“Unless I’m mistaken,” said the Chief Constable, “the key to the affair was Barratt’s marriage. I think the simplest thing I can do is to reconstruct the whole business for you, as I see it. Some of it will be guesswork, obviously; but there’s enough in the way of facts to set the Director of Public Prosecutions in action and to make the result satisfactory. If you see any weak spots, don’t hesitate to point them out.”
He took a cigarette from his case and lighted it before proceeding.
“We know how Mrs. Barratt was brought up by her grandmother, a domineering old lady, ruling her family by the power of the purse, and with a strong bias towards one particular obscure little religious sect. Some girls, in their teens, ‘take’ to religion fervently, and the really earnest ones stick to it. Mrs. Barratt at that age was evidently fascinated by some sides of religious affairs; so much so, that when Barratt came along, he was able to capture her, although he obviously did not belong to her class of society at all.
“We’ve heard various opinions about Barratt; and we can discount a good many of the adverse criticisms, because every cleric is a cock-shy for disgruntled individuals in his congregation, and one ought not to take that kind of thing too seriously. But even when one puts him in the best light, he was a tactless man, apt to rub people up the wrong way without meaning it, very set on having his own way, and rather narrow and rigid in some of his ideas.
“If he had married some mouse of a woman, she would probably have adored him for the rest of their joint lives. Unfortunately, he married Helen Alvington. You haven’t seen her, Wendover. She’s a handsome woman, round about thirty-five, nowadays; but she doesn’t look more than twenty-six or twenty-seven. She’s clever, attractive, not easily perturbed, and she has a very natural leaning towards her own class and its ways. She’s by no means the mouse who would have been the ideal mate for Barratt.
“It’s easy to imagine the reactions of that marriage. Once the original glamour faded a bit, she found herself tied to a man who was unfitted by temperament and upbringing to mix easily with friends of her own social status. He despised their amusements, I expect, and looked askance at their whole manner of living. She couldn’t entertain people of her own circle, with Barratt glooming and disapproving in the background. And, in any case, Barratt’s salary was so small that it can have left little margin for even the simplest entertaining. Year by year, she must have seen the strands between herself and her old life snapping one by one. That was inevitable. And, on the other side, she couldn’t feel much at home among the church people, mainly drawn from a lower class and with interests wholly different from hers. Some women might have managed it; but she wasn’t the type that could do it. We know the result. She neglected church affairs almost ostentatiously.
“Barratt himself, as a personality, must have jarred on her more than a little. She has a strong character, he was stubborn and peremptory. Between them they were not likely to smooth over any roughnesses which were bound to show themselves in such a situation. I can’t give you chapter and verse for every bit of that fancy picture; but I think it’s a fairly truthful one.”
“It fits everything I was able to pick up from all the people who gave me evidence about Barratt’s affairs,” confirmed Rufford. “You’ve put the whole thing quite fairly, sir.”
“Remember my mentioning a book to you;” said Sir Clinton, turning to the inspector. “Karen Michaelis’s The Dangerous Age. The dangerous age is the age when a woman feels that she hasn’t got all out of love that she expected and when she finds that her own attractiveness is threatened with a decline in the near future. It doesn’t take much acumen to see that Mrs. Barratt had probably reached her ‘dangerous age.’ She’d lost all interest in Barratt, as she told you very plainly. And that false youth of hers wasn’t likely to last for much longer. If she wanted to make a fresh start in love-affairs, it was now or never.”
“But did she want to make a fresh start?” queried Wendover, sceptically.
“Assuredly,” retorted Sir Clinton with certainty in his tone. “And the man she fixed on was Callis. What did you make of Callis?” he asked, swinging round to Rufford.
“Callis, sir? Good-looking young fellow, nice manners, social position about the eight hundred or nine hundred pound a year mark, I’d say, speaks well with a good accent. About the same class as Mrs. Barratt and the Alvingtons, as near as makes no difference. But . . . Oh, yes, I see. . . .”
“Thinking about alibis?” interrupted Sir Clinton, with a slight lift of his eyebrows. “We’ll come to them in due course. Meanwhile, let’s assume that young Callis and Mrs. Barratt became lovers. After the first step, they’d plenty of opportunities. The Barratts kept no maid. When Barratt was at his church meetings, Mrs. Barratt had the house to herself. And Callis’s wife was keenly interested in church affairs and went regularly to these meetings too, thus leaving Callis free to pay visits to Mrs. Barratt. In fact, everything favoured an intrigue running with clockwork smoothness.”
