“A widow? Anybody living there with her?”
“She’s been a widow all the time I’ve known of her, sir. She has a son that lives with her; Stephen his name is. She’s a strong-minded old lady, sir, or at least she was when I used to be about here, and she wasn’t the sort to change much as time went on, so I expect she’s much the same as ever. Brought up young Master Stephen very strict, she did. Very religious old lady, I remember; and he took after her in that, too. You could have set your watch by seeing them pass our door every Sunday, thrice a day, on the way to church. She kept young Master Stephen well tied to her apron strings. Never mixed with girls, I remember. She made him a bit goody-goody when he was young, and he just adored her, I remember from one little thing and another that’s stuck in my mind.”
“What’s his line in business?” asked Rufford out of idle curiosity.
“He never was in business that I know of,” Loman answered. “He’s twenty years or more older nor me, sir, and he’d have been shaping for business when I was a boy, in the ordinary run of things. But she had enough to live on comfortably, if all talk’s true, and she kept him out of work, just living with her up there. It suited her, and it seemed to suit him, he being a solitary kind of creature anyhow.”
“What kind of place is it, up there?”
“A sort of old farm-house, you might call it, sir, with a yard and some stables, and outhouses, mostly gone to rack and ruin, even in my day.”
“You don’t know what staff they keep? How many maids?”
Loman shook his head.
“I haven’t been near the place for years, sir. They used to keep two. Likely they do with one, now. People live simpler, nowadays.”
“Quite likely,” admitted Rufford.
The constable glanced compassionately at the two bodies lying in the disarray of death.
“This is the first murder case I’ve been mixed up in, sir,” he ventured. “It’s worse than I thought. If there had been a fight, or something like that, it would have seemed more what one looks for. But it seems kind of sad to see this sort of thing happening to a fine-looking young girl like her. Nice brown hair, she has. She can’t be more than twenty-five by the looks of her. All her life before her, so to say; and she ends up like this—snuffed out, just snuffed out. And a good class, too. I just can’t imagine how it can have happened.”
“No more can I,” said Rufford, who was no sentimentalist. “But it’s our job to clear that up. Obviously they got into a scrape and took this way out of it.”
“A suicide pact, sir? I read about ’em in the papers, but I never rightly understood why they do that sort of thing. Why not face it out, whatever it is?”
“Why not?” echoed the inspector. “Heaven alone knows. But they don’t seem able to, sometimes. A rum problem, Loman. I suppose they must be terrified of scandal, since usually a divorce would put the thing right without suicide. I can’t get inside the heads of people like that, and I don’t suppose you can, either.”
They stood for a moment or two in silence, gazing down at the bodies. Loman, moved by some obscure feeling, broke off a stem of bracken and drove off some flies which had come to settle on the blood.
“Now, let’s see,” said the inspector, in a business-like tone. “There’s an entrance wound in each skull and no exit wounds; so the bullets will turn up at the P.M. That’s that. The pistol’s there, with finger-prints on it. That’s that. Now what we still need are the spent cartridge-cases. They must be amongst the bracken somewhere. It’s no good hunting for them now. We’ll need to cut down the whole patch before we can see to find them. You’ll stay here to watch the place, after we get the bodies away; and I’ll send up someone with a couple of pairs of garden shears. Your job will be to clip away this bracken and hunt for these cartridge-cases; and if you come across any more bits of paper, collect them also. And be sure to take measurements of the places where you find anything, so that we can draw a plan of the spot.”
“Yes, sir,” said Loman obediently.
The inspector turned to look across the railway.
“Nice bit of countryside, this,” he commented. “One gets a fine view over that rolling country, with the woods, yonder. And that’s a pretty little spinney just along the slope, there.”
The sound of an approaching motor caught his ear and interrupted his æsthetic reflections.
“Ah! This’ll be the photographer and the ambulance. Lucky that no one has come along to see us and spread the glad news. Our people will be able to work without a crowd jostling around and getting in the road.”
Chapter Three
Identification
WHEN the two bodies had been placed in the mortuary and, as Loman put it, “tidied up a bit,” the inspector ordered the photographer to take pictures of the two heads, and then prepare rough prints as quickly as possible. While this was being done, Rufford occupied himself with other factors in the case.
An examination of the Colt automatic disclosed two or three very clear finger-prints on its slide. Those on the roughened parts of the weapon were, as the inspector had foreseen, useless for identification purposes. The cartridges still left in the magazine were two less than the full capacity, tallying with the two fatal shots. Rufford wasted no time over examining the fouling in the barrel, beyond ascertaining that fouling was present. He knew well enough that it is impossible to ascertain with any accuracy the time which has elapsed since a weapon has been fired.
Leaving the matter there for the moment, Rufford rang up the local coroner and gave him particulars of the discovery of the bodies. He next rang up the police surgeon, and was lucky enough to find him at home. Arrangements were made for a post-mortem examination.
