Headon Hill

The Tenth Green

IT must not be taken as a reflection on the Loamshire police that the Chief Constable of that charming county applied to Scotland Yard for assistance in unravelling the Chetwynd case. The gallant gentleman foresaw from the first that complications touching certain local personages and interests might arise, which would stand a better chance of satisfactory treatment by a man who could approach them from a detached point of view. And it is but fair to place it on record that from start to finish Superintendent Williams and his merry men gave me their cordial co-operation without a trace of professional jealousy.

Williams was on the platform of Honiford station when my train steamed in. The only thing about him that I had cause to quarrel with was his voice, which might very well have brought Colonel Chetwynd back to life.

“Inspector Peters, from Scotland Yard!” he shouted as I descended from my compartment, thereby disclosing my business to all and sundry.

That, however, was the limit of his indiscretion, and I will pay him the compliment of saying that the way he put the case before me was a masterpiece of lucidity. This was the story which he unfolded as we drove through a network of country lanes to the scene of my labours:—

On the previous day Colonel Chetwynd, a local magnate and Justice of the Peace, had arrived at the club-house of the East Loamshire Golf Club shortly after mid-day, intending to lunch by appointment with his friend, General Appleyard, with whom he had arranged to play a match during the afternoon. But Appleyard, for domestic reasons since satisfactorily explained, had failed to put in an appearance, and the Colonel, having eaten his lunch in high dudgeon, had expressed to other members present his intention of going round the links alone for a solitary practice.

“By the way, you understand the game?” the Superintendent interjected, half turning to me from his seat in the dog-cart.

I was compelled to plead guilty to the indictment.

“Ah, well,” he sighed as though condoning a fault, “there isn’t much about play in it, but you will understand the few necessary technical terms. I had to learn ’em myself in a hurry, yesterday.”

He resumed his story from the mouths of witnesses, who had described to him how Colonel Chetwynd had stumped out of the club-house, and how, on being approached by Raffles, the grown-up caddie whom he generally employed, he had dismissed the man in highly-peppered language, stating that he would carry what few clubs he needed himself. He had then started out alone, the first of the members to leave the building after lunch.

Following him at a brief interval, the Messrs. Wilson Neil and Everard Neil, father and son, had gone out for a game, the lastnamed being, the Superintendent informed me in a whisper, the unauthorised lover of Miss Mona Chetwynd, the Colonel’s only daughter. These two gentlemen had also been unattended by caddies. Lastly, after a further interval, there had started out a foursome of lady members, one of whom was Mona Chetwynd.

At this point in Williams’s disclosures we emerged from a steep, up-climbing road into a glorious expanse of heather-clad moorland with a peep of the sea beyond. A little ahead of us was a modern red-brick building, flanked by a tall flag-post, with its gaudy bunting drooping at half-mast. This was evidently the headquarters of the East Loamshire Golf Club. Beyond, a hint of emerald here and there in the nearer and farther distances showed the greens and tees of the renowned course.

But the local man was nearing the end of his story.

On approaching the tenth green, which was hidden from the tee by rising ground and an artificial bunker, the ladies were horrified to find Colonel Chetwynd lying dead on the green. He had been the victim of ferocious violence, his head having been battered almost out of recognition. The two Neils, visible some distance ahead, must have passed the green only a few minutes before, but, recalled by the shrieks of the ladies, expressed horror and surprise, avowing that the Colonel’s body had not been there when they had been “putting” on the green so recently. They had believed him either to be a long way ahead, hidden by the undulations of the course, or to have abandoned his practice and gone home.

The Superintendent said not a word to influence my suspicions, but I saw an ugly time coming for the two Neils if the murder was never brought home to any one. If nothing worse happened, fingers would be pointed and heads wagged at them; for, as I soon learned in the village, relations had been so strained between the elder Neil and the Colonel that the latter had forbidden his daughter to have anything to do with Everard Neil.

