The Twenty-One Clues

by J. J. Connington

  “Very curious,” Alvington said in a neutral tone. “I can’t account for it at all. Unless . . . perhaps someone robbed the body before you arrived on the scene.”

  In a flash, Rufford’s memory went back to the third trail which he had noticed among the bracken, and he seemed to see a glimmer of light in the mystery. Then he remembered that the single trail had been made before the double one, and he abandoned the solution which he had begun to sketch out.

  “I doubt it, Mr. Alvington,” he declared. “Any chance thief would probably have taken the whole of the notes en bloc.”

  “Unless he foresaw your line of reasoning and left a couple behind on purpose,” Alvington pointed out with his thin-lipped smile. “As he might well have done.”

  “Something in that, possibly,” the inspector conceded. “I’ll admit that it’s queer to find these notes gone. There’s not much chance of getting anything from inquiries at the bank, I’m afraid. These are old notes, pretty worn. The bank isn’t likely to have kept a record of their numbers.”

  Alvington nodded rather absent-mindedly and picked up the two railway tickets.

  “Singles?” he commented. “Evidently he didn’t mean to come back in a hurry—if at all. I never cared for him much,” he added, with apparent irrelevance. “He wasn’t my sort and I was against my niece ever marrying him. Obviously I was right in that, but it’s a bit late for her to find it out now.”

  The inspector seized on the chance which this offered him.

  “You can tell me something about him,” he said. “Naturally I didn’t care to put too many awkward questions to Mrs. Barratt when she was in such trouble. I knew I could get what I wanted from you. What sort of man was Barratt?”

  “Barratt?” echoed Alvington. “Oh, a very worthy fellow, on the surface. Started from small beginnings and made his own way in the world. Though he hadn’t got very far, after all, when one comes to think of it. His salary was nothing to write home about, you know. He’d got so far and no further. Reached a blank end. Still, he had got on, by his modest standards, and he wasn’t inclined to under-rate the feat. A little self-satisfied, perhaps, and rather apt to imagine he was invariably right; but that’s a failing we all have, I’m afraid.”

  From this carefully-diluted praise, Rufford saw how the land lay. Alvington’s dislike for Barratt was of longer standing than yesterday; for, so far as this interview had gone, he had not even referred to the liaison and the tragedy which ended it. They seemed to have left him quite indifferent. Rufford inferred that Alvington’s susceptibilities would not be ruffled by plain speaking about this nephew-in-law; and plain speaking might be necessary to extract the information he wanted. He decided to risk it, under the guise of blundering frankness.

  “I was a bit surprised when I met Mrs. Barratt,” he confessed. “She didn’t, somehow, seem to fit into the picture.”

  Alvington rose to the bait at once.

  “I don’t wonder,” he declared. “She isn’t quite the sort of woman to be altogether happy as the wife of a minister with a lower-class congregation in a narrow little sect. I’m not saying anything against them, remember. Quite decent people, no doubt, and very earnest, I’m sure. But it’s a pity she ever landed herself where she is.”

  “I can’t understand it,” Rufford admitted, to draw him out further.

  “There’s a lot in environment,” Alvington continued in a thoughtful tone. “My brother George and his wife died of typhoid when my niece was just a baby. She was brought up by my mother. In those days, my mother was a widow. She’s changed a lot, but at that time she was a big Junoesque figure, something in the style of Tenniel’s cartoons of France and Germany in the old volumes of Punch, very dominating and impressive, you know. What you might call a kind of human steam-roller. Very effective in squashing opposition, but working within restricted limits. She has a lot of good points, my mother. She was very religious then. She is so still, though her health keeps her away from church services nowadays. She’s very generous along certain lines, always ready to shell out a subscription to help the organ-bellows, or anything of that sort, though I don’t know that she d cough up much for an honest beggar in a hard case. You see what I mean by restricted limits.”

  “Many people are like that,” commented Rufford.

