Mallett was about to begin his report on the Dickinson case when the house-telephone rang.
“There’s a Mr. Dedman wants to see you,” he was told. “He says it is urgent.”
The inspector sighed. The file labelled “Re Dickinson,” now bulging with papers, yawned balefully at him. He was anxious to be rid of it once for all, and he grudged any interruption.
“Ask him if he’ll kindly come back tomorrow,” he said. “I’m very busy just now.”
There was a pause and then the voice said: “The gentleman says he must see you this morning, sir. Tomorrow will be too late. He is most insistent.” Then, in an undertone, “He seems perfectly genuine, sir.”
“Very well,” said Mallett, in a resigned tone. “Tell him to come up.”
A moment or two later Mr. Dedman bounced, rather than walked, into the room. He wasted no time in greetings but came straight to the point.
“I’m a busy man, Inspector,” he said, “and so, I have no doubt, are you. I shouldn’t be here if it wasn’t vitally necessary in my clients’ interests. My firm are the solicitors to the estate of the late Mr. Leonard Dickinson. The deceased had insured his life for the sum of—”
“Oh, Mr. Dedman, but I know all about that,” Mallett murmured.
“You do? Good! Then I needn’t waste any time explaining. The point is, that today is the last day of which I can secure any payment from the Company on the basis of suicide. I understand that you have been investigating this case. All I want from you is a clear indication—murder or suicide—which?”
“Oh,” said Mallett quietly. “Murder, undoubtedly.”
“Excellent! I’m much obliged to you. You shall hear from us if litigation proves necessary.” And Mr. Dedman shot out of his chair and made for the door.
“Good Heavens!” said the inspector in astonishment. “Do you really mean to tell me that you don’t want to hear any more? Aren’t you interested to know who murdered your client?”
“Naturally I am, but that can wait. I’m a solicitor, not a policeman. Besides, they told me downstairs that you were extremely busy.”
“I assure you, they told you the truth. All the same, in your own interests, I should advise you to make yourself acquainted with all the facts of the case before you go to see the Insurance Company. There is a little point of law which you might like to consider first.”
“A point of law?” echoed Mr. Dedman, sitting down again.
“Precisely. Do you mind telling me, how did the late Mr. Leonard Dickinson dispose of his estate?”
“One half to his widow for life, with remainder to the children in equal shares, the other half divided between the children absolutely.”
“And of that estate the insurance moneys form a part?”
“Of course—by far the larger part.”
“Is there not a rule of law, Mr. Dedman, that a murderer is not allowed to profit by the will of his victim?”
Mr. Dedman stared at the inspector silent and open-mouthed. His brisk and business-like manner seemed suddenly deflated.
“Inspector,” he said at last, “who murdered my client?”
“His son, Stephen.”
“Good God!” said Mr. Dedman, and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. “Good God!” he repeated. “But—but—Are you serious about this, Inspector?”
“Perfectly serious.”
“But I tell you, this doesn’t make sense! Stephen! Why it was he who was so insistent all along that—”
“That his father had been murdered? Exactly. It is the only case in my experience where a murderer found himself in the position of having to prove that the crime had been committed, in order to attain the result for which he had committed it.”
Mr. Dedman looked at his watch, replaced it in his pocket, and then crossed his legs and settled back in his chair.
“Please tell me all about it,” he requested, in tones that were for him positively humble.
Mallett was only too glad to comply. If he had a weakness, it was that he loved an audience. The circumstances of the present case had compelled him to work entirely alone, and he was pleased with the opportunity. Preparing a written report was always irksome to him, but he thoroughly enjoyed an exposition by word of mouth.
“Stephen Dickinson,” he began, “was an inveterate gambler on the Stock Exchange. He was at all material times, as you lawyers say, hopelessly in debt. He was thoroughly unprincipled, like many gamblers, except, oddly enough, where sex was concerned. I haven’t been able to trace that he ever had anything to do with women. In that respect, he seems to have been positively puritan. He was, of course, extremely conceited and entirely selfish. I have yet to meet a murderer who wasn’t. In particular, he disliked and despised his father, and having met the old gentleman myself, I can believe that he must have been an extremely tiresome person to live with.”
Dedman nodded his emphatic agreement.
“About the middle of the summer,” the inspector proceeded, “Stephen, whose financial position began to be really difficult, appears to have first formed the idea of murdering his father. He was, of course, well aware of the existence of the insurance policy which had been taken out after the death of Mr. Arthur Dickinson. He was also familiar with his father’s habit of taking Medinal tablets under medical advice.”
“How do you fix the date?” Mr. Dedman asked.
“It was about this time, as I learned from the family doctor whom I saw the other day, that the father purported to write to the doctor suggesting that as an experiment he should try taking the drug in powder form. The doctor duly prescribed, and shortly afterwards received a letter saying that the powder did not suit the father, and that he would prefer to continue with the tablets. Both letters were, of course, forgeries, and the son intercepted the prescription and so secured the means of carrying out his design.
