The Twenty-One Clues

by J. J. Connington

  “I’ll fix it, sir,” said Quilter, confidently. “Nine o’clock or any time round about then. Very good.”

  “Nothing come in yet about that missing car? Callis’s, I mean.”

  “Nothing reported so far, sir. But we’ve warned all stations about it, and something ought to come in very soon, surely.”

  “Good. Then I’m off. I’ll be at Short’s first of all for some grub. After that, you can phone me at Callis’s if you want me. I’m coming straight back here after I’ve seen him.”

  “I’ll note that, sir.”

  “Then I’ll go now. I’m infernally hungry after missing my lunch.”

  Rufford picked up his hat and went out. At Short’s restaurant, he was faced with the problem of whether to make a light meal and wait for his dinner later, or to make sure of food when he could get it, since quite possibly he might not have a chance of any more that evening. He finally opted for a square meal, thus ensuring that Callis would be home from his office before the inspector called. When Rufford reached Fern Bank, he noticed that Callis seemed to have got over the first shock of his wife’s death, though he was still obviously distressed. Rufford had been rather surprised to learn, over the phone, that Callis had gone back to his office in the normal way, that afternoon; but the routine of his work there had apparently been the best treatment for his troubles. It must have prevented him from dwelling continuously on the tragedy; and that was always some gain, the inspector admitted to himself.

  “I want to see these fire-arms of yours, Mr. Callis,” he explained when the accountant came into the room. “I have a list of those mentioned on your certificate and I just want to check the details, so as to have everything shipshape, in case any questions are asked.”

  “Certainly,” agreed Callis, at once. “If you’ll come this way, I’ll show you them. And my shooting-range in the garden, if you like, as well. It’s an old long greenhouse, put up in my father-in-law’s day for growing tomatoes. I merely had to modify it a bit to make it safe for shooting in.”

  “Another day, perhaps,” said Rufford politely. “All I want at the moment is to check up these fire-arms.”

  Callis nodded and led the inspector along a passage to the back of the house where there was a small pantry which Callis had fitted up as a store. He pulled open a long drawer and displayed a number of weapons lying on a bed of cotton-wool.

  “Here they are,” he announced with a gesture towards them. “I’d better name them to you, perhaps, for one or two of them are a bit out of the way, and you might not recognise them. Here’s a Webley, Mark IV target revolver, .22. This is a Smith and Wesson pistol, also .22. This one I’m sure you haven’t seen before: it’s a German one, a Walther .22 automatic. Another .22; this is a Stevens No. 10 target pistol. Here’s something heavier; you’ll know it well.”

  “Oh, yes,” Rufford confirmed. “Service model Mark VI, isn’t it?”

  “Correct,” said Callis. “And here’s another .455; it’s a Webley W.S. Bisley target model. And, finally, here’s a .38 Colt automatic. That’s the lot.”

  “Is it?” said Rufford, with sudden suspicion. “Surely not, Mr. Callis. There are three .38 Colts noted on your certificate. Where are the other two?”

  “One of them’s in your own hands,” Callis pointed out.

  “Yes, yes. But what about the third one? Where’s it got to?”

  Callis seemed faintly amused by the inspector’s eagerness.

  “I lent the third one to a Mr. Kerrison a week or two ago,” he explained. “Kerrison of The Hermitage.”

  “I know who you mean,” Rufford admitted. “What did he want with a pistol?”

  “He told me he’d been bothered by some stray cats and wanted to shoot them. He’s one of these people who have a positive horror of cats. I never can understand it, myself; but some people undoubtedly are afflicted in that way. Kerrison’s rather a bad case of it. If you shut him in a room with a cat, I believe he’d either kill it or go into a nerve-storm. Besides, he keeps chickens up there, and it seems these stray cats have managed to get into the runs and kill some of his stock. Naturally he wanted to discourage them.”

  Rufford looked grave at Callis’s answer.

  “Has he a fire-arms certificate, do you know?” he demanded.