  “My niece was brought up strictly by her grandmother,” Alvington went on. “When she was twenty or so, she was very enthusiastic about church matters. Some young girls pass through that phase. It was about that time that Barratt began to take an interest in her. I suppose she was flattered by that, on account of the church connection; she hadn’t seen much of the world, then, and no doubt it seemed a wonderful prospect to be a minister’s wife, doing good, being looked up to, and all that sort of thing. She didn’t know enough to see the snags in the fairway. Most minister’s wives must know them well, I imagine. It’s a position like the old pillory: very prominent and defenceless. But my mother rather encouraged Barratt in his suit; and as I told you, she’s rather apt to get her own way. Anyhow, my niece was Mrs. Barratt by the time she was twenty-one.”

  “What age is she now?” asked the inspector.

  “Thirty-four or thirty-five,” answered Alvington, rather to the surprise of Rufford, who had judged from her looks that Mrs. Barratt was several years younger than this. “She doesn’t look it, does she? But that’s neither here nor there. I’ll go on. My mother has a fair amount of capital at her disposal. Barratt knew that, well enough. I don’t say he married for money; but he took the advice of Tennyson’s Northern Farmer and went where money was. Not that I blame him for that; it’s a sensible policy and I’d follow it myself, if I were a marrying man. But if he was counting on immediate cash, he made a mistake. My mother doesn’t part easily; and she’s got strong ideas about the fine moral discipline furnished by being hard up. She’s never been hard up herself, of course, or she might think differently. But anyway she made no allowance to my niece when she got spliced to Barratt. I see no harm in that. Why should my mother set Barratt up in Easy Street when she won’t part with a stiver to her own sons, even to get them out of temporary financial difficulties? When you’ve got the cash, it’s a sound policy to hang on to it; then you know it won’t be wasted.”

  “Quite true,” agreed the inspector. “I’d do it myself, if I had any capital to hang on to. Was Barratt disappointed, do you think?”

  “He may have been. I don’t know if he was. What I do know is that he’s been working to establish a certain influence over my mother, as time goes on. She liked people to pay her attentions, and he danced attendance on her pretty assiduously. I thought there was something behind that, for she’s none too amiable nowadays or easy to get on with; and from some things she dropped from time to time I have an idea he was doing his best to persuade her to leave her money to the church. That would be a nice disappointment to the rest of us,” he concluded crudely, “after we’ve put up with her tantrums and domination all these years.”

  Rufford was merely bored by this recital of grievances.

  “I quite understand,” he interrupted, as Alvington showed signs of resuming his tale of woe. “You mean that after your niece married, she lost the enthusiasm she’d shown in her teens?”

  “Yes, just so,” Alvington confirmed. “She’d got herself into a false position by that marriage: saddled herself with a husband who came from a lower class and who had no . . . no . . . Well, call it culture, or intellectual interests, or whatever you like. She had next to nothing in common with Barratt’s congregation—decent people, no doubt, but not her sort; and Barratt’s pittance of a salary kept her from mixing freely with people in her own grade of society. You’ve got to entertain a bit if you want to keep in the swim; and the cash didn’t run to that. And these Awakened Israelites are a strict lot. They don’t approve of dances, for instance. Barratt didn’t dance. So she wasn’t invited to many dances in her old circle, after a while. She just dropped out. Cocktail parties, of course, were anathem
a to that congregation.”

  “They sound a bit prehistoric,” commented the inspector.

  “It’s what they are,” said Alvington. “I don’t know how they manage it, but they’re just survivals from the mid-Victorian times, with all the prejudices intact. Decent people, I admit, but living in a groove that never gets any wider, generation after generation. There was that divorce case of my brother’s lately. They turned him out of the church on account of that. And my mother got her solicitor in at once and cut him out of her will. It leaves more for the rest of us, of course, but still I didn’t quite like that move of hers. She made quite a public ceremony of it, she was so furious; for she’s got very strong views about marriage and fidelity and all that sort of thing.”

