“Blackmail, you mean?” exclaimed Wendover. “I’d never thought of that. And yet it’s quite on the cards. Lots of people might put things on paper which they wouldn’t like to see published.”
“Just so,” Duncannon said curtly. “It’s a beastly business. But to continue the catalogue, we have to deal with S.P. betting crooks.”
“You mean people who bet at the starting price by telegram?”
“Well, I mean people who hand in their wire after they know the winner’s name and yet manage to make it appear as if they’d telegraphed before the race finished. We’ve had a lot of trouble with them. Devilish ingenious, some of the schemes are. And, of course, the same thing applies to S.P. betting by letter. You seem to be interested in this kind of thing, Mr. Wendover. Here’s a neat little problem for you. A bookmaker wisely has no letter-box on his door; the postman has to deliver everything by hand inside the office. A letter is delivered, postmarked long before the race, which contains a good swingeing bet on the winner. Actually, the writer knew the name of the winner before the letter left his hands. How’s that done, do you think? The postman is not a confederate, I may say.”
“I’ll have to think that over,” said Wendover with a smile. “It sounds impossible, but I suppose you’ve had a case of the sort.”
“Oh, yes, it has been done. We’re up against some very smart crooks, I can tell you, in our line. Now here’s another game which most likely you wouldn’t think worth the candle: breaking open the coin-boxes in public-telephone kiosks.”
“It certainly doesn’t sound like a line in which one could make a fortune,” Wendover said with a smile.
“I don’t know what you call a fortune,” retorted Duncannon, “but to me £10,000 a year sounds quite a lot.”
“As much as that?” exclaimed Wendover in amazement. “Good heavens, man, that would mean something like two and a half million pennies taken from the boxes. It’s almost incredible.”
“Believe it or not,” Duncannon declared, “at one time it looked as if that gang might get away with double the figure, so you see it was quite a serious affair for the G.P.O. However, all’s well that ends well. Between the Cartwright Buzzer and one or two other dodges, they were laid by the heels.”
Sir Clinton evidently thought that Wendover had been given a fair run by this time.
“Now let’s turn to the anonymous-letter business,” he suggested. “It’s what interests me chiefly at the moment. How do you go about your business in cases of that kind, Mr. Duncannon?”
“If you ask an enthusiast about his hobby, you’re apt to get more than you want,” Duncannon said, warningly. “And this hunting out poison-pen pests happens to be the line that interests me most of all.”
“You won’t bore us, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” the Chief Constable answered. “Mr. Wendover takes a keen interest in criminology, I may tell you. We’ll be glad to hear anything you can give us.”
Duncannon leaned back in his chair and paused for a moment as if putting his facts in order in his mind before beginning.
“There are so many sides to it,” he said at last with a gesture of mock discouragement, “one hardly knows where to begin. Take the routine method first of all. Suppose X receives an anonymous letter, and complains to us about it. We ask X to write down the names of all his or her acquaintances, and we may thus get a list of a couple of hundred, perhaps. If the letter was locally postmarked, we can weed out from the list a good many names of people living at a distance. If two people, X and Y, have been pestered by letters, we get a list from each of them and compare them. If there are names common to both lists, then the thing’s narrowed down to those people.”
“But the name need not necessarily be on either list,” Sir Clinton objected. “Your poison pen may be attacking someone outside the range of personal acquaintance.”
“That’s very rare, in the early stages of a poison pen’s career,” Duncannon explained. “As a general rule, the method gives results. And, of course, the more lists we get, the more the thing is narrowed down. The next line is to try the handwriting. It’s usually disguised to the best of their ability. But what they forget is this. You can make your handwriting look different from the normal, but it’s much more difficult for a young girl to write like an elderly woman and vice versa. We can make a guess at the writer’s age and that helps us to sift out our lists still further. Then the vocabulary comes in. It’s impossible for an uneducated person to write like an educated one; and it’s almost impossible for an educated person to imitate the language of the uneducated person’s letter. It can be done, of course, but usually your poison pen is given away by some slip or other in any attempt of that sort.”
