did. He seemed to me to pitch on that description of its position

simply because it was the easiest that came to hand—which meant that it conveyed something definite to his own mind.

“That finished him, so far as I was concerned. But I took the trouble to go down to the Maze, just for my own satisfaction. I’d been there that morning; and I’d noticed gossamer all over the hedge at the loophole—some of it actually stretching across the hole in the hedge. When I went down, after interviewing friend Ernest, those gossamer threads were still there. No gun could possibly have been shoved into the hole without snapping them. I put my hand in, just to see; and of course I got it covered with spider’s web.”

“So that was why you cleaned your hand on the hedge and made such a fuss about spiders!” Wendover exclaimed. “I thought you were simply fooling——”

“I was certainly in high spirits,” Sir Clinton confessed blandly. “I think I’d every right to be. I’d got complete confirmation of my suspicion—though really I didn’t need the confirmatory evidence. Let’s get on with the story. We picked up friend Ernest’s cigar-case there; and I kept it. I had a notion that he hadn’t left it there without some ulterior purpose. And besides, I thought his finger-prints might come in useful some time. We didn’t need them, as it turned out. It was merely a precaution on my part. You see, there was very little to be done with finger-prints on these air-guns. It seems friend Ernest had carefully organised a grand air-gun shooting competition on the morning of the day he killed his brothers. He’d had the guns passed from hand to hand, so that the finger-marks of nearly everyone were printed on them in addition to his own. Of course, I had the tin box containing the spurious darts. He’d handled that. But I hardly troubled to examine it for finger-marks. I was sure he’d use gloves in touching it.

“Then I found another thing which I half-expected. I’d dropped the hint about Ariadne’s clue and the possibility of an outsider having to resort to something of the kind. Well, Wendover and I found some yards of black thread carefully placed where we couldn’t help seeing it. No black thread was found when the Shandons were murdered. But after I’d dropped that hint in Ernest Shandon’s presence, behold! we get the clue which is meant to suggest an outside murderer. Wasn’t that evidence, on the whole, quite enough to raise some suspicions about him?

“Wendover, I may tell you, thought I treated our friend Ernest rather brutally in our interview after the mythical attack on him. I certainly told Wendover afterwards that I thought Ernest had had a bad half-hour. What I meant, Squire, was the bad half-hour he had when he was laying off his tale to us and wasn’t sure what I thought about it. That was a stiff time for him. As a matter of fact, I took no pains to conceal from friend Ernest that I thought his yarn was a mere pack of lies. I wanted him to feel afraid of me, afraid of what I was getting at in the Whistlefield case. Then, I felt sure, he’d have a shy at knocking me out before I became really dangerous.

“To help on that good work, I arranged to play bridge one night at Whistlefield, so as to let him operate on his own ground. In case of accidents, I had arranged that Ardsley should come over and take charge of the casualty. I’d taken most things into account—I had to—and in case friend Ernest hit anyone else in his flurry, I arranged with Ardsley that the injured person was to ‘die’ nominally; so that friend Ernest might be convinced of the efficacy of the faked darts I’d put into his hands, and might go on to further crimes.

“I needn’t go into that affair. I’m not proud of it. I never intended to risk Miss Hawkhurst in that way. Of course, I knew at once she hadn’t been poisoned with curare. But though I’d done my best to sterilise the faked darts, I was afraid of blood-poisoning setting in. I spent a bad time over it, I can tell you. One can never be sure in a case like that.

“Well, there we were. He’d managed to nip back into the winter-garden before Wendover got after him. He believed Miss Hawkhurst was dead and only Arthur’s life stood between him and the whole of the Shandon-Hawkhurst money. By this time, like all successful mass-murderers, he’d begun to feel a complete contempt for the risk of detection. See Burke and Hare.

“So young Hawkhurst was marked down. And this time, friend Ernest meant to have a perfect alibi. He must have guessed that I suspected his other one; and he’d made up his mind to avert even a shadow of suspicion. He’d stay under my eye at the very time that murder was being done in the Maze; nearly a mile away. That was a master-stroke, I admit.

“He used his cigar-case to bait the trap—got Arthur’s back up very skilfully on the point of cowardice. And beforehand he’d set a booby-trap. He’d fixed the air-gun in position to shoot at the right level; and he’d arranged a thread to the trigger. When young Hawkhurst came to the entrance to the Maze he stepped against the thread stretched across the opening; the gun went off; and the dart hit him near the heart. So simple! And then Ernest came down with us; stumbled ‘accidentally’ over the air-gun; tore away the thread from the trigger before handing the gun to us. And then he ‘found’ Ariadne’s clue for us—the thread he’d laid down as a blind, to make us think it was a stranger at work, someone operating from the river.”

“He was cleverer than I gave him credit for,” Stenness confessed, rather grudgingly. “I always thought him a dull brute.”

“The contents of Roger Shandon’s will took away my last doubts,” Sir Clinton went on. “Besides that, I’d tested the dart he’d used against Miss Hawkhurst and found it was one of the faked lot stolen from the museum that night. So by then the only question was: ‘What should be done with friend Ernest?’”

Sir Clinton paused and lit a fresh cigar before going on to the end of his narrative. When he spoke once more his audience was rather surprised by this theme.

