The Twenty-One Clues

by J. J. Connington

  It did not take them long to reach the tract on the outskirts of the town where E. and A. Alvington were operating. It had all the ugliness and rawness of building ground in course of development: the grass trampled down, heaps of soil thrown here and there in the course of levelling operations, gaps torn in the old hedges to give easy access to working points, and trenches dug for drainage purposes. Two roads had been laid down, metalled, and finished; but the rest of the lay-out was indicated merely by lines of granite kerbs, or even by the removal of turf. Wooden pegs marked the boundaries of what would in future be gardens. Here and there, the ground was scarred by the digging-out of tree-stumps and roots. At vantage-points on the completed roads stood three decoy houses, fresh and attractive-looking with their green-tiled roofs. A fourth decoy was under construction, its grid of rafters still uncovered, and its unglazed windows showing dark on its frontage. Heaps of bricks, piles of drain-pipes, and a mound of old mortar gave an untidy aspect to its neighbourhood. Near at hand was a temporary wooden hut which formed the office of the firm.

  “They’re nice decoys,” commented Sir Clinton as he drove past them. “But not one of them’s been taken, evidently. The white patches are still on the window-panes and the notice-boards are still there, offering them for sale. There must be a fair amount of unremunerative capital locked up in the ground and these decoys. The Alvingtons are having no luck, it seems. Well, I can’t help their troubles. But I can add to them, and I’ll do it now,” he ended, unsympathetically, as he pulled up his car before the wooden office building.

  Both the partners were on the premises, and the inspector introduced his Chief to them. Edward Alvington had a strong family likeness to his brother; but whilst Arthur’s lips were thin and compressed, Edward’s were slacker and Suggested a weaker and more self-indulgent nature.

  “You’re busy people, I suspect,” Sir Clinton began without preliminaries, “and I’m fairly busy myself. Shall we get to business straight away?”

  Arthur Alvington nodded, examining the Chief Constable rather distrustfully. His brother fumbled with a pencil which he had in his hand and avoided the Chief Constable’s eye.

  “Very well, then,” said Sir Clinton, addressing himself to Arthur, “I think you told Mr. Rufford that on the night of Mr. John Barratt’s death, you were at home after dining at a restaurant down town. Your brother came in, later, and you passed the evening in going over your accounts. That’s correct?”

  “Yes, that’s correct,” echoed Arthur. “But seeing that I told this to the inspector, I don’t see why you come here to ask it again.”

  “Merely a matter of routine,” said the Chief Constable suavely. “In cases of this sort, we have to begin by eliminating from consideration a lot of unlikely people, and an alibi’s the simplest step in ruling anyone out.” He turned to Edward Alvington. “You can confirm what your brother said?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Edward asserted with rather unnecessary eagerness. “I dropped in at my brother’s house that night, some time about nine o’clock. We’d arranged to go over our accounts together. There were one or two points that needed looking into, you understand? Some decisions we had to take, and we had to see just how matters stood before we could make up our minds. The bank . . .”

  He broke off abruptly, evidently realising that he was giving away unnecessary information. Sir Clinton had little difficulty in guessing that “overdraft” might have been in the rest of the sentence.

  “Who let you into the house?” he inquired.

  “Nobody,” said Edward, seemingly surprised by the question. “My brother’s housekeeper was out. There was no one to open the door to me. I just walked in. As a matter of fact, I always do walk straight in. I’m living with my brother since my divorce, so there was nothing in that.”

  “What had you been doing before you went to your brother’s house?”

  Edward Alvington passed his hand over his brow as if perplexed.

  “What was I doing?” he echoed, apparently in the hope that this action would stimulate his memory. “I was busy here until nearly seven o’clock in the evening. Then I had dinner at my club—it’s the Colnbrook in Chandos Street. I talked to some friends there. Then I went on to my brother’s house; I’ve been staying with him since my divorce. I got there about nine o’clock and we spent the rest of the evening going into our accounts. We stopped about half-past eleven, didn’t we, Arthur?”

  Arthur Alvington confirmed this with a nod.

