Depths of Deceit

by Norman Russell

  ‘Charles!’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Josh, I’ll not risk slander over such a serious matter. Anyway, Inspector, I sent off those samples to Mr Barnes, knowing that he had a great interest in cement and its history. I didn’t tell him why I wanted the work done, you understand. I told him that it was part of an intellectual exercise.’

  Sir Charles Wayneflete sighed, and shook his head rather mournfully.

  ‘And then, Box,’ he said, ‘I heard nothing from Barnes, and when I read of his death in the papers, I took fright. Cause and effect, you know. I assume that he didn’t live long enough to undertake my commission, and that his executors would dispose of the samples as something poor Barnes had just hoarded out of curiosity. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know what became of those scrapings. Damn me, what a mess it all is! I should have left well alone— What’s this you’re showing me? Good God!’

  While the old baronet was talking, Box had produced the old photograph that Mrs Warwick Newman had given him during his visit to Melton Castra.

  ‘So I was right!’ cried Wayneflete. ‘The fellow assembled various obscure pieces of genuine Roman work, cemented them together, and set them up in that old Roman grain store. I wonder where he got that head of Mithras? And the other pieces, come to that. And how did he put them all together without anyone seeing him?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Box, ‘though I mean to find out. And now, here’s something else that will please you. These four packets contain the samples that you sent to Mr Barnes. He in turn sent them to a man called Bonner, who analysed them, and returned them on 23 July. For some reason, Mr Barnes delayed sending the results to you, and he died before he could do so. But as you can see, Mr Bonner, the chemist, inscribed each envelope with a brief description.’

  ‘So he has!’ cried the old baronet. ‘Really, Inspector, you’ve excelled yourself in this business. Let’s see what they say. “Definitely Ancient Roman. Lime, Sand, Water.” That was the first sample, which Crale told me he’d scraped from between two slabs of stone near the base of the reredos. “Modern, i.e. this century” – Crale told me that that was taken from around the section containing the head of Mithras that you’ve just shown me.

  ‘“Definitely Ancient Roman”: Crale scraped that from between two of the dressed stones constituting the right-hand wall of the vault. That confirms my belief that the vault itself is indubitably Roman. And finally, “Not Roman, Probably 17th century.” That was the sample which I scraped from my garden wall here, in Lowndes Square. I know for a fact that it was built just after 1605. So there you have it, Mr Box. Professor Roderick Ainsworth’s Mithraeum is a monstrous fraud!

  ‘It’s very interesting, you know,’ he continued. ‘Although Ainsworth’s reredos was made up of separate fragments, some of the fragments themselves must have been damaged and repaired in antiquity. I refer to the two slabs of stone near the base of the monument. The mortar joining them together was indubitably Roman. A fascinating puzzle, Inspector!’

  Major Baverstock, who had made no attempt to join in the conversation, suddenly asked a question.

  ‘What will you do now, Mr Box? This business is bound to cause a great scandal.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Box, ‘this kind of academic fraud is not strictly a crime, unless the perpetrator profits from it financially. Academic reputations are not my concern. What does concern me is murder, and the motives for murder. So I have a few more questions to ask, and then Sergeant Knollys here will have something to say.’

  Box turned once more to Sir Charles Wayneflete.

  ‘Will you tell me, sir, when Mr Crale left your employ? Did you dismiss him?’

  Box saw how Sir Charles Wayneflete glanced uneasily at his old friend Major Baverstock. Perhaps the two men had disagreed over the fate of Sir Charles’s secretary.

  ‘I received a letter,’ said Sir Charles, ‘saying that Crale had been pawning things of mine at a shop in the City Road, and that he’d done the same kind of thing when working for a previous employer. The letter mentioned some of the items – an old silver cruet, a couple of Meissen figurines. It was signed “A Well-wisher”.’

  ‘An anonymous letter…. What did you do about it, sir?’ asked Box.

  ‘Mrs Craddock looked for those things, and found that they were, indeed, missing. I confronted Crale with the letter, but he denied all knowledge of the thefts. He was very calm and dignified about it, I must say, and he tendered his resignation with immediate effect. That was on the 28 July. He left the house the same day, and wrote a brief note on the following Monday to tell me that he’d accepted employment in the household of Professor Ainsworth.’