“That’s guesswork,” objected Wendover. “You haven’t a scrap of proof for it.”
“The proof’s implicit in the whole of the facts,” said Sir Clinton, undisturbed. “Wait till we get them all fitted together. I’ve no doubt that, when we set about it, we shall be able to fish up more direct evidence on that point. For the present, all I’m assuming is that this intrigue had been going on for a while. It hadn’t passed wholly unobserved. Kerrison, for one, had his suspicions about it, as you’ll see by and by.”
Wendover evidently was about to interrupt here, but altered his mind.
“What changed the whole face of affairs,” Sir Clinton went on, “was the Alvington divorce case and its consequences. That revealed starkly that old Mrs. Alvington had very decided views about marital misdeeds and also that she didn’t hesitate to put on the financial screw when anything of that kind happened in her own family. But Mrs. Barratt, like all the Alvington clan, has a strongly developed respect for cash. If news of her own intrigue leaked out, she knew—after her uncle’s affair—that she would never see a penny of her grandmother’s money. And even short of that, Barratt—according to Edward Alvington—had some scheme for persuading the old lady to leave all her money to the Awakened Israelites. Helen Barratt might have been glad enough to be rid of Barratt, even at the cost of a divorce action; but when that divorce meant being cut out of the old lady’s will and having to live on nothing a year, I don’t think the prospect attracted her. And by that time, I surmise, she was madly in love with young Callis and Mrs. Callis stood in the way of her marrying him, even if Barratt divorced his wife. So the two of them began to lay plans which would obviate a divorce and eliminate the hindrances to their marrying each other. What they hit upon was a most ingenious scheme of substitution, as I told you before.”
“Substitution?” queried the inspector, doubtfully. “I’m afraid I don’t quite get you, sir.”
“This is what they did,” explained Sir Clinton. “They fabricated an imaginary love-affair between Barratt and Mrs. Callis, paralleling their own one. Barratt was a substitute for the real Callis, and Mrs. Callis was the substitute for Helen Barratt. Then they buttressed this shadow-intrigue with evidence drawn from their own liaison, and they filled in gaps with materials in their possession, until they had lent the shadow an apparent solidity. In practice, they substituted so much that in the end they overdid the business.”
“It would sound more convincing if you would show us how it worked out in detail,” said Wendover, critically. “As you’ve put it, I can’t say I think much of it.”
“Very well,” agreed the Chief Constable. “I’ll start on the assumption I’ve made, and take the affair chronologically. They must have spent a lot of hard thinking over the details before they actually launched out; but we can omit that and begin with the visit which Barratt and his wife made to the Alcazar Hotel, a few weeks ago. Barratt wrote the labels for their luggage. Mrs. Barratt secured those labels when they got to the Alcazar. Th
at accounts for the labels in Barratt’s handwriting which were tied to the two suit-cases recovered from the left-luggage office by Sergeant Quilter. They were just the labels of the previous visit.”
“Well, I’m damned!” ejaculated Rufford, in a tone of extreme vexation. “I never thought of that! And there it was, staring me in the face. I see now what you meant by substitution, sir.”
“Take another example of it, then,” went on Sir Clinton. “As I told you, these two hadn’t managed to conceal their intrigue completely. At least one person had suspicions about it. That person wrote an anonymous letter. Here it is. ‘You must be very blind if you don’t see what goes on under your nose. Watch your wife and you’ll see what other people have seen long ago. A preacher ought to set a better example. There’s a plain hint to you. And read Proverbs, VII.’ When Callis handed over that letter to you, inspector, you naturally assumed that he had received it from the writer, and that the wife referred to in it was Mrs. Callis. But read it as addressed to Barratt and you’ll see it in a fresh light. ‘Watch your wife . . . A preacher ought to set a better example’ by stopping the immorality which was going on under his own roof. Remember, too, Mrs. Barratt volunteered that she also had received an anonymous letter which she had put into the fire I imagine that it denounced her conduct, so she destroyed it.”
“But how could Callis get hold of a letter written to Barratt?” demanded Wendover, sceptically.
“Barratt was the sort of man who’d show it to his wife; and no doubt she managed to retain it and pass it on to Callis,” said the Chief Constable. “I don’t profess to know precisely how it was done. I’m merely showing you how the substitution-hypothesis fits the facts. The wording satisfies me that it was written to Barratt and not to Callis.”
