidence, she was fortunately advised not to repeat it on oath. But she hotly denied the suggestion that Clarke had come in from outside when she said goodbye to him in the hall. She saw him put on his hat and coat and they were quite dry. But nobody felt that her evidence was of any value because she would naturally do her utmost to help her sweetheart.

  “Finally, one of the most interesting moments in that memorable enquiry was reached when Lady Foremeere was recalled and asked to state what she knew of Miss Clarke’s antecedents.

  “‘Very little,’ she replied. ‘I only knew her in France when she worked under me in a hospital. I was very ill at one time and she nursed me devotedly; ever since that I helped her financially as much as I could.’

  “‘You made her a weekly allowance?’ her ladyship was asked.

  “‘Not exactly,’ she replied. ‘I just bought her eggs and poultry at a higher figure than she would get from any one else.’

  “‘Do you know anything about some letters that she thought were so valuable?’

  “‘Oh, yes!’ the lady replied
with a kindly smile. ‘Mary had a collection of autograph letters which she had collected whilst she was nursing in France. Among them were some by august, and others by very distinguished personages. She had the idea that these were extraordinarily valuable.’

  “‘Do you know what became of those letters?’

  “‘No,’ her ladyship replied, ‘I do not know.’

  “‘But there were other letters, were there not?’ the coroner insisted, ‘in which you yourself were interested? The ones Mr. Clarke spoke to you about?’

  “‘They existed only in Mr. Clarke’s imagination, I fancy,’ Lady Foremeere replied; ‘but he was in such a highly excited state that afternoon that I really could not quite make out what it was that he desired to sell to me.’

  “Lady Foremeere spoke very quietly and very simply, without a single note of spite or acerbity in her soft, musical voice. One felt that she was stating quite simple facts that rather bored her, but to which she did not attach any importance. And later on when Miss Euphemia Clarke retold the story of the packet of letters and of the quarrels which the deceased and her brother had about them, and when the damning evidence of the khaki tunic stood out like an avenging Nemesis pointing at the unfortunate young man, those in court who had imagination saw—positively saw—the hangman’s rope tightening around his neck.”

  IV

  “And yet the verdict was one of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown,” I said, after a slight pause, waiting for the funny creature to take up his narrative again.

  “Yes,” he replied, “Arthur Clarke has been cleared of every suspicion. He left the court a free man. His innocence was proved beyond question through what everyone thought was the most damnatory piece of evidence against him—the evidence of the khaki tunic. The khaki tunic exonerated Arthur Clarke as completely as the most skilful defender could do. Because if did not fit him. Arthur Clarke was a rather heavy, full grown, broad-shouldered man, the khaki tunic would only fit a slim lad of eighteen. Clarke had admitted the tunic was his, but he had never thought of examining it, and certainly not of trying it on. It was Miss St. Jude who thought of that. Trust a woman in love for getting an inspiration.

  “When she was called at the end of the day to affirm the statements which she had previously made to the police and realised that these statements of hers were actually in contradiction with Clarke’s own assertions, she worked herself up into a state bordering on hysteria, in the midst of which she caught sight of the khaki tunic on the coroner’s table. Of course she, like every one else in the neighbourhood, knew all about the tunic, but when April St. Jude actually saw it with her own eyes and realised what its existence meant to her sweetheart she gave a wild shriek.

  “‘I’ll not believe it,’ she cried, ‘I’ll not believe it. It can’t be. It is not Arthur’s tunic at all.’ Then her eyes dilated, her voice sank to a hoarse whisper, and with a trembling hand she pointed at the tunic: ‘Why,’ she murmured, ‘it is so small, so small! Arthur! Where is Arthur! Why does he not show them all that he never could have worn that tunic?’

  “Proverbially there is but a narrow dividing line between tragedy and farce: while some people shuddered and gasped and men literally held their breath, marvelling what would happen next, quite a number of women fell into hysterical giggling. Of course you remember what happened. The papers have told you all about it. Arthur Clarke was made to try on the khaki tunic and he could not even get his arms into the sleeves. Under no circumstances could he ever have worn that particular tunic. It was several sizes too small for him. Then he examined it closely and recognised it as one he wore in his school O.T.C. when he was a lad. When he was originally confronted with it, he explained he was so upset, so genuinely terrified at the consequences of certain follies which he undoubtedly had committed, that he could hardly see out of his eyes. The tunic was shown to him and he had admitted that it was his, for he had quite a collection of old tunics which he had always kept. But for the moment he had quite forgotten about the one which he had worn more than eight years ago at school.