  Poor old gentleman, thought Box, He’s not wise to the sinister tricks that men like Crale can play. What he’d just heard was a prime example of the Footman Tanner imposture. This was a wheeze for leaving one employer in order to carry all his secrets to another, who’d pay well for them. You got yourself dismissed for a crime that you’d never committed, in order to take up a post with a man who wasn’t too meticulous about the truth.

  ‘If you get your housekeeper to search more thoroughly, sir,’ he said, ‘I think you’ll find that those little treasures of yours are still in the house. Crale would have hidden them, and arranged for that letter to be sent, so that he’d have a decent excuse to leave your service. It’s an old wheeze, sir, as we say in the trade.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned! Did you hear that, Josh? So that villain Crale will have told Ainsworth all about my attempts to prove his precious Mithraeum to be a fraud. He’d have known all about poor Barnes—’

  ‘Yes, sir, he’d have known all about Mr Barnes, and all about Mr Gregory Walsh, too. I can see that you’re about to draw some very unpleasant conclusions, but I’d beg you not to give voice to them. Leave those conclusions to the police. I want you to listen now to what Sergeant Knollys has to say.’

  Box glanced at his sergeant, who drew a notebook from his pocket, and opened it. As Knollys spoke to the old baronet, he refreshed his memory from time to time by glancing at a closely written page of notes.

  ‘Sir Charles,’ Knollys began, ‘this man Crale, while he was still in your employ, commissioned Mr Gregory Walsh to secure samples of paint or pigment from the reredos in the Clerkenwell Mithraeum. Did he do so at your instigation?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, Sergeant. I was vexed at having to wait so long for Abraham Barnes to return the analysed samples of mortar, and decided to look into the matter of the pigments used on that monument. I told Crale to find someone suitable to undertake the work, and to engage him as though the commission were his instead of mine. He found this young man Walsh, and arranged for him to go to the Mithraeum on Thursday, 26 July, at a time when I knew that Ainsworth would be engaged elsewhere.’

  ‘And did you ever receive the results of that commission, sir?’ asked Knollys.

  ‘No, Sergeant, I did not. In the event, I received nothing, either from this man Walsh or Abraham Barnes. And then, on the fourteenth August, both men were murdered…. I drew some very sinister conclusions, looked to my own safety, and decided to forget the whole business. But your visit today had shown that I was right in believing Ainsworth to be a charlatan.’

  There was little more to be said, and some minutes later Box and Knollys took leave of Sir Charles Wayneflete. Major Baverstock accompanied them into the hall, and himself opened the front door. Box detained him for a moment, by placing a hand on his arm.

  ‘Major,’ he said, ‘I think that Sir Charles Wayneflete is in very real danger, and I intend to place a police guard on this house night and day until this murderous business is finished. Would you undertake to tell him that?’

  ‘I will, Inspector, and I’ll say at once how relieved I am. He might be titled, but he’s quite powerless and without influential friends. Consider this Ainsworth business for a moment: who would believe anything that Charles said against the popular idol? They’d say it was sour grapes, jealousy – or, worse still,
senility. That’s why he’s kept silence for so long. He’s supposed to be an amateur, but for all that he’s a very exact scholar, who’s admired in the more informed university circles.’

  The untidy, rather neglected old soldier glanced around the gaunt, faded hall of the house with honest distaste.

  ‘You know, Mr Box,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘Mrs Craddock and I are hatching a plot to get poor Charles out of this place. I’ve a little put by, and if he would sell the lease of this house, and some of those awful antiquities of his, we could buy one of those snug little cottages they’re building out at Chiswick. They call them cottages, you know, but they’re really gentlemen’s bijou residences. The three of us could live there in comfort.’

  ‘I wish you well in that project, Major Baverstock,’ said Box. ‘Sir Charles might not have powerful friends, but he’s certainly got a very loyal one – I mean you, sir! And now he’s got another friend, one that I think has more power than Professor Ainsworth could successfully resist.’

