Late, Late in the Evening

Kempson had mistaken Merle Patterson for Lionel Kempson-Conyers did his guilt appear even possible, but it made the death of Mr Ward rather less unaccountable. However, we still had to find the reason, if there was one, for Nigel to want to kill either of them. In no way could he hope to inherit the Hill Manor estate, so it was not possible to determine how the child's death could benefit him. The same fact applied in the case of Mr Ward, even if Nigel had believed that the man who had been murdered was the rightful heir.

All the same, even though the photographer had proved a broken reed in that he had lied about waiting for Nigel to pick him up outside the cinema, it was necessary to reconsider Nigel's statement that he had arrived at the pick-up point and hung about there in his car for about an hour before returning to Hill House.

As in the case of Doctor Tassall, there was a time-lag to be taken into account. To pick up the photographer at eleven, Nigel would need to leave Hill House at least not later than ten-forty. At that time Mrs Kempson was in bed, her daughter and son-in-law had retired to their own quarters, Doctor Tassall had been called away and Merle Patterson was still in the house.

As (presumably) Nigel could not have known that Merle had made an appointment to meet Tassall out in the grounds, he could have mistaken her for Lionel and killed her when he met her on his return. If this had been the case, he might not have gone to the town at all, since, according to the medical evidence, Merle could not have died later than about eleven o'clock and it would have been impossible for him to have driven to town, waited for even the shortest time outside the cinema and returned to the grounds of the manor by eleven.

If he had not attempted to keep the appointment with the photographer, it was necessary to find out what he had been doing, since he had not actually come back into the house until well after midnight.

The obvious explanation was that he had been burying Mr Ward's body, but that brought me up against the brick wall which had been a so far insurmountable obstacle throughout the whole enquiry. If Nigel had buried Mr Ward, the inference needs must be that he had killed him. But why? Nobody except Mrs Kempson had anything to gain by Ward's death, and even her gain would only be the saving of a few miserable pounds a week which she could well spare. There seemed no sense in Mr Ward's death, and that, my dear Sir Walter, intrigued me vastly.

To whom, I asked myself for perhaps the hundredth time, was Mr Ward such a menace that, at whatever risk, he had to be removed? The only answer which has suggested itself so far is that he might have become a menace to the first Mr Ward, the mysterious figure who had appeared upon the Hill House scene five years earlier and then must have disappeared within a matter of days, only to be impersonated by the second (and subsequently murdered) Mr Ward.

I placed the matter before the inspector.

'We can be pretty certain Kempson did not show up outside the cinema that night,' he said.

'Upon the now completely false evidence of the photographer?'

'No. We've got two witnesses, quite unbiased, both of them. One is the commissionaire at the cinema who states he was on duty there until after the place closed down at eleven, and the other is our man on the beat. They both swear that no car was parked outside or even reasonably near the cinema up to eleven-fifteen that night. The commissionaire went off duty when the cinema closed down, but my chap was up and down all the time, on and off, until midnight, and there was no parked car. I took their statements separately and there's no doubt about it. Wherever Kempson went that night, he did not turn up outside that cinema.'

I went back to my notebooks, beginning with the first letter I had received from Mrs Kempson and continuing with all the jottings I had made subsequent to that. It was then that the truth not only dawned on me, but did so in a kind of sunburst. The identity of the first Mr Ward was no longer a mystery. Once I realised that, the rest of the puzzle fell into place as certainly as the apparently unpredictable ball at the roulette table falls into its mysteriously appointed compartment and stakes are won and lost at one and the same time. I was certain of the identity of the criminal and I did not think there would be much difficulty in proving it.

Mrs Kempson's first letter and later remarks were helpful up to a point. She was doubtful whether the man who had claimed to be her brother was, in fact, Ward, yet there was something about his voice which appeared to be familiar to her.

She was determined to secure the inheritance for her grandson, but she also had not quite a clear conscience with regard to Ward, even though he had declared himself an emulator of Esau and was prepared to forfeit his inheritance for a mess of pottage.

All the same, it has been shown, since the two murders, that both the Mr Wards were impostors and that the real Mr Ward died in America before he had a chance of claiming the Hill Manor estate.

Only two points still needed to be worked out, but I had considered them before and I felt that I had positive answers to both of them. There was the question of the time-lag once again. In the case of young Tassall and Nigel Kempson it was a matter of hours, hours which I felt I could now account for, but in the case of the first Mr Ward there was an interval of five years to be bridged.

There was also the question of the substitution of the first Mr Ward by the second Mr Ward, a change unsuspected by either Mrs Landgrave, who had never seen the first one, or Mrs Kempson who, by her own choice, had never set eyes on the second one while he was alive.

The explanations I could find to fit in with my theories were that, during the five years' time-lag, somebody had been making either overt or disguised attempts to get Mrs Kempson to change the terms of her will. The most likely person to have so employed his time was Nigel Kempson. With regard to the substitution, it seemed that it must have been necessary to have a Mr Ward at Mrs Landgrave's, since otherwise Mrs Kempson might find out that her monthly money orders were not being cashed. As for Mr Ward's lodgings, the Landgraves, as I summed them up, were certainly not the people to take money for a non-existent lodger.

The inference was that the first Mr Ward was known elsewhere and it was necessary for him to appear in his usual haunts, a thought which had occurred to me earlier, but not in connexion with Nigel.

* * *

Again I went over my notes. Then I turned up Mrs Kempson's letters to me, and there it all was. The voice she had heard before; the discussion she had had with Nigel and they agreed that Mr Ward should receive thirty thousand pounds at her death in consideration of his abandoning all claim to the estate; the substitution of another Mr Ward as Mrs Landgrave's lodger, since Nigel himself had a lucrative position and had to be in London most of his time; his mother an actress and his father possibly an actor, so that he was able to play the part of the first Mr Ward without arousing more than the dimmest of doubts in Mrs Kempson's mind; the untidy moustache; the pince- nez; most of all, the gloves.

This all seemed obvious enough, but it still did not account for the two murders. A prime factor, I