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Yael Kali
Ayelet Baram-Tsabari
Amit M. Schejter Editors
Learning In
a Networked
Society
Spontaneous and Designed Technology
Enhanced Learning Communities
Computer-Supported Collaborative
Learning Series
Series Editor
Christopher Hoadley
Associate Editors
Jan van Aalst
Isa Jahnke
Learning In a Networked
Society
Spontaneous and Designed Technology
Enhanced Learning Communities
Editors
Yael Kali Ayelet Baram-Tsabari
Department of Learning, Instruction, Faculty of Education in Science
and Teacher Education and Technology
University of Haifa Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Amit M. Schejter
Department of Communication Studies
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Beer Sheva, Israel
Donald P. Bellisario College
of Communications
The Pennsylvania State University
State College, PA, USA
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
As I write this at the end of 2018, strong winds of change are blowing. Technological
change and, in particular, the advent of global information networks like the World
Wide Web have begun less and less to appear to be utopian tools and more to be
dystopian ones. Many of the battles to be fought for the future of human society are
starting to appear less in the realm of individual technologies or individual social
choices (whether cultural, legal, or organizational) and more to be related to the
global complex system of people, information, and technology.
As scholars and the public attempt to understand the major shifts happening in
our increasingly global, increasingly networked society, we have many tools at hand
from social science to philosophy to systems science. Many scholars and pundits
write from these perspectives on how information networks are changing democ-
racy, civil society, journalism, social interactions, and even education.
Education has historically held a critical role in past transformations of society.
In many ways, the formal structures society uses to inculcate the young serve as a
bellwether: they reflect the hopes and fears of today’s society; they presage the soci-
ety to come. Moreover, major shifts in society have in turn produced major shifts in
the assumptions, modalities, and structures of how we educate people. The
Renaissance helped produce the university, and the university helped sustain the
Renaissance. The Enlightenment helped produce many institutions that blended
knowledge building with knowledge dissemination, from research universities to
forms of public discourse. But beyond this relationship between broad change and
educational institutions, we now have a new perspective: educational research.
It is only in the last hundred years or so that we have developed a scientific litera-
ture on education and on its overlooked, but more powerful, older sibling: learning.
On the one hand, this field grew from the very limited and practical problem of
architecting schools and formal educational settings. On the other hand, learning—
one of the central phenomena of the field of education research—is not limited to
such settings. In its broadest definition, learning is the process by which individual
humans change their thinking and actions, whether to be more well-adapted to sta-
ble circumstances or to adapt to changes in their environment. Many in the academy
believe that if they are not working with children in schools, they need not concern
v
vi Preface
themselves with what the field of education research has found. This is a deeply
unfortunate, and incorrect, assumption. The study of education and, more essen-
tially, the study of learning have profound insights to offer those who want to under-
stand how we replicate the society of the past and how we transform into the society
of the future.
The team that has put this book together has profited mightily from understand-
ing this opportunity to connect research on technology, people, and information to
research on learning. Learning scientists, people who study not only how learning
happens but how to orchestrate it in all settings, have partnered with scholars from
information sciences, sociology, law, and communications to ask the big question:
how is learning changing in our increasingly networked society? The partnership
also includes technologists—computer scientists, designers, and experts in human-
computer interaction—who are best poised to understand the technical underpin-
nings and the possibilities associated with technological change. Together, they
inquired over a multi-year and inter- and transdisciplinary research project on learn-
ing in a networked society. This book represents not only a culmination of efforts
from an intellectually diverse team in one research center but also a dialogue of the
ideas from that center with scholars from around the world who help connect the
work to the broader themes, such as how we handle fake news, how an increasingly
global information landscape is accommodated by religious groups who may mis-
trust dominant global perspectives, how the law shapes the way we learn from the
information we have access to, and so on.
The field of CSCL and the book series in which this volume appears could easily
be misunderstood to be limited to some simpler, narrower topic about kids doing
classroom exercises online together. Instead, the field and this book series hew more
to this more profound combination of trying to study the science and the design of
information, people, technology, and, most of all, learning. The level of comfort
CSCL has, with not only describing and explaining the technological winds of
change and their impacts but also proactively designing the experiences people go
through in response to these changes, is an asset that can be used to help address
many of the intimidating challenges posed by today’s technology-rich global envi-
ronment. If learning is adaptation and growth, what better stance to take in the face
of a rapidly evolving sociotechnical environment? Other fields do take an interven-
tionist, agential stance with technology. Advertising and marketing attempt to
manipulate consumer behavior. Videogame design attempts to produce fun and
engagement. Management information systems attempts to produce corporate effi-
ciency. But education attempts to produce individual growth, development, and ful-
fillment. As such, it represents a powerful perspective for influencing, understanding,
and, ultimately, inventing the technology-rich future we will inhabit. If these issues
and perspectives appeal to you, I recommend this volume and indeed the other vol-
umes in the CSCL book series.
LINKS (Learning In a Networked Society) was born in the spring of 2013. A team
of researchers from four academic institutions specializing in more than half a
dozen scholarly disciplines and supported by a substantial grant as part of Israel’s
national effort to create centers of research excellence set foot to explore the vast
terrain of learning in the information society.
Six years, hundreds of papers, scores of meetings, and half a dozen annual gath-
erings later, we are proud to present LINKS’ own synergetic offspring—an edited
book comprised of chapters that demonstrate what a joint interdisciplinary effort
can bring about. Extending the biological metaphor allows us to acknowledge how
the genealogy of academic work is expressed in this cooperative effort. Indeed, it
involves parents (academic supervisors), children (graduate students), and grand-
children (their respective students), and it brings together academic marital relation-
ships, creates new families, discovers relatives near and far (disciplinary contacts),
and eventually brings about a village to grow an edited book.
In the case of this book, it took the cooperation of researchers in education, com-
munication, sociology, information and knowledge sciences, law, health and wel-
fare, and human-computer interaction (HCI) from the University of Haifa,
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology,
and the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, to create the Learning In a Networked
Society (LINKS) community. As editors of this book, we would like to express our
deepest gratitude to all who have made contributions to this work.
