by Cyril Hare
“In seeking for some explanation, I naturally tried to find something which one could mark as a turning-point between the two phases. I thought I could distinguish it in what appeared at first sight the most trivial incident of all—the dead mouse which came through the post at Rampleford. From what Mr. Marshall told me and from my own inquiries, I determined that up to that point Lady Barber had hopes of settling the action which Mr. Sebald-Smith was threatening on terms which would not ruin her husband completely. After that, it was apparent to her that Miss Parsons was not going to allow her to do any such thing. The thought crossed my mind that in such circumstances she might decide that it was better to kill her husband and live on what he had to leave her rather than allow his whole estate to be swallowed up in the enormous damages which Mr. Sebald-Smith was demanding.”
“Aha!” said Pettigrew.
“The theory left a good deal unexplained, of course. If that was right, why should she be going to such immense trouble to safeguard her husband’s life, and why should she be careful to see that her own attempts were unsuccessful? I thought, however, that all this might be put down to a very elaborate scheme to distract suspicion, and I decided that the theory was worth pursuing. But first I had to make sure that it was really to Lady Barber’s interest to kill her husband. I made inquiries from our legal department and I found out that if the Judge died, there was nothing whatever to prevent Mr. Sebald-Smith from pursuing his action at the expense of the estate, so that by killing her husband she would be no better off financially. That is the result, they told me, of a fairly recent change in the law.”
“Law Reforms (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, 1934,” Pettigrew interjected.
“Thank you, sir. Unfortunately, as it turned out, I didn’t pursue my legal inquiries quite far enough. But with that information before me, it seemed to me that my theory must be wrong. For some reason or another, Lady Barber was pretending to try to kill her husband, while all the time only too anxious to keep him alive. Only two explanations seemed to me possible. Either she was deliberately interested in frightening him, for some obscure purpose of her own, or she was suffering from some kind of mental strain. The second alternative seemed to me the better of the two. I don’t know much about such matters, but I could well imagine that a rather highly strung woman, genuinely afraid for her husband’s safety, losing her sleep in watching for the assault that never came, might in the end be so mentally affected as to start faking attacks upon him as though to justify the trouble that she was putting herself to. If I was right, I thought, then as soon as the strain of the Circuit was removed, and she was living a more or less normal existence in London again, all these odd manifestations would stop. And so it turned out.
“At the same time, I was not absolutely easy in my mind about the matter at first. Then, as time went on and there did not seem to be the least sign of any danger threatening the Judge, I felt that I must have been right. Heppenstall had been put out of harm’s way, and the first series of threats and attacks had stopped. Lady Barber had returned to London, and immediately the second, faked, series had stopped also. It all seemed too easy. Then, as though to clinch the matter, came the Judge’s attempted suicide. There was no doubt that it was a real attempt, and equally no doubt that Lady Barber had done everything in her power to save his life. Indeed, the doctor told me that but for her promptitude he would infallibly have died. That cleared my mind of my last, lingering suspicion. There could be no doubt that so far from desiring his death she was prepared to go to all lengths to preserve his life.
“Then, only a few weeks later, the Judge was killed, in circumstances with which you are all familiar. There were five obvious suspects. Three of them are in this room. The fourth was Beamish. The other, of course, was Lady Barber. The fact that the crime had been committed with a particular weapon which we could identify with the one last seen at Eastbury Assizes, led me to eliminate Miss Bartram at once and, after a little further inquiry, Mr. Marshall also. But that merely put me in this difficulty—that in so doing, I had eliminated the only two people with a motive for committing the crime at that particular moment. Yet it was plain that whoever had done so had taken a very considerable risk. The whole thing spoke not only of considerable daring and efficiency—how different, you will notice, from the half-hearted, bungling attempts on Circuit!—but also of great urgency. It looked as if the murderer had been under a compulsion to seize that one momentary chance rather than wait for a better opportunity. Looking at the three remaining suspects, two of them with not inadequate motives for murder, I could not find any such compulsion, and so far as Lady Barber was concerned, there was the added absurdity that an anxiety to keep alive must have been suddenly changed into what I have called a compulsion to kill. And yet, on the grounds of opportunity alone, it was impossible to shut one’s eyes to the fact that she was by far the likeliest of the three.
“That was my state of mind yesterday, when you, Mr. Pettigrew, gave me the key to the whole mystery, by drawing my attention to the fact that the day of the murder was exactly six months after the day of the accident at Markhampton.”
“Any competent lawyer could see the point of that,” said Pettigrew. “But I must say I was astonished that you tumbled to it so quickly. Quite candidly, I hoped you wouldn’t.”
