The Ha-Ha Case

by J. J. Connington

  “Am I bound to answer questions?” he demanded with a touch of sullenness.

  The encouraging smile vanished.

  “You’re not bound to; but it might be awkward if you didn’t,” the Chief Constable answered coldly.

  Laxford studied the carpet at his feet for some seconds while he considered his course. At last he seemed to see a way.

  “Perhaps if you put your questions . . .?” he suggested tentatively.

  “Very well. It’s come to our knowledge that John Brandon’s life was insured for £25,000, and that just before his death he assigned the policy to your wife. Is that correct?”

  Wendover saw Laxford wince. He had the look of a man who finds that an expected blow has got home at last, and despite his efforts fear showed in his eyes. He did not answer immediately, and Sir Clinton, with unusual testiness, broke in.

  “That’s merely a formal question, Mr. Laxford. We have all the facts. You may as well answer.”

  Laxford made a nervous gesture.

  “There was an assignment of the sort,” he admitted in a low voice.

  “You have it here, I suppose? Kindly let me see it.” Sir Clinton directed. Then, as Laxford appeared to demur, he added sharply, “It’s not a confidential document, Mr. Laxford. You’ll have to produce it to claim the money. And we can always insist on seeing it, if necessary, through the insurance company. There’s no need to put difficulties in our way since it’s bound to come out in the end.”

  Laxford recognised that Sir Clinton had the whip hand. Procrastination would serve no purpose. He rose from his chair, went to a little cupboard, searched among some papers, and produced the required document. Sir Clinton unfolded it and, after a casual glance through it, handed it over to the inspector. Opening his attaché-case he took out some sheets of quarto paper.

  “Make a copy of that assignment,” he directed, passing the blank paper to Hinton. “You can use that table over there to write on. And, by the way,” he added, “copy it line for line, just as it is.”

  “Very good, sir,” Hinton said, as he set to work.

  Sir Clinton closed his attaché-case again and made no effort to continue his examination of Laxford until the inspector had completed his task. Then he took back the original assignment and turned to Laxford.

  “I notice a phrase here, ‘for value received.’ Would you be good enough to explain its precies meaning?”

  Laxford had evidently not expected this question, but he made an attempt to side-track it.

  “Isn’t a contract void, unless it mentions some ‘valuable consideration’? One has to put that in, or else there’s no contract at all.”

  “Do you mean that in this case ‘for value received’ was merely eye-wash?” Sir Clinton in quired.

  “Oh, no,” Laxford protested. “My wife had been at considerable expense, in providing him with food, lodging, clothes, and so forth. The Brandon family”—he shot a malicious glance at Jim—“had made promises which were never implemented, and my wife had to foot the bill.”

  “Hardly to the extent of £25,000, though, surely.” Sir Clinton pointed out. “But in any case, past services are not a ‘valuable consideration’ in a contract, I believe. I’m not a lawyer, and I may be wrong. But that’s my impression.”

  “I only mentioned these things as examples,” Laxford declared, but it was evident that Sir Clinton’s dictum had disturbed him. “It was arranged that my wife was to find a large sum of money for him when he came of age, in connection with the Brandon estate.”

  “Then her promise to do this was the ‘valuable consideration’?”

  “It was,” said Laxford, with the air of a man who has got well out of a tight corner.

  Sir Clinton turned to Jim Brandon.

  “Was any document to that effect among your brother’s papers?”

  Jim shook his head contemptuously.

  “Curious,” Sir Clinton said musingly. “However, that’s your affair, I suppose, Mr. Laxford, if Mr. Brandon’s executors contest the validity of this document. And, by the way, there’s another thing that invalidates this kind of contract. They call it ‘undue influence.’”

  “I never brought any pressure to bear on him to sign that,” Laxford declared boldly, with a curious ring in his voice.

  “You needn’t tell lies,” Jim Brandon interrupted savagely. “I know all about your games—you, and your wife, and that Hay fellow. You put the screw on Johnnie and made him sign that thing. It’s not worth denying it. I can believe my own ears and I was out in the garden that night, I may tell you.”

