Murder Adrift (21 page)

‘Your lab. boys will find that it is the gun that fired the bullet that killed Hector.'

Littlejohn was not surprised that this new Lucy had had enough nerve to assist Kenneth in disposing of the body. Now that she had shed the listless pose she had previously assumed there was a hard core of great strength in her.

‘The gun was licensed years ago in my name and I still have the slip for it. It expired long ago. All the same, it will identify the gun as mine.'

Littlejohn rose to his feet a little wearily.

‘I have already warned Mrs. Todd senior in the official manner and I must now do the same to you, madam. . . .'

‘I'll sign a statement whenever you like, Chief Superintendent. We had better have our lawyer handy to keep matters tidy. I hope this will be regarded as self-defence and that manslaughter, instead of murder, will be the charge.'

Mrs. Lucy Todd, with the help of a good lawyer, was
acquitted. She had better luck than that of Dawson, Lever and partners, who got three years each.

By a strange coincidence, Kenneth Todd married Lucy Todd at a London registry office at the same time that Detective Sergeant Michael Hopkinson led the doctor's secretary to the altar at a small country church in Sussex where her father was the vicar. Littlejohn and his wife were there and so were Dr. and Mrs. Macmannus. Littlejohn and the doctor met at the reception, and the conversation turned to the Todd murder.

‘What did you think of the verdict in the Todd case, Littlejohn?'

‘It was a fair one in view of all the evidence. A good lawyer, a catalogue of all Hector Todd's crimes, his cruelty to his wife and children, and his moral degradation. To this add the fact that his death happened while he was stealing his mother's jewels and he held her up with a revolver. Perfect melodrama. The jury were won over right away.'

‘I agree. But having lived with the family, so to speak, as you and I have done, what then? Closely knit, with one member slowly transgressing against all the accepted rules of the Big House and its financial foundations, disgracing the Todds in public, and holding back a satisfactory marriage arrangement between Kenneth and Lucy, might they not have decided to eliminate him lest even worse befell the lot of them? The Todds have a big pull with the local police and establishment and I am sure that had Scotland Yard, in the shape of yourself, not arrived on the scene the crime would eventually have found its way to the dead-letter department. A murder at sea by person or persons unknown, presumably by some disreputable associate of Heck's.'

Littlejohn shook his head.

‘We will never know. That family played so many charades in the course of the inquiry that it was impossible to sort out the wheat from the chaff.'

Gorge Bellairs is a pen name of Harold Blundell (1902–1985), a crime writer born in Lancashire. Blundell was a prolific writer who published over 50 crime and mystery novels in his life, most of them featuring the detective Inspector Littlejohn.

Blundell also wrote regularly for the Manchester Guardian.

Discover books by George Bellairs published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/GeorgeBellairs

Death Before Breakfast
Death on the Last Train
Devious Murder
Murder Adrift

For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain in 1972 by John Gifford Limited

Copyright © 1972 George Bellairs

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eISBN: 9781448214471

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