  The inspector had heard more than enough about the Alvington family. He made a determined effort to switch the interview on to more useful lines.

  “What about this Mrs. Callis?” he asked. “Can you tell me anything about her?”

  “Esther Callis? H’m! If she’d been born ten years earlier, she might have married Barratt and no great harm done. She had an income of her own; not a fortune, you know, but enough to keep the wheels greased. And she took a lot of interest in church affairs: Girl Guides and that sort of stuff, she’d always been keen on. A very alert young woman, and always got value for her money, from what I saw of her.”

  “Did you notice that she saw much of Barratt?”

  “I didn’t bother much about her, to tell you the truth,” Alvington explained. “But some of the congregation certainly thought she was always hanging round him on the excuse of church business. She was a very capable sort of girl, always ready to dash in and manage things if she thought they weren’t being run properly; and of course that brought her into contact with Barratt a good deal. I thought nothing of it myself, until this business came along.”

  A thought crossed the inspector’s mind at this moment and prompted a fresh question.

  “Was Barratt’s life insured?” he demanded.

  “He had some sort of policy, I believe,” Alvington answered. “I remember he consulted me about various insurance companies when he took it out. It was a beggarly little thing—five hundred pounds or something like that. He hadn’t enough income, you know, to pay a decent premium.”

  “What was the company, do you remember?”

  “Let’s see. . . . Oh, yes, I recommended him to go to the Eaglesham and Exeter Union. I’m insured with them myself and I’ve gone into the bonuses and all the rest of it carefully.”

  “You didn’t chance to see any of the people involved in this case last night, I suppose?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Alvington without hesitation. “It’s my housekeeper’s day out, so I had dinner at the Regal down town. Then I went home and spent the evening with my brother going over our business accounts.”

  “There’s just one thing more,” said Rufford. “Callis says you’re a member of this pistol-shooting club that he got up amongst his friends. You’ve got a .38 Colt pistol, I think? Have you a fire-arms certificate for it.”

  “Oh, yes, of course I have,” said Alvington at once. “I haven’t it with me, but you’ll find it noted in your books.”

  “So I expected,” Rufford declared, not quite truthfully. “Well, Mr. Alvington, that’s all I want at the moment. Thanks for giving me your help. You’ll get your summons to the inquest in due course.”

  After ridding himself of the builder, the inspector sat down and made a full note of the salient points of the interview, which he added to his increasingly bulky folder. Then he leaned back in his chair and pondered for a moment or two on the impression which Alvington had left upon his mind. A phrase from Edgar Wallace put the thing in a nutshell:

  “That fellow spells Life with an £.”

  He had no further time to spend on Alvington’s psychology just then. Going into the next room, he singled out Sergeant Quilter.

  “That box and the cotton waste are out in the yard, you said?”

  “Yes, sir. I cut the hole in the end, as you ordered. Do you want them now?”

  “I do. You’d better come out and give me a hand.”

  Rufford returned to his room, took the fatal pistol from a drawer, felt in his pocket for another Colt pistol which he had borrowed and a packet of ammunition which he had bought at the gunsmith’s on his way from Callis’s house. He loaded the magazines of both pistols, picked up some cleaning materials, and went out into the yard, where Quilter was awaiting him.

  With the help of the sergeant, he packed the box with cotton waste, interleaving this with vertical pasteboard sheets at six-inch intervals. Then from a short distance he fired a shot from the borrowed pistol through the hole in the end of the box. Withdrawing the sheets of pasteboard, he ascertained exactly where the bullet lay, in front of the first unpierced sheet; and this simplified his search for the projectile among the waste. His first two shots were unsatisfactory, as he had initially packed the waste too tightly; but his third shot gave better results, and he fired four more under the same conditions, cleaning the pistol-barrel between each pair of shots and recovering the bullets at the end of the trials. Then, with the same precautions, he fired five shots from the fatal pistol. Quilter observed the operations with obvious interest.