“What about bad language?” asked the Chief Constable.
Duncannon rubbed his chin ruefully.
“It means simply nothing. You see some dear old lady who looks as if an honest ‘Damn!’ would make her faint on the spot. And yet somewhere at the back of her mind she may have a vocabulary that would paralyse a navvy. Where they get it, I can’t imagine. But I’ve learned that you can’t go by language in poison-pen work.”
“Doctors will tell you the same about the things some patients say in delirium,” Sir Clinton confirmed. “It’s stored up in the most unlikely people.”
“In the subconsciousness, maybe,” Duncannon suggested. “But that’s off my beat. I only mentioned it to show you that you can’t put too much stress on language of that sort in anonymous letters.”
“What happens after you’ve got your suspects reduced to reasonable dimensions?” asked Wendover.
“Oh, well, after that, it’s more or less routine. Very dull and tiresome. We simply put a watch on them, one after another, and if they post anything we have a special clearance of the box at once to see if we can find a poison-pen production in it. There are other methods, but I needn’t go into them now.”
“What’s behind all this poison-pen business?” asked Wendover. “You’ve had a wide experience of cases. Are these people mentally askew?”
“Now you’ve put your finger on the really interesting part of the thing,” Duncannon admitted. “Mentally askew, you say? No, they’re not dotty, if that’s what you mean. Morally, I’d say they were a bit off. You’ll think it funny, but sometimes I’ve been sorry for them when we’ve got them trapped.”
“Very funny,” Wendover agreed, sardonically. “But this is one of these jokes which have to be explained to me before I see the point.”
“Well, I’ll give you an example,” Duncannon volunteered. “It may make my point a bit clearer. Just imagine a servant girl, plain, unattractive, rather timid by nature, not able to make friends easily, very isolated in life. There are plenty of people like that in all classes of society, you know. And because they’re naturally shy, they tend to brood over the way other people treat them, look for slights, and so forth. Well, then, suppose this maid thinks her mistress is treating her badly. She can’t stand up for herself. She shrinks from looking for a new place, because she hates going among strangers. And at last she gets a brilliant idea — write an anonymous letter to her mistress and make it a stinger. Perhaps she’s picked up some odd information that will lend the thing a real barb. She sits down one night in her kitchen, lonely, smarting from some fresh grievance, and she decides to launch her little arrow. She goes out and slips it into the pillar-box. Next morning, she sees it delivered and she can watch its effect. A great thrill, that, for a starved and repressed creature, burning with some wrong real or fancied.”
Wendover glanced across at Sir Clinton with a twinkle in his eye.
“This picture’s a shade more sympathetic than the one you drew for Malwood and me,” he commented. “He made out that the poison-pen pest was blood-brother to Neil Cream the murderer, Mr. Duncannon.”
“Well, he’s not so far out there, I think,” the expert admitted soberly. “Neil Cream used strychnine, didn’t he, while our friend down town uses ink? One poisoned
the body; t’other one poisons the mind. It might be hard to say which of them has caused most harm.”
“You’ve left your picture unfinished,” Sir Clinton reminded him.
“Oh, yes. Well, you can suppose that this first letter gives its authoress a thrill. After that, it’s just like a drug-habit. She wants the thrill again, so she writes another letter. Then she begins to spread herself. There are her mistress’s friends coming about the house. She knows something about each of them. Why should they be happy while the maid’s miserable? So she starts on them next, and each letter gives her another kick and fastens the habit still more firmly on her. She feels she’s got power in her hands. She can make these opulent people writhe and squirm merely by putting pen to paper. So her circle widens, ring by ring. By and by, she goes into still further fields, writes to people she’s never even seen, people she knows about only by hearsay, prominent personalities in the town. That’s how it grows.”
