Barsett indicated a chair to the Chief Constable; and as Sir Clinton seated himself he let his glance run round the room. On the mantelpiece, amongst a litter of silver knick-knacks, stood a tin of Algonquin A tobacco.
“And now, what else can I do for you?” asked Barsett, fixing the Chief Constable with his bright, unwinking stare.
“It’s the Hyson affair,” Sir Clinton replied bluntly. “Sometimes, Mr. Barsett, we find that if a witness wishes to emend the evidence he’s given us, the best thing is to accept the change and make no fuss. We can do that in the early stages. If it gets the length of court, that’s a different matter. Now some information has come into my hands which makes me think you might care to . . . revise what you said to Inspector Craythorn.”
Barsett succeeded in suppressing any surprise that he might have felt at this direct attack.
“What’s the source of your fresh information?” he demanded quietly.
“We don’t divulge our sources, as a rule,” retorted the Chief Constable.
“Some of this poison-pen stuff?” asked Barsett, shrewdly. “I’ve had samples from that factory myself.”
Sir Clinton refused to be drawn.
“Our informant’s identity is beside the question,” he pointed out. “I’ve come here merely to give you the opportunity of amplifying what you told Inspector Craythorn. It’s for you to decide whether you will or not.”
Barsett examined the Chief Constable’s face with a long, considering stare before he replied.
“You seem to have got hold of something,” he decided at last. “Perhaps I’d better take advantage of your offer. If I do, that washes out my previous evidence?”
“It’s on record,” Sir Clinton pointed out, “but if you amplify it, naturally the new record holds the field.”
Barsett again considered for a few seconds before answering.
“I’d better amplify, then,” he decided. “What, exactly, did I tell your man?”
“Simply that you had dinner at 7.30 P.M. and that you remained in the house during the rest of the evening.”
“Well, up to a point, that’s correct,” Barsett declared with a rather wry smile. “The first half of it is perfectly true, at least. I had dinner at half-past seven, though it’s an unfashionable hour. After dinner, I always come in here to work; and there’s a standing order that I’m not to be disturbed unless I’ve made a previous appointment with somebody. And to make quite sure, I lock the door behind me when I do come in. I take my coffee in the dining-room and I keep whiskey and a syphon in that cupboard over there, so no servant need come and bother me during the evening.
“That night of Hyson’s death, I came in here as usual. I’m not going to make any concealment about things. I’m very fond of Mrs. Hyson. I want to marry her, in fact; and if she’d only agreed to divorce Hyson, I’d have married her long ago, for she’s attached to me. Now that Hyson is out of the way, we’re going to get married as soon as we decently can. But she would never agree to take Hyson into the Divorce Court. She’d conscientious scruples about that.”
“So I understand,” Sir Clinton confirmed.
“The thing has been unbearable for a long time,” Barsett went on, still keeping his eyes fixed on Sir Clinton’s face as though hoping to read some sign of sympathy on it. “You must have picked up things which told you what sort of fellow Hyson was — not fit to lick her shoes. And that made me more set on finding some way out of the impasse, as you can imagine. That’s just to let you see that I’d been brooding over the business for a long while and that what I did wasn’t merely an affair that I hit upon on the spur of the moment. I’d thought over it pretty carefully, and I could see only one way of getting what I wanted. I’m not asking your sympathy or approval or anything of that sort for the scheme I hit on finally. It wasn’t ideal, and in a way it meant swindling the woman I was fond of. But at least it would have made her happier, and that was the main thing from my point of view.
“I’m a fairly well-to-do man. At least, I can afford to pay for my fancies, and this was something more than a fancy. To cut a long story short, my idea was to suborn Hyson into faking up a mock suicide. Get him to go off and be found drowned or something of that sort so that his wife would be certain he was dead. Actually, of course, he’d be alive and kicking, with a good slice of my money in his pocket to enjoy life with according to his standards.”
“You seem to have romantic ideas,” commented Sir Clinton, with a faint smile.
Barsett examined the smile stolidly, as though trying to classify it.
