Trent Intervenes. E. Bentley C.
The canon drew himself up in his chair. ‘It was an abominable act of sacrilege!’ he exclaimed. ‘The man calling himself Verey—’
‘I don’t think,’ Trent said, ‘it was the man calling himself Verey who actually did the abominable act. We believe it was the fourth member of the gang, who masqueraded as the Vereys’ chauffeur—a very interesting character. Superintendent Owen can tell you about him.’
Mr Owen twisted his moustache thoughtfully. ‘Yes; he is the only one of them that we can place. Alfred Coveney, his name is; a man of some education and any amount of talent. He used to be a stage-carpenter and property-maker—a regular artist, he was. Give him a tub of papier-mâché, and there was nothing he couldn’t model and colour to look exactly like the real thing. That was how the false top to the gravestone was made, I’ve no doubt. It may have been made to fit on like a lid, to be slipped on and off as required. The inscription was a bit above Alf, though—I expect it was Gifford who drafted that for him, and he copied the lettering from other old stones in the churchyard. Of course the fake sign-post was Alf’s work too—stuck up when required, and taken down when the show was over.
‘Well, Alf got into bad company. They found how clever he was with his hands, and he became an expert burglar. He has served two terms of imprisonment. He is one of a few who have always been under suspicion for the job at Sir Andrew Ritchie’s place, and the other two when the Chalice was lifted from Eynsham Park and the Psalter from Lord Swanbourne’s house. With what they collected in this house and the jewellery that was taken in all three burglaries, they must have done very well indeed for themselves; and by this time they are going to be hard to catch.’
Canon Maberley, who had now recovered himself somewhat, looked at the others with the beginnings of a smile. ‘It is a new experience for me,’ he said, ‘to be made use of by a gang of criminals. But it is highly interesting. I suppose that when these confiding strangers had been got down here, my tenant appeared in the character of the parson, and invited them into the house, where you tell me they were induced to make a purchase of stolen property. I do not see, I must confess, how anything could have been better designed to prevent any possibility of suspicion arising. The vicar of a parish, at home in his own vicarage! Who could imagine anything being wrong? I only hope, for the credit of my cloth, that the deception was well carried out.’
‘As far as I know,’ Trent said, ‘he made only one mistake. It was a small one; but the moment I heard of it I knew that he must have been a fraud. You see, he was asked about the oar you have hanging up in the hall. I didn’t go to Oxford myself, but I believe when a man is given his oar it means that he rowed in an eight that did something unusually good.’
A light came into the canon’s spectacled eyes. ‘In the year I got my colours the Wadham boat went up five places on the river. It was the happiest week of my life.’
‘Yet you had other triumphs,’ Trent suggested. ‘For instance, didn’t you get a Fellowship at All Souls, after leaving Wadham?’
‘Yes, and that did please me, naturally,’ the canon said. ‘But that is a different sort of happiness, my dear sir, and, believe me, nothing like so keen. And by the way, how did you know about that?’
‘I thought it might be so, because of the little mistake your tenant made. When he was asked about the oar, he said he had rowed for All Souls.’
Canon Maberley burst out laughing, while Langley and the superintendent stared at him blankly.
‘I think I see what happened,’ he said. ‘The rascal must have been browsing about in my library, in search of ideas for the part he was to play. I was a resident Fellow for five years, and a number of my books have a bookplate with my name and the name and arms of All Souls. His mistake was natural.’ And again the old gentleman laughed delightedly.
Langley exploded. ‘I like a joke myself,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be skinned alive if I can see the point of this one.’
‘Why, the point is,’ Trent told him, ‘that nobody ever rowed for All Souls. There never were more than four undergraduates there at one time, all the other members being Fellows.’
‘NO; I happened to be abroad at the time,’ Philip Trent said. ‘I wasn’t in the way of seeing the English papers, so until I came here this week I never heard anything about your mystery.’
Captain Royden, a small, spare, brown-faced man, was engaged in the delicate—and forbidden—task of taking his automatic telephone instrument to pieces. He now suspended his labours and reached for the tobacco-jar. The large window of his office in the Kempshill clubhouse looked down upon the eighteenth green of that delectable golf course, and his eye roved over the whin-clad slopes beyond as he called on his recollection.
‘Well, if you call it a mystery,’ he said as he filled a pipe. ‘Some people do, because they like mysteries, I suppose. For instance, Colin Hunt, the man you’re staying with, calls it that. Others won’t have it, and say there was a perfectly natural explanation. I could tell you as much as anybody could about it, I dare say.’
‘As being secretary here, you mean?’
‘Not only that. I was one of the two people who were in at the death, so to speak—or next door to it,’ Captain Royden said. He limped to the mantelshelf and took down a silver box embossed on the lid with the crest and mottoes of the Corps of Royal Engineers. ‘Try one of these cigarettes, Mr Trent. If you’d like to hear the yarn, I’ll give it you. You have heard something about Arthur Freer, I suppose?’
‘Hardly anything,’ Trent said. ‘I just gathered that he wasn’t a very popular character.’
‘No,’ Captain Royden said with reserve. ‘Did they tell you he was my brother-in-law? No? Well, now, it happened about four months ago, on a Monday—let me see—yes, the second Monday in May. Freer had a habit of playing nine holes before breakfast. Barring Sundays—he was strict about Sunday—he did it most days, even in the beastliest weather, going round all alone usually, carrying his own clubs, studying every shot as if his life depended on it. That helped to make him the very good player he was. His handicap here was two, and at Undershaw he used to be scratch, I believe.
‘At a quarter to eight he’d be on the first tee, and by nine he’d be back at his house—it’s only a few minutes from here. That Monday morning he started off as usual—’
‘And at the usual time?’
‘Just about. He had spent a few minutes in the clubhouse blowing up the steward about some trifle. And that was the last time he was seen alive by anybody—near enough to speak to, that is. No one else went off the first tee until a little after nine, when I started round with Browson—he’s our local padre; I had been having breakfast with him at the vicarage. He’s got a game leg, like me, so we often play together when he can fit it in.
‘We had holed out on the first green, and were walking onto the next tee, when Browson said: “Great Scot! Look there. Something’s happened.” He pointed down the fairway of the second hole; and there we could see a man lying sprawled on the turf, face-down and motionless. Now there is this point about the second hole—the first half of it is in a dip in the land, just deep enough to be out of sight from any other point on the course, unless you’re standing right above it—you’ll see when you go round yourself. Well, on the tee, you are right above it; and we saw this man lying. We ran to the spot.
‘It was Freer, as I had known it must be at that hour. He was dead, lying in a disjointed sort of way no live man could have lain in. His clothing was torn to ribbons, and it was singed, too. So was his hair—he used to play bareheaded—and his face and hands. His bag of clubs was lying a few yards away, and the brassie, which he had just been using,