  “That’ll do, Mr. Brandon,” said Sir Clinton sharply. “You’re not here for that sort of thing.”

  He turned back to Laxford and put a plain question.

  “You didn’t exercise any moral pressure to obtain John Brandon’s signature to this document?”

  “No, I did not,” said Laxford with equal bluntness, and Wendover was surprised to find that his tone gave the impression that he was telling the literal truth.

  Sir Clinton seemed in no way surprised.

  “I think I see your point,” he said quietly.

  Wendover was again surprised, for Laxford did not seem pleased by this. Rather the reverse, it appeared, from his looks. He glanced suspiciously at the Chief Constable, as though that last sentence had made him more uneasy than Jim Brandon’s outburst. And then came a third surprise; for Sir Clinton, with the game apparently in his hands, dropped the subject and turned to a fresh aspect of the affair. He picked up the assignment and passed it across to Jim Brandon.

  “That’s in your brother’s handwriting, isn’t it?”

  Jim studied it for some minutes with almost meticulous care, scanning it word by word and occasionally going back to an earlier line to make comparisons. It was plain that he meant to find a flaw in it if that were possible. But as time passed, his face showed disappointment more and more plainly. At last he gave it up, with something that sounded like a sigh of disappointment, and handed back the paper to the Chief Constable.

  “It seems to be my brother’s writing,” he admitted, though with the most obvious reluctance.

  “So I expected,” Sir Clinton said, with a rather bleak smile. “A document of this sort is more convincing when it’s a holograph. I suppose you saw him write it, Mr. Laxford?”

  “Yes, that’s so,” Laxford admitted.

  “You didn’t dictate it, of course?”

  “Oh, no,” Laxford declared flatly, and again Wendover was impressed by the ring of truth in the tone.

  “My brother never wrote that off his own bat,” Jim Brandon broke in. “It’s not his style, even if it’s his writing.”

  “We may come to that in a moment,” Sir Clinton said, with a gesture which silenced Jim. “Just one more question, Mr. Laxford. You signed this as a witness, didn’t you? Did you put your signature to it when it was written?”

  “Yes,” Laxford asserted.

  “You’re quite sure about that? Your memory isn’t playing you a trick?”

  “I’m quite sure.”

  Jim Brandon made a movement as though about to say something, then, apparently, he thought better of it and leaned back in his chair. Evidently he felt he was trying the Chief Constable’s patience too highly by his repeated interruptions. Sir Clinton, after a glance at him, opened his attaché-case again and took out the volume which Wendover recognised as Johnnie’s diary.

  “You recognise this, I think, Mr. Laxford? And you, Mr. Brandon? It’s your brother’s diary, isn’t it? It’s not a confidential affair like Pepys’s Diary, and I suppose he didn’t keep it under lock and key.”

  “Miss Menteith told me it lay about the house, anywhere,” Jim confirmed. “I found it myself in the smoking-room after his death.”

  Sir Clinton opened the volume and turned over some pages.

  “Anyone might read it,” he commented. “For instance, here’s an entry: ‘August 7th. Read my books for two hours. Went into Ambledown with Una
in car. She shopped and I got back my shoes re-soled. In afternoon, went fishing. Di came along. Caught three trout, biggest a half-pounder. Sprained my ankle jumping down bank. Di helped me home. Played bridge in evening. Ankle rather swollen.’ Quite commonplace, evidently. Here’s another: ‘28th July. Took a day off. Shot a brace of rabbits and one wood-pigeon. Helped Una to clean car. In afternoon, with Una to the Grange. She beat me 3 up and 2. Off my game. Took out boat on lake after that. After dinner, walk in garden with Di. Billiards later with Mr. L.’”

  Wendover, listening to these innocuous chronicles, was surprised to see the effect which they had upon Laxford. To him they seemed to convey some esoteric meaning which was completely veiled from the rest of the audience; and though he kept himself in hand, his dilated eyes betrayed his deepening uneasiness as Sir Clinton passed from the first entry to the second.

