The Shrieking Pit

A >> Arthur J. Rees >> The Shrieking Pit

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"Fresh facts have come to light--facts that tend to prove the innocence
of Penreath, who was accused and convicted for the murder."

"Dear me! This is a very grave statement. What proofs have you?"

"Sufficient to warrant further steps in the case. It is a long story,
but I think when you have heard it you will feel justified in taking
prompt action."

Before Mr. Cromering could reply, the police constable who had shown in
Colwyn and Mr. Oakham entered the room and said that Superintendent
Galloway, from Durrington, was outside.

"Bring him in, Johnson," said Mr. Cromering. He turned to Colwyn and
added: "When I received your telegram I telephoned to Galloway and asked
him to be here this afternoon. As he worked up the case against
Penreath, I thought it better that he should be present and hear what
you have to say. You have no objection, I suppose?"

"On the contrary, I shall be very glad for Galloway to hear what I have
to say."

The police constable returned, ushering in Superintendent Galloway, who
looked rather surprised when he saw his superior officer's visitors. He
nodded briefly to Colwyn, and looked inquiringly at the chief constable.

"Mr. Colwyn has discovered some fresh facts in the Glenthorpe murder,
Galloway," explained Mr. Cromering. "I sent for you in order that you
might hear what they are."

"What sort of facts?" asked Galloway, with a quick glance at the
detective.

"That is what Mr. Colwyn proposes to explain to us."

"I shall have to go back to the beginning of our investigations to do
so--to the day when we motored from Durrington to Flegne," said the
detective. "We went there with the strong presumption in our minds that
Penreath was the criminal, because of suspicious facts previously known
about him. He was short of money, he had concealed his right name when
registering at the hotel, and his behaviour at the breakfast table the
morning of his departure suggested an unbalanced temperament. It is a
legal axiom that men's minds are influenced by facts previously known or
believed, and we set out to investigate this case under the strong
presumption that Penreath, and none other, was the murderer.

"The evidence we found during our visit to the inn fitted in with this
theory, and inclined the police to shut out the possibility of any
alternative theory because of the number of concurrent points which
fitted in with the presumption that Penreath was the murderer. There
was, first, the fact that the murderer had entered through the window.
Penreath had been put to sleep in the room next the murdered man, in an
unoccupied part of the inn, and could easily have got from one window to
the other without being seen or heard. Next was the fact that the murder
had been committed with a knife with a round end. Penreath had used such
a knife when dining with Mr. Glenthorpe, and that knife was afterwards
missing. Next, we have him hurriedly departing from the inn soon after
daybreak, refusing to wait till his boots were cleaned, and paying his
bill with a Treasury note.

"Then came the discovery of the footprints to the pit where the body had
been thrown, and those footprints were incontestably made by Penreath's
boots. The stolen notes suggested a strong motive in the case of a man
badly in need of money, and the payment of his bill with a Treasury note
of the first issue suggested--though not very strongly--that he had
given the servant one of the stolen notes. These were the main points in
the circumstantial evidence against Penreath. The stories of the
landlord of the inn, the deaf waiter, and the servant supported that
theory in varying degrees, and afforded an additional ground for the
credibility of the belief that Penreath was the murderer. The final and
most convincing proof--Penreath's silence under the accusation--does not
come into the narrative of events at this point, because he had not been
arrested.

"It was when we visited the murdered man's bedroom that the first doubts
came to my mind as to the conclusiveness of the circumstantial evidence
against Penreath. The theory was that Penreath, after murdering Mr.
Glenthorpe, put the body on his shoulder, and carried it downstairs and
up the rise to the pit. The murderer entered through the window--the
bits of red mud adhering to the carpet prove that conclusively
enough--but if Penreath was the murderer where had he got the umbrella
with which he shielded himself from the storm? The fact that the
murderer carried an umbrella is proved by the discovery of a small patch
of umbrella silk which had got caught on a nail by the window. Again,
why should a man, getting from one window to another, bother about using
an umbrella for a journey of a few feet only? He would know that he
could not use it when carrying the body to the pit, for that task would
require both his hands. And what had Penreath done with the umbrella
afterwards?