  ‘And what powerful friend is that, Mr Box?’

  ‘Scotland Yard,’ Box replied.

  He and Knollys shook hands with the major, and stepped out into Lowndes Square.

  ‘Sergeant,’ said Box, as the two men walked out of the square in the direction of Hyde Park, ‘when that man Crale arranged for Walsh to go to the Mithraeum on the 26 July, he’d already been lured away from his employer by Ainsworth. He pulled the Footman Tanner wheeze on the 28th, and by the following Monday he was working for Ainsworth. I bet you anything that Crale cancelled that appointment for the 26th, and told poor Walsh to turn up on the 14 August instead—’

  ‘The very day,’ said Knollys, ‘that the good professor was due to entrain for Edinburgh. So we could say that Ainsworth conspired with Crale to lure Gregory Walsh to his death. Perhaps Crale was used in some way in the Carshalton murder, too.’

  ‘Perhaps he was, Jack, and I’ve already concocted a little plot to make Mr Crale eat out of our hands when the time comes. I want to pay another visit, first, to the late Mr Barnes’s house and works at Carshalton. There are a few questions I want to ask the impudent widow, who’s probably now in complete charge of the place.’

  ‘And after that, sir?’

  ‘After that, Sergeant, I’ll give our Mr Crale my full attention. And then you and I will pay a call on the Subterranean Pipe Office of the London County Council, which, as you know, is in Spring Gardens, just five minutes’ walk from King James’s Rents. There’s something they’ve got there that I very much want to see.’

  15

  The Ubiquitous Mr Crale

  Arnold Box stood in front of the solid, four-square granite house in Carshalton where the murdered cement manufacturer Abraham Barnes had lived and died. The name ‘Wellington House’ on the gateposts had been freshly gilded, and new, crisp lace curtains adorned every window. Evidently the predatory widow, Laura Barnes, had started to make her presence felt.

  What, Box wondered, had happened to the thin, pale and tearful daughter, Hetty Barnes? The widow had told him that Hetty would have to manage on a competence elsewhere: it had been clear even then that Laura would not suffer her stepdaughter to remain at Wellington House.

  He rang the bell, and in a moment the front door was opened by a smart, pretty girl of twenty or so, wearing the black dress and ribboned cap of a house parlour-maid. She curtsied, took Box’s card, and asked him to sit down in the hall. Missus, she told him, would be out in a moment.

  There was a strong smell of paint everywhere, and the gloom that had pervaded the house on his last visit seemed to have been very effectively dissipated. He wondered whether the widow had married the shifty Mr Harper yet, and whether all this decoration was a celebration of their tasteless and rather sinister alliance.

  The door of the drawing-room opened, and an elegant woman emerged to greet him. She wore a fashionable morning dress of brown silk adorned with cream lace. ‘Inspector Box!’ she exclaimed, giving him her hand. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure! Come into the drawing-room.’

  Box followed the lady of the house into the room where he had first encountered the family of Abraham Barnes. His mind was reeling! He had only just recognized the lady as the tearful, faded daughter, Hetty. What miracle had transformed her into this commanding and handsome lady? And where was the hard-bitten widow, Laura Barnes?

  ‘I can see that you’re rather nonplussed, Mr Box,’ said Hetty, smiling, and motioning him to sit down. Like the hallway, the drawing-room was in the process of being redecorated. Rolls of red flock wallpaper stood upright like ship’s funnels against one wall. ‘Let me very briefly explain what occurred here after your last visit.

  ‘My father’s will was produced and read on the 17 August, just two days after you came here. He left his widow Laura an annuity of a hundred and fifty pounds. Everything else, including this house, the cement works, and all his accrued savings, he left to me.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it, Miss Barnes,’ said Box, and the sincerity of his words was so obvious that Hetty knew they were rather more than a conventional reply. His kindness would encourage her to speak more frankly to him of family matters.