“Ugh! I can see it, but it’s not pretty,” Wendover confessed in a tone of deep disgust. “But surely you people in the G.P.O. could stop these things in the post, once the writing on the envelope has become familiar? What’s the good of delivering these damnable epistles to people at all?”
“We can’t do that,” Duncannon explained. “Even if I were certain I had a poison letter in my hand I couldn’t open it to make sure, unless I had the special permission of the Postmaster-General. You can’t play tricks of that sort with people’s letters, or all confidence in the postal system would be gone. No, once a letter’s posted it has to go through the mill with all the rest, unless the P.M.G. gives you special authority to interfere with it.”
“Suppose we get down to brass tacks,” the Chief Constable suggested. “What about this local poison pen? You’ve more or less made a corner in information about that, Mr. Duncannon. We’ve passed on anything we came across ourselves, so you have all the threads in your hands.”
Duncannon took a leather wallet from his pocket and removed some papers from it.
“I thought you might like to see some specimens,” he explained. “They illustrate what I’ve just been telling you. Now here’s the first one that came into our hands. It was addressed to a Miss Ruth Jessop.”
“I seem to know the name,” interrupted Wendover. “Wait a moment. I’ve heard it before. . . . Oh, yes, that’s it, perhaps. The Kestons mentioned it once or twice. What’s your Miss Jessop like, Mr. Duncannon?”
“Not a particularly good looker,” Duncannon admitted. “A bit pudding-faced and well-padded about the figure. Very eager to please, I thought, and says ‘Mr. Duncannon’ about every fourth word when she speaks. Somewhere in the thirties, her age would be.”
“Yes, that seems to be the same, so far as I can remember,” Wendover declared. “I’m sorry I interrupted you.”
“Well, here’s what she got out of the lucky-bag,” Duncannon pursued. “I’ll read it to you.
Why do you hang round Mr. Shinfield the curate so much? People are all talking about it. Better to marry than burn, says you. But it takes two to marry, and perhaps he’s not so keen. Ha! Ha! Hope to see you at the Mothers’ Meeting in due course.
No bad language in that one,” Duncannon pointed out. “I inquired who this Mr. Shinfield is. He’s the curate at St. Salvator’s and Miss Jessop attends the services there. I don’t know if she’s done anything to lend point to what’s in the letter. She seems the kind of dame to fuss over any man who comes near her, I judge, from the way she dealt with me in an interview I had with her. Most likely she’s the same with the curate. But that’s by the way. The point is that this precious production wasn’t written by hand. It was made up from words and letters cut out of newspapers and gummed on to notepaper. So there’s not much to take hold of, there.”
“What about the address on the envelope?” asked Sir Clinton.
“Same thing. But that’s where this poison pen slipped up. We put our sorters on the lookout for any more letters with that kind of address on the envelope. They reported the addresses to us, and I called on the addressees immediately after the letters were delivered and got a lot of information in that way. Otherwise some of the things would have been burned at once, I expect.”
He selected another sheet from his collection.
“Now here’s the second one we were able to trace. It’s addressed to the maid, Cissie Worgate, at the house of a Mrs. Hyson . . . Mrs. Oswald Hyson.”
“Oh, I know her,” Wendover interjected.
“Do you?” said Duncannon, apparently a shade taken aback. “Well, anyhow, here’s the production her maid got:
A nice house you live in! I know all about your master and mistress. He likes tarts; and butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, one would think, to hear her. Like takes to like, so they married and lived happily ever after, I don’t think. Ha! Ha! You must be pretty queer yourself, if you can stand it. But perhaps you’re a Catholic too.
No bad language there, either, you’ll notice.”
“Did you find out anything about this maid?” Sir Clinton put in.
“Not very much,” Duncannon admitted. “She’s a little, worried-looking thing, with a faint squint. Perfectly respectable, according to her record, but not very attractive. Hard to get much out of her, I found. As to the contents of the letter, she avoided the subject of Mr. Hyson, I noticed; but she was all up in arms about the insinuations against her mistress. Mrs. Hyson was very kind to her, she said.”
