“He was a deacon, was he?”
“He was. In Barratt’s church.”
“That’s the Church of Awakened Israel, isn’t it?”
“Bull’s-eye. And a very strict denomination they are. They ex-communicated Uncle Ted forthright as soon as his wife got her decree nisi. I was in their midst about that time, writing up my article on them. Grandma was the power behind the throne there. She’s one of their financial mainstays and what she says, goes. Though I think they’d have jettisoned Uncle Ted without that. Puritan virtue, deaconship, and divorce don’t make a sound team.”
“Did you come across a man Callis amongst them? He’s their treasurer.”
“Let’s see. Young chap with flashing eyes and teeth to match? And a rather bossy young wife. . . . By Jove! That’s the Mrs. Callis of this case, is it? I hadn’t linked them up. H’m! Well, she was a nice-looking wench; but Barratt had a handsomer one at home, so far as my taste goes. He’d no need to cross his own doorstep in search of beauty.”
Peter’s further reflections were interrupted by the entry of a constable, who addressed the inspector.
“I’ve gone through the list, sir, as you told me; and I can’t find that any permit for a pistol was issued to John Barratt.”
“Very good,” said Rufford, dismissing his subordinate at once.
Peter had listened to this brief dialogue with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Pistol, eh?” he said slowly. “Now that reminds me of something, but I can’t think what it is, just at the moment. It’s at the back of my mind. Pistol? . . . No, it’s slipped my memory. It’ll come back, by and by. So Barratt had no permit for a pistol, eh? But he had a pistol, hadn’t he?”
“He had. His finger-prints were on it,” the inspector volunteered. “We’ll just see about that now. I gave orders for a fuller examination to be made.”
He left the room for a few moments and came back with a satisfied look on his face.
“Yes, that’s O.K.,” he announced. “Our finger-print expert has examined that automatic, and he finds several of Barratt’s finger-prints on it and no prints belonging to anyone else.”
“I’ve heard of the Church Militant somewhere,” commented Peter, “but this seems to be carrying the notion a shade too far, if they go about armed like gangsters. Why did he shoot the woman? That’s what I can’t make out.”
“It looks like a suicide pact,” said Rufford. “I found some torn-up love-letters beside the two of them. One letter, in her handwriting, was on bluish paper with her address printed on it as a heading. I’ve got a sample of exactly the same note-paper with her writing on it. There’s no doubt she wrote that love-letter. The other letter I found was in Barratt’s writing, and I’ve checked that up also.”
“Guilty Glamour, eh? Barratt’s Baleful Bewitchment? No, that’s a rotten headline. Delete it. But why suicide, Rufford? Why weren’t they content to jog along quietly on the sly?”
“Perhaps because people had begun to talk,” suggested Rufford curtly. “But against that, I’ve evidence that they were thinking of making a bolt together. And she had an income of her own that would have kept them going, though it wouldn’t have spelt luxury. What I can’t see is why they should change their minds at the last moment. And it was the very last moment, for they had tickets for London all bought and everything ready.”
At this moment there was another interruption. The inspector was called to the telephone.
“That was the Toynton Lacey inspector—Fowler—ringing up,” he explained, when he came back again. “Here’s what happened. Yesterday morning, a wire came to the Callis’s house about lunch-time. The maid saw it; Callis read it. It was to his wife from a Mrs. Longnor of Toynton Lacey, an old friend of Mrs. Callis, who happened to be in town that morning. The wire invited Mrs. Callis to pick up Mrs. Longnor at Robinson’s tea-room, drive her home to Toynton Lacey, and stay there for a day or two. Mrs. Callis packed a suit-case and went off in her car that afternoon. I put Fowler on to inquire about this from Mrs. Longnor. He says that Mrs. Longnor sent no such wire. She wasn’t in town yesterday at all, and she hadn’t invited Mrs. Callis to stay with her just now. But the wire came, for all that. I saw it myself.”
“Then someone else must have sent it, obviously.”