  “He’s a member of my little pistol-shooting club,” explained Callis, “so I take it he ought to have a certificate. I assumed that he had one when I lent him the thing.”

  “Hasn’t he got any fire-arms of his own?”

  “I don’t think so,” Callis declared. “He uses mine, when he comes here to shoot. A good many of my little club do that, and I don’t mind their doing so. All except my .455’s. I can’t afford to have them deteriorated.”

  “You use them at Bisley?” said Rufford. “Naturally you want to keep them in good condition.”

  “Exactly. I don’t care about lending them to all and sundry. But the rest of the stuff’s different. I don’t mind who uses that.”

  “Is Mr. Kerrison a good shot?” queried the inspector.

  Callis shook his head in a very decided fashion.

  “Good Lord, no!” he declared. “He’s only a beginner, remember. He shapes well enough, though, and might do better in time; but all he wants is to kill those cats that bother him. He’s got no real interest in firearms or markmanship. He doesn’t know enough about a pistol to dismantle it for cleaning. I have to do that for him, after he’s been using my Colt.”

  The inspector considered for a moment or two before speaking again.

  “You might give me a list of the people you have in this shooting club of yours, Mr. Callis.”

  The accountant received this proposal rather doubtfully.

  “Why do you want that?” he asked. “Are you going to snoop round and find out if any of them haven’t got licences and get them fined? You can hardly expect me to supply evidence for use against friends of mine; and I don’t believe you can force me to give you their names.”

  “The law’s the law,” retorted Rufford. “If people break it, they have to pay. But all I really want is to warn your friends to take the proper steps. I’m not very keen on petty prosecutions for technical offences, Mr. Callis, I may tell you without prejudice. If your friends will take my tip, there’ll be no trouble.”

  Callis looked the inspector in the eye, apparently attempting to gauge his earnestness in this matter. He seemed satisfied.

  “Very well, then,” he conceded, “I’ll give you a list of them.”

  “Please write it here,” requested Rufford, pulling out a note-book and opening it at a blank page.

  Callis took the book from him and, with intervals for reflection, wrote down a list of about a dozen names and addresses.

  “That’s the lot,” he declared, handing back the note-book.

  Rufford glanced down the list. Most of the names were unfamiliar, and he fastened upon those which chanced to be known to him.

  “Kerrison—you’ve told me about him already. . . . Barratt? Did he go on for this sort of thing?”

  “I only put him in to make the list complete,” Callis explained with a wry expression, as though Barratt’s name had wakened painful memories. “He came only once, and I showed him how to load and fire an automatic. I don’t think he took much interest, really, for he never came back again.”

  This explanation solved one of Rufford’s problems. An ignoramus would hardly have tumbled to the necessity of pulling back the slide of an automatic in order to bring the first cartridge up from the magazine into the barrel. Now he knew how Barrett had come by that knowledge.

  “Arthur Alvington,” he read out, as he went down the list.

  “That’s Mrs. Barratt’s uncle,” Callis explained. “He was one of the first to join. He’s always been interested in target shooting; and it’s cheaper to practise in my place than to go to a gunsmith’s. He has a couple of pistols of his own: a Colt .38, like mine, and a Belgian thing, a .32 Bayard, I think it is.”


  “A good shot, is he?” Rufford inquired casually.

  “Fair,” said Callis, judicially. “It was he who brought Barratt along, that day, I remember.”

  “Did your wife know anything about fire-arms?” said the inspector, unexpectedly.

  Callis shook his head very definitely.

  “Not the beginnings of it, so far as actual shooting went. She was always nervous of guns, wouldn’t touch one even if you told her it was unloaded. In fact, when we had a meeting here, she preferred to go out for the afternoon, if she could. She disliked even the sound of the shots. When we were married first, I tried to get her to take an interest in shooting, taught her how to load a pistol and so on. But when it came to firing, she was so nervous that it obviously wasn’t worth while to go on with it.”

  Rufford understood that. Some women had a terror of fire-arms. He turned back to the drawer which still remained open and idly picked out the .38 Colt automatic for examination, slipped the catch, and pulled out the magazine, which he found empty. Callis had been watching the operation.