"The clue of the umbrella silk, and the pool of water near the window
where the murderer placed the umbrella after getting into the room,
definitely fixed the time of the murder between eleven and 11.30 p.m.,
because the violent rainstorm on that night ceased at the latter hour.
If Penreath was the murderer, he waited until the storm ceased before
removing the body. There were no footprints outside the window where the
murderer got in, because they were obliterated by the rain. On the other
hand, the footsteps to the pit where the body was thrown were clear and
distinct, proving conclusively that no rain fell after the murderer left
the house with his burden. It seemed to me unlikely that a man after
committing a murder would coolly sit down beside his victim and wait for
the rain to cease before disposing of the body. His natural instinct
would be to hide the evidence of his crime as quickly as possible.

"These points, however, were of secondary importance, merely tending to
shake slightly what lawyers term the probability of the case against
Penreath. But a point of more importance was my discovery that the
candle-grease dropped on the carpet was of two different kinds--wax and
tallow--suggesting that two different persons were in the room on the
night of the murder. Mr. Glenthorpe did not use a candle, but a reading
lamp. Neither did Mr. Glenthorpe use the gas globe in the middle of the
room. Yet that gas tap was turned on slightly when we examined the room,
and the globe and the incandescent burner smashed. Who turned on the
tap, and who smashed the globe? Penreath is not tall enough to have
struck it with his head. Superintendent Galloway's theory was that it
might have been done by the murderer when throwing the body of his
victim over his shoulder.

"An ideal case of circumstantial evidence may be weakened, but not
destroyed, by the destruction of one or more of the collateral facts
which go to make it up. There are two kinds of circumstantial evidence.
In one kind presumption of guilt depends on a series of links forming a
chain. In the other, the circumstances are woven together like the
strands of a rope. That is the ideal case of circumstantial evidence,
because the rope still holds when some of the strands are severed. The
case against Penreath struck me as resembling a chain, which is no
stronger than its weakest link. The strongest link in the chain of
circumstances against Penreath was the footprints leading to the pit.
They had undoubtedly been made by his boots, but circumstances can lie
as well as witnesses, and in both cases the most plausible sometimes
prove the greatest liars. Take away the clue of the footprints, and the
case against Penreath was snapped in the most vital link. The remaining
circumstances in the case against him, though suspicious enough, were
open to an alternative explanation. The footprints were the damning
fact--the link on which the remaining links of the chain were hung.

"But the elimination of the clue of the footprints did not make the
crime any easier of solution. From the moment I set foot in the room it
struck me as a deep and baffling mystery, looking at it from the point
of view of the police theory or from any other hypothesis. If Penreath
had indeed committed the murder, who was the second visitor to the room?
And if Penreath had not committed the murder, who had?

"That night, in my room, I sought to construct two alternative theories
of the murder. In the first place, I examined the case thoroughly from
the police point of view, with Penreath as the murderer. In view of what
has come to light since the trial, there is no need to take up time with
giving you my reasons for doubting whether Penreath had committed the
crime. I explained those reasons to Superintendent Galloway at the time,
pointing out, as he will doubtless remember, that the police theory
struck me as illogical in some aspects, and far from convincing as a
whole. There were too many elements of uncertainty in it, too much
guess-work, too much jumping at conclusions. Take one point alone, on
which I laid stress at the time. The police theory originally started
from the point of Penreath's peculiar behaviour at the Durrington hotel,
which, from their point of view, suggested homicidal mania. To my mind,
there was no evidence to prove this, although that theory was actually
put forth by the defence at Penreath's trial. I witnessed the scene at
the breakfast table, and, in my opinion, Sir Henry Durwood acted hastily
and wrongly in rushing forward and seizing Penreath. There was nothing
in his behaviour that warranted it. He was a little excited, and nothing
more, and from what I have heard since he had reason to be excited.
Neither at the breakfast table nor in his room subsequently did his
actions strike me as the actions of a man of insane, neurotic, or
violent temperament. He was simply suffering from nerves. It is
important to remember, in recalling the events which led up to this
case, that Penreath was invalided out of the Army suffering from
shell-shock, and that two nights before the scene at the hotel there was
an air raid at Durrington. Shell-shock victims are always prejudicially
affected by air raids.