  The Chief Constable picked up the assignment and seemed to compare something in its upper half with the two entries in the diary, while Laxford watched him with strained attention. Then he closed the volume and settled himself comfortably in his chair.

  “This is a second edition, isn’t it?” he asked Laxford, with a gesture towards the assignment on the table before him.

  Laxford’s lips seemed to have gone dry. He passed his tongue over them nervously before answering.

  “I don’t quite follow you.”

  “I’ll put it plainer,” Sir Clinton answered with a faint gesture of apology. “There was an earlier document assigning this £25,000 policy to Mrs. Laxford, wasn’t there?”

  “I don’t see the point,” Laxford retorted huskily. “Why should there have been any other?”

  “Well,” Sir Clinton pointed out, “on 15th August Mr. John Brandon wrote to the Mersey and Midland Insurance Company, saying that he had assigned his £25,000 policy to Mrs. Laxford. Therefore, on 15th August, some assignment must have been in existence. It couldn’t be this one, for this one’s dated 28th August, a fortnight later than the date of his letter. Hence there must have been a previous assignment. Q.E.D.”

  “Yes,” Laxford muttered. “I remember now. There was an earlier document. It slipped my memory for the moment.”

  “That earlier assignment was, of course, invalid, since John Brandon was a minor on 15th August. I infer that the person who induced him to make the assignment learned a little more about the law between the middle of August and the end of the month. But that’s mere surmise on my part. Don’t let’s discuss it. We’ve more important things to talk about.”

  The Chief Constable picked up the assignment and glanced over it casually.

  “A holograph’s much more convincing than a typewritten document in a case like this,” he said reflectively. “And in this case we’ve had the handwriting vouched for by Mr. James Brandon, who has no incentive to identify it, seeing that it tells against the financial interests of his father. The signature’s all right, because it was witnessed by Mr. Laxford and a Mr. Joseph Hay. The body of the document’s all right, for no ordinary person could forge such a long story well enough to deceive Mr. Brandon. That leaves only the date . . . Do you find the room too hot, Mr. Laxford? . . . No? then that’s all right. I can go on.”

  A glance at Laxford’s face showed Wendover that the Chief Constable had touched a sore point in his last few words.

  “Ah, yes, the date, as I was saying,” Sir Clinton continued blandly. “A date is a very short bit of writing; and a date makes a lot of difference, in some cases—in this case, for example, when a boy is coming of age.”

  Wendover saw Laxford’s face lose its colour as though the blood were answering some call.

  “Now here’s a hypothetical case,” Sir Clinton proceeded with a slight increase in suavity. “John Doe, a minor, makes a written assignment on or before August 15th. A few days later, Richard Roe, who has an indirect interest in the assignment, discovers that it is invalid, because John Doe is under age. Richard Roe persuades John Doe to make a fresh assignment, let us say on 24th August, when a visitor, Joseph Hoe, is available as a witness. Richard Roe sets John Doe down at a table with pen, ink, and paper, and proceeds to dictate from the existing assignment. But he begins his dictation with the words: ‘In consideration of value received . . .’ And John Doe obediently writes that down and continues under the dictation. Now John Doe is a simple youngster, not much versed in business, and he doesn’t notice that no date was dictated to him. So the dictation continues to the end; John Doe signs; and Richard Roe and Joseph Hoe obligingly add their signatures as witnesses. That gives Richard Roe an assignment, undated.

  “John Doe dies suddenly on 28th August, the morning when he came of age. Now if Richard Roe could put the date, 28th August, to the assignment, it would apparently be a valid assignment. I think you follow me?”

  He lifted the document from the table and passed it to Wendover.

  “I want you to read that over carefully, and then put your initials in the corner. Look at the date, specially.”

  Wendover scrutinised the assignment most minutely, but he detected nothing out of the common. After reading it through twice, he initialled it. Sir Clinton handed it to Jim Brandon with the same request. Jim, in his turn, pored over it, evidently in the hope of putting his finger on something amiss; but finally he initialled it and handed it back with a look of disappointment on his face.

