The Counsellor

by J. J. Connington

  “That seems to fit, certainly,” Standish admitted. “I ought to have seen that myself. But I didn’t,” he confessed frankly.

  “Then there was the personator of Querrin,” The Counsellor went on. “The inspector here did his best to trace anyone of that description having stayed in the neighbourhood at the time. Nobody could tell him anything about the fake Querrin. Ergo, that young man must have been staying with accomplices till his time came to get on the stage. So, obviously, several people must have had a hand in the game: Whitgift, probably; the Trulocks almost for a certainty; and someone else who provided a refuge for the fake Querrin beforehand. In fact, a gang of some sort.”

  The Counsellor took out a cigarette and lighted it before continuing his narrative. Pitching the match into the fireplace behind him, he went on.

  “The next episode was the murder of poor old Treverton, with its forerunner, the killing of Miss Treverton’s dog. That served a double purpose, you see, Querrin. The actual killing was a dress rehearsal for Treverton’s death, and by killing the dog they made sure that she wouldn’t have it with her when she was kidnapped. It might have turned nasty and put them off their stroke if it had been there. Now Treverton was killed late in the evening in his study. You remember about the key being found on the outside of the door in the morning, which was suggestive. But his body was found in the garage. Somebody must have got into the house and removed him. Now Whitgift made a mistake when he admitted to me that on the night of Miss Treverton’s disappearance he went into Longstoke House with his latch-key to ring up Fairlawns and ask about her. That proved he had access to the house whenever he wished. And therefore he, at anyrate, could have got in and removed Treverton’s body to the garage without disturbing anyone. So my suspicions of his bona fides got another lift up.

  “But for a while I was quite in the dark as to the motives behind all these manœuvres. Obviously someone wanted an uncle and a niece out of the way. Family feuds don’t reach that pitch in England. So I looked for some other connection between the Trevertons. I found it in the affairs of the Ravenscourt Press, where they were the two biggest shareholders. But the company was an almost bankrupt show. Why should anyone go the length of murder in connection with it? I couldn’t see through it. But I took a chance and quietly bought a share, to give myself a standing. Then I found somebody, acting through solicitors, was eager to buy up the thing, lock, stock, and barrel. Note the dates. The letter with the offer was received on September 12th. The next few days were enough to show Treverton’s reaction to it: nothing doing. So on the 19th Treverton got finished off. And the abduction and the murder had been neatly timed to keep the Treverton interest off the map while the deal went through. Just out of curiosity—and also to protect Miss Treverton’s interests—I stepped in with a rather better offer.

  “That put the cat among the pigeons at once. The interested party decided to push me off the map with the others. And—like Smith of brides-in-the-baths fame—he followed his previous procedure precisely in his second attempt. In my case, however, he misfired—and damned lucky for me it was. I had the sense to tell a few lies about being liable to seizures, so he was left wondering whether I realised that an attempt had been made on me. But still I was quite in the dark as to the object of all these doings. It did occur to me that they might be stealing valuable paintings under cover of photographing them; but that notion was a wash-out. Nothing in it.

  “Now you, Sandra, had picked up a bit of information which seemed to fit in, somewhere. That little typist told you that Albury had tried to persuade her to go with him to some place where they could have “a really good time, something out of the common.” And that turned my mind to Grendon Manor and its Hell Fire Club. But I got no further on that line at the moment. The really important matter was to find out how Miss Treverton had been kidnapped. You all know how we got at the root of that. And that root led straight to Grendon Manor and these Children of Light. So Querrin and I got into one of the seances. I needn’t explain how, at the moment, lest I embarrass the inspector, here.”

  He glanced towards Pagnell with something which was almost a wink. The inspector took the hint and asked no questions.

