Scallaway's End

The Reveal

‘You… you can’t be serious?’ said the constable, looking in bewilderment at Symes, Sueducate and Sturling.

‘We’re entirely serious,’ said Sturling.

‘But… Mrs Minkwater dead, and the maid and two of her guests… it’s inconceivable.’

‘We have our… suspicions as to who the murderer was,’ said Symes, his gaze flicking briefly towards Sturling.

‘We do indeed,’ said Sturling. ‘In fact, we are positively sure of who the murderer was.’ Symes looked surprised. ‘Now,’ Sturling continued. ‘Would you mind sending one of your men back to town to get the magistrate, as then I will be spared the trouble of conducting two separate explanations of what happened here.’ The policeman nodded, and turned to the road clearers.

‘You heard him,’ he said. ‘A couple of you nip back to Scallaway and grab old Robert Rutherford.’ Two of the road clearers moved off towards the road, while the rest stood gawping up at Scallaway’s End.

‘Now,’ said Sturling, ‘I’d like all the grounds of Scallaway’s End checked, and anyone found lurking brought into the drawing room. I would pay particular attention to the gatehouse,’ he added.

The rest of the road clearers went off to search the grounds, while the constable, two other policemen and several townsfolk who had come bringing food and relief supplies filed into the drawing room after Sturling. Sueducate and Symes followed behind the rest, eyeing Sturling with uncertainty and mistrust. The constable said something to the other policemen and then turned to Sturling. ‘We’d just like to check the upper rooms to ensure that those four really are dead.’

‘Of course,’ said Sturling. As the policemen left, a few of the roadmen filed into the drawing room.

‘The magistrate’s almost here,’ said one to Sturling. Looking out the window, Sturling saw a black car turn in at the driveway and come cruising up to park next to the police cars outside Scallaway’s End. Out got the two road clearers and a balding man in well pressed clothes. They entered the drawing room.

‘Afternoon, Rutherford,’ said the constable, and the two shook hands. ‘What a case this is! I came here expecting to give old Mrs Minkwater some fresh food and fix her power cut, but this…’ He shook his head.

Robert Rutherford turned to Sturling. ‘Ah, so you must be the detective these two lads were telling me about. So is it true? Is the old lady really dead?’

At that moment the door opened again and the two police officers came in, looking slightly pale. ‘It certainly is true,’ said one. ‘Four people dead, Mrs Minkwater, her maid and two guests, all on their beds.’

From behind the policemen the rest of the road clearers filed in. The drawing room was now getting rather crowded.

‘So, you know who killed Mrs Minkwater and the other's?’ asked Rutherford, sitting down in an armchair.

‘I certainly do,’ replied Sturling. ‘In fact, I even know who previously attempted to murder Mrs Minkwater, which is why she sent for me in the first place.’

Robert Rutherford put the tips of his fingers together. ‘I believe you’d better explain from the very beginning,’ he said. Sturling cleared his throat and began.

‘As was previously outlined, seven people were residing in the house known as Scallaway’s End, the owner, the maid, four guests and myself. Over the course of the next three days, the maid, the owner and two of the guests were killed by a mysterious murderer. Before telling you who the murderer was, however, I will take you all through exactly what happened so that the motive of the murderer may be better understood.’

The room was utterly silent. Sturling cast his eye over the faces looking at him and continued. ‘I received a letter from Mrs Minkwater, the owner and resident of Scallaway’s End, after three attempts to murder her took place. She detailed in her letter to me that she suspected all of her four guests and her maid for the attempted murders, and claimed that each had a motive to kill her. I hastened to Scallaway’s End, as the mystery somewhat took my fancy.

‘On arrival, I interviewed Mrs Minkwater and the suspects themselves; the maid, Minkwater’s lawyer Sylvester Symes, her nephew Tristan Sueducate, her friend Ethel Braithwaite and her late husband’s friend Sir Cumbridge. I soon found that each certainly had a motive to want to kill her. On the night of the murder, all the suspects but the maid were gathered in the drawing room. Mrs Minkwater retired to bed while the rest chatted or played cards. I myself was trying to figure out which of the suspects had attempted to murder Mrs Minkwater in the three cases she had laid out to me in her letter. A poisonous pill was found in her glass of water, her skirts caught alight while she was asleep, and a contraption was created so that a heavy painting almost fell on her when she picked up a letter.