“Having done this, he waited until his father went on his annual walking tour before putting his plan into execution. There may have been some reason against attempting the murder in his own home. Perhaps he had some sentimental feeling about it. I don’t know. In any case, he decided that it should be done at Pendlebury Old Hall Hotel, where he knew that his father, a creature of habit if ever there was one, would infallibly end his holiday. He was in this difficulty, however, that he did not know precisely on what day his father would arrive there. At the same time, he had to make provision for as conclusive an alibi as possible.
“He got over it in this way: He arranged to go to Switzerland with his sister for the holidays and then at the last moment invented some excuse for not joining her at the time arranged. (We have been to some trouble over the week end to find out from the hotel details as to how his room was cancelled at short notice.) Then he went to stay at Pendlebury until such time as his father should come along. He took the name of Stewart Davitt—the initials were the same as his own, naturally enough, so that he should not be given away by his luggage, which, no doubt, was marked ‘S.D.’ more or less prominently.”
“Talking of initials,” said Mr. Dedman, “have you observed—”
“I shall come to that presently,” said Mallett. He went on: “He gave an address in Hawk Street, which, I have since ascertained, is in fact a lodging-house and was until the other day the address of a clerk in the office of the stockbrokers through whom he carried on his speculations. He was on close terms of acquaintance with this young man, who has, by the way, since been dismissed by his employers for gambling in shares on his own account. At the hotel, he selected the room next to the one which he knew his father always occupied. (I expect he was familiar, to the point of boredom, with every detail of the old man’s life at his beloved Pendlebury.) He made an excuse for keeping out of sight of all the other residents in the hotel, and bided his time.
“In due course, Mr. Dickinson came to the hotel. As he always did, he ordered a cup of tea to be sent up to his room. As he always did, when it arrived, he told the maid to leave it outside until he was ready for it. All that the son had to do was to slip out of the room adjoining, empty his packet of Medinal powder into the tea-pot (the stuff dissolves quite quickly and is almost tasteless, I am told) and slip back again. The father came out, took in the tray, added his usual dose to the already poisoned tea and went to sleep, never to wake up again. Early next morning, having made his arrangements overnight, Stephen Dickinson left the hotel, caught the express to London, took the eight o’clock aeroplane for Zürich, and met his sister in Klosters that afternoon, no doubt telling her that he had travelled out by boat and train in the usual way. He immediately carried her off on a long climbing expedition, sleeping in various mountain huts, until he knew that it would be too late for him to be in time for the inquest or the funeral, at either of which he might be recognized. (The Swiss authorities, by the way, have been very helpful in tracing the guide whom they took with them.)
“So far as he could tell, everything had gone according to plan. His father would be found dead of an overdose of his usual medicine, a sympathetic coroner would find that death was accidental and no questions would ever be asked. And that, no doubt, was what would have happened, but for three unfortunate accidents—firstly, the presence of a remarkably apt quotation by the bedside; secondly, the fact that having just come to the end of one bottle of tablets the deceased had opened another to make up his usual dose; and lastly, the very peculiar manner in which the old gentleman had talked to me on the eve of his death. And the son had put it out of his power to correct these misconceptions at the inquest! Whether he realized at once how fatal a finding of suicide was to his hopes of reaping the reward of his crime, I don’t know. At all events, he learned it soon enough. It put him in a very nasty position.” Mallett chuckled. “A very nasty position indeed! Having taken the appalling risk of committing murder, he had to take the yet more terrible risk of proving that a murder had been committed—by someone.
“And so Stephen Dickinson, the gambler that he was, decided on the greatest gamble of his life. And before taking any other step, he came round to see—me, of all people. I suppose he thought that I might be able to give him some useful facts, that would help him in disproving suicide, but I fancy that his real motive was to see whether he could get away with an interview with me without arousing any suspicion in my mind. If he could do that, no doubt he felt that he would be safe in carrying out the inquiries which he proposed. And he certainly succeeded! I never gave the matter a thought. It wasn’t until the other day, when the suicide of that man at Midchester brought the whole affair back into my mind again, that I ever seriously considered the question of whether Mr. Dickinson had been killed and if so, by whom.
“Of course when you come to look into it,” the inspector confessed with a shrug of his shoulders, “the whole affair becomes startlingly simple. There is the question of motive for one thing. But over and above that, the principal clue, as you no doubt have realized, Mr. Dedman, is the perfect knowledge that the killer must have had of his victim’s habits. Consider: he must have known, in the first place, that he would be at this particular hotel, and sleep in this particular bedroom. He must have known that he was accustomed to this particular drug, and to taking it in this particular way. He must even have been familiar with his insistence that the tea should always be left outside the door. Now who on earth could have had such a combination of knowledge except a member of the deceased’s own family?”
“Something of that sort had occurred to me,” remarked Dedman. “That was why I favored the theory that the murderer had made a mistake and that the deceased had taken the poison intended for someone else.”
