“Yes, I’ll — I’ll look, of course — Where did you see them last? I see — well, certainly I’ll… Yes, dear — no, no, it’s no trouble — I mean, it may be import… That is, you must want them — I’ll look — Yes — Good-bye, Ramona…”
She hung up and came back into the drawing room. “That was Ramona,” she said.
“We had gathered that,” said George. “What did she say?”
“She was calling about — about the funeral, and so on. I told her…” She glanced in inquiry at Henry. “I suppose the funeral arrangements can go ahead, Mr. Tibbett?”
“As far as I know,” said Henry. “There’s no need to change anything at this point.”
“Get on with what Ramona said,” put in George Manciple impatiently.
“Well, then she said, just as an afterthought, had I seen her sleeping pills?”
Major Manciple took a step toward his wife.
Violet continued, “She said she had had an almost full bottle, which was on the table beside her bed. She hadn’t noticed when she was packing, but when she got back to Bradwood, she found she didn’t have them. She thinks she must have forgotten them, and that they are still on her bedside table. But…” Violet looked at Henry with a desperate sort of appeal. “But I’ve just been cleaning out the room they had, and there’s nothing there. Nothing at all.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I CAN’T UNDERSTAND IT, Tibbett,” said Sir John Adamson. “I simply can’t. I thought the whole thing was over and done with.”
“So did I,” said Henry. It was only teatime, but he felt very tired already. “But there it is. There were traces of barbiturates in both the specimens of lemonade that I sent for analysis. It’s true that I poured the lemonade from the jug into a bottle which had previously contained Major Manciple’s pills, so that proves little, one way or the other. But the barbiturate in the drinking glass can’t be accidental. Dr. Thompson has confirmed that even a small amount of the drug would have been fatal to Miss Manciple with her heart condition. And Lady Manciple’s sleeping pills have disappeared; there’s no sign of them, and nobody at Cregwell Grange will admit to having seen or touched the bottle, though they all agree that they knew of its existence. Well, as I told you, Major Manciple finally agreed to a post-mortem examination, and — there’s the result.” Henry tapped the file which lay on Sir John’s desk. “Miss Manciple died from heart failure as a direct result of swallowing a couple of sleeping pills, which would not have harmed any ordinary person. They were undoubtedly administered in the lemonade.”
“Why, Tibbett? That’s what beats me. Why?”
“I can only suppose,” said Henry, “that it was because Miss Manciple had announced her intention of having a talk with me later in the day.”
“About the supernatural manifestations of parrots? Bah!” said Sir John forcefully.
Henry sighed. “I know, sir,” he said. “It does sound silly when you put it like that, but…”
Sir John picked up a metal ruler and began beating a tattoo on the leather desk top. “Mason,” he said, “let’s get back to Mason. That’s why you’re here, after all. Let’s have an end to this hedging and ditching. Tell me straight out what happened to Mason.”
Henry hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “I think that Raymond Mason’s death was accidental.”
“You mean, somebody killed him by mistake? Is that it?”
“No.”
“Then what in heaven’s name…”
“I think that he killed himself by mistake.”
For a moment it seemed that Sir John would explode. Then, with a great effort at self-control, he said, “I think you will have to make yourself a little clearer, Tibbett.”
Henry grinned. “Certainly,” he said. “I’ll start at the beginning — or as near the beginning as I’ve been able to trace so far. Raymond Mason wanted to buy Cregwell Grange.”
“We all knew that.”
“He wanted to buy it with a sort of desperation, something far more powerful than the ordinary desire of a man who has seen a house that suits him and hopes to get it. For some reason Cregwell Grange had become an obsession with Raymond Mason.”
“Wanted to establish himself as a landed gent.” said Sir John. He laughed shortly. “Some hope!”
Henry looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “Well, he started by making a generous offer for the house, and when it was turned down he increased his bid. Apparently it took some time to penetrate Mason’s brain with the fact that George Manciple was simply not prepared to sell at any price. This undoubtedly infuriated Mason, and made him more determined than ever to get the Grange for himself.
“His next line of attack was to try to make George Manciple’s life such misery that he would be happy to sell the place and move to get a little peace and quiet. Mason’s best hope lay in getting the shooting range banned, because he was shrewd enough to realize that it was Major Manciple’s chief joy in life and that without it he might well be tempted to — anyhow, Mason failed. Major Manciple had too many friends in high places.”
Sir John cleared his throat noisily and said, ‘Very interesting theory. Go on.”
“Mason’s next gambit,” said Henry, “was to propose to Miss Maud Manciple. A pretty far-flung hope that was, but she’s a beautiful girl and I imagine that he really fell in love with her. No reason why he shouldn’t have. Unfortunately for him, she was secretly engaged already, and he was not only turned down and snubbed in what must have been a very hurting manner, but he was insulted and even threatened by her fiancé. After that, I think he got really desperate. He was determined to get his own back from the Manciple family, to get them out of that house at all costs.”
“That’s all very well,” said Sir John, “but how did he think he was going to do it?”
“Very sensibly,” said Henry. “He went back to the shooting range idea. Previously he’d claimed that the range might, in theory, be dangerous — and he’d been overruled. Now, supposing that an accident should take place on the range, a potentially fatal accident. Not all Major Manciple’s influential friends would be able to defend it then. Naturally, Mason knew all about Manciple’s patent tennis-ball traps, just as everyone else did. He also found it quite easy to filch one of Manciple’s guns in order to do some experiments.”
“How on earth do you know all this?”
“Major Manciple had reported a gun missing a couple of weeks ago and I found it in Mason’s house. There was a piece of string still tied around the trigger. Mason had obviously been experimenting with firing it by remote control.”
Sir John was beginning to look interested. “Had he, by Jove? And did it work?”
“I think it did,” said Henry. “It doesn’t take any great pressure on the trigger to fire the gun, just a short, sharp pull. Mason’s idea, as I see it, was to stage an accident, with himself cast in the role of potential victim, who might easily have been maimed or even killed but for a lucky chance.”
“Taking a bit of a risk, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, no. He had it all worked out. His idea was that at a time when he knew Major Manciple to be down at the range a shot should be fired which might have hit somebody in the drive. In fact, the errant shot would be fired out of the window of the downstairs lavatory, that little Gothic slit that looks out into the shrubbery beside the front door. Mason himself, the possible victim, would be in the drive, but by great good fortune he would be protected by the open hood of his car, which he would have happened to raise in order to investigate a fault in the engine, a fault which, of course, he had engineered himself. Protected by a ton and a half of Mercedes Benz, he would have been perfectly safe. But the bullet would have struck the car, providing just the evidence Mason needed. Manciple’s shooting range would never have survived an incident like that.”