‘During the evening, every guest had to leave at some point during the night. The maid, of course, was absent for almost the whole time. Sueducate left early in the evening to look outside, and during the course of the evening Cumbridge did too. Both were checking the state of the weather, as by this time a heavy storm was brewing.

‘As night fell, the power line was cut and everyone separated while hunting around the house for an electricity generator. Any one of the guests could have slipped upstairs at this point.

‘Whilst I was searching the servant’s quarters, I heard footsteps on the servant’s stairs, however did not see who it was. Only a few minutes later the maid screamed and we all raced upstairs to find Mrs Minkwater lying dead on her bed.

‘That night, as we went to bed, none of us expected to get a wink of sleep. Indeed, I was still awake hours afterwards, and therefore heard a sound from below my room which I would have otherwise slept through. Going to the window, I saw the servant’s door open and someone go outside, however I couldn’t see who it was.

‘I figured that the murderer had tried to make a run for it, but in the morning everyone was there. The house was completely cut off and the telephones were down, so we had no choice but to stay in the house until the road was cleared which, as we found after going for a short walk, wouldn’t be for some time. On returning to the house, I looked out the window from Cumbridge’s room, which was next to mine, and realized that, had he been awake, he would have had the perfect view of whoever it was that had left the house in the night. I found the maid nosing around in Sir Cumbridge’s room, and, on asking, she told me he was downstairs. I went down and asked him whether he had seen who it was that had left the house last night. He told me that he had seen who it was, and was just about to tell me when the maid gave a scream from the hall. Running out of the drawing room where we had been talking, she told us and the other guests that a hunting knife in Mr Minkwater’s collection had gone missing, and that it had been there that morning. We all split up and went on a hunt for the missing knife, as we believed the murderer had stolen it and was planning on striking again. However we were all shocked at the discovery of Cumbridle dead in the hall, killed by a stab wound from the very hunting knife we had been searching for. By his body we found a lace handkerchief belonging to Mrs Braithwaite, and everyone’s suspicions instantly jumped to her.

‘Symes, Sueducate and I went on another walk to see if the road was less flooded than before. On our way back I noticed an old gate house which, on closer inspection, had recently been used. Someone had opened the door and the path leading to it had a set of carefully hidden footprints. But on reaching the house we were met by another shocking discovery. Ethel Braithwaite lay at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and her neck was broken. On checking the landing, I could see that there had been a fight, and that she had been pushed down the stairs. And suddenly, I knew who the murderer was.’

Sturling was pacing back and forward as he spoke, and everyone’s eyes were fixed on his every movement.

‘This case has been a difficult one,’ said Sturling. ‘Perplexing, confusing, muddeling and utterly difficult. But doable.

‘Before I tell you who it was that killed Mrs Minkwater, I should perhaps mention the attempted murders. I figured them out easily enough, but plenty of thought went into them so they deserve at least a mention. The poisonous pill was put in Mrs Minkwater’s glass of water while she slept by Sir Cumbridge. He had a small pill box of them, which the maid discovered… but I’ll come to that later. Mrs Minkwater’s skirts were set alight by none other than Ethel Braithwaite. She was cunning and used a legal form to set Mrs Minkwater’s skirts alight so as to frame Symes. Unwittingly she left a little of her lipstick on the edge of the paper, a lipstick which I later saw on her bedside table when searching her room for the missing dagger. The falling painting was the easiest to figure out. Sueducate practically told me himself. The contraption to make the painting fall on picking up the letter required delicate machinery which Sueducate enjoyed to make in his spare time. What is more, the letter in the tray below which Mrs Minkwater had picked up was a letter about a gambling debt dated several weeks old which Sueducate had not opened, and had placed in the letter tray so as to catch the eye of Mrs Minkwater.’

Sturling paused, his eyes roaming over the faces of the road clearers, Symes and Sueducate, the policemen and the townsfolk all of whom were looking shocked, confused and utterly transfixed. ‘But now we reach the central question of the case,’ he said. ‘The question which all the other murders were caused by. Who shot Mrs Minkwater?

‘The answer, as it always is in these sort of cases, had been in front of me this whole time. For almost the whole span of the case I couldn’t shake off the strange thought that there was something I had forgotten, there was something I had eliminated too early, something that I wasn’t taking into account. It was only when I saw Ethel Braithwaite dead and my last two suspects unblamable that I realized what it was. Would anyone like to take a guess?’ The room was utterly silent. ‘I thought not,’ said Sturling. ‘You see, the eliminated factor was this: the person who killed Mrs Minkwater wasn’t one of the suspects.’