“I saw that myself, without your help,” said Rufford, crossly. “It stares you in the face. But I’ll tell you something you don’t know. Mrs. Callis was down town when that wire was despatched. And it doesn’t take much brains to see what that means. She sent it herself to cover up this proposed elopement as long as possible. She and Barratt were vamoosing together that afternoon, probably, according to plan. That meant that when she didn’t get back home, Callis would be perturbed. So she sent this wire, inviting herself to the Longnors for a day or two. She knew Callis would see it, or she could show it to him when she got back for lunch. Then he wouldn’t worry over her disappearance. She and Barratt would get at least a couple of days’ start, before Callis made any inquiries about her; and that would be quite enough to cover the trail.”
“Something in that, perhaps,” Peter admitted. “But it still leaves an explanation due. Why did she and Barratt change their minds at the last moment? And why did they suicide? Puzzling problems, these.”
Another summons to the telephone interrupted the inspector as he was about to answer. He was absent rather longer this time.
“That was Callis ringing up,” he explained to Peter on his return. “He wanted to know about the pistol found beside the bodies. I described it to him—I’d noticed a scratch on the butt—whereupon he claimed it as belonging to him. He says he’s got a perfect young arsenal of firearms. . . .”
Peter brought his palm down on his knee with a smack.
“Of course! I knew there was something at the back of my mind. Now I remember. I wrote a three-line paragraph about Callis a year or more ago. Time he did pretty well in the revolver-shooting competition at Bisley. That’s it! I remember all about it. He’s by way of being quite a good marksman with small arms. He makes a regular hobby of it. Unless I’m mistaken, he has a range, of sorts, in his back garden, and he got up a kind of club for pistol and revolver shooting amongst his neighbours.”
“Ah!” said Rufford, with relief. “That accounts for the pistol, then. I couldn’t make out how that Barratt man had got hold of one without a permit. Now I see it, it’s obvious that Mrs. Callis must have helped herself to one from Callis’s arsenal and given it to Barratt. But that means this suicide business was prearranged, surely. She must have grabbed it from stock before she left the house. Or maybe she’d given it to Barratt days beforehand.”
“That’s not likely,” interrupted Peter. “If she’d taken it days ahead, Callis might have missed it, if he happened to take a fancy to do some practising. He’s the sort of man who would know just what he had in the way of weapons and he’d spot at once that one was amissing. No, obviously she must have lifted it at the last moment.”
The inspector picked up a pen and jabbed viciously at the blotting-pad on the table before him.
“But that doesn’t make sense, if they had their get-away all fixed up. Suicide won’t fit in with that side of the affair,” he asserted.
“Oh, yes, it will,” said Peter, coolly. “Here’s the solution, by our crime expert. Meaning me. They meant to go off together. That’s plain on the facts. But they didn’t reckon it as a permanency, if you see what I mean.”
“I don’t,” said Rufford bluntly.
“Put it this way, then,” Peter amplified. “What they aimed at was a Week’s Wild Whirl of Bliss, or Carnival of Concupiscence. But it was to be a real carnival, meaning Farewell to the Flesh. In other words, they meant to have a short orgy and then . . . Pong! Thus cutting loose from all future complexities and complications and saving themselves from possible regrets and repinings. It’s not an uncommon plan. See Sunday papers, passim.”
“I wonder, now,” said Rufford, musingly. “Put in th
e way you put it, it sounds just possible. And as you say, it’s hot uncommon. Most of these suicide pacts run on rails just like that. But it leaves things still obscure, if you ask me. I can understand the notion of having a real riot for a week or so and then, as you say. . . . Pong! But I can’t see the point of cutting out the riot and going straight to the shooting. It’s like paying for something and not taking delivery of the goods. And that’s not according to human nature as I understand it.”
“Perhaps human nature’s more complicated than you suppose,” Peter suggested. “Or else your understanding’s not so deep as you imagine. Let’s take the plain facts of the case and see what they suggest. First of all, how long has this game been going on between Barratt and Mrs. C.? What’s the evidence there?”