“Well, that is all,” said Williams, as he got down from the trap at the door of the club-house and gave the reins to the constable who had accompanied us. “Except that there’ll be another Richmond in the field, unless you make an arrest very shortly. Mr. John Chetwynd—that’s the Colonel’s brother and executor— has sworn to call in Radford Shone if the police can’t do the trick. Now, would you wish to see the club steward first, or visit the ground? Come along, then; I’ll show you round the links.”

I spent three days in the village, pushing my inquiries by methods which by the readers of detective fiction would be regarded as commonplace and dreary, and which shall therefore be omitted here. Though I had formed certain theories, I had not seen my way clear to an arrest, and when, on the fourth day, I started out after an early breakfast to pay yet one more visit to the scene of the crime, I was beginning to wonder how soon I should have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Radford Shone. I had had occasion to call on Mr. John Chetwynd, who had assumed the reins of government at the Grange, and he had confirmed my friend Williams’s statement as to his intention to invoke Shone’s aid in the event of my efforts not being speedily successful.

Mr. John Chetwynd, a plethoric little merchant from Mincing Lane, must have been an exact replica of his irascible brother.

He spouted fury on the dilatoriness of the police, and laughed Scotland Yard to scorn. I had heard the same sort of thing before, but of course I listened with all due deference, expressing perfect willingness to collaborate with Mr. Radford Shone if he came down. In this I was quite sincere, for I had never yet met the great criminal expert whose marvellous powers of deduction had made him almost a cult amongst moneyed people with secrets to find out. In six months he had become the talk of the town, as the result of his recovery of the Duchess of Wilford’s jewels—a case which was hushed up before it reached the courts, and with which I myself had no official connection.

My way from my lodgings to the scene of the Colonel’s death led me along the switchback crest of the breezy down, amid the succession of tees, bunkers, and greens that formed the East Loamshire golf course. I had left the tenth tee behind and was climbing the slope towards the bunker—a turf bank with gaps for the passage of the players—when I heard voices beyond, and sure enough, on passing through one of the gaps I saw a party of three gentlemen on the green below, at the spot which during the past three days had been the focus of my work.

The short, stubby one in breeches and gaiters I recognised as Mr. John Chetwynd, the murdered man’s brother. He was standing aloof from the other two, his figure thrown into relief by a sombre larch grove to the right of the green. The next one to fill the eye was a tall, loose-jointed man in city clothes, who was very slowly crawling, ventre-a-terre, across the green, like a gigantic earth-worm taking an airing. The third was a stout, smooth-faced young man, also wearing the silk hat and velvetcollared overcoat of the town dweller, who with clasped hands seemed to be ecstatically following the serpentine wrigglings of the prone figure.

I went down to them over the “approach,” tricky by reason of the stunted heather.

“Ah, here is Inspector Peters,” cried Mr. Chetwynd. “Now you will     ”

But the man on his stomach twisted round and shook his head reprovingly, while the fat gentleman in his wake held up a warning finger. So I halted in my tracks till, some three minutes later, Mr. Radford Shone saw fit to rise to his feet, pocketing the lens with which he had been examining the ground. Mr. Chetwynd introduced us formally, also the other man, whose name he gave as Mr. Samuel Martin. There was an ingenuous honesty and earnestness about Mr. Martin which endeared him to me there and then. That, by the way, for Mr. Radford Shone naturally claimed my chief attention.

Running the measure of my eye over his lean face, I was at once struck by the singular mobility of his protuberant eyes. I had expected something of what fictionists call “latent fire” in the eyes of the celebrated expert, which would probably be deep-set in cavernous sockets; but Mr. Shone’s orbs were like large glass marbles, never still for a moment, rolling and goggling after the fashion of “ transparency” advertisements on the underground railway. His skin was sallow and none too healthy looking, and I wondered how those spindly arms and legs would serve him in a rough-and-tumble with an ugly customer.

But, after all, it was his brain that I was most concerned with, and he was not long in giving me a sample of its quality.

“Well, Inspector,” he began in a high-pitched key, after he had extended a thin, nervous hand for me to shake, “still groping in the dark, eh?”