  “Ever seen this done before?” asked the inspector. “No? Then you’d better come along and see it through. One lives and learns, as Mr. Peter Diamond was good enough to tell me this afternoon.”

  He led the way back into the police-station, laid down on the table the things he was carrying, and produced from his collection the envelopes containing the fatal bullets and also some sticks of plasticine, at which the sergeant stared uncomprehendingly.

  “This is only a rough trial,” Rufford explained. “If we have to go into the business thoroughly, we’ll have to send the things to a real fire-arms expert. But this ought to give us something to go on with. You know what the inside of a pistol-barrel’s like? Have a look through this one, to make sure.”

  He picked up the borrowed pistol, removed the magazine from the butt, pulled back the slide to eject the cartridge left in the barrel, and then, slipping the safety-catch into the second notch to hold the breech open, he handed the weapon to Quilter.

  “Look down the muzzle and get some light into the breech,” he directed.

  Quilter obeyed, manœuvring the pistol until he got the lighting in the proper position.

  “You see those projections sticking up from the sides—lands they call them? And the spaces between the lands; what they call grooves?”

  “Yes, sir,” confirmed Quilter.

  He knew what lands and grooves were, just as well as the inspector, but if it pleased Rufford to explain such elementary points, it was all the same to the sergeant. “Never seem too clever or get too big for your boots” was one of his guiding principles in life.

  “Now look at this,” said the inspector, handing him one of the bullets fired from the borrowed pistol. “You see six well-marked furrows running from nose to base? These are cut by the lands in the barrel. Notice that they don’t run straight from nose to base. They’ve got a slant on them. That’s because the rifling puts a twist on the bullet, and it begins to spin as it travels up the barrel.”

  “I see, sir.”

  “Now take this lens and look between the furrows. See some striations on the bullet casing?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the sergeant with more interest, since this was fresh ground to him.

  “These are made by the tool-marks at the bottom of the grooves in the barrel; and since the tools used in making the barrel vary a bit, these striations are never the same in any two pistols.”

  “I see, sir. Like finger-prints. Very interesting.”

  “Right! Now we’ll try something else.”

  Rufford took some of his plasticine sticks and rolled them out with a ruler into slabs. Picking up a bullet which had been fired from the borrowed pistol, he rolled it lightly ove
r the plasticine surface, thus producing a pattern of raised lines, like a series of parallel groynes on the sea-shore, each raised line corresponding to one of the furrows on the bullet casing. He repeated the process with a bullet fired from the fatal pistol, and then showed the results to Quilter.

  “You see the two sets have the same slant, and there’s the same number of lines to the inch in both cases? That proves they’ve both been fired from barrels of the same type. But not necessarily the same barrel, as you can see. Let’s try again.”

  He picked up the two bullets and set them base to base, fixing them together with a dab of plasticine and turning one bullet until the furrows on the pair came into coincidence at the bases.

  “See how they match, furrow for furrow?” he asked, turning the conjoined bullets round for Quilter’s inspection. “Not much doubt that they were both fired from pistols of the same make, is there?”

  “No, sir. They match perfectly, so far as I can see.”

  “Now we’ll try the bullets that Dr. Fanthorpe found in the bodies,” said the inspector. “They’ve both got a bit deformed in hitting the bones of the skulls; but they’re fairly intact at the bases, where the rifling marks show clearest. Here’s number one: the bullet from Barratt’s head. Let’s compare it with a bullet from the pistol found beside the bodies and also with another bullet I fired just now out of a borrowed Colt.”

  He rolled the three bullets in turn across three slabs of plasticine and then made a gesture inviting the sergeant to look closely at the results.

  “You see the general type’s the same in the lot: six grooves, a left-hand twist in the rifling, narrow lands and wide grooves. That goes to show that all these bullets were fired from pistols of the same make. Now we need to look for smaller details. See that scratch here, made by some tiny projection at the bottom of one of the grooves of the pistol? Look for it in the other two.”