“Nothing romantic about it at all,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Short of murdering Hyson, it was the only solution I could hit upon. She wouldn’t marry me until he was certified dead. It was a case of getting her on false pretences, I admit quite frankly. But it would have made her happy, and that’s all I cared about. I’m no stickler about the niceties of morality myself, in a case of this kind.”
“There’s one obvious flaw in your scheme,” Sir Clinton pointed out. “Even if he fell in with it, what was to hinder his turning up later on and blackmailing you?”
“Doing the Enoch Arden act without the altruism? Well, I’d covered that in my plan,” Barsett explained with a chilly smile. “He’d have had to do a bit of forgery to get my money. I wouldn’t have objected so long as he stayed ‘dead’; but if he resurrected himself, I’d have produced his forged cheque and gaoled him. I don’t think he would have come back to bother us.”
“You’ve got an ingenious mind,” Sir Clinton complimented him with no trace of irony. “That’s very neat. But all this is rather off the point, so far as my business goes. You came in here after dinner. What happened after that?”
“I’d brought a hat and a coat in here beforehand to wear over my dinner jacket. I simply put them on and got out of the window, over there. Then I walked round to Hyson’s house. I knew he’d be at home. Mrs. Hyson rang me up at about half-past two that afternoon about a golf tournament and told me she knew he would be in that evening.”
Sir Clinton noted that this fitted neatly with Linda’s own evidence, but he made no comment on the point.
“And your idea was to call on him; and, in the course of a little friendly chat, make a cash offer for his wife,” commented Sir Clinton. “I’m not easily surprised, Mr. Barsett, but I admit you’ve managed it.”
“If you’d known Hyson, it wouldn’t surprise you a bit,” Barsett retorted. “He wasn’t the man to turn a hair if you put that sort of proposition before him, provided he got enough out of it for himself. Besides, I had picked up some hints that made me think that cash was what he needed most, just then. I gather, from what’s come out since, that he was in a fix; so I wasn’t so far out.”
“Well, go on with your tale,” Sir Clinton suggested, abandoning this point as irrelevant at the moment.
“Mrs. Hyson’s maid has half a day off on Thursdays,” Barsett continued, “so I wasn’t surprised when Hyson himself opened the door to me. He made some remark about his wife being out, hinting that I had come to see her and not him. But I told him I’d come on his account, not hers; I took off my hat and coat and he showed me into the drawing-room. I noticed that he seemed a bit on wires. Usually he was a cool, sneering brute, but that night his nerves must have been strained. He knocked against an occasional table by accident and brought down a rose-bowl or something of the sort that was standing on it.
“I saw I’d interrupted him in some job or other. The blinds were down and the electric light on, and he’d evidently been at work on some papers at a writing-desk which stands in one corner of the room. I sat down and pulled out my pipe. He wasn’t the sort of man I’d stand on ceremony with, you know. Then I put the thing to him, without wrapping it up much. There was no need to do that in his case.
“I don’t quite understand, now, what his position actually was. What did emerge was that he was prepared to look at my scheme, but he had a lot of objections to make to it of one sort
and another. Also, he tried to push me up in my cash figure, again and again. But I’d made up my mind exactly how far I’d go, and he got nothing out of his attempts. We discussed one or two possible ways of faking a suicide, without coming to any definite plans. Also, he pressed me for cash in advance. But knowing the man, I naturally refused to look at anything of that sort.
“By-and-by I glanced at the clock and saw the hands stood at 9.20. You know how a glance at a clock makes you think of looking at your own watch. One does it mechanically. And in this case we’d been talking for a good long time, and 9.20 seemed a bit too early. So I had a look at my own watch, and found it was really 9.40, so the clock must have stopped twenty minutes before that.
“I got up, then. The fact is, I wanted to get away before Mrs. Hyson came home again. Whenever Hyson got us together, he had a habit of saying nasty things, double-edged remarks meant to make her uncomfortable. He knew exactly what our position was, you see; I mean he knew that we were fond of each other. And it always struck him as a huge joke to rub that in by saying things with two meanings. Naturally, I didn’t want to run the risk of that happening, so I was anxious to get away before she came back. I left him about twenty to ten, roughly.”