  “We attended the meeting,” The Counsellor went on. “I spotted Trulock and I recognised Albury, too. The whole affair was—h’m!—very free-and-easy, Liberty Hall in the fullest sense of the term. Querrin and I made a careful note of the symptoms produced by the drinks. Next day, I got in touch with a specialist in that line. My stuff was obviously mescal. Mescal’s hard to come by. But you can get it in South America. And Trulock had been in South America before he came here. Trulock, then, was the brain behind that part of the business. And he was up to the neck in the kidnapping, too, as we’d discovered. I put two and two together, then, and the result relieved me a good deal, I can tell you. Given these drugs, you could persuade any patient that she was delirious, and so prevent her from taking active steps to escape. So it seemed likely that Miss Treverton was alive and in their hands.

  “Then I began to think over the Children of Light stunt. On the surface, it could be made a paying game simply through the fees for the séances. But there was the chance of bigger money behind. You know what happened to the crew who drank the second drug. And you can guess what chances of blackmail there were in doings of that sort. Even the mescal-drinkers could be put under the screw along with the others. Nobody wants to get their name mixed up with a stink of that sort, even if they aren’t actually participants. Mud of that kind always sticks. So that seemed to suggest something. Treverton might have been mixed up in it. . . .

  “But when I thought it over, that didn’t fit at all. Treverton was almost a recluse. Nothing to connect him with the Children of Light and their doings, so far as one could see. And certainly it didn’t cover Miss Treverton’s kidnapping. So I came back to that bankrupt company and the struggle to control it. That was the only thing that did seem to bring things together. But for a while I simply couldn’t get the key to the puzzle. When I spotted it, at last, I could have kicked myself for not seeing it straight away. So simple, and so very obvious. That was when I got in the epidiascope, Wolf,” he added, turning to Standish.

  “By that time, I was almost certain that Miss Treverton was detained in Grendon Manor. Then came that neat little touch of the fire on the premises, practically throwing the place open to the police so that they could search it from roof to cellar. But, two poor burned creatures were shipped away, smothered in bandages, before the police arrived on the scene. And where were they taken? To Fairlawns, in charge of the hospitable Dr. Trulock. All I had to do was to get Fairlawns raided by the inspector, after he’d primed himself about likely drugs. I hadn’t even to wrestle with my conscience, for my pharmacologist expert had suggested the possibility of hashish being the second drug or at anyrate a component of it. So I could make a sworn declaration about hemp without feeling I was deliberately lying. It’s not on my conscience, anyhow.

  “You know what happened next. The inspector got in with a search-warrant and found Miss Treverton more or less as I’d expected. He swept all the Fairlawn’s crew into his net, and I think he’ll bring his case home to them in the matter of the kidnapping. Trulock kept his mouth shut. Wouldn’t make any statement after he was arrested. I expect he’ll talk before we’re done. He’d better.”

  The Counsellor glanced at the inspector, who smiled rather grimly in return, as if endorsing the last remark.

  “That brought us up against an awkward legal point. Somebody had killed Treverton. That somebody had also tried to finish me off. But you can only try a man for one offence at a time, so on the face of it the evidence in my case wasn’t relevant against the suspect if he was charged with Treverton’s death. But—especially after the decision in the Brides-in-the-baths case—you can adduce evidence of “system”, and so drag in other examples of similar methods used by the prisoner. But then you want all the possible evidence of a “system”, to make your case thorou
ghly convincing. We had the dog, and Treverton, and myself, all treated to carbon monoxide. One further parallel would convince any jury. So I persuaded Querrin, here, to act as live bait to catch that evidence. You tell ’em your share in the show, Querrin.”

  Querrin seemed rather unwilling at first, but he thawed in the course of his tale.

  “The only part I played in the thing was a lay figure in your hands,” he began. “All I had to do was to appear on the scene and speak the piece you supplied me with. There was no credit in doing that.”

  He turned to the rest of his audience and continued.