  “None of them’s loaded,” he explained. “If a burglar came along, he’d find me quite harmless, in spite of all this, unless he gave me time to load up. The ammunition’s here.”

  He opened a cupboard and showed the inspector a few stacks of boxes containing cartridges of various makes and calibres. Some of the boxes had been opened, others were still intact.

  “I keep a stock, you see,” he pointed out. “When my friends come here to shoot, they use my stuff and pay for what they fire off. It saves carrying ammunition about.”

  Rufford made no immediate comment. Here was a possible explanation of another matter which had been puzzling him. Callis kept his pistols unloaded in this drawer, open to anyone. Mrs. Callis thus had easy access to both weapons and ammunition; and although she had a horror of actual shooting, she had learned how to fill and insert a magazine. Thus it had been simple enough for her to secure a fully-loaded pistol, which she had apparently handed on to Barratt. But there was yet another point still left mysterious. The .38 Colt found beside the bodies was two cartridges short of its full load, and yet four empty shells had been found by Loman beside the bodies. That implied that she had filled the magazine from the cartridge store in the cupboard and had taken away two extra cartridges as well. And these two extra cartridges had been used to reload the pistol after two shots at least had been fired from it. But why reload at all, when the magazine still contained unused cartridges? The inspector puzzled over that for a moment or two and then added this mystery to the earlier one: why two extra shots had been fired at all, since apparently they had found no detectable billets. He dismissed the subject from his mind at the moment, and replaced the Colt on its cotton-wool bed in the drawer.

  “Kerrison isn’t much of a marksman, you told me,” he said, turning back to the accountant. “Had he any luck with his cat-shooting?”

  “Better than he deserved,” Callis said, with a faint grimace. “He killed two poor brutes, he told me. But he’d fired away four or five bobs’ worth of ammunition in doing it. A trap would have been cheaper, at that rate.”

  “I hope he killed them outright, anyhow,” commented Rufford. “Pity if the poor brutes struggled away to die slowly in some odd corner.”

  “He seems to have been lucky,” Callis declared. “He told me he’d buried both bodies, so they must have been shot dead or else he finished them off, after crippling them. I don’t think any got away. He didn’t say anything about that, anyhow.”

  “It’s rather a lonely place, that house of his,” said Rufford. “Not a neighbourhood where you’d expect to find many stray cats, surely. Not much food in sight except Kerrison’s chickens, surely?”

  “Wherever you have chickens, you usually have rats,” Callis pointed out. “The rats may have attracted the strays. Besides, there’s a spinney quite close to the house, on the other slope of the hill from the railway. You probably didn’t notice it if you keep on the railway side of the crest-line. There are birds there, and some rabbits as well. Cats could find quite enough provender round about Kerrison’s, without raiding his chicken-runs.”

  “Something in that,” admitted the inspector.

  He glanced at his watch.

  “Well, thanks for showing me all this,” he said. “I shan’t make things awkward for your friends. Just give them a tip that they must get certificates if they haven’t got them already.”

  Callis acknowledged this with a nod of appreciation.

  He accompanied the inspector to the door and as he opened it, he paused to make a final statement.

  “Just one thing, Mr. Rufford,” he said with complete sincerity. “I know things look very black against my wife. That’s obvious. But there’s one thing I’m absolutely convinced about in my own mind: she never was unfaithful to me. She may have been incautious in some ways, I’m not going to deny that. It was her way, to go her own road and not mind what people said about her. But she was absolutely straight. I’m not afraid of the truth so far as she’s concerned; and that’s a great help to me in this trouble. I know it isn’t your affair to establish her innocence. But bear it in mind, please, will you? And if any evidence turns up to clear her character, do please bring it out publicly so that everyone will know the truth. I owe that to her. I’ve done my best to be matter-of-fact with you; but it’s been a strain, I don’t mind admitting that. And you’re not the only one. I’ve been rung up half a dozen times by reporters and other people to-day, all asking questions and hinting plainly enough what they think about the business. One of the hardest things to bear has been this slur on my wife’s character, when there’s been no chance of clearing it away at once. All the town gossips—I know them!—will fasten on this affair and put the poor girl’s doings in the worst light, just for their own amusement. Do what you can to end that, as soon as it’s possible.”