  ‘I was astounded,’ Hetty continued, ‘and somehow, realizing that poor Father had loved me best all along, brought me out of my shell. I don’t just seem a different woman – I am a different woman! I’ve decided to develop the works along the lines suggested by Mr Harper, and I think that, in a year’s time, the Royal Albert Cement Works will be transformed.’

  ‘And have you engaged a new manager to assist you, Miss Barnes?’ asked Box. ‘I should think you’d need an experienced person to help you manage a concern of this nature.’

  The elegant lady suddenly treated Box to a smile of triumph, a smile that was at one and the same time joyful and cruel. She pulled the bell hanging beside the fireplace, and almost immediately the pretty young maid appeared. She glanced rather apprehensively at Box, and then addressed her mistress.

  ‘You rang, ma’am?’

  ‘Mary,’ said the lady of the house, ‘tell the master to come here at once.’

  The maid curtsied, and went out. Within the minute the door opened, and the handsome young works manager, Mr Harper, came in to the room.

  ‘Did you ring for me, my dear?’ he asked. Seeing Box, he actually blushed in confusion, rapidly turning his discomfiture into a kind of servile bow.

  ‘It was just to let you know, James, that Inspector Box has called to see me privately. I thought it right that you should know. Have the furnace-liners arrived yet? They were due here at ten.’

  ‘They’re here now, my dear. I’d better go and attend to them. Goodbye, Mr Box, Pleased to meet you again.’

  As the young man left the room, Hetty held up her left hand for Box to see the thick gold band gleaming on her marriage-finger.

  ‘Yes, Mr Box,’ she said, ‘I am Mrs James Harper, now! We were married by special licence ten days ago. James and I will agree well together, and between us we’ll make our name resound in the building industry.’ She glanced briefly at her father’s portrait where it hung over the fireplace, surrounded with black mourning-crape.

  ‘Dear Father! He left everything entailed to me, you know. If James wants to make his fortune, he’ll have to make it from the future profits of the company. He knows that, too.’

  Mrs Harper treated Box to a shrewd but not unpleasant smile. She was evidently enjoying her new status as the undoubted mistress of Wellington House and its occupants.

  ‘I always liked him, you know,’ she continued, ‘even though I pretended not to. That’s because Laura – well, never mind about her. James has got a good business head on his shoulders, as well as being a very presentable man.’

  ‘And what happened to Mrs Laura Barnes, ma’am, if I may be so bold as to ask?’

  ‘Laura? Well, she’s fled across the river to live with her spinster sister in Somers Town. I hope she’ll be very happy there. But I don’t suppose you
’ve come down here to ask after Laura, have you? It’ll be about poor Father’s murder. How can I help you?’

  ‘I want to ask you a question, ma’am, about some samples of mortar that your late father had sent to a man called Bonner to analyse. Mr Bonner returned these samples by post on the 23 July. Your father was supposed to forward them to a gentleman living in London, but never did so. I gather that Mr Barnes was an efficient business man. Can you account for his failure to forward those samples?’

  ‘Father was very busy all July, and he probably thought that these samples could wait until he was less pressed for time. What were they – some private matter? Yes, I thought so. Father would have let them wait until he had time to see to them. Matters concerning the business always had priority.’

  ‘Was Mr Barnes away from Carshalton at any time in July?’

  ‘Yes, he was. He went up to Birmingham to see our accountants on the 31 July – which was a Tuesday – and returned here on the third. After that, Inspector, I suppose he kept putting off this business of the samples until – well, until it was too late.’

  Mrs Harper glanced briefly at her father’s portrait, and bit her lip. She seemed to be struggling with some emotion which Box thought might have been vexation. She’s making up her mind to tell me something, thought Box, and if I just stay quiet and say nothing, she’ll tell me what it is. Something to do with her late father, I’ll be bound.

  ‘I’ll leave you now, Inspector,’ said Mrs Harper, rising from her chair. ‘I’m going to send my maid, Mary, to talk to you. You guessed, I think, that she was my only confidant when this house fell under the bane of that woman? Well, she remains so still, and very recently she told me something about my father which I think you should hear. It explains why he came down, fully clothed, into the conservatory on that fatal night – the night when he met his terrible death.’