  “And so the khaki tunic, instead of condemning Clarke had entirely cleared him, for it now became quite evident that the miscreant who had committed the dastardly murder had added this hideous act to his greater crime, and deliberately set to work to fasten the guilt on an innocent man. He had gone up to Clarke’s room, opened the wardrobe, picked up a likely garment, no doubt tearing a piece of cloth out of it whilst so doing, and thus getting the fiendish idea of inserting that piece of khaki between the fingers of the murdered woman. Finally, after locking the parlour door, he put the key in the pocket of the tunic and stuffed the latter in the bottom of a drawer.

  “It was a clever and cruel trick which well nigh succeeded in hanging an innocent man. As it is, it has enveloped the affair in an almost impenetrable mystery. I say ‘almost’ because I know who killed Miss Clarke, even though the public has thrown out an erroneous conjecture. ‘It was Lady Foremeere,’ they say, ‘who killed Miss Clarke.’ But at once comes the question:

  “‘How could she?’ And the query: ‘When?’ Arthur Clarke says he was with her until seven, and after that hour there were several members of her household who waited upon her, notably her maid who it seems came up to dress her at about that time, and she and Lord Foremeere sat down to dinner as usual at eight o’clock.

  “That there had been one or two dark passages in Lady Foremeere’s life, prior to her marriage four years ago, and that Miss Clarke was murdered for the sake of letters which were in some way connected with her ladyship were the only actual undisputable facts in that mysterious case. That it was not Arthur Clarke who killed his sister has been indubitably proved; that a great deal of the evidence was contradictory everyone has admitted. And if the police does not act on certain suggestions which I have made to them, the ‘Hardacres’ murder will remain a mystery to the public to the end of time.”

  “And what are these suggestions?” I asked, without the slightest vestige of irony, for, much against my will, the man’s personality exercised a curious fascination over me.

  “To keep an eye on Lord Foremeere,” the funny creature replied with his dry chuckle, “and see when and how he finally disposes of a wet coat, a dripping hat and soaked boots which he has succeeded in keeping concealed somewhere in the smoking-room, away from the prying eyes even of his own valet.”

  “You mean—?” I asked, with an involuntary gasp.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I mean that it was Lord Foremeere who murdered Miss Clarke for the sake of those letters which apparently contained matter that was highly compromising to his wife. Everything to my mind points to him as the murderer. Whether he knew all along of the existence of the compromising letters, or whether he first knew of this through the conversation between her ladyship and Clarke the day of the servants’ party, it is impossible to say; certain it is that he did overhear that conversation and that he made up his mind to end the impossible situation then and there, and to put a stop once and for all to any further attempt at blackmail. It was easy enough for him on that day to pass in and out of the house unperceived. No doubt his primary object in going to ‘Hardacres’ was to purchase the letters from Miss Clarke, money down; perhaps she proved obstinate, perhaps he merely thought that dead men tell no tales. This we shall never know. After the hideous deed, which must have revolted his otherwise fastidious senses, he must have become conscious of an overwhelming hatred for the man who had, as it were, pushed him into crime, and my belief is that the elaborate mise-en-scène of the khaki tunic, and the circumstantial lie that when he came out of the smoking-room Arthur Clarke had obviously just come in from outside, were invented not so much with the object of averting any suspicion from himself as with the passionate desire to be revenged on Clarke.

  “Think it over,” the Man in the Corner concluded, as he stuffed his beloved bit of string into his capacious pocket; “time, opportunity, motive, all are in favour of my theory, so do not be surprised
if the early editions of tomorrow’s evening papers contain the final sensation in this interesting case.”

  He was gone before I could say another word, and all that I saw of him was his spook-like figure disappearing through the swing door. There was no one now in the place, so a moment or two later I too paid my bill and went away.

  V

  The Man in the Corner proved to be right in the end. At eleven o’clock the next morning the street corners were full of newspaper placards with the flaring headlines: “Sudden death of Lord Foremeere.” It was reported that on the previous evening his lordship was examining a new automatic which he had just bought and explaining the mechanism to his valet. At one moment he actually made the remark: “It is all right, it isn’t loaded,” but apparently there was one cartridge left in one of the chambers. His lordship, it seems, was looking straight down the barrel and his finger must accidentally have touched the trigger; anyway, according to the valet’s story, there was a sudden explosion, and Lord Foremeere fell, shot right between the eyes.