First, indeed, are our fellow researchers and the institutions that supported their
work: from the University of Haifa, Dror Angel, Keren Aridor, Osnat Atias, Sarit
Barzilai, Hava Ben-Horin, Maya Benichou, Dani Ben-Zvi, Niva Elkin-Koren, Yoni
Har-Carmel, Dorit Geifman, Oren Golan, Yotam Hod, Carmel Kent, Adi Kidron,
Hana Manor, Nakhi Mishol-Shauli, Shai Olsher, Carmit Pion, Daphne Raban,
Sheizaf Rafaeli, Amit Rechavi, Ornit Sagy, Tamar Weiss, and Michal Yerushalmy;
from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Nelly Elias, Malka Shacham, Iris
Tabak, and Noam Tirosh; from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Yaela
Golumbic; and from the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya, Oren Zuckerman.
vii
viii Acknowledgments
ix
x Contents
Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 257
Chapter 1
Five Waves of Conceptualizing Knowledge
and Learning for Our Future
in a Networked Society
Since ancient times, notions of knowledge, knowing, and learning and their relation
to society have inspired human thought. Throughout history, attempts to answer
various questions had led to the development of various conceptions of learning and
ideologies for education: What is the nature of knowledge? How do we come to
C. Hoadley
NYU, Department of Administration, Leadership and Technology, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
Y. Kali (*)
Department of Learning, Instruction, and Teacher Education, University of Haifa,
Haifa, Israel
e-mail: [email protected]
know? What is the role of education in serving society? What is its role for serving
individuals? And what is the role of culture in learning and education? The unprec-
edented advancements in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in
the past decades, and their tremendous effects on every aspect of our lives, have
stimulated contemporary conceptualizations on learning and education that seek to
meet new challenges and opportunities evoked by these changes in modern
society.
Research on learning and on information technology have both contributed much
to the development of such conceptualizations. Both these research areas use, as a
touchstone, an important, kaleidoscopic concept: that of knowledge. While com-
monsense definitions such as those that view knowledge as information that is
ingested, comprehended, and recalled are still quite useful, the notion of a net-
worked society helps us expand this concept in useful ways. Throughout this book,
we see that by exploring learning in a networked knowledge society we can expand
the definition of knowledge following advances in various disciplines, including
learning sciences, information sciences, sociology, communication, psychology,
and others. One historical distinction between “learning” theorists (educational
researchers, psychologists, etc.) and “technology” theorists (computer scientists,
information scientists, etc.) was that the first focused on knowledge as a property of
people, something in their heads, while the others focused on knowledge in the use
of representations and symbol systems, whether human or artificial. But as John
Seely Brown and Paul Duguid highlight in their book The Social Life of Information
(Brown & Duguid, 2017), knowledge is hard to pin down to either brains or sym-
bols. Knowledge is as knowledge does, and information retrieval alone does not
explain the myriad ways in which knowing does or doesn’t influence actions in the
world, whether by people, organizations, or even computers. Knowledge has
become increasingly understood to be a property of distributed systems in which
knowledge may be applied, rather than a property of a person, a database, or an
organization.
As life has become more networked and more technologically embedded, the
role of knowledge has shifted. Increasingly, we see sociotechnical systems that
exhibit knowledge that may rest in no one place (Hutchins, 1995). Conceptions of
knowledge have expanded to concern themselves with who is knowing, what their
roles are, and what power structures allow or inhibit access to knowledge creation,
dissemination, and application. We see learning as linked with identity formation
and identity linked with the practices that demonstrate knowing, such that we may
think of learning a body of knowledge as a shift in role and in identity, to become a
person who participates in the practices of that knowledge. Epistemically, there has
been an explosion in the ways that people construct knowledge for themselves and
share it with others, taking us far beyond the scientific revolution of the enlighten-
ment and into a world of postmodernism, “fake news,” and contested truths (see
Barzilai & Chinn, Chap. 4). And throughout, we see tensions between deliberate
and accidental ways of knowing. These shifts have powerful implications for what
it means to learn or to foster learning.
1 Five Waves of Conceptualizing Knowledge and Learning for Our Future… 3
The shifting nature of knowledge and its role in society help surface and reframe
one of the key issues that arises in considering learning in a networked society: the
tensions between studying learning as it emerges naturally and the implications for
designing learning environments specifically to support learning, or as we have
elsewhere described it, the continuum from spontaneous to designed learning envi-
ronments (see Chap. 2). Certainly, the systemic view of knowledge, and therefore
learning, brings us to a deeper set of questions than the knowledge generated when
students encounter information presented by a teacher. How knowledge in the form
of identities, practices, norms, laws, and connectivities arises in the networked
world brings complexity to both spontaneous and designed learning. In this section
we explore these issues more directly from a design lens. How can learning designs
take account of the complexity of learning in a networked society?
Following Hoadley (2016), we look at five waves of learning and technology that
emerged in the past. These waves are less of an attempt to divide history into par-
ticular time periods, but more of a developmental trend that appears to align well
with the emergence of how we use knowledge in the networked society. These five
waves of learning with technology are Wave 1, information dissemination and con-
sumption; Wave 2, constructivism and mind tools; Wave 3, collaborative and social
learning; Wave 4, distributed intelligence; and Wave 5, eudaemonic learning. Each
of these waves might be identified with particular pedagogies, particular technolo-
gies or artifacts that supported those pedagogies, and – critically – particular social
conceptions of education that those pedagogies and technologies helped bring into
being. Each wave has involved some upheaval of not only educational structures
but, more generally, practices and social structures that underpin society’s relation-
ship to knowledge and learning. Yet, even in upheaval, each wave builds on, and to
some extent incorporates, the prior waves. We summarize the five waves in Table 1.1,
and then discuss each one in detail.
4 C. Hoadley and Y. Kali
The second wave, constructivism and mind tools, might be associated with early to
late twentieth-century teaching. Piaget’s conception of constructivism, that the act
of learning requires the work of constructing knowledge on the part of the learner,
shifts the focus from providing information to engaging thought. In this model the
role of a teacher is not to transmit information to the learner and ensure correct
transmission through feedback but, instead, to foster activities by the learner that
lead to engagement with information, permitting the learner to either assimilate it
into their existing knowledge (akin to simple transmission) or to accommodate it by
restructuring their current understandings.