  “Under direction, I wrote to Whitgift, as temporary boss of the Ravenscourt Press, asking for an appointment. I went down to Longstoke House to keep that appointment. They showed me up into the office Whitgift has taken it over, now Treverton’s gone, I recited my piece, all about having talked things over with Miss Treverton and her having almost decided to accept Brand’s offer when the matter came up for discussion. She was doing that on my advice, I said, but she wasn’t quite fixed in her ideas. Still, it was only fair to let him know how things were going, etc., etc. And then I said I was a bit uneasy about the whole show. There seemed to be. . . something fishy about it somewhere. I didn’t quite like the look of it, in fact. And before doing anything definite . . . Well, I’d make it my business to overhaul the whole affair from top to bottom. And so on.

  “That seemed to shake him up a bit, though it was all Greek to me, personally. I just said what was put into my mouth. Anyhow, Whitgift pulled himself together and began asking about Miss Treverton. When were we going to get married, and so forth. So I told him ‘almost immediately. No reason for waiting.’ Then he went back to the other line, and wanted to know if I’d spoken to anyone else about these suspicions of mine. I said: ‘Not even to Miss Treverton’, which was quite true. So then he hummed and hawed. Seemed to be doing a bit of quick thinking, and finally said he’d like to consult Albury for a few minutes to see if he saw anything wrong. I said: ‘Of course, I’ll wait to hear what he says.’ So Whitgift went off and left me alone in the office. Then I tried the door, as Brand told me to do, and it was locked. So I sat down and smoked a cigarette or two. And by-and-by Brand and the inspector came in and said it was O.K. and quite successful. That was this afternoon, and I’m still waiting to hear what it was all about. I’ve a glimmering, of course.”

  “This is how it is,” explained The Counsellor. “The previous appointment was to give time for the criminal to make his preparations beforehand. The crucial bit in your playlet was when you let out that you’d told no one else about your suspicions. That meant that if you lived, things would be overhauled. But if you died, no one would know what you’d been thinking. Last night, the inspector chaperoned me whilst I cut the old acetylene piping leading out of the coachhouse. That made certain that you’d come to no harm by the old and well-tried method, which I was sure would be used. And I’d given you a pistol, just in case more open methods were tried. But the chance of that was small, I believed. Anyhow, you said you could look after yourself, so I took your word for it.

  “When you walked up to Longstoke House front door, the inspector here was in the loft above the garage with his eye to a hole in the floor, just to see what happened. A couple of constables and myself were hiding within sight of the garage door. After a bit, Whitgift came out of the house, walked over to the garage, coupled up the piping, and started the engine of Treverton’s old crock. Then when he’d seen this, the inspector whistled and the constables collared Whitgift and removed him with as little fuss as possible. So we had him absolutely red-handed.”

  “So it was Whitgift?” interrupted Sandra. “Why, I was sure it was Albury.”

  “It looked like the two in partnership at one time, especially after I spotted Albury at the Hell Fire Club that evening. But it turns out that the ’phone call which drew Albury away from the office and left me to be done in alone, came from the A.A. box near the gate of Longstoke House. Whitgift was an A.A. member and of course had an A.A. key to open that box. That adds another bit of confirmatory evidence against him.”

  “We’ve been hunting for evidence to confirm Albury’s story about going to see about that rumoured fire at his house,” interjected the inspector, “and we’ve managed to get someone who actually saw him in Grendon St. Giles at the time he said he was there. So he’d no hand in the attempt on Mr. Brand.”

  “No, we can put Albury down simply as one of the less desirable lot among the Children of Light, and let it go at that,” continued The Counsellor. “He was a bad hat. But he’d no hand in either the abduction or the murder business. My impression is that he was enrolled amongst the Children of Light merely to have a sort of hold over him, on account of his little games there, if he cut up rough in the matter of the company manœuvres. But that’s merely an idea of mine. Now perhaps the inspector can tell us if he found much at Fairlawns when he searched the house.”

  Pagnell stowed away his notebook before speaking. Evidently the facts were fresh enough in his memory to need no written data. He turned to The Counsellor with something very near a grin on his face.