  “Go back a little earlier,” said Sir Clinton, addressing both brothers. “Had either of you any occasion to visit the railway station that day? About delivery of building material, or anything of that sort?”

  The Alvingtons exchanged a glance which suggested that they were surprised by the question.

  “No,” said Arthur. “There was nothing to take us to the station. I certainly didn’t go there.”

  “Nor did I,” Edward chimed in. “I haven’t been there for weeks; not since I went to London on business, and that was two months ago.”

  “Very good,” said the Chief Constable, turning to Arthur Alvington. “Now I want to ask you something about these hypnotic experiments which Mrs. Barratt mentioned to Inspector Rufford. Do you remember an evening when Mr. Barratt tried some experiments with Mr. and Mrs. Callis, a Miss Spencer, and yourself?”

  A faint smile flitted momentarily across Arthur Alvington’s face but vanished almost at once.

  “Yes, I do remember that affair,” he admitted. “What do you want to know about it?”

  “I’d like to know what led up to the hypnotic experiments,’ said Sir Clinton. “Perhaps you can remember how the subject came up.”

  “I think I can,” said Arthur, rather doubtfully. “Oh, yes, it was like this. We happened to be at my niece’s house for the evening. These affairs were always very dull. Barratt disapproved of card-playing. He generally took charge and gave us an hour of nice clean fun—the sort of thing which would have kept an eight-year-old juvenile in fits of laughter, but just a shade boring to more mature minds. He was rather childish in some ways. A case of arrested development in the sense of humour, one might call it. But I admit that he enjoyed himself immensely with that kind of thing, and it was always something to know that one of the party was brimming with cheerfulness and gaiety. He got Callis to do a little parlour conjuring, which was some relief; for Callis is quite a good hand at leger-de-main. And then Callis proposed these hypnotic experiments. I expect he was as bored as the rest of us by the Barratt amusement programme and welcomed any substitute. And he knew that Barratt dabbled in mesmerism a bit. Anyhow, that’s how it started.”

  “How much of the results was genuine?” asked Sir Clinton, with an unconcealed smile. “Take your own part, for example. Were you genuinely hypnotised?”

  “Not a bit,” confessed Arthur Alvington frankly. “I was just pulling his leg and pretending to be under his control. It was easy enough. He gave me a glass of water and pretended to put a Seidlitz powder into it and told me to drink it while it was fizzing. Anyone can imitate a man drinking a Seidlitz powder. You don’t need to be much of an actor for that.”

  “Did he ask you to do anything else?”

  “He ordered me to count the money in my pockets. That was easy enough. Then he told me that one of the pictures was a mirror and that I was to look at myself in it and put my tie straight. I’d no objection to humouring him up to that point. After that, I showed signs of coming out of my trance. That finished my turn. He was quite proud of his results with me.”

  “After that, he tried his hand with the other guests?”

  “Oh, yes. Callis, I think, was pulling his leg, just as I’d done. Mrs. Callis I’m not so sure about,”

  “Why?” asked Sir Clinton, with obvious interest.

  “Well, she was a girl who took a lot of pains with her make-up. Quite an artist in that way, always beautifully turned out, from the tip of her nails to the last wave in her hair. Well, that fool Barrat
t, among other things, ordered her to wash her face—rub it with her hands, as a boy would do. You can imagine the result, when the black stuff from her eyes got smeared all over her cheeks. My niece was horrified, and took her off at once out of the room to repair damages. Quite time, too. Now I doubt if a girl like her would have gone that length—making a sight of herself—merely to carry on a joke. No, it looks to me more as if Barratt was really able to hypnotise her. And I believe the results he got with Miss Spencer may have been the genuine article also. She’s got about as much personality as a rabbit or a hen, and anyone can hypnotise a hen.”

  “Thanks,” said Sir Clinton. “That seems to make the matter as clear as we are likely to get it. Now about Mr. Barratt himself. I couldn’t very well ask his wife about him. But you knew him intimately. What kind of man was he?”