By the time personal computing became available in the 1980s, powerful tools
were becoming available to support the work of learners as they constructed their
understandings. For instance, Papert advocated using programming languages as
“things to think with” in his constructionist educational philosophy (Papert, 1980);
Jonassen (Jonassen, 1996; Jonassen & Marra, 1994) called technologies that assisted
learners in manipulating and constructing information (like dynamic hypertext sys-
tems) and their own knowledge “mindtools.” Specialized software was created to
allow learners to explore, inquire, and construct understanding, like simulations and
microworlds for science, learner-friendly word processing and editing tools, and so
on. In this wave, we see an increasing move toward learner agency and autonomy.
Much of the learning research from this era focuses on ways teachers and carefully
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her father shown up. He could have had the old earl put in the dock,
I believe. Naturally she chose the brother, who, by the way, didn’t
know anything about Stanworth’s activities, so I understand. Quite
an amiable, rather weak sort of a fellow.”
“And since then, of course, Stanworth had the whip hand over
her?”
Jefferson winced. “Yes,” he said shortly. “Even after her father
died, she wouldn’t want the family shown up.”
“I see,” said Roger thoughtfully. So Lady Stanworth had little
enough reason to love her brother-in-law. And since Jefferson fell in
love with her, her cause would naturally become his. Truly he had
motive and to spare for ridding the world of such a man. Yet,
although Jefferson and his wife might easily have concocted the
story of his whereabouts that night, Roger already felt just as
convinced of the former’s innocence as he was before of his guilt.
The man’s manner seemed somehow to preclude altogether the idea
of subterfuge. Had he really killed Stanworth, Roger was sure that
he would have said so by the time that matters had reached this
length, bluntly and simply, just as he had told the story of his own
downfall.
But in spite of his convictions, Roger was not such a fool as not
to put the obvious questions that occurred to him.
“Why was your marriage secret?” he asked. “Did Stanworth know
about it?”
“No; he wouldn’t have allowed it. It would have looked like a
combination against him. He wanted us separate, for his own ends.”
“Did you hear the shot that killed him?” Roger said suddenly.
“No. About two o’clock, wasn’t it? I’d been asleep two hours.”
“You did sleep with your wife then, in spite of the necessity of
preserving secrecy?”
“Her maid knew. Used to go back to my room in the early
morning. Beastly hole-and-corner business, but no alternative.”
“And only Stanworth’s death could have freed you, so to speak?”
Roger mused. “Very opportune, wasn’t it?”
“Very,” Jefferson replied laconically. “You think I forced him
somehow to shoot himself, don’t you?”
“Well, I—I——” Roger stammered, completely taken aback.
Jefferson smiled grimly. “Knew you must have some comic idea
in your head. Just seen what you’ve been driving at. Well, you can
rest assured I didn’t. For the simple reason that nobody or no
threats on earth could have made him do a thing like that. Why he
did it, Heaven only knows. Complete mystery to me. Can’t fathom it.
Thank God he did, though!”
“You don’t think he might have been—murdered?” Roger
suggested tentatively.
“Murdered? How could he have been? Out of the question under
the circumstances. Besides, he took jolly good care of that. I’d have
murdered him myself before this—hundreds of times!—if I hadn’t
known it would make things worse than before all round.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about that. Kept the evidence addressed to the
interested parties, didn’t he? I suppose everyone knew that?”
“You bet they did. He rubbed it in. No, Stanworth never meant to
be murdered. But my God, I had a fright when I saw him lying there
dead and the safe locked.”
“You were going to try and open it when I interrupted you
yesterday morning, of course?”
“Yes, properly caught out then,” Jefferson smiled ruefully. “But
even if I’d found the keys, I didn’t know the combination. Lord, what
a relief that note of his was. You know about that, I suppose?”
“You got a note by the post before lunch, did you?”
“That’s right. Saying he was going to kill himself. Rum business.
Can’t explain it. Almost too good to be true. I feel another man.”
“And so are a good many other people, I imagine,” Roger said
softly. “And women, too. His activities were fairly widespread,
weren’t they?”
“Very, I believe. Never knew much about it, though. He kept all
that sort of thing to himself.”
“That butler now,” Roger hazarded. “He looks a pretty tough
customer. I suppose Stanworth employed him as a sort of
bodyguard?”
“Yes, something like that. But I don’t know about ‘employed.’ ”
“What do you mean?”
“He was no more employed than I was. That is to say, we got a
salary and we did our work, but it wasn’t a sort of employment
either of us could leave.”
Roger whistled softly. “Oho! So friend Graves was another victim,
was he? What’s his story?”
“Don’t know all the details, but Stanworth could have had that
man hanged, I believe,” Jefferson said coolly. “Instead he preferred
to use him as a sort of bodyguard, as you say.”
“I see. Then Graves hadn’t much cause to love him either, I take
it?”
“If he hadn’t known what would happen afterwards, I wouldn’t
have given Stanworth ten minutes of life in Graves’s presence.”
Roger whistled again.
“Well, thanks very much, Jefferson. I think that’s all I wanted to
know.”
“If you’re trying to look for someone who induced Stanworth to
shoot himself, you’re wasting your time,” Jefferson remarked.
“Couldn’t be done.”
“Oh, there’s a little more in my quest than that,” Roger smiled, as
he let himself out of the room.
He hurried upstairs, glancing at his watch as he did so. The time
was nearly five minutes to four. He scurried down the passage to
Alec’s room.
“Finished packing?” he asked, putting his head round the door.
“Good, well come along to my room while I do mine.”
“Well?” Alec asked sarcastically, when they were once more
ensconced in Roger’s bedroom. “Has Jefferson written out his
confession?”
Roger paused in the act of laying his suitcase on a chair.
“Alec,” he said solemnly, “I owe friend Jefferson an apology,
though I can’t very well tender it. I was hopelessly wrong about him,
and you were hopelessly right. He didn’t kill Stanworth at all. It’s
extremely annoying of him considering how neatly I solved this little
problem of ours; but there’s the fact.”
“Humph!” Alec observed. “I won’t say, ‘I told you so,’ because I
know how annoying it would be for you. But I don’t mind telling you
that I’m thinking it hard.”
“Yes, and the most irritating part is that you’re fully entitled to do
so,” Roger said, throwing his pyjamas into the case. “That’s what I
find so irksome.”
“But I suppose you’ve found somebody else to take his place all
right?”
“No, I haven’t. Isn’t it maddening? But I’ll tell you one significant
fact I’ve unearthed. That butler had as much cause as anyone, if not
more, to regret the fact that Stanworth was still polluting the earth.”
“Had he? Oh! But look here, how do you know that Jefferson
didn’t do it?”