  “First of all, sir, to relieve your conscience, I’d better say that we found some ‘dried or flowering tops of the pistillate plant known as cannabis sativa’,” he began. “That’s the legal description of Indian hemp, from which you can prepare hashish, bhang, and things of that sort,” he explained for the benefit of the uninitiates in the audience. “So you were right enough in suspecting that they’d been mixing their drugs a bit and doping their members with hemp extract as well as the other stuff you told me about. And on the table beside the bed in Miss Treverton’s room we found a glass with some mescal tincture in it. It’s been identified provisionally by an expert.”

  “How could he do that in the time?” demanded Standish. “It’s none so easy to identify a rare alkaloid in a hurry.”

  “Perhaps he swallowed a small dose and noted the effects, same as I did,” suggested The Counsellor. “‘Identified provisionally’, was the inspector’s phrase. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Another thing we found,” went on the inspector,” was the grey coat and skirt used by that nannie when she impersonated Miss Treverton. So that’s that. When we produced them, the young lady collapsed and was quite eager to tell us all about it. So was Mrs. Trulock. And so was Trulock himself to-day, when he found what cards we held. I don’t wonder at their eagerness to spill the beans.”

  He paused, evidently waiting for a question.

  “Why?” demanded Standish. “I don’t see what they gain by it.”

  “Why, sir?” echoed the inspector. “Why, because they’re all in a holy terror lest they should be mixed up in the murder side of it. That’s why. They didn’t mind taking a hand in a kidnapping. Trulock thought he saw his way to turning that girl loose eventually in such a mental state that no one would believe a word she said and would put it all down to delirium. But into the middle of that nice little game came their accomplice’s despatch of Treverton. That wasn’t in their programme at all. That was a Whitgift move, pure and simple. They never heard about it till it was all over. And by that time they couldn’t split without involving themselves in a nice set of other charges. Once they were nailed on the other counts, of course their only hope was to make a clean breast of it and give Whitgift away. Which they did, pretty thoroughly. They were working along with Whitgift up to a point, but murder was no part of their programme.”

  Sandra made a gesture of incomprehension.

  “But what was at the back of it all?” she exclaimed. “I can’t see it.”

  “Money, miss,” said the inspector seriously. “Just money. But that’s really Mr. Brand’s part of the tale. I’ll leave it to him.”

  “Tell us, Mark,” demanded Sandra. “And don’t make a long story of it, or I’ll scream. I shall! It doesn’t sound like common sense. There was no money in that company. That was plain enough.”

  �
��Here’s how it was,” said The Counsellor, “staring us in the face from the start. A bankrupt picture-reproduction firm that never paid a dividend, and yet some parties unknown were sweating to buy it. Why? Well, I thought of a theft of valuable pictures by substitution. All that idea did was to put me off the track completely when there was a far simpler solution.”

  He pulled out a note-case and skinned a one pound Bank of England note from a packet.

  “Look at it: the colouring in the design, the engine-turning in the pattern, and the water-mark. Wasn’t the Ravenscourt Press the very last touch in colour-reproduction? Didn’t they use photography in their work? Wasn’t Whitgift originally a paper-making expert? And hadn’t Whitgift a locked room into which he allowed no one else to go? Why, it simply shouted ‘Counterfeiting’ at one, if one had only ears to hear. And we’d actually come across two specimens of the stuff: one was in our museum, and the other I got later from that garage at St. Neot’s, where it had actually been paid over by one of the gang. As soon as I thought of the idea, I got in an epidiascope, and put a genuine note and one of the forgeries side by side into it, magnified them up on the screen, and measured some of the engine-turning with dividers. The forgeries were almost exact facsimiles—but not quite. Under that magnification one could find slight differences, a constant error running through the measurements. That pointed straight to photography.”

  “But you can’t make much out of a few forged banknotes,” objected Sandra.

  “I don’t know what you call ‘much’,” said The Counsellor. “When the old Treasury notes were first issued at the start of the war, one young gentleman working in an old garage turned out £60,000 worth of them and nearly got away with it. Is £60,000 ‘much’ by your standards?”

  “But you’ve got to get them distributed,” Sandra objected again.