The Shrieking Pit

by Arthur J. Rees

Should he have done more? Colwyn asked himself this question again and again. But that query always led to another one—Could he have done more? In his mental probings the detective could rarely get away from the point—and when he did get away from it he always returned to it—that Penreath, by his dogged silence, had been largely responsible for his own conviction. If a man, charged with murder, refused to account for actions which pointed to him as the murderer, how could anybody help him? Silence, in certain circumstances, was the strongest presumptive proof of guilt. A man was the best judge of his own actions and, if he refused to speak when his own life might pay the forfeit for silence, he must have the strongest possible reason for holding his tongue. What other reason could Penreath have except the consciousness of guilt, and the hope of escaping the consequences through a loop-hole of the law?

Colwyn, however, was unable to accept this line of argument as conclusive, so he tried to put the case out of his mind. But the unsolved points of the mystery—the points that he himself had discovered during his visit to the inn—kept returning to his mind at all sorts of odd times, in the night, and during his walks. And each recurrence was accompanied by the consciousness that he had not done his best in the case, but had allowed the silence of the accused man to influence his judgment and slacken his efforts to unravel the clues he had originally discovered. Thus he travelled back to his starting-point, that the conviction of Penreath had not solved the mystery of the murder of Roger Glenthorpe.

The hotel and its guests bored him. The season was over, and the few people who remained were elderly and commonplace, prone to overeating, and to falling asleep round the lounge fire after dinner. The only topics of conversation were the weather, the war, and food. Sometimes the elderly clergyman, who still lingered, though the other golfers had gone, sought to turn the conversation to golf, but nobody listened to him except his wife, who sat opposite to him in the warmest part of the lounge placidly knitting socks for the War Comforts Fund. The Flegne murder and its result were not discussed; by tacit mutual understanding the guests never referred to the unpleasant fact that they had lived for some weeks under the same roof with a man who had since been declared a murderer by the laws of his country.

Colwyn decided to return to London, although the month he had allowed himself for a holiday was not completed. He was restless and uneasy and bored, and he thought that immersion in work would help him to forget the Glenthorpe case. He came to this decision at breakfast one morning. Within an hour he had paid his bill, received the polite regrets of the proprietor at his departure, and was motoring leisurely southward along the cliff road towards its junction with the main London road.

Important consequences frequently spring from trifling incidents. Colwyn, turning his car to the side of the road to avoid a flock of sheep, punctured a tyre on a sharp jagged piece of rock concealed in the loose sand at the side of the road. He had not a spare tyre on the car, and the shepherd informed him that the nearest town where he could hope to get the tyre replaced was Faircroft, but even that was doubtful, because Faircroft was a small town without a garage, and the one tradesman who did motor-car repairs was, just as likely as not, without the right kind of tyres, or equally likely to have none at all. As he had left Durrington barely three miles behind Colwyn decided to return there, to have the car repaired, and defer his departure till the following day.

He reached Durrington with a deflated tyre, took the car to the garage, and then went back to the hotel. It wanted nearly an hour to lunch-time, and on his way in he paused at the office window to inform the clerk that he had returned, and would stay till the following day. The proprietor was in the office, checking some figures. The latter looked up as Colwyn informed the lady clerk of his altered plans, and informed him that a young lady had been at the hotel inquiring for him shortly after his departure.

"What was her name?" asked the detective, in some surprise.

"She didn't give her name. She seemed very disappointed when she learnt that you had departed for London, and went away at once."

"What was she like?"

The proprietor and the lady clerk described her at the same time. In the former's eyes the visitor had appeared pretty and young with golden hair and a very clear complexion. The lady clerk, without the least departure from the standard of courtesy imposed upon her by her position, managed to indicate that the impression made upon her feminine mind was that of a white-faced girl with red hair. From both descriptions Colwyn had no difficulty in identifying the visitor as Peggy.