Roger explained.
“Not much so far as actual hard-and-fast-evidence goes, I’m
afraid,” he concluded, “but we greater detectives are above
evidence. It’s psychology that we study, and I feel in every single
bone in my body that Jefferson was telling the truth.”
“Lady Stanworth!” Alec commented. “Good Lord!”
“Some men are brave, aren’t they? Still, I daresay she’ll make an
excellent wife; I believe that’s the right thing to say on this sort of
occasion. But seriously, Alec, I’m absolutely baffled again. I think I
shall have to turn the case over to you.”
“Well, do,” Alec retorted with unexpected energy, “and I’ll tell you
who killed Stanworth.”
Roger desisted from his efforts to close the lid of his bulging case
in order to look up in surprise.
“You will, eh? Well, who did?”
“Some unknown victim of Stanworth’s blackmail, of course. The
whole thing stands to reason. We were looking for a mysterious
stranger at first, weren’t we? And we thought he might be a burglar.
Translate the burglar into the blackmailer’s victim and there you are.
And as he burnt the evidence himself, and we haven’t the least idea
who was on Stanworth’s blackmailing list, we shall never find out
who he was. The whole thing seems as clear as daylight to me.”
Roger turned to his refractory case again. “But why did we give
up the burglar idea?” he asked. “Aren’t you rather overlooking that?
Chiefly because of the disappearance of those footprints. That must
mean either that the murderer came from inside the house or that
he had an accomplice there.”
“I don’t agree with you. We don’t know how or why the
footprints disappeared. It might have been pure chance. William
might have raked the bed over, somebody might have noticed it and
smoothed it out; there are plenty of possible explanations for that.”
With a heave Roger succeeded in clicking the lock with which he
was struggling. He straightened his bent back and drew his pipe out
of his pocket.
“I’ve talked enough for a bit,” he announced.
“Oh, rot!” Alec exclaimed incredulously.
“And it’s about time I put in a little thinking,” Roger went on,
disregarding the interruption. “You run along down to tea,
Alexander; you’re ten minutes late as it is.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to spend my last twenty minutes here doing some
high-speed cogitating in the back garden. Then I shall be ready to
chat with you in the train.”
“Yes, I have a kind of idea that you’ll be quite ready to do that,”
said Alec rudely, as they went out into the passage.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Mr. Sheringham Hits the Mark
Roger did not reappear until the car was at the front door and
the other members of the party already making their farewells on
the steps. His leave-taking was necessarily a little hurried; but
perhaps this was not altogether without design. Roger did not feel at
all inclined to linger in the society of Lady Jefferson.
He shook hands warmly enough with her husband, however, and
the manner of their parting was sufficient to assure the latter,
without the necessity of any words being spoken on the subject, that
his confidences would be regarded as inviolate. The taciturn
Jefferson became almost effusive in return.
Arrived at the station, Roger personally superintended the
purchase of the tickets and deftly shepherded Mrs. Plant into a non-
smoking carriage explaining that the cigars which he and Alec
proposed to smoke would spell disaster to the subtleties of Parfum
Jasmine. A short but interesting conversation with the guard,
followed by the exchange of certain pieces of silver, ensured the
locking of the door of their own first-class smoker.
“And so ends an extremely interesting little visit,” Roger observed
as soon as the train started, leaning back luxuriously in his corner
and putting his feet on the seat. “Well, I shan’t be sorry to get back
to London, on the whole, I must say, though the country is all very
well in its way. I always think you ought to take the country in small
doses to appreciate it properly, don’t you?”
“No,” said Alec.
“Or look at it in comfort from the windows of a train,” Roger went
on, waving an appreciative hand towards the countryside through
which they were passing. “Fields, woods, streams, barley——”
“That isn’t barley. It’s wheat.”
“—barley, trees—delightful, my dear Alexander! But how much
more delightful seen like this in one charming flash, that leaves a
picture printed on the brain only to give way the next instant to
another equally charming one, than stuck down in the middle, for
instance, of one of those fields of barley——”
“Wheat.”
“—of barley, with the prospect of a ten-mile walk in this blazing
sunshine between you and the next long drink. Don’t you agree?”
“No.”
“I thought you wouldn’t. But reflect. Sunshine, considered from
the purely æsthetic point of view, is, I am quite willing to grant you,
a thing of——”
“What are you talking about?” Alec asked despairingly.
“Sunshine, Alexander,” returned Roger blandly.
“Well, for goodness’ sake stop talking about sunshine. What I
want to know is, have you got any farther?”
Roger was evidently in one of his maddening moods.
“What with?” he asked blankly.
“The Stanworth affair of course, you idiot!” shouted the
exasperated Alec.
“Ah, yes, of course. The Stanworth affair,” Roger replied
innocently. “Did I do that bit well, Alec?” he asked with a sudden
change of tone.
“What bit?”
“When I said, ‘What with?’ Did I say it with an air of bland
innocence? The best detectives always do, you know. When they
reach this stage of the proceedings they always pretend to have
forgotten all about the case in hand. Why they do so, I’ve never
been able to imagine; but it’s evidently the correct etiquette for the
job. By the way, Alec,” he added kindly, “you did your part very well.
The idiot friend always shouts in an irritated and peevish way like
that. I really think we make quite a model pair, don’t you?”
“Will you stop yapping and tell me whether you’ve got any
farther with Stanworth’s murder?” Alec demanded doggedly.
“Oh, that?” said Roger with studied carelessness. “I solved that
exactly forty-three minutes ago.”
“What?”
“I said that I solved the mystery exactly forty-three minutes ago.
And a few odd seconds, of course. It was an interesting little
problem in its way, my dear Alexander Watson, but absurdly simple
once one had grasped the really vital factor in the case. For some
extraordinary reason I appeared to have overlooked it before; hence
the delay. But don’t put that bit in when you come to write up the
case, or I shall never land the next vacancy for a stolen-crown-
jewels recoverer to an influential emperor.”
“You’ve solved it, have you?” Alec growled sceptically. “I seem to
have heard something like that before.”
“Meaning Jefferson? Yes, I admit I backed the wrong horse
there. But this is a very different matter. I’ve really solved it this
time.”
“Oh? Well, let’s hear it.”