“It must have been going on for quite a while,” declared Rufford confidently. “Callis showed me an anonymous letter he’d received. That pointed to someone having suspicions. And people don’t usually get suspicious about an affair of that kind until it’s lasted for a good while. Then these love-letters we found in the bracken. They were all wet with the dew, but the ink hadn’t run. That means they weren’t written in the last day or two. What’s more, a guilty couple don’t usually get worked up to the pitch of bolting together, unless the intrigue’s been going on for some time.”
“I’m with you there,” Peter agreed promptly. “Imaginary dialogue: ‘Darling, I’ve just discovered I adore you. Let’s fly together instanter.’ ‘Beloved, this is so sudden. Make it next Tuesday.’ No, that doesn’t ring true, somehow. The process must be more drawn-out, one would think. Pass that. Next question is, can we assume the worst, or had they not got that length?”
“When a woman discards her own wedding-ring and wears another one with her initials and a man’s inside it, she’s got herself to blame if people do assume the worst,” said the inspector.
‘’Meaning that she was kidding herself that this intrigue was a new marriage, made in heaven without the intervention of mere registrars and such-like? Well, it’s not improbable. Some people can persuade themselves that anything’s straight, so long as they want it badly enough. You’re going to hunt round to find when this ring was bought? The initials should make that an easy job.”
“If it was bought locally, yes. But it may have been bought anywhere for all one can tell,” said Rufford, doubtfully.
“Now let’s take the rest of the evidence,” Peter continued. “This bolt by the two of them was prearranged, obviously. And pretty well thought out too. Witness the telegram and the railway tickets.”
“And the suit-cases packed and dumped in a left-luggage office,” amplified the inspector. “You don’t know about them yet. One belongs to Mrs. Callis and one to Barratt. I’ve got the left-luggage office receipt for them, and I’ve sent a man down to collect them. There’s not a shadow of doubt that this affair was planned ahead.”
“And yet it goes flop at the last moment. All these preparations wasted. Funny, that is. But turn to a fresh facet. How did they get out to that place up the line where you found the bodies?”
“In the Callis’s car,” explained Rufford. “The telegram I told you about made that clear. It asked Mrs. Callis to bring her car down town. The car’s not in the Callis garage now. Obviously she used it to take Barratt out to the bracken-patch.”
“In company with the pistol? But why go near the bracken-patch at all, at that stage of the game? See what I’m trying after? I’d like to guess just when they changed their minds—or one of them did. It was a change in somebody’s mind that prevented them from going off by train, obviously. Then whose mind? And why?”
“I bank on the woman,” said Rufford without hesitation. “She’d most to lose.”
“Well, if she did change her mind about bolting, why couldn’t she just come back home and jog along with the old clandestine intrigue? Nothing to prevent that, was there? Then why all this bloody drama? I can’t make sense of it,” Peter confessed, in a tone of perplexity. “But leave that now. Next point is, what’s become of the car? If they went up there to shoot themselves, they must have left the car near-by. They couldn’t drive it away after they’d suicided, now could they?”
“I’ve given instructions to have the car traced,” said Rufford, “but that may take time. I’ve no more notion than you have, about where it is just now. And there’s another thing that’s amissing. Barratt’s last appearance before vanishing was when he attended a meeting at his church. A collection was to be taken there. He had a small black bag with him, to park the dibs in. That bag’s gone also. It may be in the car, of course; and we’ll see about that when we track down the car. But before I forget, I want to ask you about somebody else. The nearest house to the bracken-slope belongs to some people Kerrison. Do you know anything about them, by any chance?”
He had regarded this question as a forlorn hope; but to his surprise, Peter pricked up his ears at it.
“Kerrison?” he said at once. “That would be Stephen Kerrison. He lives there. I know the house; I’ve been there, once. Oh, yes, I can tell you something about Stephen Kerrison. He’s one of the Awakened Israelites. Likewise a religious maniac, in a sort of way.”
“How d’you know that?” demanded Rufford, surprised.
