Tragedy at Ravensthorpe

by J. J. Connington

“This is the kind of stuff I always skip when I’m reading a detective story,” complained Joan. “Can’t you get along to something interesting soon?”

“You’re like the Bellman in the ‘Hunting of the Snark,’ Joan. ‘Oh, skip your dear uncle!’ Well, I skip, as you desire it. I’ll merely mention in passing that an American tourist came here a while ago and asked to see the Leonardo medallions, because he was writing a book on Leonardo. He, I believe, was Mr. Blank from America; and his job was to see the safe in the museum and note its pattern.

“I must skip again; and now we reach the night of the robbery in the museum. You know what happened then. Mr. Foss came to me with his tale about overhearing some of you planning a practical joke. His story was true enough, I’ve no doubt; but it set me thinking at once. I may not have shown it, Joan, but I quite agreed with you about his methods. It seemed a funny business to come straight to the police over a thing of that sort. Of course he had his reason ready; but it didn’t ring quite true, somehow. I might have put it down to tactlessness, if it hadn’t suggested something else to my mind.

“That pistol-shot which smashed the lamp was too neatly timed for my taste. It was fired by some one who knew precisely when the keeper was going to be gripped, and it was fired just in time to get ahead of Foxton Polegate in the raid on the show-case. That meant, if it meant anything, that the man who fired the shot was a person who knew of the practical joke. But on the face of it, Foss was the only person who knew about the joke, bar the jokers themselves. So naturally I began to suspect Foss of having a hand in the business. It was the usual mistake of the criminal—trying to be too clever and throw suspicion on to some one else.

“Now Foss wasn’t the man in white, obviously; for he came to see me while the man-hunt was still in full cry. So at that stage in the business I was fairly certain that at least two people were in the game: Foss and some one else, who was the man in white. That looked like either the valet or the chauffeur, since they were the only people I knew about who were directly associated with Foss while he was here. But this incognito business at the masked ball had made it possible for outsiders to come in unrecognized; so the man in white might be a confederate quite outside our range of knowledge. One couldn’t assume that either Marden or Brackley was in the show at all.

“I learned, later on, that Foss had synchronized his watch with yours, Cecil; and that, of course, made it pretty plain that he was in the game. There was also another bit of evidence which suggested something. If either the valet or the chauffeur was the confederate, then they could easily enough have found out from the servants what costume Maurice meant to wear that night—a few questions to his valet would have got the information—and they could have chosen the Pierrot costume for their own runner in order to confuse things. That suggested that Foss’s servants might be in the business; but it proved nothing really. The white Pierrot costume was chosen mainly for its conspicuousness, I’m sure.

“Now I come to the disappearance of the man in white.”

“Thank goodness!” Joan commented. “It gets more interesting as it goes on, doesn’t it? That’s something to be thankful for.”

“One does one’s best,” Sir Clinton retorted, unperturbed. “Now the vanishing of that fellow could be accounted for in various ways, so far as I could see. First of all, he might have slipped down the rope into the little lake. That was what the rope was meant to suggest, obviously. But unfortunately one of the hunters had the wit to keep an eye on the lake; and it was pretty clear the man in white didn’t go that way. Then there was the possibility of his being concealed in the cave; but that was ruled out by the search of the cave. Thirdly, the gang might have hit on the opening of one of the secret passages of Ravensthorpe. Candidly, I ruled that out also. It seemed next door to impossible. But if you exclude all these ways, then there seem to be only two possibilities left. The first of these depends on the man in white having a confederate in the cordon who let him slip through. But the chance of a slip-through of that sort escaping the notice of the rest of the hunters seemed very small. It seemed to me too risky a business for them to have tried.

“The final possibility was that the fugitive disguised himself as something else. Well, what disguise would be the best? It’s a question of camouflage, and they had only a few seconds to do the camouflaging. You can’t dress up as a drain-pipe or a garden-seat in a couple of seconds. So we come down to something that’s human in shape but isn’t really human. In a garden, you might pretend to be a scarecrow; but up on that terrace a scarecrow was out of the question. And then I remembered the statues.