On the fatal night every movement of each conspirator was carefully timed and cut and dry to the last detail. When near the works on the return journey Stanley called out to Berlyn to stop, saying that he had seen a man lying on the road. He jumped out and ran round the car, and on Berlyn following him he slipped behind his victim and sandbagged him. Hastily throwing the body into the car, he drove to the works gate. There he was met by Phyllis, who had already drugged Gurney’s tea in the way French had surmised.
At the works Phyllis helped Pyke to carry the body to the packing-shed. After replacing Gurney’s drugged tea with fresh, she put her bicycle in the tonneau of the car and drove out to the selected spot on the moor. She changed the magneto and made the two lines of footmarks by putting on shoes of Berlyn’s which she had brought for the purpose. Then mounting her bicycle, she returned to the works. The bicycle and the magneto she hid in a clump of shrubs, waiting until Pyke came out to say that the ghastly job in the works was complete. She then went home, silently let herself in, replaced Berlyn’s shoes in his room, changed her clothes, wakened the maid and called up Sergeant Daw.
In the meantime Stanley Pyke rode on the bicycle to Colonel Domlio’s, dropped the clothes and other objects into the well, and continued on his way to Plymouth. There he left the bicycle in a dark entry in the lower part of the town, where he was sure it would speedily be found and annexed. He took the first train to London, returning to Ashburton in the character of Jefferson on receipt of Daw’s wire about the tragedy.
Such was the plan, and, had the conspirators been sure their actions would have remained unquestioned, they would have stopped there. But both were afraid that in some unforeseen way suspicion might be aroused and they took several other steps in the hope of turning such possible suspicion on to other persons.
First they considered it necessary that, should the crate be discovered, the body therein should be taken as Stanley Pyke’s. This would effectually prevent a doubt arising as to Jefferson’s identity. Pyke, therefore, changed his own underclothes with those of the dead man and dropped his own suit down the well, while both he and Phyllis stated that the birthmark on Berlyn’s arm was really on Pyke’s.
To carry on the same deception, Pyke decided to make up as Berlyn while disposing of the crate. In height and build he was, in his disguise, not unlike Berlyn. The chief difference between them was their colouring, both the Pykes being dark and Berlyn fair. Stanley therefore dyed his hair and lightened his complexion before going to Wales.
The episode of the blackmailing letter was designed with a similar object. Phyllis Berlyn had staged the farce of the twisted ankle. She had fallen into Domlio’s arms in such a way that a photograph might have really been a profitable investment to a blackmailer. Pyke had, of course, forged the letter. The confederates hoped that the taking out of the car which they believed would result, together with the finding of the articles in the well, which they thought a competent detective might achieve, would throw the suspicion on Domlio.
With regard to money, Pyke had resolved on a bold stroke. French found that he had instructed a firm of solicitors in London to get in touch with Jefferson’s lawyers in the Argentine for the purpose of arranging the sale of Jefferson’s property there. He had forged Jefferson’s signature to the necessary documents, and the matter was well advanced.
This piece of greed had prevented Stanley from leaving London and had caused him to rent the Victory Place flat as a refuge in case Kepple Street got too hot to hold him. Flight thither under such circumstances had been decided on, and, therefore, when danger threatened, only the time and method of reaching it remained to be settled.
As all Berlyn’s property went to Phyllis under the deceased’s will, she also would have been well off, so that when the two took up their abode in a rather out-of-the-way part of Algeria, as they had intended, they would have been comparatively rich.
But thanks to Evan Morgan’s desire for a fishing expedition on the last day of his holidays, together with Inspector French’s steady pegging away at a puzzling and wearisome case, these evil hopes were frustrated. Some three weeks after the next assizes, both Stanley Pyke and Phyllis Berlyn paid for their crime with their lives, leaving the ownership of Jefferson’s money as a juicy morsel on which the lawyers of England and the Argentine could pile up fees to their hearts’ content.
For French the case had not been an unmixed triumph. Though in the end he had taken the criminals and added to his reputation with his superiors, in his heart of hearts he knew that he had been saved by the skin of his teeth alone and that he had had a lesson in the danger of neglecting to follow up unlikely clues to the very end which would last him for his life. But on the whole he was satisfied.
Colophon
The Sea Mystery
was published in 1928 by
Freeman Wills Crofts.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Robin Whittleton,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2024 by
Brian Raiter and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
HathiTrust Digital Library.
The cover page is adapted from
The Sea Mystery,
a painting completed in 1928 by
Harry Dixon.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The
