The Twenty-One Clues

by J. J. Connington

“Now I come to the gist of the demonstration,” he said, with a sardonic smile. “Thanks for your attention, so far. Observe that when I handed this pistol to Mr. Wendover, I held it by the butt, which is roughened and does not take finger-prints of any value. Mr. Wendover took it from me, naturally, by catching the slide, which is smooth and takes finger-print impressions excellently. Result, the only clear finger-prints on it are Mr. Wendover’s.”

  He pointed to the pistol and Rufford bent over it to examine the prints which were quite visible on the black metal surface.

  “That seems right,” the inspector admitted. “And I suppose you were careful not to touch anything but the roughened parts when you picked it up after Mr. Wendover had laid it down on the desk?”

  “Just so,” Sir Clinton confirmed. “Well, now that you’re satisfied so far, will you just pick it up, inspector, and have a look down the barrel? If you pull back the slide to the halfway catch you’ll get enough light at the breech end. Is the barrel clear?”

  “No it isn’t,” reported Rufford. “There’s a bit of paper or something stuck in it. But you put the paper into the barrel of the other pistol, sir, the one that’s in the drawer. I watched you doing that.”

  Sir Clinton laughed at the sight of the expressions on his hearers’ faces.

  “Try the one in the drawer, then,” he adviced.

  Rufford pulled open the drawer, picked up the pistol which lay there, and seemed still further amazed.

  “Why, this tiring hasn’t got a barrel in it at all!” he ejaculated . “I don’t see how that comes about, sir.”

  “No? Well, here’s a spare barrel if you want one,” the Chief Constable returned, opening his hand and showing it. “It’s rather oily.”

  He put it down on the desk and wiped his fingers with his handkerchief.

  “I ought to have been on the watch for your tricks,” said Wendover, “but you did it so naturally that you took me in. You see, Mr. Rufford, Sir Clinton used to be a good amateur conjuror. It’s clear how he bamboozled us. When he picked up that first pistol to drop it into the drawer, he distracted our attention by pretending to see Alvington passing the window. Just the ordinary conjuror’s patter, but it took both of us in. While our attention was diverted, and under cover of the desk, he took the barrel with the paper in it out of the first pistol, and palmed it. When he dismounted the second pistol he put down the first barrel and palmed the second one. Then, when he reassembled all the stuff on the desk, the barrel with the paper in it went into the stock of the second pistol, and he was left with the other barrel palmed in his hand. That was how it was done, wasn’t it?” he demanded, turning to the Chief Constable.

  “That was how it was done,” Sir Clinton admitted. “And if I could do it in front of a critical and alert audience, no doubt somebody else could manage it with an audience that wasn’t on its guard. You can see from that business how little stress we can lay on Barratt’s finger-prints.”

  Wendover pondered for a moment or two.

  “I see my way through it, now,” he declared. “The same barrel was evidently used by Kerrison in his cat-shooting and in the killing of Mrs. Callis and Barratt. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “It’s obvious,” corrected Sir Clinton with a touch of irony, “seeing that all the bullets involved bore the rifling-marks of one barrel.”

  “And that barrel was finally transferred to a stock which had Barratt’s finger-prints on it,” continued Wendover, working out his ideas aloud.

  “It looks like Kerrison to me,” hazarded the inspector. “Kerrison had the right barrel. That’s proved by the bullets in the cats.”

  “I bet on Callis,” said Wendover. “Callis was a bit of an expert at legerdemain. That came out in the evidence about Barratt’s hypnotic experiments.”

  “If Kerrison did it, no conjuring was needed,” the inspector pointed out. “What do you say, sir?”

  “I think you’re both simplifying things rather too much,” said the Chief Constable. “Besides, there’s more evidence to come. Suppose we take it now.”

  He opened a drawer in his desk and took out further exhibits. Some of them were new to Wendover, but he recognised two items at once; the torn fragments of love-letters which had been found beside the bodies. The pieces had been carefully fitted together and clipped for safety between sheets of glass. Sir Clinton put these aside for the moment and picked out some other sheets of paper.

