“I needn’t go into details about the thing,” Sir Clinton continued. “All I need say is that it would take a pretty smart man to spot what Ernest had spotted. And so, naturally, I reconsidered my ideas about friend Ernest. He wasn’t an ass after all—not by any means. That set me thinking hard. And what made me think harder was his evident desire to throw suspicion on you, Stenness. He tried to persuade me—indirectly—that he was in fear of his life from you.”
“From me?” Stenness asked in amazement.
“I’m telling you the facts,” Sir Clinton contented himself with pointing out. “Well, the next business was the news that Ernest himself had been attacked in the Maze. And at that point I began to feel pretty sure of my ground. It was the most obvious line he could have taken to divert suspicion from himself. And, what made me more uneasy, it was a possible preliminary to an attack on someone else. He’d killed his two brothers. If a third attack was made, he might come under suspicion—and a breath of suspicion might be enough. So he boldly faked up an attack on himself next. Then, if still another attempt was made, who would suspect the poor victim who had nearly lost his life just a few days earlier?”
“One has to admit he showed some acuteness,” Ardsley said, drily.
“At that point the case began to clear up a little in my mind. Assuming Ernest to be the murderer, what was he after? The more I thought about it the clearer it seemed that cash must be at the bottom of the affair. He wanted money. He’d never worked in his life. How could he lay his hands on cash? And of course it was as plain as anything then. If he could kill off his brothers he’d inherit part of their money—I learned that pretty easily from the fact that there were no near relations except himself, Arthur and Miss Hawkhurst. But the craving for money isn’t easily satisfied. Obviously, if he could eliminate his nephew and niece, he’d be left with not only the whole of his two brothers’ fortunes, but the Hawkhurst money as well.
“If you look into criminology, you’ll find that the murderer for money reasons is a fairly definite type. He’s usually clever enough to devise a fresh method of murder, or of disposing of the body. Apart from that, he’s not a very brainy type. And he has a terrible knack of repeating the same method in successive crimes. Suppose you have to cross a boiling torrent by stepping from stone to stone. You get across the first time in safety. If you have to cross again, you’ll choose the same stones as before. You’ve proved them to be safe. Any other stones may be insecure and may bring you down. Now that’s the state of mind of the mass-murderer when he goes in for his work. He carries out his first crime by a novel method. He isn’t detected. So when he tries his hand again he follows his first procedure slavishly in all its mean details. These are the safe stepping-stones for him. Look at the case of Smith, how he repeated all the minutiæ of his bath-business time after time. Deeming used to put down a fresh cement floor in a room to cover the bodies of his victims. He did that more than once. He’d found it safe the first time, you see. If you read up Burke and Hare’s doings, you’ll find them a steady repetition of the same method applied without variation. It’s the mark of the mass-murderer.
“So naturally, I expected the poisoned darts and the airgun to come into play again, if Ernest carried his work to a further stage. And I made up my mind that I’d choose his next victim for him. He made two deadly slips in that interview he had with us, Wendover. Perhaps you noticed them?”
Wendover shook his head.
“You told me after our talk with him that I ought to know who the murderer was; but I didn’t guess it. What slips did he make?”
“The first slip was when he volunteered that he had a bicycle and had used it to get down to the Maze. Once I had information that he owned a bicycle, his alibi with the sore toe disappeared instanter from my mind. His second slip was a worse one. He said to us that he hadn’t been down to the Maze since the murders. And then he let out that he knew the position of the loophole through which Roger Shandon was shot. Speaking of his mythical assailant he said: ‘He was at the same loophole as he’d used when he killed Roger.’ If he’d never been near the Maze, how could he have known where that loophole was? Perhaps you think he might have picked up the information from those who were there. But if he had, I doubt if he’d have phrased the thing as he did. He seemed to me to pitch on that description of its position simply because it was the easiest that came to hand—which meant that it conveyed something definite to his own mind.
“That finished him, so far as I was concerned. But I took the trouble to go down to the Maze, just for my own satisfaction. I’d been there that morning; and I’d noticed gossamer all over the hedge at the loophole—some of it actually stretching across the hole in the hedge. When I went down, after interviewing friend Ernest, those gossamer threads were still there. No gun could possibly have been shoved into the hole without snapping them. I put my hand in, just to see; and of course I got it covered with spider’s web.”
“So that was why you cleaned your hand on the