“There’s just one thing, doctor,” Rufford concluded, before ringing off. “In each case there’s an entrance wound, but no exit one; so you’ll probably find the bullets inside the skulls. I want you to be careful with them, please. Don’t scratch them with your instruments or anything like that. It may be important for all I can tell. You’ll see to it? Right! Then good-bye.”
Armed with a few necessary utensils, Rufford next went to the mortuary along with a constable, to make a further examination of the bodies. The “tidying up” process had been confined to the unwounded sides of the heads. Rufford began his task by expanding his earlier rough notes on the powder-blackening caused by the shots. Taking the woman’s body first, he found some blackening around the wound, though much less than would have been produced if black powder had been used. There were signs of scorching on the hair at the temple.
“That shot was fired at fairly close range, evidently,” he reflected. “Eight inches, say. A foot at the outside. That fits well enough with the notion that the man was sitting beside her, where the bracken was crushed down; and that he shot her from that position. Some of her blood might have spurted over his right side, then. But there’s no help in that, because when he shot himself in his own right temple, he got blood from his own wound over him on that side.”
He turned to examine the male body. Here, the signs of powder-blackening were much less conspicuous, showing that in this case the pistol must have been further from the skin when fired. This was confirmed by the absence of any scorching of the hair on the man’s temple.
“I wonder, now,” mused the inspector. “It almost looks as if she had done the shooting: close range in her case, and the pistol not so near when the shot was fired into him. Well, the finger-prints will settle that.”
He took a complete record of the finger-prints from both bodies. Then he made a few measurements with an inch-tape, finding that the man was about five feet eight in height whilst the woman was five feet six.
A search of the pockets followed. In the man’s case, rather to the inspector’s surprise, he found no engagement-book and no papers which furnished any clue to the owner’s identity. There was a pair of reading spectacles; but the case had evidently been bought from a chain store and bore no maker’s name. A fountai
n-pen of a well-known make was too common in type to be helpful. Nor did a cheap note-case with a couple of notes in it furnish any clue, though Rufford took the precaution of jotting down the numbers. He found a Yale latch-key; but that also was useless for his present purpose, as were the few coins which he fished out of the trouser pockets. There were no smoking materials or matches. The man’s handkerchief had two minute punctures at one corner; but the aluminium laundry-tag which caused them had been removed, either purposely or by accident.
It was in the ticket-pocket of the man’s jacket that he made his first promising discovery: two railway tickets and a piece of paper which he unfolded and examined. It proved to be a left-luggage office voucher for two suit-cases, issued at the local main line station and dated on the previous day, the day on which the shooting had occurred.
“Two suit-cases,” Rufford pondered. “That looks as if they’d made some plan for travelling, yesterday.”
He turned to the tickets.
“Two third class singles for London, dated yesterday, with consecutive numbers, which looks as if they’d been bought by the same person. That would be the man, of course. So they’d planned to go up to town together, evidently. Then what made them change their minds and go in for the shooting business? That’s a rum start.”
He cogitated for a moment or two before finding a possible solution.
“One of them must have weakened at the last moment. The girl, most likely. A girl has usually got more to lose than a man has, in an affair of this sort. But against that, the pistol looks like premeditation. The man in the street doesn’t go about armed, not in this country. A very rum start. I wish I knew just when that shooting happened.”
He fished a penny local time-table from his pocket and consulted it. An up train left for London at 8.9 p.m., arriving at 10.8 p.m. The next one left at 8.55 p.m. and, being a slow one, did not reach town till 11.46 p.m. The final train, leaving at 11 p.m. and getting to London at 3.55 a.m. was obviously an unlikely one, for passengers reaching London at that hour in the morning would probably have difficulty in getting into an hotel without attracting attention; and notice was the last thing which an eloping couple would wish to attract. He put the matter aside for the moment, promising himself to make inquiries at the station later on.
The girl’s coat had two pockets, but they were empty.
Each body had a watch on its wrist. Rufford examined them and found both watches still going. Knowing that wearers of wristlet-watches are apt from time to time to wind them up before they have run down, he did not think it worth while to meddle with them.
“Not much of a catch here,” he grumbled to himself as he completed his search. “If it weren’t for that address on the note-paper, I’d probably have had to wait till these two were reported missing, before I got much further. What beats me is how they laid their hands on a pistol. It’s not the sort of thing one expects, somehow.”
He examined finally the shoes in both cases. The girl’s were smart town walking-shoes, size five; the man’s were serviceable articles, size eight, which had obviously been re-soled a month or two previously.
Returning to the police station, he questioned his staff, all of whom by now had inspected the bodies. None of them had recognised either the man or the woman. The constable who had experience of the beat including Haydock Avenue was off duty at the moment and it did not seem worth while disturbing him, since it was just as easy to make inquiries at Fern Bank itself. But before going there, Rufford wanted the photographs which had been taken in the mortuary, and they were not yet available. To fill in his time, he took out the two envelopes in which the fragments of letter-paper had been stowed and began to piece together the torn documents, handling the moist scraps gingerly for fear of tearing them or leaving his own finger-prints upon them.