  “Here’s a sheet of note-paper which the inspector secured from Barratt’s desk,” he began. “It’s inexpensive stuff with nothing to identify it specially. On a cursory examination, it seems very much like the paper on which that torn love-letter was written. I doubt if it’s worth while pursuing the matter further, though no doubt we could find out more about it if we wanted to. For the present, all I want to point out is that it hasn’t any printed heading. The inspector noticed that the Barratts used an embossing press to stamp their note-paper as they needed it.”

  He picked up the glass-protected reconstitution of Barratt’s love-letter.

  “The paper’s just like the other, so far as casual inspection goes,” he pointed out, holding the two side by side. “No watermark on either specimen. The only curious point about the torn letter is that the whole document is complete except for the top right-hand corner of the first page.”

  “I see what you’re after,” said Wendover. “That’s the place where the date would be. I ought to have thought of that before.”

  “But you omitted to do so,” said Sir Clinton. “Quite so. It does seem suggestive, doesn’t it? But let’s go on to something more amusing.”

  He produced several sheets of note-paper of a bluish tint and laid them out on his desk along with the glass-protected letter in Mrs. Callis’s handwriting.

  “I’ve been chaffing you about buying note-paper,” he said to Wendover, “but it’s a fact that I’ve been in touch with some of the local stationers in the last day or two. As a result, I’ve identified the firm that Mrs. Callis dealt with. You know that when you go into a stationer’s shop to choose note-paper, they often haul out a vast volume with samples of paper and headings stuck down on the pages, so that you can turn the thing over and make your choice. By a bit of good luck, Millman & Co. have preserved these tomes from year to year. They’ve got a perfect library of them. I showed them the sheet of bluish paper which the inspector got from Callis: a list of names in Mrs. Callis’s handwriting. The address heading is in Roman type, you see, identical with the Roman heading on this love-letter under the glass. Have a look at them both. There’s no deception.”

  Wendover and the inspector gave the two sheets a cursory examination; but being eager to hear what more the Chief Constable had to say, they did not waste much time.

  “I asked Millman & Co. for particulars about purchases of note-paper with that address on it; and I chivvied them back through a number of years in their accounts. Mrs. Callis, it seemed, had a special liking for that particular shade of paper. She always asked for it when she bought a fresh supply, and she generally bought a good big lot at one time. Now here’s a sample removed from the 1931 scrap book. Have a good look at it. Roman type heading, you see, just like the love-letter. Hold it up to the light and look at the watermark. FINLANDIA, isn’t it? See anything else of interest?”

  “It has parallel lines across it, watermarked,” Wendover reported. “They run vertically, about an inch apart; and there’s a set of horizontal lines, too, but fainter and closer-ruled, made in the watermarking. Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes,” the Chief Constable explained. “That distinguishes the kind of paper that’s called ‘wove.’ If there are no lines of that sort, it’s a ‘laid’ paper. Now just hold that love-letter up to the light. What do you find there?”

  “Just the same,” Wendover reported, passing the specimen to Rufford when he had finished his examination. “Heading in Roman type, FINLANDIA watermark on what you call ‘wove’ paper of the same bluish shade.”

/>   “Try again,” suggested the Chief Constable, handing over a fresh sheet. “This one was bought from Millman & Co. in 1935. What do you make of it?”

  “The Fern Lodge heading is in Gothic type this time,” Wendover pointed out to the inspector. “Apart from that, everything’s the same: wove paper with FINLANDIA watermark. The tint seems to be identical with those of the other samples.”

  “That’s what I wanted,” Sir Clinton declared. “Now here’s one more sample. It’s the list of some church committee written by Mrs. Callis only a few days ago.”

  Wendover examined it carefully, with the inspector looking over his shoulder.

  “I see no difference from the last one,” he announced. “Heading in Gothic type, wove paper, FINLANDIA watermark, and tint identical with the others. Have I missed anything?”

  “No, I believe it’s a sheet from the 1935 batch,” said Sir Clinton. “Here’s the last sample.”