“That sounds genuine,” Wendover confirmed.
“Maybe,” said Duncannon sceptically. “But some people are ready enough to bite the hand that feeds them. We take very little for granted in my line. What’s more to the point, perhaps, she’s a church mouse, and never misses anything that goes on at St. Salvator’s on her nights out. I led her on to talk about the vicar and the curate. The curate’s her favourite. ‘Such a nice gentleman.’ Mrs. Hyson’s a Catholic, I gather?”
Wendover gave a confirmatory nod.
“You sounded almost as if you were suspecting this maid,” he pointed out. “You don’t, do you? People don’t write anonymous letters to themselves.”
“Oh, don’t they?” exclaimed Duncannon ironically. “Why, it’s one of the commonest features of the whole business. Look here. I had one case where a woman was pestered by anonymous letters, a perfect stream of them, making the vilest accusations against her. No one else was bothered. She used to throw fainting-fits when any of the letters was delivered. That went on for a couple of years. She was fined a fiver in the end. Every one of these scurrilous things was written by herself.”
“But why?” Wendover demanded in amazement.
“To make herself interesting, of course,” Duncannon said with a laugh. “Get the sympathy of her friends, and all that sort of thing. She fairly revelled in it — while it lasted. Oh, no, Mr. Wendover, you can’t assume that the writers of anonymous letters are so simple as all that. One of the first dodges that occurs to them is to write a note to themselves, expecting people to reason exactly as you’ve been doing just now. We’ve got far past the stage of overlooking that possibility.”
He picked out another paper, looked at it doubtfully for a moment, and then continued.
“Here’s a specimen of a later vintage. The percentage of bad language increases as time goes on. I’ll read it, and put in blank cartridges instead:
A nice — you are, comforting a married woman when her — of a husband’s got pressing business at the office, as the old joke says. I’ve got my eye on you, mister, and on your Aholibah too. Just you ease off, you — , or I’ll blow the — gaff on you both. So there! And where would the two of you be then? Ha! Ha!”
“Did the man who got that give it to you?” demanded Wendover in surprise.
“Well, he more or less had to,” Duncannon said with a wooden face. “You see, I called along with the postman who delivered it and perhaps I gave him the idea that we knew the contents already.”
“Who was he?” Sir C
linton demanded. “This is official, not mere curiosity.”
“Well, I shall have to give you a full list and the documents finally, when we catch the writer,” Duncannon answered, after a moment’s thought, “so it doesn’t much matter whether you get it now or later. It was addressed to a Mr. Norris Barsett.”
“Barsett?” repeated Wendover. “H’m! I’d have thought Mr. Barsett would have had the decency to suppress that production.”
“He’d no idea what was in it,” Duncannon explained. “When I told him it was one of these poison-pen productions, he refused to look at it. He just opened it formally and handed it over to me straight away.”
“Very proper procedure,” Sir Clinton commented, with an expressionless face.
“I suppose he’d no idea that anyone else would be mentioned in it,” said Wendover. “I know something about Barsett, and I don’t think he’s the kind to give a woman away intentionally. Any more of these pleasing exhibits?”
“Well, here’s one addressed to Dr. Malwood. I know he’s a friend of yours, but he gave me permission to show you it and tell you his name. He seems to take it as a joke, so far as I could see. Laughed very heartily over it and said he’d like to have a professional talk with the writer.
You and your psychoanalysis! Just talking — smut to a lot of females, that’s what it is. Ha! Ha! Hope you get a — good kick out of it, old boy. Glands, says you? — , says I. May your harem never grow less, Solomon.
It would be interesting to know what Dr. Malwood would make of the writer after a heart-to-heart chat.”
“Is ‘psychoanalysis’ properly spelt?” queried the Chief Constable.
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