Without fitting them completely together, he made out the tenor of the two notes. They were ardent love-letters. For the moment, he went no further, since it would be safer to wait for the paper to dry before handling it too much. The letter in the woman’s handwriting bore only the name of a weekday, Tuesday, instead of the ordinary date. In the case of the man’s letter, the right-hand upper corner of the first page was missing; but the remainder bore an embossed heading which was incomplete: “38, GRA . . .” Rufford was glad that he had cautioned Loman to collect any further scraps which might have drifted among the bracken. But even failing these, he felt certain of being able to identify the complete address if it were a local one. There could not be many streets with names beginning with the letters GRA.
He turned to the signatures. The woman had signed with a mere initial: “E,” which reminded the inspector of the “E.C.” in the inscription inside the wedding-ring. Her letter began: “Dearest John.” The letter in the man’s handwriting opened with: “My darling,” and was signed: “John,” which seemed to tally with the “J.B.” on the wedding-ring. Rufford realised that there was a misfit amongst these facts. If a woman “E.C.” had married a man “J.B.,” then her name would change to “B.” In that case, how did she come to be staying at Fern Bank, whose owner was called Callis? Then the obvious solution struck him. Her maiden name must have been Callis, and at Fern Bank she had been staying with some relation of hers, a brother, possibly. There was no need at the moment for Rufford to speculate further. He would soon learn the facts.
He cautiously gathered up the moist fragments and placed them between two sheets of glass, so that they would dry flat and be easy to piece together later on.
A glance at his watch showed that he had still a short time in hand before he could receive the photographs, and he decided to spend this in making a rough examination of the finger-prints on the Colt automatic. The pistol had been brought in carefully strapped to a board so that the prints had been preserved intact during transit; and, as it chanced, there was a very clear print on the exposed smooth surface of the slide, so clear that powder was unnecessary to bring out the lines. Rufford noted that it was a “whorl” pattern—that is, one which has a central core to its maze. By using a magnifying glass, he counted the number of ridges which intervened between the core and the nearest “delta”—a point where the ridges eddied away into subsidiary patterns—and found fourteen of them. There were two fairly prominent “islands” in the pattern, and he counted the number of the ridges between each of them and the “core,” noting the relative positions of the three features.
He next took up the prints which he had made from the fingers of the two bodies. The designs on the woman’s finger-tips were all of the “loop” type, so he was able to discard them immediately. The right thumb of the male body showed a “whorl” pattern, however; and a repetition of the counting process proved that here also there were fourteen ridges between the core and the nearest delta. Rufford was able to pick out the two islands, also; and the numbers for them were identical with those which he had found on the pistol-print. The relative positions of the various features were alike in both patterns.
“Not much need to go further for the present,” Rufford assured himself thankfully. “I can get the rest of the prints checked carefully by and by. It’s plain enough from this that the man must have had the pistol in his hand.”
He had hardly put the pistol into a place of safety, and given some orders to his subordinates, when the photographer brought in the rough bromide prints of the photographs he had taken.
“You’d better go easy in handling them, sir,” he pointed out. “I dried them with alcohol, but it may be a little while yet before they can stand rough treatment.”
The inspector glanced at the prints. By his orders, the pictures had been taken in profile, from the uninjured sides of the faces, so that they showed no trace of the damage done by the bullets. Dismissing the photographer, he put the prints carefully into a folder and then glanced at his watch. A good many business men in the town lunched at home; and it seemed possible that he might catch Callis—whoever he was—at Fern Bank. That, for many reasons, woul
d be better than interviewing him at his office, Rufford decided.
He consulted the telephone directory, found the Fern Bank number, and in the line below he noted a repetition of the name Callis in the title of a firm of chartered accountants: Callis, Frensham & Olney, with offices in South Street. Callis was an uncommon name, so it was likely that Callis of Fern Bank and Callis of South Street were identical. Rufford dialled the Fern Bank number, and was relieved to find Callis at home, though just preparing to leave again for his office. The inspector reflected sourly that he himself would have to go luncheonless, for by the time he had paid his visit, it would not be worth while to trouble about food. He fixed an immediate appointment at Fern Bank, picked up his folder, and made his way to Haydock Avenue.
Chapter Four
The Telegram
INSPECTOR RUFFORD had a predilection for guessing the financial status of householders from the general appearance of the streets in which they lived. In many cases, his estimate was probably far astray, but on the average he came near the mark. Mr. Smith, living in Acacia Drive, was a five-hundred pounder; Mr. Jones, in Laurel Grove, probably just reached the thousand pound-level. And so on. Haydock Avenue, he judged when he came to it, was probably an eight-hundred-a-year street; and this conclusion was reinforced in his mind by the number of perambulators which he noted in the front gardens. Evidently this was a street where young couples started married life without actually having to pinch. Then, if they got on in the world, they moved to quarters better suited to their increased incomes and growing families, leaving a house vacant for a pair of new recruits.
At Fern Bank he was shown into a comfortable sitting-room; and almost immediately the door opened and a frank-looking young man came in, with a faintly puzzled expression on his face as he greeted the inspector.
The Twenty-One Clues Page 5