‘Yes,’ he continued, somewhat enjoying the stunned looks on everyone’s faces, ‘Not even Mrs Minkwater had expected anything like this. But you see, the person who killed Mrs Minkwater was not someone who slipped in through the window and then ran away into the storm. Mrs Minkwater knew about this person, but never took them into account. They were mentioned to me in Mrs Minkwater’s first letter to me, and she mentioned the killer again in my first conversation with her. I always had a needling suspicion about this person, ever since I realized what it was that bothered me about the maid’s motive. You see, Mrs Minkwater told me that she had given the maid a choice between getting the sack or getting rid of her cat, and the maid confirmed this. The last thing she wanted was to lose her job, but when I spoke to the maid it sounded like she was considering losing her job instead of sending away her cat.’ Sturling paused. ‘The maid must have loved her cat very dearly,’ he said. ‘And what makes it all the more strange was that she didn’t have a single cat hair on her, or have any cat food in the servant’s quarters.

‘You see, the murderer of Mrs Minkwater was Catherine Stubbs.’

The people in the room turned to one another, looking confused. ‘I see you don’t recognize the name,’ said Sturling, smiling slightly. ‘Very well, I will rephrase myself. The murderer of Mrs Minkwater was Gladys Stubb’s Cat.’

A shocked, confused muttering spread around the room. Surling let it continue for several seconds before silencing it with his next sentence. ‘Though I had always thought it strange that I never saw a cat wandering around anywhere, it never occurred to me until the end of the case that Gladys Stubb’s Cat was, in fact, a person. Or, to be more exact, Gladys Stubb’s daughter.

‘As we all raced around looking for a generator in the dark, Cat slipped up the servant’s stairs, shot Mrs Minkwater and crept back to the servant’s quarters. On finding Mrs Minkwater’s body I did an examination of the crime scene and found two very interesting points, the gun used to kill her, and the fact that she was not afraid when the murder entered. When I presented these facts to the others, I noticed that the maid paled slightly, and looked rather afraid. No doubt she realized that it must have been Cat who shot Mrs Minkwater. As we went to bed she went back to the servant’s quarters and found Cat. I believe that they must have come to a hasty agreement that Cat would have to leave the house for a few days while the whole thing blew over. So Cat slipped outside, awaking Sir Cumbridge and I, and crept around to the old gatehouse where she stayed the night.

‘But unfortunately for Cat and her mother, the murder did not blow over. It merely created a landslide effect. As I previously mentioned, the following morning I had found the maid nosing around in Sir Cumbridge’s room. No doubt she was looking out the window to check if he could have been able to see her daughter leave. She also clearly knew that Sir Cumbridge had tried to kill Mrs Minkwater with cyanide, and possibly hoped to trick him into eating it by mistake by placing it on his bedside table. On finding her in Sir’s room I asked her where Sir Cumbridge was, and she must have followed me as I went to find him. I entered the drawing room, and she eavesdropped on our conversation as I asked Cumbridge if he had seen who had left the house. Of course, if Cumbridge told me then the whole case would be up. So she screamed, and when we came running out to find her she made up a story about a missing knife. As we searched the house, she slipped into Mr Minkwater’s old hunting room, took the very knife we were searching for and killed Sir Cumbridge, then escaped from the scene.

‘Symes was the first to discover the body. So far Symes has come very little into this story, but this was his moment to shine. Whilst the maid was killing Cumbridge, Symes had slipped upstairs. Syme’s motive was a little more complicated than everyone else’s. He needed both Mrs Minkwater and Ethel Braithwaite dead in order to get the money. Or, he needed Mrs Minkwater dead and Ethel Braithwaite framed for her murder. Symes had taken one of Braithwaite’s handkerchiefs, clearly hoping for an opportunity to frame her. While upstairs he slipped into my own room and found the gun which I had for safekeeping, clearly hoping to kill someone himself and frame Braithwaite. But on coming downstairs, he was shocked to discover Cumbridge’s body. And yet here was his chance. He dropped the handkerchief by the body, and, when everyone else came running and saw the body, he pointed it out. Braithwaite was now framed for the murder of Cumbridge.