  “A hypocritical blackguard,” Edward Alvington declared, vehemently. Then, seeing Sir Clinton raise his eyebrows slightly, he continued in self-justification. “Oh, yes, he’s dead, I know. Nil nisi bonum, you think? I don’t agree with you, where he’s concerned. Look at him! He hounded me over this divorce case, nothing was too bad to say about my doings. Did he feel restrained because I was his wife’s uncle? Not a rap, not a rap! He let himself go, all out. He denounced me in public and in private. Nothing was too bad to say about me. Nothing! He turned my mother against me and persuaded her to change her will so as to cut me off. Nice forgiving fellow, wasn’t he? And all the while he himself was in tow with this Callis woman. There wasn’t a pin-point’s difference between us—except that I was found out and he wasn’t. Is that enough to justify what he did to me? You may think so; I don’t. I didn’t mind his chucking me out of his church. That’s all in the day’s work, a mere matter of professional etiquette, one might say. But to come crawling and sneaking into my family and using his position to undermine me and do me out of my inheritance . . . That takes more forgiving than I feel up to, and I don’t mind saying so.”

  He stopped abruptly, either through lack of breath or because he caught a warning glance from his brother. Then he added a few more words.

  “You’d better ask my brother what his opinion is. He’s not actually suffered a cash loss, as I’ve done. But he can tell you that Barratt was trying to get round our mother and persuade her to leave all her money to that wretched little sect. Oh, yes, Arthur. Your turn was coming next, yours and Helen’s. Neither of you would have seen a stiver of the old lady’s money, if Barratt had had his way. You’d have been in the same boat with me, if he’d lived much longer. Lucky for you that he didn’t.”

  Arthur Alvington evidently felt that this kind of talk was injudicious, for he intervened swiftly.

  “My brother’s naturally prejudiced,” he said coolly. “My sympathies are on his side, of course. I didn’t like Barratt’s methods, though no doubt he was acting according to his lights. Until these recent revelations, I always looked on him as an upright man, a trifle narrow in his views, perhaps, and very obstinate when he had got a notion into his head. He seemed to have many good points. . . .”

  Here Edward Alvington sniffed audibly and contemptuously, but Arthur continued without changing his tone:

  “. . . but he had a queer indifference—a personal indifference, I mean—to money, which possibly accounts for some of his curious views and their results. There must be a defect somewhere in any man who lacks the money-sense so completely. And, of course, as this affair shows, he was hardly the man with the right to treat my brother as he did treat him. I’m afraid he must have had a strong streak of hypocrisy in his make-up. I won’t say more than that, but I can’t say less.”

  “He had a queer mentality, certainly,” Sir Clinton agreed. “But we’re all rather curious, aren’t we? In some way or other. Well, we are all pretty busy people, so I mustn’t waste any more of your time.”

  As they drove away, Rufford turned to the Chief Constable.

  “You didn’t get much out of them, sir,” he opined, evidently comparing his own methods with those of Sir Clinton.

  “Think so?” said Sir Clinton, indifferently. “I got what I wanted, which seems the main thing.”

  “What did you want, sir?” persisted Rufford.

  “Just another piece or two of the jig-saw,” retorted the Chief Constable with a glimmer of a smile about the corners of his mouth. “Mr. Edward Alvington is fresh to both of us. And I picked up a point or two about Mrs. Callis which might be useful. Oh, it wasn’t time wasted. That reminds me. Will you get hold of the lawyers who are handling Mrs. Callis’s estate and ask them two things: if she was insured, and who profits under her will, if she made one. She had a fair amount of capital, apparently; and we may as well know who gets it.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Rufford.

  “The next port of call will be the post office in Silver Street,” Sir Clinton decided. “That’s where Callis’s wire came from—the one Mrs. Barratt told us about. You can do the talking for a change, inspector. I’ve done my share for the present. Ask to see the record of that message; and when you’ve got it, make sure that you see any other wire that went to the Barratt’s house on that day.”

  “You’re expecting to find a wire from the Alcazar, sir, confirming the booking of that room for Barratt and Mrs. Callis?”

  “There may be none,” pointed out Sir Clinton. “The Alcazar may have sent a postcard of acknowledgment, which has disappeared. All I want is to check whatever we can.”

  It turned out, however, that the hotel had sent a wire. Rufford had little difficulty in tracking it down; and he took copies of both it and the wire from Callis to Barratt.