"Even if the police theory had been correct on this point, it seemed
inconceivable to me that a man affected with homicidal tendencies would
have displayed such cold-blooded caution and cunning in carrying out a
murder for gain, as the murderer at the _Golden Anchor_ did. The Crown
dropped this point at the trial. I merely mention it now in support of
my contention that the case of circumstantial evidence against Penreath
was by no means a strong one, because it originally depended, in part,
on inferred facts which the premises did not warrant.

"Next, the discoveries made in the room where the murder was committed,
and certain other indications found outside, did not fit in with the
police case against Penreath. Superintendent Galloway's reconstruction
oL the crime, after he had seen the body and examined the inn premises,
did not account for the existence of all the facts. There were
circumstances and clues which were not consistent with the police theory
of the murder. The probability of the inference that Penreath was the
murderer was not increased by the discoveries we made. I am aware that
absolute proof is not essential to conviction in a case of
circumstantial evidence, but, on the other hand, to ignore facts which
do not accord with a theory is to go to the other extreme, for by so
doing you are in danger of excluding the possibility of any alternative
theory.

"On the other hand, when I sought to account for the crime by any other
hypothesis I found myself puzzled at every turn. The presence of two
persons in the room was the baffling factor. The murderer had entered
through the window in the storm, lighted the tallow candle which he
brought with him, walked straight to the bed and committed the murder.
Then he had waited till the rain ceased before carrying the body
downstairs to the pit. But what about the second person--the person who
had carried the wax candle and dropped spots of grease underneath the
broken gas globe? Had he come in at a different time, and why? Why had
he sought to light the gas, when he carried a candle? Why had he--as I
subsequently ascertained--left the room and gone downstairs to turn on
the gas at the meter?

"Eliminating Penreath for the time being, I tried next to fit in the
clues I had discovered with two alternative theories. Had the murder
been committed from outside by a villager, or by somebody in the inn?
There were possibilities about the former theory which I pointed out to
Superintendent Galloway, who subsequently investigated them, and
declared that there was no ground for the theory that the murder had
been committed from outside. The theory that the murder had been
committed by somebody inside the inn turned my attention to the inmates
of the inn. Excluding Penreath for the time being, there were five
inmates inside the walls the night the murder was committed--the
innkeeper, his daughter, his mother, the waiter, and Ann, the servant.
The girl could hardly have committed the murder, and could certainly not
have carried away the body. The old mad woman might have committed the
murder if she could have got out of her room, but she could not have
carried the body to the pit--neither could the servant. By this process
of elimination there remained the landlord and the deaf waiter.

"For a reason which it is not necessary to explain now, my thoughts
turned to the waiter when I first saw the body of the murdered man. The
possibility that he was the murderer was strengthened by the slight clue
of the line in the clay which I found underneath the murdered man's
bedroom window. That window is about five feet from the ground outside,
and the waiter, who is short and stout, could not have climbed through
the window without something to stand on. But the waiter could not
possibly have carried the body to the pit. His right arm is malformed,
and only a very strong man, with two strong arms, could have performed
that feat.

"There remained the innkeeper. He was the only person on the inn
premises that night, except Penreath, who could have carried the corpse
downstairs and thrown it into the pit. Although thin, I should say he is
a man of great physical strength. It is astonishing to think, in looking
back over all the circumstances of this extraordinary case, that some
suspicion was not diverted to him in the first instance. He was very
hard-pressed for money, and he knew for days beforehand that Mr.
Glenthorpe was going to draw L300 from the bank--a circumstance that
Penreath could not possibly have known when he sought chance shelter at
the inn that night. He was the only person in the place tall enough to
have smashed the gas globe and incandescent burner in Mr. Glenthorpe's
room by striking his head against it. He knew the run of the place and
the way to the pit intimately--far better than a stranger like Penreath
could. I was struck with that fact when we were examining the
footprints. The undeviating course from the inn to the mouth of the pit
suggested an intimate acquaintance with the way. The man who carried the
body to the pit in the darkness knew every inch of the ground.