“Still groping,” I assented with a laugh. “But you have had better luck, I trust, Mr. Shone?”

“Do you hear that, Martin?” he said, turning on his stout friend so suddenly as to make him jump. “Can you be surprised at the failures of the official executive when one of their principal men talks about luck in connection with a simple case like this?”

“Very crass,” I heard Mr. Martin murmur in response. He plainly did not intend the remark to reach my ears, but Shone gave him away ruthlessly by repeating loudly—“Crass indeed! You are merciful in your phrases, Martin, and just a little silly. I should have used quite another word if I had wanted to be rude—honestly rude—to Inspector Peters.”

And he cold-shouldered his crest-fallen follower in order to pulverise me still further.

“Luck, Mr. Peters,” he said, “does not belong to the equipment of the skilled investigator, and I use the word skilled as distinct from the term experienced. A man may have all the experience in the world and yet be devoid of skill. Now I will give you a lesson in what I mean. Do you see those two molehills, one on either side of the green?”

“Yes,” I answered curtly, for I was beginning to be nettled by his discourteous assumption of superiority.

“Good!” he proceeded. “Exactly between those two molehills, at a spot in the middle of the green, I hope to find confirmation of the only logical explanation of Colonel Chetwynd’s death. Martin!”

The stout young man, who had been drinking in his words, stepped forward.

“What is it, Shone?” he asked nervously.

“This is one of the rare occasions when brute strength may come to the aid—the supplementary aid—of the art of subtle deduction. Down on your hands and knees, my friend, and tear up the turf along the line I shall indicate—here, and here, and here.”

He pointed with his skinny forefinger to the ground, and Mr. Samuel Martin, panting with responsibility, fell upon his allotted task. Mr. John Chetwynd, who had not ceased to glare balefully at me, drew nearer, and I myself, impelled by a genuine curiosity, followed suit. Mr. Radford Shone’s detective methods were certainly impressive to my workaday mind, and there was no reason why they should not be brilliant. In other words they might arrive by a short cut at the result for which I had been striving in my plodding way through three days and a half.

Martin grubbed and tore at the turf, his jellybag cheeks shaking with excitement, and then, suddenly, Radford Shone gave him pause, pushing him unceremoniously aside, and flinging himself down at the spot where the last sod in the mole track had been turned. For a long time he remained flat on the ground, examining the uncovered “run” with his lens. Then he rose with an air of assured triumph, the tails of his frock coat fluttering in the breeze from the sea.

“Martin,” he said, his thin lips curling in a satisfied smile, “you remember my monograph on the habits and customs of the mole—the talpa europoea of the ancients?”

“Oh, yes, I read it—splendid!” Mr. Martin replied, picking the earth from his fingernails. “You proved, I think—that there, I really forget what you didn’t prove. They are funny little beggars. I know I gathered that.”

“It is something to learn that you gathered anything,” was Mr. Shone’s severe verdict on this fatuous remark. And with incredible swiftness he shifted the gaze of those prominent eyeballs to me. “Inspector Peters,” he addressed me impressively, “the object-lesson which I promised you is complete, and it has led up to the axiom never to despise apparently immaterial things. The knowledge, long since acquired, of the way of the little four footed animal whose track lay under the green has furnished a clue pointing straight to the murderer of Colonel Chetwynd. It is now ten o’clock in the morning. If you will call upon me at eight this evening, at the King’s Arms, I shall be in a position to enable you to arrest the culprit.”

The three moved away, leaving me planted on the green and feeling several sizes smaller in my own estimation. Shone was so assured of success that I could not but believe that by some marvellous method of deduction he had arrived at the same conclusion as myself, but that, unlike myself, he had discovered the means of proving it. It galled me intensely, for my own chain of evidence only lacked one little link to change suspicion into certainty. And Mr. Radford Shone’s genius must have soared above ordinary details, for I had observed that he had not once looked in the direction of the larch grove, which to my humbler intelligence had been a source of lively interest.