  “We’ll try the bank, next,” Sir Clinton proposed, when the inspector returned to the car. “You’d better let me take a turn, now. Banks are apt to be sticky when it’s a question of giving away their clients’ affairs. But in this case the client’s dead, which makes a difference. And if they’re reluctant, I can say that I’ll get an indemnity for them from Barratt’s executors, whoever they may be. We can’t allow banking etiquette to stand in our way in a case of this kind.”

  The bank manager showed some scruples, as Sir Clinton had foreseen; but these were overcome without too much discussion, and Barratt’s account was thrown open to the Chief Constable’s inspection.

  “It’s this twenty-five pounds I want to know about,” he explained, putting his finger on the item. “It was drawn out over the counter, I believe. Can you let me see the cheque itself? You haven’t returned it to the drawer, obviously, since it was cashed only a day or two ago.”

  The manager went out of the room for a few moments and came back with the cancelled cheque in his hand. Sir Clinton took it and gave a glance at each side.

  “Drawn to ‘Self,’ signed by J. Barratt, and endorsed by him. The signatures are all right? I wonder if I could see the paying-out clerk who dealt with this?”

  The manager retired and returned in a few minutes with his subordinate.

  “Have a look at this cheque,” said the Chief Constable, handing it across. “Do you remember dealing with it?”

  The clerk examined the cheque carefully, thought for a moment or two, and then, after a glance which asked permission from his chief, he gave his information.

  “I remember it quite well, because Mr. Barratt was an old client of ours and he always made a little conversation when he came into the bank. He asked for notes, and I gave him it in new Bank of England pound notes. I offered him fives, but he took one-pound notes. I’ve looking up my jottings, and I find that I gave him a consecutive series of numbers: E 50 A 900829 onwards.”

  “Thanks,” said Sir Clinton. “There was nothing unusual in that transaction?”

  “Oh, no, nothing,” said the clerk, rather surprised by the question. “He used to draw a cheque for about that figure once a month—to pay tradesmen’s bills, I expect. There’s nothing wrong, is there, sir?” he asked, anxiously, turning to the manager. “The signature’s all right I know, and I saw him write the
endorsement myself. Besides, I couldn’t have mistaken Mr. Barratt. I was perfectly well acquainted with, him. No one could have personated him.”

  “It’s all right,” said Sir Clinton, reassuringly. “We only wished to know how he took the payment, and you’ve given us that. Thanks for your help.”

  The clerk, evidently relieved in his mind, went out of the room. When he had gone, Sir Clinton turned to the manager.

  “We may want this cheque, later on. Don’t send it to the executors with the rest of his cancelled cheques. Better put it in your safe. I’ll take the responsibility.”

  “Oh, if you make yourself responsible, Sir Clinton, then it’s all right,” said the manager. “I don’t care to divulge anything about a client’s account. You know our etiquette. . . .”

  “When subpoenas come in, etiquette has to take a back seat,” Sir Clinton pointed out. “You’ll probably be ordered to produce this cheque by and by. That’s why I’m suggesting that you should take care of it.”

  He returned to his car, where Rufford was waiting for him.

  “That seems to finish our round,” he said, as he pressed the self-starter. “Now there’s another thing. What luck have you had in the matter of that Jubilee double-florin? Any news of it?”

  Rufford shook his head.

  “No, sir, not so far. We’ve warned the banks, of course; but it’s a curiosity, and no one would be likely to use it as current coin. It hasn’t been seen at any of the local pawnshops, either. None of the jewellers have seen it, either. We tried the bric-à-brac shops, too, Southcote’s and Whitefoot’s and Springs, but none of them has seen it. We’ll just have to wait, I’m afraid, sir.”

  “Have you tried an old fellow Wilmot?” asked Sir Clinton. “He’s just started in the business a week or two ago. Japanese and Chinese stuff is his main line, but he does a little in numismatics too. I paid him a call the other day to look at some netsukés he sent me a message about, but he hadn’t been offered a double-florin at that time. Try him again, will you? He’s an absent-minded old creature, I gathered, and he may have forgotten all about my inquiry.”