“There’s always a good deal of talk in the newspapers from time to time about ‘unexplained mysteries,’ ‘unsolved crimes,’ ‘police inefficiency,’ and so forth. Now I’ll put a case to you. Suppose you were a detective engaged on some beastly case like the Jack-the-Ripper business. And suppose you discovered in the end that the criminal was a lunatic—as Jack-the-Ripper obviously was. And, finally, suppose that his insanity has been discovered and that he’s been put into an asylum since his latest crime. What would you do? Would you publish your results? Even if he weren’t already in an asylum, what could you do? Try him, and get him sent to Broadmoor? For you couldn’t hang him, since he’s insane. Would you do that? If you did, the net result would be that you’d spatter all his innocent relations with the mud of his crime; and you’d do no good at all. There are some sleeping dogs that are best left lying. Mind, I’m giving you merely my own private view. I don’t mean that you can take that to represent police procedure. I’m simply telling you how I feel about the business.”

Ardsley nodded in agreement.

“So long as a brute gets his deserts, it doesn’t seem to me to matter how he gets them. And I agree with you about making an innocent family suffer through no fault of their own.”

Sir Clinton acknowledged Ardsley’s support.

“That’s how I looked at the Shandon case,” he said. “I could have arrested the brute. Then we’d have had a trial. And the Hawkhursts would have been branded as relatives of a murderer. I thought things could be done just as efficiently by making Ernest Shandon his own executioner. In fact, my method was a stiffer one than mere hanging, as you know. And if it failed—well, the law would take its normal course.

“I’d found a suit-case packed ready in the Maze on the night that young Hawkhurst was attacked. I expected something of the sort and went specially to look for it. I’d a notion that he wouldn’t care to sneak out of the house with a suit-case in his hand at the last moment, if he bolted. He’d have it cached somewhere, so that he could leave with empty hands, quite unsuspicious, you know. I knew he’d need a complete change of clothes so as to be able to alter his appearance and put the hue and cry off his track. He’d shown a penchant for the Maze all along. He’d even dragged it into his story of the attack on himself; so it was clear he had it very much in mind. I banked on that when I looked there for his suit-case. It was a good enough choice. He could sneak out of the house, pick up the suit-case, go across to the boat-house, and row himself down to the village without having to be seen carrying the bag on the public road at all—quite a good plan, if you ask me.”

“I hadn’t seen why he went to the Maze, I admit,” said Stenness. “It seemed rather like a bit of magic on your part to have foreseen that.”

“Once I’d found the suit-case,” Sir Clinton went on, “all that remained was to arrange the moment for his bolt, so that I could grip him. There was no use waiting on his good pleasure to fix the time. I gave him a plain hint that I’d be glad to see him go—let him think I wanted to avoid the scandal of a trial. There was no lying in that. I certainly did want to avoid putting him in the dock.

“Now as it happened, Stenness had been realising some capital at that time; so I got him to put his cash into the study safe that night. And I told friend Ernest that the money was there—a good round sum. That gave him the sinews of war for his bolt, free of charge, you see? He’d only to grab it in passing. And as soon as I felt he was nibbling, I telephoned a code-message to the police-station: some rot about Navy Cut tobacco. From that prearranged message, they knew they’d only to open an envelope and carry out their sealed orders which I’d left with them. They came up to the Maze during the night; watched Ernest into it about 6 a.m.—I’d been keeping an eye on his room during the night, so he couldn’t have given us the slip anyhow. Then, as soon as he went into the Maze my men closed the gates behind him—and the game was up!

“You know the rest. We had to hold an inquest, of course; but you must have seen that we gave the bare legal minimum of evidence; just enough to prove suicide. Of course there’s sure to be some talk. One can’t help that. But we’ve stifled it as far as we possibly could; and the reporters got so little that the thing was hardly talked about in the papers.”

Sir Clinton smiled with a tingle of sardonic amusement.

“I wonder what they’d have made of it if they’d known all about our methods! Perhaps I wasn’t quite orthodox. Perhaps I ought to have got him nicely hanged—and incidentally run the public in for a big bill for his prosecution. I can only say that my conscience is quite clear; it doesn’t give me a twinge. Consciences are weird things.”

He glanced across at Stenness with a glint of humour in his eye which the rest failed to see.

“And now, what about some bridge?”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

This transcription follows the text of the 1927 edition, as reprinted by Penguin Books, with the exception of the chapter names, which were omitted in that edition. The ebook reprint by Orion House was consulted to restore the original chapter names.

The following alterations have been made to correct what are believed to be unambiguous errors in the Penguin Books edition:

* “two laces at once” to “two places at once” (Chapter IV) * “may seen strange” to “may seem strange” (Chapter VII) * “a tract almost grazing” to “a track almost grazing” (Chapter X) * “dissapeared” to “disappeared” (Chapter XI) * “In easy visions” to “In uneasy visions” (Chapter XIII) * “Arthur Shandon” to “Arthur Hawkhurst” (Chapter XIII) * “Your afraid” to “You’re afraid” (Chapter XIII) * “polished then” to “polished them” (Chapter XVI) * “slighty” to “slightly” (Chapter XVI) * “fron” to “from” (Chapter XVI, three occurrences) * “as he did do” to “as he did so” (Chapter XVII) * “didn’t you makes” to “didn’t you make” (Chapter XVIII)

Additionally, several occurrences of unpaired quotation marks have been corrected. Lastly, in Chapter IV a single line of dialogue (“Can you guess what poison was used?”) was erroneously omitted. It has been reinstated here (obtained by consulting the Orion House ebook).

Other errors, if any, in the Penguin Books edition have been left as printed.