  “I’m not a skilled forger myself,” Sir Clinton confessed, “so when I put myself into the position of the ordinary man who finds forgery essential to his comfort, I probably follow his line of reasoning more or less. Copying writing by freehand drawing would be beyond me. Tracing is as high as I could rise, if I had a model to trace from. Now in this case I put before you, all a forger needs in the way of a model is a date, and that date can be built up from the separate sections, ‘28th,’ ‘August,’ and ‘1924.’ Where can you get models for these in the original handwriting? Old letters, perhaps. Better still, a diary.

  “But if the forgery is to be done in pen and ink, you come up against a practical difficulty. It’s easy enough to cover a bit of manuscript with a sheet of plain paper, stick the combination up against the window-pane, and trace the thing in pencil. But you can’t use ink in that position with satisfactory results, as you’ll find if you try. You might trace in pencil that way, then write over the pencil tracing with ink, with the paper on a table. But pencil lines don’t take ink over well; and besides, you’d have to use india-rubber later to remove the obvious pencil-marks; and that spoils the surface of the paper.

  “A much sounder method is this. Put a sheet of carbon paper under your model, and your undated document under the carbon. Then trace over the model with a fine point—a pin fastened in a pen-holder does very well. That gives you a faint carbon tracing of your model, and you ink it in at leisure. Since the carbon ink is much the same colour as ordinary ink, you don’t need to rub out anything; and if your model happens to be written in thick scrawly caligraphy, you can easily make your ink lines broad enough to cover the carbon tracing completely.

  Sir Clinton reached over and picked up Johnnie’s diary.

  “Here we have a forger’s model which gives all he wants. So I examined it with interest and a magnifying glass. It wasn’t a long business. All I had to look at were the entries during ‘August’ and the ‘28th,’ in each of the earlier months. When I came to the entry for August 7th—the one I read out to you first—the magnifying-glass showed up the trace of scratchings on the name of the month. The same thing occurred on the ‘28th’ of July. Now if we compare the ‘28th’ and the ‘August’ of the assignment with these two entries in the diary, I think we’ll find them identical. And it’s only by the merest accident that a person writes a date twice in the same way, line for line.”

  He opened the diary at the entry for August 7th and spread out the assignment alongside. Wendover, Jim Brandon, and the inspector examined the two writings in turn. Laxford, crouching in his chair, had the look of a predatory creature brought to
bay.

  “All that’s mere surmise, of course,” Sir Clinton went on. “It needs something more to make it certain. You’ve no objection to my trying a little experiment, have you, Mr. Laxford? It won’t do any permanent damage to your assignment.”

  Laxford saw that he would have to go through it, and he pulled himself together sufficiently to give a husky permission. Sir Clinton re-opened his attaché-case and, to Wendover’s surprise, took out the six-penny bottle of Milton which he had bought in the village. He also produced a small piece of cotton-wool.

  “Now,” he explained, as he spread the assignment on the table, “all I propose to do is to bleach one or two letters in this date. That doesn’t destroy the ink, it merely decolorises it temporarily. The permanent record is still there and can be restored by another chemical. Let’s try our luck.”

  He moistened the cotton-wool with some of the Milton solution and applied it carefully to the last four letters of “August” in the date. Swiftly the writing faded and, untouched by the chemical, a faint thin lettering stood out: “gust.”

  “The ink fades, as you see, but the Milton doesn’t affect the carbon tracing, so it shows up clearly enough, doesn’t it?”

  Sir Clinton corked the bottle of Milton and put it back into his attaché-case.

  “I think that converts the thing into proof,” he said to Jim Brandon. “It’s hardly likely that this assignment will make its appearance in court, now.”

  “We owe you one for that,” Jim said cordially. “I’d never have thought of it. And, of course, that fits in exactly with my brother telling me he had signed nothing, that morning.”

  “That was my starting-point when I began to think the thing out,” Sir Clinton explained. “And now, Inspector, I think we might have Mr. Joseph Hay, if you please.”

  At the sound of Hay’s name, Laxford evidently recognised that the game was up. His face betrayed him, and Wendover was glad to look elsewhere. The inspector left the room, and in a minute or so returned, ushering Hay before him.