  From Callis’s manner, Rufford feared that the accountant’s nerve was beginning to weaken and that he might break down if the strain were prolonged. The inspector had secured all the evidence he needed at the moment, so he hastily took his leave, thinking it best to give Callis a chance to recover his self-possession in peace.

  On the way back to the police-station, Rufford went into a stationer’s shop, where he purchased some sticks of plasticine and a few sheets of pasteboard; and he also paid a call at the shop of a gunsmith with whom he had dealings in the past.

  Chapter Eight

  The Bullets

  WHEN Rufford returned to the police station, he found Sergeant Quilter waiting for him with a report.

  “I’ve got that cotton waste and the boxes, sir. They’re out in the yard. Will you be wanting them to-night? It looks as if there might be rain, and they might get wet if it comes on.”

  “I’ll be using them later on,” said Rufford. “Just leave them there for the present unless a shower starts. Anything else fresh?”

  “Dr. Fanthorpe left this for you, sir. It’s an envelope with two bullets that he found in the skulls. Each of them’s labelled. He said to tell you he found only the two, one in each skull.”

  “Right. I’ll take them,” said the inspector, holding out his hand for the envelope, which he locked away in a drawer without examining the contents at that moment. “Anything else?”

  “Dr. Fanthorpe hasn’t finished his examination, sir. Not yet. But he wrote an interim report. Here it is, sir.”

  “Very good.”

  Rufford took the report from the sergeant and stowed it away in his pocket.

  “Any word about that car of Callis’s yet?” he demanded.

  “No, sir, not yet. It can’t be on the roads, or we’d have had word of it before now.”

  “Probably it’s in some garage—a private garage. You warned all the public garages?”

  “We did, sir. None of them’s seen it.”

  “Very good. Let me know at once as soon as any news comes in. And when Mr. Alvington turns up, take him over to
the mortuary, show him the bodies, and then bring him to me.”

  While Rufford had been busy with the Barratt case, his routine work had, perforce, been set aside. He now sat down to overtake the day’s arrears, and in this task the time passed unnoticed until he was interrupted by the sergeant ushering Arthur Alvington into the room.

  “I’m sorry to give you such an unpleasant job,” said Rufford, after he had greeted his visitor. “But it was hardly the kind of thing for Mrs. Barratt to do. You’ve seen the bodies? And you can identify Mr. John Barratt, of 38 Granville Road?”

  “Oh, it’s Barratt, all right,” Alvington answered, with no sign of emotion. “And the other’s Mrs. Callis. I knew her quite well.”

  Rufford had not hitherto encountered Alvington in person, but his name was familiar enough to the inspector since it appeared on many notice-boards scattered about the town. Alvington was a speculative builder in a small way of business and not altogether prosperous, if local gossip were to be trusted.

  “We didn’t find much in his pockets,” the inspector explained, “but you’d better see what he had in them. It may suggest something to you which we haven’t spotted.”

  He opened a drawer and laid the pathetic little collection of odds and ends on his desk for Alvington’s examination. The builder bent over and inspected each article in turn. The note-case attracted his attention and, with a gesture to ask permission, he picked it up and seemed surprised by finding so few notes in it.

  “This is curious,” he said, in his usual suave tone. “There seems to be only a couple of notes here, and yet my niece told me that Barratt cashed a cheque for twenty-five pounds yesterday morning. He didn’t give the cash to her. I wonder what’s happened to the balance. Twenty-five pounds is a fair sum and one would like to know where it’s gone.”

  “You can’t suggest anything?” inquired Rufford. “There were one or two newly-bought articles in a suit-case he left at the station, and he may have used some of this money in buying two tickets to London; but that would leave him with a fair balance in hand. More than’s here, certainly. And he had an hotel bill to face in London, I suppose.”