Returning to the village, I spent the morning in a search for the missing link, and then, after a hasty lunch, I left the cottage where I had secured a lodging and strolled up the main street to call on the doctor who had made the autopsy. Having obtained from this gentleman a few additional points as to the injuries of the deceased, I had just quitted his house in somewhat of a brown study when I heard my name called softly from behind. Wheeling round, I was confronted by a tall girl, dressed in deep mourning, and heavily veiled.

“May I walk a little way with you?” she said in a voice quivering with emotion. “I am Mona Chetwynd, and oh, Mr. Peters, I am in such trouble!”

She raised her veil as she spoke, and in the beautiful anguished eyes I read a grief greater than for the loss of her father. It was more than grief—a haunting dread as well—that searched my face so pleadingly as she preferred her request.

“By all means let us walk together, Miss Chetwynd,” I replied. “And you may count on me for any assistance that I can render without a breach of duty, for you know, I presume, that I am a police-officer?”

“Oh, yes, I know; that is why I want to speak to you,” the girl faltered as she paced at my side. Then suddenly she looked up at me. “You don’t believe it, do you, Mr. Peters, that Everard Neil and his father killed papa?” she asked. “You are not really going to arrest him to-night?”

“Who says so?” I demanded, with official caution.

“That wretch, Radford Shone, in whom Uncle John is so—what shall I call it—wrapped up,” Miss Chetwynd replied. “Mr. Shone was at the Grange this morning, and put questions to me which showed plainly that he thought Everard guilty, and afterwards—was it very wrong, Mr. Peters?—I listened at the door of the study. They said dreadful things about you—that you were an idiot and a bungler, but that you would have no option but to arrest my lover after something they were going to do today. Then they all talked at once, and I could make no more sense of it.”

“Hush!” I said, noticing women coming to their cottage doors to listen. “What is it you wish me to do, Miss Chetwynd?”

“To tell me that Radford Shone is mistaken, and that my dear, good Everard is in no danger of such a horrible indignity,” was the reply.

I comforted her as best I could, but it was not possible for me to give her any real assurances, much as I longed to do so. “We must hope that Mr. Shone, for all his great reputation, is not infallible,” I concluded lamely.

I think that she recognised that I was friendly, if more or less incapable; for she heard me with several impatient little nods, and held out her hand abruptly. “Go and see Everard Neil,” she said, drawing her veil over the tear-stained eyes. “You won’t find him quite that sort of man, Mr. Peters.” And she whisked round and was off up the village street before I had time to tell her that I was then on my way to call on the Neils—father and son.

And, mere rough-hewn product of “the Yard” as I am, I chuckled a little at the simplicity of that country maiden in trying to pit me against the eminent person who had called me idiot and bungler. That battle was already set, and his abusive epithets could not add to my desire to be beforehand with him. The trouble was that the day was slipping away and the vital link in the chain, which should give me the pull over him, was still unfound.

The Neils’ house was at the end of the village, a pretty, ivyclad cottage residence set back from the road under shady trees. It is not to be supposed that this was my first interview with two such important factors in the case, and there was therefore no need for introductions when I was shown into their cosy smoking-room. Mr. Neil, senior, a spare elderly man with scanty irongrey hair, uttered a harsh laugh on my entrance.

“Got your warrant, Inspector?” he blurted out, with a curious glance at his son.

Everard Neil, who had been supporting his well-knit inches against the mantelpiece, flushed angrily and straightened himself.

“No, gentlemen; I have got no warrant—yet,” I said significantly. “But I am promised a complete case this evening, in which event I shall have to apply for one. Mr. John Chetwynd has placed at my disposal the valuable assistance of Mr. Radford Shone.”

The two exchanged glances.

“That accounts for it,” I heard the elder man mutter under his breath, and I guessed to what he referred. I was already aware that he had been “cut” by Mr. Chetwynd and other members at the club-house on the links since my encounter with Shone in the morning.