“Kerrison wrote it, of course?” interjected Wendover.
“Yes, and if Kerrison had lived, we’d have definite proof from him that he sent it to Barratt and not to Callis. Which was one reason why Kerrison came to a bad end and didn’t live to tell his tale,” Sir Clinton pointed out. “You remember I was going to visit him next day, but that was too late.”
“Please go on, sir,” urged Rufford, who was now seeing the whole case from a fresh standpoint and was eager to see it fitted together.
“The next episode is the fake elopement and the deaths of Mrs. Callis and Barratt,” the Chief Constable continued. “The idea was to suggest suicide as the result of a suicide pact. But a suicide pact by itself might have roused suspicions. There wasn’t enough evidence of a long intrigue between Barratt and Mrs. Callis. But supply evidence of a planned elopement and it goes to prove that the intrigue has been going on for a while. That strengthens the shadow-case markedly, doesn’t it? And, what’s more, by super-imposing a suicide pact affair on the elopement preparations, you tend to make people spend their energy on wondering why the pair of them suicided at all, instead of examining the facts for another explanation.”
This described Rufford’s own doings so well that he grew rather red in the face and refrained from any comment.
“Now look at these elopement preparations,” Sir Clinton continued. “Take the two suit-cases that Quilter extracted from the left-luggage office. When I saw the lists of contents, it seemed to be a rummy sort of packing. Take Barratt’s suit-case first. No shaving-tackle, a new tooth-brush and new hair-brushes. Why had his hair-brushes and tooth-brush been left out? Well, most of us brush our teeth and our hair more than once a day. But that suit-case was dumped in the left-luggage office in the morning. Suppose that Mrs. Barratt had packed it surreptitiously. She couldn’t risk packing these brushes, because Barratt, when he came home for luncheon—dinner, in his case—might want to brush his teeth or his hair; and then he would miss his brushes and want to know what had become of them. So new brushes were bought and put into the suit-case instead. As to the shaving-tackle, it’s possible that a woman might forget that altogether. But as it stood in the Barratt bathroom in plain sight—you noticed it yourself, inspector—it’s likely that it was left out of the packing lest Barratt should notice that it had gone amissing.”
“That was one of the first things that made you suspicious, wasn’t it?” asked Wendover.
“Yes, and my suspicions got a good deal deeper when I ran over the things missing from the Callis suit-case. No tooth-brush, tooth-paste, nail-brush, face-cloth or sponge; and no brush and comb, although they were lying quite handy on the dressing-table. The same reasoning applies to the lot; they might be missed during the day if they were packed up. A black dress, but no corresponding belt, although it was an essential part of the outfit. That’s a man’s blunder. A woman wouldn’t have made it. No manicure set or beauty-box. That might be forgetfulness or perhaps it wasn’t safe to risk removing them, as Mrs. Callis might take a fancy to use them during the day. One might have expected to find a hair cap and a dressing-gown or dressing-jacket. I’m inclined to put their absence down as a masculine oversight. Put the two lists together, and one can’t help a suspicion that a woman packed the Barratt suit-case whilst a man packed the suit-case supposed to belong to Mrs. Callis. Certainly one can’t account for the various brush omissions except on the assumption I’ve made. By the time I’d run over these two lists, I was well on my way to the notion of substitution, and that without having to press the facts too far, either.”
“And the next point?” asked Wendover, as Sir Clinton paused.
“Well, there’s that telegram to the Alcazar, booking a double room for the night of the murder and so supplying further evidence that the sham elopement had been carefully planned in advance. And, just in case Barratt got wind of the reply telegram without actually seeing it, we have the wire from Callis which Mrs. Barratt could produce if Barratt asked about a wire being delivered. He might have spotted the telegraph boy at the door, you see; so it was advisable to have something to show him in that case. Really, this affair was very creditably planned, apart from the inevitable blunders.”
“You make it sound damned plausible,” Wendover conceded in a rather aggrieved tone. “But then you always do sound damned plausible when you start in with your explanations. What comes next?”
“Another bit of substitution. That fake wedding-ring had to be ordered and engraved, ready to slip on to Mrs. Callis’s finger instead of her real one. Again, you see, the idea was to suggest a fairly longstanding intrigue between her and Barratt.”
“And after that?” asked Wendover.