  He passed over yet another sheet of note-paper which resembled the others; but when Wendover held it up to the light he showed some surprise.

  “This isn’t the same as the rest,” he declared. “The heading is in Roman type, like the one on the earlier samples you showed me. And it’s laid paper, not wove. And the watermark’s a new one: ZEBRA CREST. The tint’s the same, or nearly so. See for yourself, Mr. Rufford.”

  He handed the sheet of paper to the inspector who examined it with care and then nodded a confirmation of Wendover’s observations.

  “That last sample is part of a purchase made by Callis just a month ago. Millman & Co. tell me that the FINLANDIA stuff hasn’t been manufactured for over a year; and they’ve replaced it in stock by this ZEBRA CREST paper, which is almost identical in tint. Now you’ve got the evidence that’s needed to settle the business. Most of it was collected by the inspector before I came on the scene at all, so the credit’s mainly his. Oh, there is one point more, though it’s not essential. Neither of those letters under the glass has any clear finger-prints on it; some faint smudges are all that came up with the powder.”

  “Have you got the solution of the business?” Wendover asked, turning to the inspector.

  “No, I don’t see my way through, even yet,” Rufford confessed frankly.

  “It’s not often that one comes across such a painstaking bit of crime,” said Sir Clinton, intervening to shield his subordinate as far as possible. “Quite a pleasure to unravel a case of this sort. But actually, in some ways, it was easier than it looked. The desire for perfection is the worst disease that ever afflicted the human mind. This affair would have been harder if it hadn’t been contrived by someone suffering from that trouble.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “They are so Grateful”

  THE Chief Constable had not liked Wendover’s blunt question to the inspector. Now he gave Rufford the satisfaction of seeing the Squire himself at fault.

  “One of the keys to this affair is the sentence: ‘They are so grateful’,” he said, turning to Wendover. “You’re a student of criminological literature. Can you place it?”

  Wendover pondered for a few seconds and then shook his head.

  “It seems to stir something in my memory, but I can’t recall the context,” he confessed. “Where does it occur?”

  “We’ll come to it, by and by,” said Sir Clinton. “Our immediate business is to pave the way for your signing an official document.”

  “Then the sooner we start, the better,” said Wendover. “It’s high time you put your cards on the table, I think.”

  “Very well, then, since you wish it,” said Sir Clinton. He turned to Rufford and continued: “If you hadn’t taken such full notes of all the evidence, we might have been left high and dry. Congratulations. Now when I saw the evidence you’d collected before I came upon the scene, one or two points in your notes caught my eye at once. Probably they struck you, too. The first of them was the list of things you found in the suit-cases; and that coupled up with some other facts you’d jotted down. One thing we know definitely about Mrs. Callis. She took a pride in her appearance. She was an artist in that line, as Arthur Alvington told us; and you yourself noticed that her hands were carefully manicured. And when you found her body, you jotted down in your notes that you detected a faint odour of verbena bath salts. Now, on the face of things, Mrs. Callis packed her suit-case in order to elope with Barratt. On a trip of that kind, a woman would want to be at her best. And yet, in the packing, her beauty-box got left behind, and she took no manicure set with her. Nor did she pack any bath-salts, although bath-cubes were there in her bath-room, ready to hand.”

  “Perhaps she packed in a deuce of a hurry, sir,” objected the inspector. “She forgot some other things as well: tooth-brush, nail-brush and sponge-bag. That certainly looks like a bit of a rush.”

  “And yet she remembered to take her jewellery, curiously enough,” Sir Clinton reminded him. “And her cheque-book. And, to continue my line of thought, she deliberately picked out a dress which she seldom wore, one which her maid thought she didn’t like very much. Not only so, but she left behind her the belt corresponding to that particular dress. I’m not laying too much stress on these things at the moment; all I say is that they caught my attention. There were other omissions from that list of the suit-case contents, but I needn’t bother you with them. Now turn to Barratt’s packing. His suit-case contained a bath-gown and a bath-sponge; but he forgot his shaving tackle.”