“Well, what do you want of us, Inspector?” said Everard, taking a step forward. “My father, as you see, has been upset by—by something that has occurred; and, to tell you the truth, I am not in the mood to be civil to you. But if we can supplement our evidence we shall be glad to do so. Without incriminating ourselves—having it taken down and used against us,” he added, with a jerky laugh that was singularly like the elder man’s.

“We have not reached that stage,” I answered drily. “The object of my call is to ask if Mr. Radford Shone has been here. I thought it likely.”

“No; and he had better keep away if he values his hide,” growled Neil the elder, taking upon himself to reply; and I noticed that he glanced intuitively at a range of hunting crops on the wall. As a player myself, I recognised the temper of the futile golfer in Mr. Wilson Neil’s lack of restraint. And lack of restraint is sometimes useful to men of my profession—when the lack is on the other side.

Young Everard checked his irate sire with a click of the tongue and a frown that did not entirely hide the affection behind it.

“Look here, dad,” he said hurriedly, “you and I had better keep a stiff upper lip.” Then he turned to me and added: “Is your colleague Radford Shone an adept at disguise?”

“I understand that he is up to most of the tricks of the game,” I said. “But why do you ask?”

“Because a fellow called here half an hour ago, and represented that he was a new professional up at the golf links—said he had come to see if we wanted any clubs repaired. We gave him a couple to mend.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “That was all I wanted to learn.” And I made as though to depart.

Everard Neil accompanied me to the door and showed me out, all stiffly starched till we got to the porch. Then he suddenly thrust out his hand, and a faint smile creased his handsome, worried face.

“Good-bye, Mr. Peters,” he said. “Or perhaps I ought to say au revoir, as you expect to return fortified with a warrant.”

But I did not take his hand, it being no part of my duty to be familiar with a young gentleman who was like to loom so largely in the criminal annals of the country. I only bade him a civil good-day, and took myself off to the outskirts of the village.

Having passed the intervening hours as profitably as I knew how, I repaired to the King’s Arms punctually at eight o’clock. Mr. Radford Shone had secured the use of the one private sitting-room that the inn boasted, and there I found him, pacing to and fro while he held forth to his friend Martin. He broke off on my entrance, and, folding his arms across his chest, surveyed me slowly from head to foot.

“I don’t know what you call the pay they give you, Inspector Peters—whether salary, or stipend, or wages—but when you go to draw it next, I hope that you will do so with a becoming sense of modesty. I have found your murderer for you. But sit down, man. Martin, set a chair for the officer. He must be tired after his superhuman exertions.”

The great expert’s stout henchman blundered forward with a chair, but I waved it aside.

“I cannot stay long,” I said. “If your labours are over, Mr. Shone, there remains much for me to do. May I ask you to favour me with your results as speedily as possible.”

Shone seated himself on the table, one skinny leg curled up and the other swinging.

“That is the great fault of the official detective,” he said judicially. “Your artistic sense, if you ever had any, is blunted. Your thoughts are all for the gross materialism of the handcuffs, without heeding how to place them on the right wrists. Well, Mr. Peters, you will be interested to hear that my little fourfooted friend was right, and that I was right in trusting to its guidance. My insight has even astounded Martin here, accustomed as he is to the success of our little excursions.”

‘‘Marvellous, and yet so simple,” Mr. Martin assented in his throaty tones.

“When you know how it’s done,” his mentor corrected him. “Now, Inspector, you are dying to know the name of your prospective prisoners,” Shone continued, rolling his great eyeballs at me. “You can apply for a warrant against Wilson Neil and his son Everard as soon as you like—the former as the actual murderer, and the latter as an accessory both before and after the act.”

“And the grounds of the charge?” I said, producing my note-book.

Mr. Radford Shone saw fit to laugh a little.

“You take it so calmly,” he said, “that it is plain that you, too, had these men in your mind—with this difference, that you failed to bring the crime home to them. We started, I expect, my dear Inspector, from the same thesis that these men were ill friends with Colonel Chetwynd, and that they would materially gain by the marriage of the younger Neil to Mona Chetwynd—a union against which the Colonel had set his face. You got no further than that. I did. From the state of the soil in the molehills I calculated to a nicety that the mole must have been at work under the green at the time of the murder. At my bidding our excellent Martin opened up the run, and I saw that at a certain point the animal had tried frantically to burrow into the earth of its run at right angles.”