“With the greatest pleasure,” Roger responded heartily. “Let me
see now. Where shall I begin? Well, I think I’ve told you all the really
important things that I managed to elicit from Mrs. Plant and
Jefferson, haven’t I? Except one.” Roger dropped his bantering
manner with startling suddenness. “Alec,” he said seriously, “that
man Stanworth was as choice a scoundrel as I’ve ever heard of.
What I didn’t tell you is that he gave Mrs. Plant three months in
which to find two hundred and fifty pounds for him; and hinted that
if she hadn’t got it already, a pretty woman like her would have no
difficulty in laying her hands on it.”
“Good God!” Alec breathed.
“He even went farther than that and offered to introduce her to a
rich man out of whom she would be able to wheedle it, if she played
her cards properly. Oh, I tell you, shooting was much too easy a
death for friend Stanworth. And the person who did it ought to be
acclaimed as a public benefactor, instead of being hanged by a
grateful country; as he certainly would be, if all this had got into the
hands of the police.”
“You can hardly expect the law to recognise the principle of
poetic justice for all that,” Alec objected.
“I don’t see why not,” Roger retorted. “However, we won’t go
into that at present. Well, to my mind there were two chief
difficulties in this Stanworth business. The first one was that at the
beginning there didn’t seem to be any definite motive for killing him;
and afterwards, when we’d found out about him, there were far too
many. All those people in the house, Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, Lady
Stanworth, the butler (who, by the way, appears to be a murderer in
a small way already, as I gather from Jefferson; that was the hold
which Stanworth had over him)—all of them had every reason to kill
him; and the case began to take on the aspect not so much of
proving who did it, but, by a process of elimination, of finding out
who didn’t. In that way I managed eventually to dismiss Mrs. Plant,
Jefferson, and Lady Stanworth. But besides the people actually
under our noses in the house, there were all the others—goodness
only knows how many of them!—of whose very existence we knew
nothing; all his other victims.”
“Were there many of them, then?”
“I understand that Stanworth’s practice was a fairly extensive
one,” Roger replied ironically. “Anyhow, I was able to narrow down
the field to a certain extent. Then I began to go over once more the
evidence we had collected. The question I kept asking myself was—
is there a single item that gives a definite pointer towards any
certain person, male or female?”
“Female?” Roger repeated surprisedly.
“Certainly. In spite of everything—the footprint in the flower bed,
for example—I was still keeping before me the possibility of a
woman being mixed up in it. It didn’t seem altogether probable, but
I couldn’t afford to lose sight of the bare possibility. And it’s lucky I
did, for it was just that which finally put me on the right track.”
“Good Lord!”
“Yes; I admit I was slow in the up-take, for the fact had been
staring me in the face the whole time, and I never spotted it. You
see, the key to the whole mystery was that there was a second
woman in the library that night.”
“How on earth do you know that?” Alec asked in consternation.
“By the hair we found on the settee. I put it away in the
envelope, you remember, and promptly forgot all about it, assuming
it to have been one of Mrs. Plant’s. It struck me suddenly in the
garden just now that it wasn’t anything of the sort; Mrs. Plant’s hair
is very much darker. Of course that opened up an entirely new field
for speculation.”
“Good Lord!”
“Yes, it is rather surprising, isn’t it?” Roger continued equably.
“That set my brain galloping away like wildfire, I need hardly tell
you; and five minutes later the whole thing became absolutely plain
to me. I’m a little hazy about some of the details, of course, but the
broad lines are clear enough.”
“You mean you guessed who the second woman was?”
“Hardly guessed. I knew at once who she must be.”
“Who?” Alec asked, with unconcealed eagerness.
“Wait a bit. I’m coming to that. Well, then I began to put two and
two together. I’d got a pretty shrewd idea already of the personal
appearance of the man himself.”
“Oh, it was a man then?”
“Yes, it was a man right enough. There was never any doubt that
a man must have done the actual killing. No woman would have
been strong enough for the struggle that must have taken place.
Stanworth was no weakling, so that gives us the fact that the man
must have been a strong, burly sort of person. From the footprint
and the length of those strides across the bed he was evidently both
tall and largely built; from the clever way in which everything was
left he must have been possessed of a fund of cunning; from the
manner in which he left that window fastened behind him it was
clear that he was thoroughly accustomed to handling lattice
windows. Well, what does all that give us? It looked obvious to me.”
Alec was staring intently at the speaker, following every word
with eager attention. “I think I see what you’re getting at,” he said
slowly.
“I thought you would,” said Roger cheerfully. “Of course there
were other things that clinched it. The disappearance of that
footprint, for instance. That must have been done by somebody who
knew what he was doing. And somebody who heard me say that I
was going to fit every male boot in the house into the mark, you
remember. Of course it was that which made me so sure at first
about Jefferson, because I jumped to the conclusion that it must
have been Jefferson whom we saw edging out of the library door.
After that I more or less had Jefferson on the brain.”
“I did my best to put you off that track,” said Alec with a slight
smile.
“Oh, you did. It wasn’t your fault that I clung to him so
persistently.”
“I tried hard to stop you putting your foot in it, if you remember.”
“I know. And I daresay it’s lucky you did. I might have put things
a good deal more plainly to him, with extremely awkward results, if
you hadn’t dinned it into me so hard.”
“Well,” Alec said slowly, “what are you going to do about it, now
you’ve presumably got at the truth at last?”
“Do about it? Forget it, of course. I told you my views just now,
when I said the man who killed Stanworth ought to be acclaimed as
a public benefactor. As that is unfortunately out of the question, the
next best thing is to forget as diligently as possible that Stanworth
did not after all shoot himself, as everybody else believes.”
“Humph!” said Alec, gazing out of the window. “I wonder! You’re
really sure of that?”
“Absolutely,” said Roger with decision. “Anything else would be
ludicrous under the circumstances. We won’t discuss that side of it
again.”
There was a little pause.
“The—the second woman,” Alec said tentatively. “How were you
able to identify her so positively?”
Roger drew the envelope out of his breast pocket, opened it, and
carefully extracted the hair. He laid it across his knee for the moment
and contemplated it in silence. Then with a sudden movement he
picked it up and threw it through the open window.
“There goes a vital piece of evidence,” he said with a smile.
“Well, for one thing, there was nobody else in the house with just
that particular shade of hair, was there?”
“I suppose not,” Alec replied.
There was another silence, rather longer this time.