"It is easy to be wise after the event, but my thoughts and suspicions
were centering? more and more around the innkeeper when Penreath was
arrested. His attitude altered the whole aspect of the case. His
hesitating answers to me in the wood, his fatalistic acceptance of the
charge against him, seemed to me equivalent to a confession of guilt,
so I abandoned my investigations and returned to Durrington.

"I was wrong. It was a mistake for which I find it difficult to forgive
myself. Penreath's hesitation, his silence--what were they in the
balance of probabilities in such a strange deep crime as this murder? In
view of the discoveries I had already made--discoveries which pointed to
a most baffling mystery--I should not have allowed myself to be swerved
from my course by Penreath's silence in the face of accusation,
inexplicable though it appeared at the time. You know what happened
subsequently. Penreath, persisting in his silence, was tried, convicted,
and sentenced to death--because of that silence, which compelled the
defence to rely on a defence of insanity which they could not sustain.

"I went back to the inn a second time, not of my own volition, but
because of a story told me by the innkeeper's daughter, Peggy, at
Durrington four days ago. The night before the inquest Peggy paid a
visit to the room in which the murdered man lay. I did not see her go
in, but I saw her come out. She went downstairs and hurried across the
marshes and threw something into the sea from the top of the breakwater.
The following day, after Penreath's arrest, I questioned her. She gave
me an explanation which was hardly plausible, but Penreath's silence,
coming after the accumulation of circumstances against him, had caused
me to look at the case from a different angle, and I did not
cross-examine her. The object of her visit to me after the trial was to
admit that she had not told me the truth previously. Her amended story
was obviously the true one. She and Penreath had met by chance on the
seashore near Leyland Hoop two or three weeks before, and had met
secretly afterward. The subsequent actions of these two foolish young
people prove, convincingly enough, that they had fallen passionately in
love with each other. Peggy, however, had never told Penreath her name
or where she lived--because she knew her position was different from
his, she says--and she could not understand how he came to be at the inn
that night. Naturally, she was very much perturbed at his unexpected
appearance. She waited for an opportunity to speak to him after hearing
his voice, but was compelled to attend on her mad grandmother until it
was very late.

"Before going to bed she went down the passage to see if by any chance
he had not retired. There was a light in Mr. Glenthorpe's room, and,
acting on a sudden girlish impulse, she ran along the passage to Mr.
Glenthorpe's door, intending to confide her troubles in one who had
always been very good and kind to her. The door was partly open, and as
she got no reply to her knock, she entered. Mr. Glenthorpe was lying on
his bed, murdered, and on the floor--at the side of the bed--she found
the knife and this silver and enamel match-box. She hid the knife behind
a picture on the wall. She did a very plucky thing the following night
by going into the dead man's room and removing the knife in order to
prevent the police finding it, for by that time she was aware that the
knife formed an important piece of evidence in the case against her
lover. It was the knife she threw into the sea, but she kept the
match-box, which she recognised as Penreath's. When she came to me she
did not intend to tell me anything about the match-box if she could help
it. She was frank enough up to a point, but beyond that point she did
not want to go.

"After Penreath's conviction she began, womanlike, to wonder if she had
not been too hasty in assuming his guilt, and as the time slipped by and
brought the day of his doom nearer she grew desperate, and as a last
resource she came to me. It was a good thing she did so. For her story,
though apparently making the case against Penreath blacker still,
incidentally brought to light a clue which threw a new light on the case
and decided me to return to Flegne. That clue is contained in the
match-box."

CHAPTER XXV

Colwyn opened the silver and enamel box, and emptied the matches on the
table.

"I showed this match-box to Charles on my return to the inn, and he told
me that Penreath used it in the upstairs sitting-room the night he dined
there with Mr. Glenthorpe. Therefore, it is a reasonable deduction to
assume that he had no other matches in his possession the night of the
murder.