Sir Clinton paused for a few moments before making any comment on the story.
“It doesn’t seem to account for a suicide,” he pointed out at last. “You had stepped in at the critical moment and offered him a way out of his difficulties. And yet the next time he reaches the public view, he’s got his head in the gas-oven. What do you make of that?”
“Not very much,” Barsett admitted frankly. “But I told you the man was all on wires. You can’t tell what may happen then. He was usually so cool. That made his condition strike me at once.”
“Now, just a question,” Sir Clinton said. “You and he were alone in the house. While you were there, did you hear any sound, any ordinary sound, I mean? Just think.”
Barsett apparently racked his memory in vain for several minutes. Then his face cleared suddenly.
“I did hear one thing,” he declared with an accent of certainty. “I heard the flap of the letter-box click and the noise of something falling into it. Now that you remind me of it, I recall that quite clearly.”
Sir Clinton seemed satisfied by this, but he came back to the earlier subject.
“Suicide seems curious, just after you’d made him that offer.”
“But perhaps, after all, my offer came a shade too late,” Barsett suggested shrewdly. “I gather from what’s come out that he’d been doing some forgery in connection with shares he was stealing. Lockhurst died just then, didn’t he? That meant an overhaul of all the office books, inevitably; and that meant discovery, didn’t it? Now, as I told you, I hadn’t a cut-and-dried plan for the faked suicide. I’d made plain to him, though, that whatever scheme we devised must be an absolutely lock-fast one, with no chance whatever of any mistakes. I told him to think over that and produce a plan himself — since he knew his own limitations best — and then I’d go over it and see if any holes could be picked in it. Now suppose he sat down after I’d gone and began to think it over. He was all nerves. Most likely he found he couldn’t evolve anything that had even a sporting chance of passing muster. He’d be desperate, wouldn’t he? Hence the gas-oven. At least, it doesn’t sound unlikely.”
“You saw him; I didn’t,” Sir Clinton admitted, “so you’re a better judge of his state of mind than I am.”
“He was badly demoralised. That I’m quite definite about.”
“And you came straight home after leaving him? You met no one you knew, on the road?”
Barsett shook his head.
“No, nobody. I came back here and got in at the window. You may think that a bit out of the common, but the fact was I didn’t want to leave any trace of that interview if I could help it. Obviously if he was going to disappear by a faked suicide with my financial backing, the less talk there was about that interview the better it would be. Keep people clean off the real track, you see?”
“I see your point,” Sir Clinton conceded. “But now, tell me, Mr. Barsett, just why you didn’t give us this tale at the very start. What induced you to suppress all this and mislead us as to your doings that night?”
“Just think a bit, Sir Clinton,” Barsett retorted. “There’s the inquest. Suppose I’d told the truth at the start, I’d have been called as a witness, wouldn’t I? And all this story would have come out in public. It isn’t a nice yarn, I’d be the first to admit. But if only myself had stood to lose by the telling of it, I wouldn’t have minded. But what about Mrs. Hyson? Rather a damnable position for her, if it came out publicly that her husband and another man had been laying their heads together and making a bargain, a cash bargain, as to which of them was to have her. You see how I was placed? I had nothing to tell that really threw light on Hyson’s suicide. The suppression of my story left things exactly where they were. What was the point in telling it, when it was bound to make a scandal round Mrs. Hyson’s name? None whatever. So I simply kept it dark when your inspector came and questioned me; and I’d have held my tongue even now if it weren’t that you seem to have got on the track in some way.”
“Mrs. Hyson knows nothing about this proposed bargain of yours?”
“Heavens, no!” declared Barsett. “The whole point of it depended on her not knowing. Naturally I haven’t mentioned it to her at all.”
“You don’t happen to have a copy of the Times — to-day’s issue? There’s a paragraph in it that I’d like to look at.”