Then Roger, glancing curiously across at his companion,
remarked very airily:
“Just to satisfy my natural curiosity, Alec, why exactly did you kill
Stanworth?”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
What Really Did Happen
Alec contemplated the tips of his shoes for a moment. Then he
looked up suddenly. “It wasn’t exactly murder, you know,” he said
abruptly.
“Certainly not,” Roger agreed. “It was a well-merited execution.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean, if I hadn’t killed Stanworth, he
would probably have killed me. It was partly self-defence. I’ll tell you
the whole story in a minute.”
“Yes, I should like to hear what really happened. That is, if you
feel yourself at liberty to tell me, of course. I don’t want to force
confidences about—well, about the second lady in the case.”
“About Barbara? Oh, there’s nothing that reflects on her, and I
think you ought to hear the truth. I always meant to tell you the
whole thing if you found out that I did it, and of course, if you were
intending to take any drastic step, such as telling the police or trying
to get Jefferson arrested. That’s why I made you promise to tell me
before you did anything like that.”
“Quite so,” Roger nodded understandingly. “A good many things
are plain to me now. Why you hung back so much and were so
unenthusiastic and threw cold water on everything and pretended to
be so dull and refused to believe that a murder had been committed
at all, although I’d proved it to you beyond any shadow of doubt.”
“I was trying to keep you off the right track all the time. I really
never thought you’d find out.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have done if the significance of that hair
hadn’t dawned on me at last. After that everything seemed to come
in a series of flashes. Even then I might not have hit on the truth
with such certainty if two particular photographs hadn’t suddenly
developed themselves in my mind.”
“Tell me all your side of it, then I’ll tell you mine.”
“Very well. As I said, that hair was the clue to the whole thing.
I’d taken it quite idly out of my pocket out there in the garden and
was having a look at it, when it suddenly struck me that whosoever
it might be it was certainly not one of Mrs. Plant’s. I stared at it hard
enough then, I can tell you, and the second realization occurred to
me that, from the colour at any rate, it looked uncommonly like one
of Barbara’s. Then the first of the pictures flashed across my mind. It
was of Graves sorting the post just before lunch yesterday. He had
only three letters, and they were all of exactly the same appearance;
same shaped envelopes and typewritten addresses. One was for
Mrs. Plant, one for Jefferson—and one for Barbara. The first two I’d
already accounted for, now I seemed to be accounting for the third.
Add to all that Barbara’s ill-concealed agitation the next morning and
the fact that, for no apparent cause whatever, she broke off her
engagement to you at the same time, and the thing was as plain as
daylight—Barbara was also in the library that night and for some
reason or other the poor kid had got into Stanworth’s clutches.”
“She hadn’t,” Alec put in. “It was——”
“All right, Alec; you can tell me all that in the proper place. Let
me finish my story first. Well, having got so far, of course I asked
myself—What light does this throw on Stanworth’s death? Does it
give a definite pointer to any person? The answer was obvious. Mr.
Alexander Grierson! I gasped at first, I can assure you, but when I
got rather more used to the idea, daylight simply flooded in. First of
all, there was your hanging back all the time; that began to take on
a very significant aspect. Then there was your height and your
strength, which fitted in very nicely, and I knew that your place in
Worcestershire, where you must have spent most of your boyhood,
is liberally supplied with lattice windows, so that you might be
expected to be up to all the tricks of the trade regarding them. So
far, in fact, so good.”
“But what about that footprint? I thought I’d managed that
rather neatly. By Jove, I remember the shock you gave me when you
discovered that and the way I got out of the library that night. I’d
thought that was absolutely untraceable.”
“Yes, that did give me an awkward couple of minutes, until I
remembered that you’d run back to get your pipe while I was talking
to the chauffeur! And that’s where the second of my little pictures
comes in. The scene flashed across my mind on that flower bed just
after you had stepped on to the path when we were trying to find
out who had been in the library and before you smoothed out the
fresh footprints you’d made. The old and the new prints were
absolutely identical, you see. I suppose I must have noted it
subconsciously at the time without realizing its significance.”
“I noticed it all right,” Alec said grimly. “It gave me a bad turn for
the moment.”
“After that all sorts of little things occurred to me,” Roger
continued. “I began to test each of the facts I’d collected, and in
each case the explanation was now obvious. Those letters, for
instance. I knew they must have been posted between five and
eight-thirty that morning; and at eight o’clock behold you coming
back from the village and actually saying you’d been down there to
post a letter!”
“Couldn’t think of any other explanation on the spur of the
moment,” Alec grinned ruefully.
“Yes, and curiously enough I questioned the bookmaker motif at
the time, didn’t I? Then there was your quite genuine anxiety to stop
me from assuming complicity on the part of Mrs. Plant. I suppose
you knew all the time about her and Stanworth, didn’t you?”
Alec nodded. “I was present at the interview between them,” he
said briefly.
“The devil you were!” Roger exclaimed in surprise. “I never
gathered that. She didn’t say anything about it.”
“She didn’t know. I’ll tell you all about that. Anything else on
your side?”
Roger considered. “No, I don’t think so. I gathered that you had
somehow got to know that Stanworth was blackmailing Barbara, and
had simply waded in and shot him, as any other decent chap would
have done in your place. That’s the gist of it.”
“Well,” Alec said slowly, “there’s a little more in it than that. I’d
better begin right at the beginning, I think. As you know, Barbara
and I had got engaged that afternoon. Well, I suppose you can
imagine that a thing like that rather unsettles a chap. Anyhow, the
upshot was that when I got to bed that night I found I couldn’t
sleep. I tried for some time, and then I gave it up as hopeless and
looked round the room for a book. There was nothing I particularly
wanted to read there, so I thought I’d slip down to the library and
get one. Of course I had no idea that everyone wouldn’t be in bed,
so I didn’t trouble to put on a dressing-gown but just went down as
I was, in pyjamas. There were no lights on the landing or in the hall,
but to my surprise when I got there I found all the lights in the
library full on. However, there wasn’t anyone inside and the door
was open, so I went in and began to look round the shelves. Then I
heard unmistakably feminine footsteps approaching and, hardly
wishing to be caught like that, I nipped behind those thick curtains
in front of the sash window and sat down on the seat to wait till the
person, whoever it might be, had gone. I thought it was someone
come down like me for a book, and probably also more or less in a
state of undress. Not that I really thought much about it at all. I just
didn’t want to be mixed up in a rather embarrassing situation.”
“Quite natural,” Roger murmured. “Yes?”