"This fact is highly significant, because the matches in Penreath's
silver box are, as you see, blue-headed wax matches, whereas the matches
struck in Mr. Glenthorpe's room on the night of the murder were of an
entirely different description--wooden matches with pink heads, of
British manufacture--so-called war matches, with cork pine sticks. The
sticks of these matches break rather easily unless they are held near
the head. Two broken fragments of this description of match, with
unlighted heads, were found in Mr. Glenthorpe's room the morning after
the murder. Superintendent Galloway picked up one by the foot of the
bed, and I picked up the other under the broken gas-globe. The recovery
of Penreath's match-box in the murdered man's room suggested several
things. In the first place, if he had no other matches in his possession
except those in his silver and enamel box, he was neither the murderer
nor the second person who visited the room that night. But if my
deduction about the matches was correct, how was it that his match-box
was found in the murdered man's room? The inference is that Penreath
left his match-box in the dining room after lighting his candle before
going to bed, and the murderer found it and took it into Mr.
Glenthorpe's bedroom to point suspicion towards Penreath.

"This fact opened up a new possibility about the crime--the possibility
that Penreath was the victim of a conspiracy. When we were examining the
footprints which led to the pit, the possibility of somebody else having
worn Penreath's boots occurred to me, because I have seen that trick
worked before, but the servant's story suggested that Penreath did not
put his boots outside his door to be cleaned, but came to the door with
them in his hand in the morning. But Penreath told me this morning that
he put out his boots overnight to be cleaned, but had taken them back
into his room before Ann brought up his tea. The murderer, therefore,
had ample opportunity to use them for his purpose of carrying the body
to the pit and to put them back afterwards outside Penreath's door.

"But Peggy's belated admissions did more than suggest that Penreath was
the victim of a sinister plot--they narrowed down the range of persons
by whom it could have been contrived. The plotter was not only an inmate
of the inn, but somebody who had seen the match box and knew that it
belonged to Penreath.

"I returned to Flegne to resume the investigations I had broken off
nearly three weeks before, and from that point my discoveries were very
rapid, all tending to throw suspicion on Benson. The first indication
was the outcome of a remark of mine about his height, and the broken gas
light in Mr. Glenthorpe's bedroom. It was purely a chance shot, but it
threw him into a pitiable state of excitement. I let him think, however,
that it was nothing more than a chance remark. That night I was put to
sleep in Penreath's room, and there I made two discoveries. The first
was the existence of a small door, behind the wardrobe, opening on a
corresponding door on the other side, which in its turn opens into Mr.
Glenthorpe's room. Thus it would be possible for a person in the room
Penreath occupied, discovering these doors as I did, to see into the
next bedroom--under certain conditions. My second discovery was the
outcome of my first discovery--I picked up underneath the wardrobe a
fragment of an appealing letter which Penreath had commenced to write to
his fiancee, and had subsequently torn up. It was a long time before I
grasped the full significance of these two discoveries. Why should a
man, after writing a letter of appeal to his fiancee, decide not to send
it and destroy it? The most probable reason was that something had
happened to cause him to change his mind. What could have happened to
change the conditions so quickly? The hidden doors in the wall, which
looked into the next room, supplied an answer to the question. Penreath
had looked through, and seen--what? My first thought was that he had
seen the murder committed, but that theory did not account for the
destruction of the letter, and his silence when arrested, unless,
indeed, the girl had committed the murder. The girl--Peggy! It came to
me like a flash, the solution of the strangest aspect of this puzzling
case--the reason why Penreath maintained his dogged silence under an
accusation of murder.

"It came to me, the clue for which I had been groping, with the
recollection of a phrase in the girl's story to me--her second story--in
which she not only told me of her efforts to shield Penreath, but
revealed frankly to me her relations with Penreath, innocent enough, but
commenced in chance fashion, and continued by clandestine meetings in
lonely spots. I remembered when she told me about it all that I was
impressed by Penreath's absolute straightforwardness in his dealings
with this girl. He was open and sincere with her throughout, gave her
his real name, and told her much about himself: his family, his
prospects, and even his financial embarrassment. He went further than
that: he told her that he was engaged to be married, and that if he
could get free he would marry her. A young man who talks in this strain
is very much in love. The artless story of Peggy revealed that Penreath
was as much in love with the girl as she was with him. 'If he could get
free!' That was the phrase that gave me the key to the mystery. He had
set out to get free by writing to Miss Willoughby, breaking off his
engagement. Later he had torn up the letter because through the door in
the wall he had seen Peggy standing by the bedside of the murdered man,
and had come to the conclusion that she had murdered him.

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