  “I’ve done that myself once, sir,” objected the inspector. “It might have slipped his memory.”

  “And I suppose you’ve also forgotten your hair-brush, tooth-brush, nail-brush and slippers simultaneously? I’ll admit that one may forget one article, or even a couple, but surely not the whole of that collection. Only amnesia would account for it. And did you remember your omissions on the way to the station and drop into a shop or two to buy substitutes, as Barratt apparently must have done, since he had new hair-brushes, a new tooth-brush, and a fresh tube of tooth-paste in his suit-case.”

  “You mean. . . .” interjected Wendover.

  “I mean that it all struck me as peculiar,” said Sir Clinton. “So perhaps I approached the rest of the case from a different point of view to the one that you preferred. Take the next queer business: those torn-up love-letters. . . .”

  “They were genuine enough, surely,” interrupted Wendover. “I compared the handwriting in them with other specimens of Barratt’s writing and Mrs. Callis’s, and no mistake was possible. They weren’t forgeries, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

  “Quite true,” agreed the Chief Constable. “But can you suggest why they were torn up?”

  Wendover had his explanation cut and dried.

  “On the face of things,” he pointed out, “they’d decided to relinquish this elopement. Perhaps they’d made up their minds to turn over a new leaf and go straight in future. In that case, the tearing up of old love-letters might be a kind of symbolic gesture.”

  “Curious that they should have the letters there to hand,” said Sir Clinton drily. “I think you’re missing out a point, though. The letter in Mrs. Callis’s writing was complete, you remember. It was an undated letter. Perhaps she was one of these people who never put the date on their epistles. But a piece of the Barratt letter was missing; and that missing bit was exactly where the date would normally be put. That struck me immediately. Why was that bit of it the only one that Constable Loman couldn’t find? And further, why were all the finger-prints on both letters mere blurs? Finger-prints are made by the natural grease of the body. It’s soluble in alcohol or chloroform to some extent, and you can destroy finger-prints almost completely by soaking the paper in one of these solvents—which don’t affect old ink—and brushing the surface with cotton-wool or something soft. Whoever it was that scattered the letter-fragments about, had taken care to remove that date and any finger-prints before throwing them down. That struck me as strange.”

  “It does sound very rum when you pu
t it together like that,” the inspector agreed. “So I see now, sir. Was there anything else?”

  “The initials on the new wedding-ring,” answered the Chief Constable. “Here’s a woman who’s throwing off her old life, leaving her husband, won’t wear the wedding-ring that he gave her but gets a new one made and engraved specially. Would she put the initial of her married name, Callis, on the new ring? ‘Esther and John,’ I could have understood; or even ‘E.P.’ for her maiden name; but not ‘E.C.’ for Esther Callis. It doesn’t ring true, psychologically.”

  “There’s something in that, sir,” confessed Rufford. “I ought to have thought of that point. But it never occurred to me.”

  “Even murderers can’t think of everything, thank goodness,” said the Chief Constable. “And now, another thing struck me, and I’ve harped on it all through this business: Why did Loman find four empty cartridge-cases when two shots did the killing?”

  “These two youngsters heard two shots at nine o’clock, sir, and Kerrison heard two shots at ten o’clock; that makes the four,” Rufford pointed out.

  “That’s a fact, inspector, if you accept Kerrison’s unconfirmed story. But a fact isn’t an explanation, and it’s an explanation that’s wanted. Why were four shots fired instead of two? And, yet another point, why were there two trails through the bracken, a single one and a double-width one. When I looked at all these oddities, the only explanation I could find for them was a bizarre one.”

  “And that was?” demanded Wendover.

  “That the whole affair was a case of ingenious substitution,” said the Chief Constable. “It almost deserved to come off.”

  “Substitution?” echoed Wendover, with a blank expression. “What are you talking about? There’s no question as to the identity of the bodies. Where’s the substitution?”

  “It runs through the whole case,” said Sir Clinton, “once you’ve got the key.”

  “No doubt,” said Wendover, restively. “But I haven’t got the key. What is it?”