“Instead of which,” Mallett rejoined, “if Vanning—whose real name is Purkis, by the way, a nasty little blackmailer—if he had slept in the room that was originally intended for him, he would have been murdered in place of Mr. Dickinson!
“Well, the rest of the story is no news to you, I think. After his interview with me, young Dickinson spent the next two weeks scouring the country trying to fix the responsibility for his own crime on to the shoulders of some innocent person, aided and abetted by his equally innocent sister and her fiancé. They investigated the antecedents of every person staying in the hotel, except, of course, the mythical Mr. Davitt.”
“He reserved the case of Davitt for himself,” Mr. Dedman put in. “And invented a purely imaginary interview with an equally imaginary landlady to account for him.”
“That is just what I expected. The attempt to find a scapegoat for his own crime was a forlorn hope, of course, but it came perilously near to success twice. The first time, was in the case of Parsons.”
“I told him that properly handled, the Parsons affair might have produced a favorable settlement from the Insurance Company,” said Mr. Dedman in vexation. “It was really pitiful to see how he and young Johnson bungled that business! I beg your pardon, Inspector, I was forgetting. Please go on.”
“The second time,” said Mallett, his moustache points twitching as he tried to suppress a smile, “the result was very nearly more serious than it had been in Parsons’ case. I think he was prepared to throw up the sponge after you had pointed out to him that he had failed to prove Parsons’ guilt; but the news that his last speculation had ruined him drove him to make one last despairing effort. And I am afraid I was really responsible. As a last resort, he tried to put the guilt upon Martin Johnson. You see, Johnson really had something to hide. He was no murderer, but he did happen to be in the hotel on the night of the murder, and he was almost recognized there by Mr. Dickinson. Incidentally, Mr. Dickinson was talking to me at the time, and I remember noticing that immediately afterwards he suddenly switched the conversation to his daughter, who had not been mentioned before. I saw the significance of that only when I had learned that Johnson was his daughter’s fiancé.”
“I knew it!” exclaimed Mr. Dedman. “Jones!”
“Exactly. The suitcase point over again.”
“But not that point only. I knew it as soon as I saw Miss Dickinson’s face when the name of Jones was mentioned in my office.”
“She knew that he had been there, gallivanting with another young lady of his choice?”
“Undoubtedly. And I am very much afraid she knows a good deal more than that.”
“I am sorry to hear it. So far as Stephen Dickinson is concerned, he does not seem to have guessed it until at our last meeting I put it into his head. I did it to test his reactions, but I confess that I did not think they would be as violent as they proved to be.”
“That is a question that is puzzling me,” said Mr. Dedman. “How did young Dickinson hope to be able to represent that Johnson was guilty, in the face of the violent denials he would be sure to make, and what was his object in getting him to drive down to Pendlebury?”
“We can only guess at that,” the inspector replied. “But I have not the smallest doubt what the true answer is. He intended to kill Johnson.”
“But this is terrible!” said Mr. Dedman.
“Why not? One murder often leads to another, and a pistol was found on him when he was picked up. I think that his design was to kill him, and represent it as suicide brought on by remorse acting on a guilty conscience. The point of taking him to Pendlebury, no doubt, was to give colour to the theory. He would be able to say afterwards that he charged him with the crime and that he had then confessed. It would have been very difficult to disprove. Possibly he did actually go so far as to accuse him. That would account for the erratic driving of the car. Johnson will be able to tell you that when he is better. How is he, by the way?”
“Almost recovered. But he has no recollection of anything that happened for half an hour before the accident. On the whole, I think it is just as well.”
“As you say. He seems to have got off very lightly. I never saw a more completely smashed car in my life. But of course the passenger’s side took the brunt of the collision.”
“And how did you come to be on the spot so very opportunely, Inspector?”
“I was going to the Old Hall myself, to see whether the people there could identify Stephen Dickinson from the photograph which I had had taken of him the afternoon before. As it turned out, I was able to get the identification from his body instead, which was much more satisfactory.”
The two men sat in silence for a few moments, and then the solicitor rose to his feet.
“Thank you,” he said. “I shall be making my claim on the Insurance Company for the full amount of the policy moneys today. So far as Stephen Dickinson’s share is concerned, I don’t think there will be any difficulty. It will naturally fall into the rest of the estate and be divided between his mother and sister. The one thing that concerns me now is to see that Mrs. Dickinson never learns the truth. Goodbye.”
The inspector turned to his writing. For an hour there was no sound in the quiet room except the gentle scratching of his pen on the paper. At last, even that ceased. The record was complete. The file of “Re Dickinson” returned for the last time to its drawer in the inspector’s desk.
At his mother’s insistence, Stephen was buried in Pendlebury churchyard next to his father. There was a full attendance of the family at the funeral. It was observed by all that Uncle George was in far better humour than usual. The reason, as Aunt Lucy could have told them, was that since the settlement with the Insurance Company there was no longer any ground for fearing that he would be called upon to contribute anything to the support of his brother’s family.