“Callis had to persuade Kerrison to borrow a Colt automatic for shooting cats. Obviously the barrel in that pistol when it was lent to Kerrison was the barrel eventually used in the murders. I suppose the idea was to provide a stalking-horse if things got too hot. It would be easy enough to get those cats dug up and the bullets in them examined. Their rifling-marks would implicate Kerrison, if one chose to look on the affair from that point of view. Once the cats were shot Callis recovered the barrel under pretence of cleaning the pistol, as I demonstrated to you is possible. After that, if the borrowed pistol disappeared—as it did—the obvious explanation would be that Kerrison left it beside the bodies, where Inspector Rufford found it.”
“Substitution again,” commented Wendover. “Certainly it does seem to run through the whole business, as you said. Go on.”
“We can go on now to the actual day of the tragedy,” Sir Clinton proceeded. “After breakfast, Barratt went out to the meeting of that organ committee. Callis was there from ten-fifteen to eleven-fifteen. Note what he did, according to the organist’s evidence. He got up a squabble with Barratt—which was an easy enough matter, considering Barratt’s character—and under pretence of pique he left the group and stalked about the church. Nobody would notice what he was doing. In a case like that, one doesn’t stare after a man. So while he was unobserved, he slipped that appointment note—‘Wait for me after the service,’—etc. into one of Mrs. Callis’s books in her pew. Nothing very outré in a man wandering to his own pew in the church and fingering the books
, is there?”
“No, sir. That’s quite clever on his part,” said Rufford. “But where did that note come from originally, I’d like to know. It’s in Barratt’s own fist; there’s no question of forgery. And it had Barratt’s address on the paper, too.”
“Curious thing, inspector,” said Sir Clinton. “That address convinced you that it was a genuine document. It convinced me that it was a fake. I put it to you. If you were conducting an intrigue and meant to leave a message for your paramour in her hymn-book where it might be discovered if anyone happened to sit in that pew and use the books on the desk, would you go out of your way to stamp your address on the paper? I’m a simple fellow myself, but I don’t think I’d be quite such a zany as to do that. It’s the old substitution business again. That was a genuine document.”
“Genuine?” said the inspector, startled. “Then you mean there was some game on between Barratt and Mrs. Callis?”
“Just think it over,” suggested Sir Clinton. “What sort of a woman was Mrs. Barratt? Didn’t she produced one document after another when we asked for them? She keeps ordinary papers carefully, obviously. Wouldn’t she preserve the love-letters she got from Barratt in her day with equal care? Most people keep love-letters and when the first burst of enthusiasm is over, they still keep them—perhaps because they’re too lazy to destroy them. Mrs. Barratt, I think, was the kind of person who would preserve every scrap of a note that she got from Barratt during their courtship. This appointment letter was one of them.”
“But it had their married address on it . . .” began Rufford. “Oh, I see, sir. The embossing press I saw on his desk! She stamped the address on the paper with that and so brought the thing up to date. That was it?”
“I expect it was,” said Sir Clinton. “It sounds likely enough, doesn’t it? Now we’ll go on with the tale, if you want more. Callis left that organ committee meeting at eleven-fifteen. He had his car with him, and in his car, I imagine, the suit-case with the Strathpeffer label on it and its rather peculiar contents. He picked up Mrs. Barratt at some prearranged place to which she had brought the second suit-case. Callis, I believe, had a dark soft felt hat with him, the semi-clerical kind, which he wore when he was taking the London single tickets and dumping the suit-cases in the left-luggage office. The hat, of course, was intended to make the officials think they remembered a clergyman, if they were questioned later on. Meanwhile, Mrs. Barratt had gone to send off the faked Longnor wire of invitation from the G.P.O., where her appearance would not be noticed, as it might have been if she’d gone to some small district office. And, just to complete the story of that morning, Barratt seems to have gone to the bank and cashed the twenty-five-pound cheque we heard about. That was intended to suggest that he had enough cash in hand to start his elopement with. My impression is that we may find these notes in Mrs. Barratt’s possession, which would account for their disappearance from Barratt’s note-case. I bank a little oh her not having destroyed them. That would go against the grain in the Alvington family, with its highly-developed money-sense. She’s probably thought it safe to hold on to them, so long as she doesn’t use them for a year or two. If we find them in her possession, it’s always an extra bit of evidence. If we don’t, it’s a small matter. Make a note of it, please, inspector.”
The Twenty-One Clues Page 28