“I didn’t see the point of it,” said Mallett modestly. “But I did see that there was a point somewhere. The date of the murder was in some way connected with the date of the accident. Very well. The only thing to do was to start all over again from the beginning, and find out what I could about the accident. Accordingly, on leaving you, I went straight to Faradays, Mr. Sebald-Smith’s solicitors. And there, almost the first question I asked brought the explanation which I had been seeking for so long. I asked what stage the action against the Judge had reached at the time of his death, and the partner whom I interviewed told me that in fact it had never got beyond the stage of negotiations. The writ in the action was actually to have been issued on the day after the Judge died. I noticed that he seemed very upset about it.”
“I bet he did,” said Pettigrew. “Are Sally and Sebald suing the firm for negligence?”
“He indicated that there was a possibility of that occurring.”
“An odd little epilogue to a murder!”
“But I don’t understand,” said Derek. “What had all this to do with the murder?”
“The answer,” said Pettigrew, “is in Sub-section three of Section one of the Act of Parliament I quoted just now. Put into non-technical language, it amounts to this: You can maintain an action against a chap for running you down even if he’s dead. But to do so you must fulfil one of two conditions. Either you can start your action while he is still alive, in which case John Brown’s body can moulder in the grave, but your case goes marching along and you cash in on the executors. Or you can start your action with J.B. already mouldering, but in that case you have only got six months to do it in, counting from the time his car hit you. If you choose to spend six months palavering about the rights and wrongs of your case before you kick off and the man dies on you, then your action descends into the grave and moulders also. And serve you right.”
“And that is what happened in this case?”
“That is what happened in this case. And it happened because Hilda—God rest her soul!—meant it to happen. She was a lawyer, you see, and it so chanced that her pet study was what is known as the Limitation of Actions—a subject I used to think dull, but never will again. She knew that Sebald-Smith’s action would ruin her husband completely if it was fought. She knew also that if he died, she would be ruined by it just the same. So she set herself to keep him alive and the plaintiff’s solicitors at bay until the six months were up. That was why she had to stop him from committing suicide last month. And that was why, the moment the period had gone by, she had to kill him before the writ could be issued. She must have thought it all out as soon as she was certain that Sally meant to have her pound of fles
h—that day at Rampleford when the fatal little mouse turned up in your pocket, Marshall. I apologize, Inspector,” he added. “I’m afraid I’ve taken the words out of your mouth.”
“Not at all,” said Mallett. “You have put it all much more clearly than I could have done. I think that that is the whole of the story—except for this, Mr. Pettigrew.” He indicated the note on the table.
“That? My little footnote to the Act of Parliament? Well, it’s a very succinct missive, is it not? A mere reference to the Law Reports.”
He took the paper and read aloud:
“Dear Hilda,
(1938) 2 K.B. 202.
F.”
“That, my lord and members of the jury, is simply the reference to the case of Daniels v. Vaux, which decided a different point of law altogether, but in which the facts were rather similar to these. A well to do young man, who had omitted to insure himself, ran into a policeman and injured him badly. There was no real defence to the policeman’s claim, and the solicitors on both sides settled down to argue the amount of the damages. They were on the point of agreement when the young man himself was killed—how, history does not relate, but since all this happened in pre-bomb days, I assume either by his own car, or someone else’s. That occurred six months after the first accident, and nobody had thought of starting an action. And so the poor plaintiff had none. You will find all that set out, as my hieroglyphics indicate, in Volume Two of the King’s Bench Reports for the year 1938, at page two hundred and two. I happened to refer to it yesterday morning, and that was why the coincidence of the dates struck me so forcibly.”
Pettigrew’s face, which had been animated during his exposition, suddenly looked very tired. He reached for the note and tore it slowly into pieces.
“I suppose,” he said bitterly, as he dropped the fragments into the wastepaper basket, “I suppose that it is the first time on record that anyone has ever been driven to commit suicide by a quotation from the Law Reports.”
About the Author
Cyril Hare was the pseudonym for the distinguished lawyer Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark. He was born in Surrey, in 1900, and was educated at Rugby and Oxford. A member of the Inner Temple, he was called to the Bar in 1924 and joined the chambers of Roland Oliver, who handled many of the great crime cases of the 1920s. He practised as a barrister until the Second World War, after which he served in various legal and judicial capacities including a time as a county court judge in Surrey.
Hare’s crime novels, many of which draw on his legal experience, have been praised by Elizabeth Bowen and P. D. James among others. He died in 1958 - at the peak of his career as a judge, and at the height of his powers as a master of the whodunit.
Copyright
First published in 1942
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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This ebook edition first published in 2012
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© Cyril Hare (Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark), 1942
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ISBN 978–0–571–28876–2