“Well, he wrote a book. It was printed locally, by Simonds and Yabsley, the jobbing printers in Topsfield Street. Whence I infer that no publisher would look at it, and he had to bring it out at his own expense. I got it to review for the Gazette. ‘Local author. Let him down lightly.’ So my chief desired. I read it; which is always a good thing to do when you’re reviewing a book. Love’s Labour Lost, I regret to say. I did my best, but no one could have understood that book. Wild stuff. All about Seven Seals, and Beasts, and the Scarlet Woman—he seemed to have a special down on the Scarlet Woman, I gathered—and the Great Pyramid and how the British were the Lost Ten Tribes, and a lot more besides. Made my head spin, trying to make head or tail of it. The only bit I did seem to understand clearly was a chapter on Hawthorne. How that crept in, Heaven alone knows. But he dealt at some length with The Scarlet Letter—red seems to act on him as if he was a bull—and I gathered that he thought Hester Prynne got off much too lightly. He’d have sent her to the stake, just to l’arn her better. And boiling oil treatment was his prescription for the Reverend Arthur. Frailty of the flesh got no sympathy from Stephen, I can tell you. One got the notion that he had ideas. But what the ideas were, on the whole, I frankly couldn’t make out, though he seemed to get very worked up about them. Anyhow, I reviewed it briefly. Let him down lightly, as Donnington ordered. Did that content him? Far from it. He said I’d misrepresented him. I may have, for all I know. I did my best, I give you my word; but apparently it wasn’t good enough for him. These young authors are very touchy. Donnington ordered me to go and see him. Smooth him down, and all that sort of thing. So I did. Crawled in the dust before him and left him happy in his victory. All saved except honesty. There were moments when I thought he might hit me on the jaw in defence of his ideas. A violent fellow, I fear, when you touch him on that side. There’s a nasty fanatical look in his eye. However, we parted friends; and he told me a lot more about the measurements of the Great Pyramid and how the English were the Lost Ten Tribes. One lives and learns.”
“One lives, certainly,” conceded the inspector.
A fresh thought seemed to strike Peter.
“Your Chief’s on holiday at the moment, isn’t he?” he inquired.
“Yes, he is. He’s due back shortly, if you want to interview him.”
Peter shook his head rather despondently at the suggestion.
“No one ever gets much change out of Driffield. If he ever wants a coat of arms sketched out, the Heralds’ College ought to give him supporters: a tin-opener on one side and an oyster on the other. One to symbolise his methods of investigation and the other his attitude towards inquirers. It’s true that supporters ought to be pairs; and a tin-opener isn’t a living creature; but Dr
iffield’s original enough not to mind a trifle like that. Motto: On les aura!”
Rufford hastened to defend his Chief Constable.
“Well, anyhow, he generally does ‘get ’em’ when it comes to the pinch,” he pointed out. “And I’ll say this for him. He never grabs any subordinate’s credit and often he gives subordinates the credit of his own brains.”
“His brand of brains is too scientiflco-mathematical for me, altogether,” grumbled Peter. “At school, the only way I could get over the Pons Asinorum was to tear the page out of my Euclid, pin it on the back of a pal at the desk in front of me, and read it off for the delectation of my revered teacher. I don’t lay claim to a logical mind. I’m a literary cove. But I know how Driffield would set about this Barratt case.”
“Do you?” said the inspector, interested.
“Oh, bless you, yes,” retorted Peter. “He’d say as follows: ‘Here we have two dead people. The possibilities are these. First, it may be accident. Second, it may be suicide. Third, it may be murder. Or it may be accident and suicide, or accident and murder, or suicide and murder . . . and so on, with a neat little mathematical formula to put the thing in a nutshell. Then, after going over the evidence, he’d begin to discard from strength—chuck out the absolutely impossible cases, one by one. And finally he’d be left with the real solution staring him in the face, Lord bless you! It’s as easy as winking, the Driffield method.”
“I’ve seen worse, all the same,” said the inspector. “Surprising how often he gets there, once he takes a thing up. Suppose you go and give it a run yourself. I’ve nothing more to tell you at the moment and I’ve got a lot to do myself. And there’s one thing you might do, if you’ve the fancy. Go and pick up some opinions amongst the Awakened Israelites. Some of them might know a thing or two about the doings of their late pastor and Mrs. Callis. They’d probably shut up like clams if I sent a man to interview them. But you’re got a soapy way with you, and you might chance on something useful.”
The Twenty-One Clues Page 10