“You’re getting it now, Inspector,” Martin giggled, only to subside under a reproving scowl from the great man.

“From that,” Shone proceeded, “I deduced that the mole had been frightened by the thundering footsteps of the Neils overhead, as they fled from the scene of their crime, so as to get forward before the foursome of ladies appeared through the gaps in the bunker. It was all an open book to me. The ‘sign’, as the American trappers call it, was clear. I had definite cause to take drastic measures, and I took them promptly. You gentlemen of the official force do not often use disguises, I think?” he broke off.

“We seldom have occasion to,” I answered.

“Ah, well!” he went on with a sigh, “I have. This afternoon I went to Neils’ house, got up as a golf professional attached to the links, and asked if they had any clubs that required mending. I fooled the pair of scoundrels to the top of their bent. They handed me two clubs, on one of which, belonging to the elder man, is a distinct smear of blood with a hair attaching to it which I have since verified as Colonel Chetwynd’s. Martin, surely you’re not asleep. Give Inspector Peters that cleek.”

The fat young man stumbled up from his chair, and reverently lifting the damning piece of evidence from the corner by the fireplace, laid it in my hands.

“There’s your case,” said Radford Shone with an air of finality, swinging his long legs from his perch on the table and lounging over to point with his long finger at the hair on the golf club.

“Yes,” I replied, examining it with interest. “It is useful, but—not altogether material, Mr. Shone.”

“What do you mean?” he gasped, glaring at me with the awe of a high priest confronted with an act of sacrilege.

“I mean,” I answered with some relish, “that this will help—only help, mind you—to hang the man whom I arrested an hour ago for this little job. Not Mr. Wilson Neil, nor yet Mr. Everard Neil; and my prisoner has simplified matters by confessing as soon as I had my grip on him. The ‘Yard’ lacks brilliancy, perhaps, Mr. Shone, but we get there by plodding—sometimes. It was Raffles, the caddie, who killed the Colonel.”

And amid a silence broken only by the panting of Martin I went on to inform them that Colonel Chetwynd had not been attacked on the green at all, but in the larch grove flanking it. I had found traces of this on the first day of my investigation, and among the trampled undergrowth had picked up a button which had tended to incriminate the caddie. I had been compelled, however, to delay arresting the man till I had traced to his possession the waistcoat from which the button had been wrenched in the struggle.

I had accomplished this during the day, and the culprit had confessed that he had beckoned the Colonel into the wood and had there killed him with one of the clubs which, being damaged, the Neils had given him to carry back to their house. After they had passed he had run out and laid the body on the green in the hope of diverting suspicion to them. He had committed the crime partly out of rage at Chetwynd’s language to him after lunch, and partly to rob him; though he had been cunning enough to take only coin, leaving the gold watch and such articles as could be traced.

“But how—how—?” Shone began to stutter.

“How did my suspicion first come to rest on Raffles?” I laughed. “Well, Mr. Radford Shone, I didn’t have to look underground for my clue. The golf ball with which the Colonel had been practising was nowhere to be found. I knew that the two gentlemen, if they had been guilty, would not have taken the ball, whereas a caddie, whose natural prey is a golf ball, wouldn’t under any circumstances have been able to keep his hands off one.”

“Quite a commonplace affair, after all,” Shone plucked up spirit to say in his old superior manner.

“Fortunately brought to a satisfactory conclusion because dealt with in a commonplace way,” I retorted, and I could not refrain from adding—“You’ll have better luck next time, perhaps—yet, luck I say—if you remember the old adage that ‘none are so blind as those who will not see.’”

“Like the mole,” murmured Mr. Samuel Martin. And, amid the storm of abuse which this imbecile remark brought upon his devoted head from his chagrined chief, I contrived to slip away.