Barsett went to an arm-chair and, from behind it, picked up the newspaper which he had thrown down after reading it. Sir Clinton opened it out, sought for a certain place, read for a moment or two, and then returned the paper to Barsett with a word of thanks.
“I think I’d better have a note of this evidence of yours,” he decided. “I’ll dictate a précis to one of my men and send it up to you. Look it over when it comes, please, and if it’s all right you might put your initials to it and my man will return it to me. You don’t mind? It’s the usual thing.”
As Sir Clinton settled himself in his car and pressed the self-starter, a rather forbidding smile crossed his features.
“Clever fellow, Barsett,” he reflected. “What he suffers from is a lack of pictorial imagination.”
He drove to Headquarters and summoned Inspector Craythorn, and a constable to whom he dictated a précis of Barsett’s evidence. Then, dismissing the constable after giving him instructions to get Barsett’s signature, he turned to Craythorn.
“Well, you’ve heard that tale. What do you think of it?”
“It fits most of the facts, sir,” Craythorn admitted. “It covers one or two things that he could hardly have known, any other way. The overturned table, for one; and the letter dropping into the box.”
“He’s hand in glove with Mrs. Hyson and her sister,” Sir Clinton said, dryly. “They knew of all these points that he used in his tale. You don’t suppose that these three people have refrained from discussing Hyson’s death among themselves, do you? That stopped clock, for instance. And that reminds me, Inspector. I’m not very sure of the run of that electric main which serves Hyson’s house. I know it goes along Cowslip Avenue and turns off into Ashleigh Park and Vendale Road, but I’d like to make sure whether Barsett’s house is served by it or by another cable. The City Electricity Department will be able to tell you. Find that out for me, sometime, please.”
“I’ll ring up now, sir,” Craythorn volunteered.
After a few minutes spent at the phone, he returned with the information.
“You’re quite right, sir, about the main serving Hyson’s house. But Barsett’s house draws from another main: the one that runs along Cadogan Road. That’s all you wanted? Now there’s another thing you put me on to, you remember. You asked me to find out about the holidays some of these people took in the summer. I’ve got the facts here” — he produced a sheet of paper — “and I
’ll just read them to you.”
“Go ahead,” Sir Clinton said.
“Hyson, sir, took no holiday at all. Probably afraid to leave Forbury in charge at the office for fear of his spotting that things were going wrong. He stayed at The White Hart in John Street the last three weeks in August, because the house in Cowslip Avenue was shut up and the maid on holiday. Mrs. Hyson and Miss Errington went away together, after the first week in August. They spent the first fortnight of their holiday with friends in Mullion, somewhere in Cornwall I think it is. The last week in August they took a motor tour up in Scotland. The maid, Cissie Worgate, was sent home for her holiday, to somewhere in Yorkshire. She was away the same three weeks as Mrs. Hyson. Barsett plays golf, and he went away all August. The first fortnight he stayed at Gillane — that’s somewhere near North Berwick, sir — and the second fortnight he put in at Tain. Miss Jessop was away at Skegness for the first fortnight in July; and in September she went to stay for a week at the beginning of the month with an old aunt of hers at Lynmouth. Now for the staff at Lockhurst’s office. They went off in relays, of course. That Lyndoch girl was at Broadstairs for the second fortnight in July. Effie Hinkley went with a couple of girl friends to Blackpool for the first half of August. Kitty Nevern was off the first fortnight in September; she went home to her people. Forbury took his holiday in the second half of August and went away with his family to Fisherwick, that little village down on the coast, you know. He has fares to consider, with that family of his. That’s the lot, sir.”
“Just leave me the paper,” Sir Clinton requested. “Now here’s a fresh item about our friend with the poison pen. You remember that dodge of passing an envelope through the post with a pencil address and then delivering it by hand? The way that letter came to Hyson’s house, I mean. Well, Duncannon tells me that there’s been no more of that after the Hyson affair. There have been poison-pen letters sent, but they’ve gone through the post in the normal way as they used to do at first. That seems interesting.”
Murder Will Speak Page 25