“Through the chink in the curtains I could see that it was Mrs.
Plant. She was still in evening dress, and I saw at once that she
looked rather worried. Very worried, in fact. She began to wander
aimlessly about the room, twisting her handkerchief about in her
hands and it looked rather as if she’d been crying. Then Stanworth
came in.”
“Ah!”
Alec hesitated. “I don’t want to exaggerate or turn on the
pathetic tap too much,” he resumed a little awkwardly, “but I hope
to God I never have to see anything again like the scene that
followed. Roger, it was almost unbearable! I don’t know how I sat it
out without dashing through the curtains and getting my hands into
Stanworth’s throat; but I had the sense to see that anything like that
would only make matters very much worse. Have you ever seen a
woman in agony? My God, it was absolutely heart-rending. I could
never have imagined that a man could be such an indescribable
brute.”
He paused, shivering slightly, and Roger watched him
sympathetically. He was beginning to realise just how terrible that
scene must have been, if it could move the stoical Alec to such a
display of emotion.
“You know the main lines of what happened, don’t you?” Alec
went on, rather more calmly. “So I needn’t go into details. The
wretched woman begged and wept, but it had no more effect upon
Stanworth than if he had been a stone image. He just went on
smiling that infernal, cynical smile and told her not to make such an
unnecessary fuss. Then he made that suggestion to her that you told
me about, and for the moment I very nearly saw red. As for her, it
finished her off completely. She just crumpled up on the chesterfield
and didn’t say another word. A few minutes later she got up and
tottered out of the room. Then I came out of my hiding place.”
“Good man,” Roger murmured.
“Well, of course I knew by this time just how the land lay. I knew
what Stanworth was, and I knew where he kept his evidence against
these people. I didn’t quite know what I was going to do, but it was
pretty clear that something had got to be done. Well, he was a bit
startled at first, but recovered himself wonderfully and began to be
infernally sarcastic and cynical. I told him that I wasn’t going to
stand the sort of thing I’d just seen; and unless he stopped the
whole thing and let me burn all the evidence he’d been talking
about, I’d go straight to the police and tell them all about it. That
seemed to amuse him quite a lot; and he pointed out that if I did
that, everything would come to light which all these people had
been paying money to keep concealed, and they’d all be very much
worse off than before. That had never occurred to me, and I was
rather taken aback for the minute; then I told him that if that was
the case I’d unlock the safe myself, even if I had to lay him out to
get the key. He simply laughed and tossed his keys on the table.
‘That’s the one for the safe,’ he said. ‘I don’t quite know how you’re
going to open it as you happen to be ignorant of the combination,
but doubtless you have provided for that contingency.’ Of course that
took me in the wind again, but before I could answer him I heard
somebody coming down the stairs.
“ ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I was quite forgetting. I’ve got another visitor
coming to see me to-night. As you seem to have mixed yourself up
in my affairs, the least I can do is to invite you to be present at this
interview also. Get behind that curtain again, and I think I can
promise you an interesting quarter of an hour.’
“Well, I hesitated, while the footsteps began to cross the hall, till
he caught me by the arm and sort of snarled, ‘Get out of sight, you
fool. Can’t you see you’ll make it ten times worse for her by letting
her see you?’
“Even then I didn’t realise what he meant, but I saw that there
was something in what he said, and just managed to get behind the
curtain in time. You can imagine what I felt like when the door
opened and I saw Barbara come into the room.”
“Ghastly!” Roger exclaimed with feeling.
“Ghastly! That’s putting it mildly. Well, I’m not going to tell you
the details of what happened then, because there’s really no need to
and it’s only giving people away unnecessarily. All I need say is that
Stanworth had got hold of some information about—well, about Mrs.
Shannon. I don’t even know what it was. He ostentatiously pulled a
revolver out of his desk, opened the safe, and showed her two or
three pieces of paper, holding them so that she could read them
without taking them into her hands. Then he told her to sit down on
the settee to talk things over, keeping the revolver in front of him on
the desk all the time. Well, Barbara sat down, looking very white and
frightened, poor kid, but still not knowing in the least what
Stanworth was getting at. He didn’t keep her in ignorance long. He
just leaned back in his chair, informed her calmly that if she didn’t
fall in with his wishes he’d make the information he’s just shown her
public property and calmly proceeded to state his terms.
“Lord, Roger, old man, I had some difficulty in holding myself in.
What do you think he wanted? He told her absolutely plainly that
what he was after was money, and went on to say that he knew
quite well that she herself hadn’t got enough to satisfy him.
Therefore she’d got to marry me within a month, so that she would
be able to pay the very moderate sums which he would from time to
time require. She could either tell me or not, as she saw fit; it didn’t
matter to him in the least. If she refused, he was very much afraid
she and her mother would have to take the consequences.
“Of course you see what he was getting at. Me! He was
practically saying to me that if I didn’t marry her and pay his
blackmail, he would disgrace and ruin the mother of the girl I loved.
Very neat sort of trap, wasn’t it? Incidentally, he went on to point
out, also for my benefit, that it wasn’t the least use trying to do him
any sort of bodily harm, because that would only bring things to a
head in the way you know, and he never opened the safe without a
loaded revolver in his hand, which he wouldn’t hesitate for a second
to use if it became necessary.
“Well, Barbara behaved like an absolute thoroughbred. In fact,
she told him, in so many words, to go to the devil; she wouldn’t
dream of involving me in the affair, and as for her and her mother,
they’d have to take what was coming to them if he chose to behave
in such a damnable way, but they’d take it alone. Great Scott, she
was wonderful! She practically defied him to do his worst, and said
that she was going to break off her engagement to me the very next
morning. Then she sailed out of the room with her head in the air,
leaving him sitting there. No tears, no entreaties; simply the most
overwhelming contempt. Roger, she was just marvellous!”
“I can believe you,” Roger said simply. “What happened then?”
“I came out again. I think I meant to kill Stanworth then if I got
a chance to do so without making a worse mess of things.