‘The maid, meanwhile, was suffering greatly. She was not made out to be a killer, all she wanted was to keep her daughter safe. When I confronted he about the murder of Cumbridge, she almost gave way, and was on the verge of telling me that it was she who had shot Minkwater. Symes, who must have been passing the room, overheard the conversation. Of course, this was very, very bad for him. Should the maid admit to the murder of Cumbridge, Symes would not get Mrs Minkwater’s money, as Mrs Braithwaite would no longer be the prime suspect. He still had the gun which he had stolen from my room, and so opened the door and shot the maid before she could tell me the truth.

‘When Symes, Sueducate and I went out for a walk later that day, Cat took her chance and returned home to meet her mother. I cannot imagine what her shock and grief must have been on finding her mother dead. All we know is that it ended with Cat, in grief or anger we will never know, pushing Ethel Braithwaite down a steep flight of stairs, breaking her neck. But perhaps,’ and here Sturling looked towards the road clearers who had searched the grounds, ‘Cat would like to tell us what happened herself. She’s here. She was found in the gatehouse.’

All heads turned to look at the crowd of road clearers. A few people pointed and whispered. Then, very, very slowly, a girl who had been lurking at the back of the crowd moved into the light. She had sharp features and was dressed all in black.

‘Why don’t we invite Cat up here to ask her why she killed Mrs Minkwater?’ suggested Sturling. The magistrate nodded. Cat moved, as if sleepwalking, up to the front of the crowd.

‘Catherine Stubbs,’ said Rutherford. ‘Is it true that you shot Mrs Minkwater?’

Cat stared at him with an unreadable expression. Then she nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

‘Is it also true that you pushed Mrs Ethel Braithwaite down a steep flight of stairs, killing her?’

‘Yes,’ said Cat.

Rutherford leaned forward in his chair. ‘What was your motive?’ he asked. Cat stared at him in silence, and then looked at Sturling. Her gaze was cold and curt and very hard to hold. Sturling lowered his eyes.

‘Mrs Minkwater threatened to send me away,’ she said.

‘Why did she threaten to send you away?’ asked Rutherford.

‘She and my mother would argue. We both hated it at Scallaway’s End. I kept telling mother that we should move to town, but my mother didn’t want to leave my grandmother alone in the country.’

‘And why did Mrs Minkwater threaten to send you away?’

‘In their last argument Mrs Minkwater told my mother that if there was one more argument she would send me away to work. Mrs Minkwater is always as good as her word, and I knew that she and my mother were sure to have another fight.’

‘And why did you kill Ethel Braithwaite?’

‘When I found that my mother was dead I screamed. She came running and must have realized that it was me. She tried to drag me up the stairs so she could lock me into one of the rooms upstairs, but I struggled. I didn’t mean to push her down the stairs, though.’

Cat was still staring at Sturling, and never once looked at Rutherford questioning her. To avoid her stare Sturling glanced to the back of the crowd, and met eyes with Symes. Symes face was filled with cold fury, and he gave Sturling a glance that would have made a weaker man quail. Sturling gave a small sigh. Solving a case ended up creating quite a few enemies, and Symes would certainly not be happy with Sturling after he had been found guilty of murdering the maid.

*

Sturling sat outside a cafe with one of his old friends, Ted Tunsford. The sun was hot and the street was busy with bustling people. Ted had recently read the front page of the paper and had been talking of nothing else for the last half hour.

‘But I still don’t understand how you did it,’ he said, stirring sugar into his coffee. ‘How did you work out that Cat was the killer?’

Sturling leaned back in his chair and squinted his eyes against the sun. ‘I’d had a lurking suspicion about Cat the whole case,’ he said. ‘When Mrs Minkwater was telling me about the suspects I noticed something slightly strange in the evidence she gave about the maid.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She was talking about all the arguments she had with her maid. She mentioned threatening the maid with sending away her beloved Cat if she didn’t stop poking and prying. I thought that it was strange that she used it as such a dire threat. If the maid had had a cat she must have loved it very dearly. And yet she never had a single cat hair on her, and when I was hunting around the servant’s quarters I saw no cat bowl or cat food.’

Ted nodded slowly. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘When you look at it like that it’s very obvious. It was very ingenious for an unplanned murder, though.’

‘Yes,’ said Sturling. ‘But at least it’s solved.’

‘Oh, and by the way,’ said Ted. ‘My friend had contacted me to ask you if he could have a bit of help in a case of his. My friend’s a policeman, and there have been some funny thefts in the village he works in by someone who wears a cat mask.’

Sturling finished his coffee and nodded. ‘You can contact him and tell him I’ll be there in three day’s time,’ he said. ‘But right now I need a little peace and quiet.’