Remember, I knew already to what lengths he was ready to push the
wretched women that he had in his clutches, and though Barbara
would certainly never give way to him an inch, I wasn’t so sure
about Mrs. Shannon. Well, there was the safe still open, and there
was Stanworth sitting in his chair with the revolver in his hand. He
looked at me with a grin as I appeared, and said he hoped I hadn’t
been too bored. I walked straight up to him without a word (I was
beyond talking by then), and I suppose he could see from my face
what I had in mind. Anyhow, when I was only a few feet away he
whipped up the revolver and fired. Luckily he missed, and I heard
the vase shatter behind me. I lunged forward, grabbed his wrist and
used all my strength to twist it round till the muzzle was pointing
straight at his own forehead. Then I simply tightened my finger over
his on the trigger and shot him.
“I didn’t stop to think what I was doing, or anything like that; I
hardly imagine I was capable of thought at the moment. I just knew
that Stanworth had got to be killed, in the same way that one knows
that a mad dog or a rat or any other vermin has got to be killed. In
fact, once he was dead, I hardly paid any more attention to him at
all. He was a filthy thing wiped out, and that’s all there was about it.
I never felt, nor have felt since, a single moment’s compunction. I
suppose it’s curious in a way.”
“You’d have been a sentimental fool if you had,” Roger said with
decision.
“Well, I suppose I’m not a sentimental fool then,” Alec replied
with a slight smile; “for I most certainly haven’t. Well, as soon as the
man was dead I became as cool as ice. I knew exactly, almost
without thinking about it, what had got to be done. First of all, and
in case I was interrupted, the evidence in the safe had got to be
destroyed, and then I had to make my escape. It didn’t take long to
burn the documents in the safe. There was one shelf full of them, all
done up in envelopes inscribed with various addresses; about
sixteen or seventeen altogether, I suppose. I burnt them in the
hearth without opening them, and just ran through the contents of
the other shelves to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything.
“Up till then, mind, it had never occurred to me that the case
would ever appear to be anything but murder; and if it was traced
back to me, I should simply say that I had shot him in self-defence,
after he had first shot at me. I would have gone to the police
straight away and told them the whole thing, if it wasn’t that that
would have given away the facts of blackmail, which it was of course
essential to hush up. Then I glanced at the chair in which he was
lying, and it struck me that he looked exactly as if he had shot
himself, so I began to wonder if I couldn’t make the whole thing look
like suicide.
“I knew you weren’t such a blithering fool as you’ve been trying
to make yourself out to be for the last forty-eight hours——”
Roger interjected, “Yes?”
“Well, the whole finished effect didn’t occur to me at once. I
started off by shutting the safe and putting the keys back in his
waistcoat pocket; the wrong pocket, as it turned out afterwards.
Then I cleared up the bits of vase and shoved them into my pocket
for the time being, and examined the revolver in Stanworth’s hand.
To my joy, I found that I could get at the chamber and extract the
first shell without loosening his grip, which I proceeded to do. You
were right about my knowledge of lattice windows. I knew that trick
with the handle when I was a boy, and patted myself on the back
when I realised how I could get out of the room and leave
everything locked behind me. Lord, I never thought anyone would
spot that!”
“You weren’t reckoning for me to be on the trail, my boy,” Roger
said with modest pride.
“Well, you certainly made me jump when you discovered it. Let’s
see now, what did I do next? Oh, yes, the letters. I knew that all
these people would be scared to death at the idea of Stanworth
having shot himself with the safe still locked, as even if they had the
keys nobody could open it without the combination; and I thought
that in the agitation of the moment Mrs. Plant or somebody might
give some vital point away. So I sat down and hammered out letters
to the three of them on the typewriter, for I knew by what I’d seen
in the safe that both Jefferson and Lady Stanworth were involved in
it also. You know what I said in the letters, of course. Well, then, I
had a final look round and just by chance thought I’d better glance
into the waste-paper basket. The very first thing I saw there was a
sheet of paper, only very slightly crumpled, that bore Stanworth’s
signature. Instantly I thought to myself—why not rig up a statement
of suicide just to clinch things? And I typed one out above the
signature.
“Of course all this took a devil of a time. In fact, it was about
four o’clock by now. I’d been as cool as a cucumber for two hours,
but I was getting so tired that I made one or two mistakes after
that. I never searched the waste-paper basket, for instance, and so
left that other piece of paper with the signature there for you to
find; and I forgot to smooth over that footprint on the bed. I did
curse myself for that when you found it! Also I ought not to have
thrown those bits of vase into the shrubbery between the library and
the dining room, I suppose.”
“But how did you get back into the house?” Roger asked.
“Oh, before I locked up the library I went through and opened
the dining-room windows. Then I just walked round from the lattice
window and in through the dining room, locked the dining-room
door, and went up to bed. And that’s all.”
“And very nicely timed,” Roger remarked, glancing out of the
window. “We shall be at Victoria in five minutes. Well, thanks very
much for telling me like that, Alec. And now let us proceed madly to
forget all about it, shall we?”
“There’s one thing that’s been worrying me rather,” Alec said
slowly. “Do you think I ought to tell Barbara?”
“Good heavens above, no!” Roger shouted, staring at his
companion in dismay. “What on earth would you want to tell her for?
She’d only be overcome with shame that you knew anything about
her mother’s shortcomings; and the fact that you’d killed a man
more or less on account of her would simply make her wretchedly
miserable. Of course you mustn’t dream of telling her, you goop!”
“I think you’re probably right,” Alec said, gazing out of the
window.
The train began to slacken speed, and the long, snaky Victoria
platforms appeared in sight. Roger stood up and began to lift his
suitcase off the rack.
“I think we might stay up in town this evening and do a dinner
and a show, don’t you?” he said cheerfully. “I feel as if I want a little
relaxation after my strenuous mental efforts of the last two days.”
Something seemed to be troubling Alec.
“You know,” he said awkwardly, “somehow I can’t help
wondering. Are you really sure, Roger, that it wouldn’t be best for
me to go and tell the police? I mean, it isn’t as if they’d have me up
for a murder or anything like that; nothing worse than manslaughter,
I should imagine. And I daresay I should get off altogether on the
self-defence idea. But are you sure it isn’t really the right thing to
do?”
Roger gazed down at his companion with disfavour.
“For heaven’s sake, Alec, do try sometimes not to be so
disgustingly conventional!” he said scornfully.
The End
Transcriber’s Notes
The Layton Court Mystery was first published anonymously in
1926, the author being identified only as “?”. This transcription
follows the text of the edition published by Doubleday, Doran &
Company, Inc. in 1929 (which identifes the author as Anthony
Berkeley). The following alterations have been made to correct what
are believed to be unambiguous errors in the text:
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